Michael Lucas’s “BSD Needs Books” talk from NYCBSDCon 2010, on Youtube.  I’ve talked about it before because I saw it in person; it’s a good talk.  Ironically, he talks about getting a publisher interested in your book, and he just self-published.

Hubert Feyrer linked to the slides of two pkgsrc talks at FOSDEM; one about bringing pkgsrc to MirBSD, and one about pkgin, which is included in DragonFly.

• Jeff Vogel, who is a funny and smart guy, wrote this article, essentially about crowdsourcing.  It’s another way of saying “bikeshed“.  Plus: D&D!
• Michael Lucas, sometimes BSD author, has a new fiction collection out.  He’s working on a SSH book too.
• Hey, AsiaBSDCon is coming up in March, BSDCan in May.  I don’t know about EuroBSDCon or NYCBSDCon, though.  Plan ahead!
• Did you know there’s a bsd.org?  Very old-school: here’s a list of commands, get going.
• GNU Tar doesn’t have a man page.  (via)  Weird.  I didn’t verify that, but I’m not sure how to.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: there’s a Freddy, and a dragonfly, but it’s not DragonFly BSD.  It’s still fun though.

• NYCBUG posts audio of their regular presentations, and I’m linking to this one by James K. Lowden, titled “Free Database Systems: What They Should Be, And Why You Should Care“.  He was one of the more colorful speakers at NYCBSDCon 2010, so this should be good.
• It’s Slashdot, so whatever, but this “In Favor of FreeBSD On the Desktop” linked story had a few good comments – BSD hasn’t done enough to differentiate itself from Linux.  “BSD: In Need of a Narrative“.  Or perhaps, “Who cares if it’s clang or it’s gcc – what do you build with it?“
• I read this essay about social networks (via), and the last paragraph is an excellent summation.  Read it, then cancel your Facebook/Google Plus/whatever accounts.
• Xv6 is a modern version of Sixth Edition UNIX, used at MIT for teaching operating system design.  (via)   The source is available via git, and as a numbered PDF.   The book for the class should make interesting reading.  Oh, you can see the class details, too.
• FOSDEM 2012 in Brussels, February 5th, 09:00 – 17:00: “Open Source Game Dev”.   Get on the mailing list if this interests you.  Microsoft operating systems still rule the market for games, really, even indie work, so it’s neat to see something that is both open source and game oriented.  There will be BSD “devrooms” there, too.
• If you are looking for a particular Unicode character (and there’s lots to choose from), Shapecatcher lets you draw what you are looking for and looks for matches.  (via)  I’ve needed that here a few times for people’s names, and it’s fun just to see what comes up from a random scribble.

Your unrelated link of the week: The New Shelton Wet/Dry.  Titles, content, and images are all picked from unrelated sources, but it forms an oddly compelling digest of multiple topics.  Slightly NSFW, sometimes.

• There is a certain subset of readers here that will find this fascinating: a video of a game postmortem.  Specifically, Elite.  (via)  Needs Flash.
• This is as good an article as any I’ve seen describing where the tablet computer market is going, at The Economist.
• Remember RetroBSD, mentioned here previously?  Here’s some discussion of it.
• EuroBSDCon’s 2011 conference is open for registration, but the early bird discount only lasts until the end of August, so jump on it soon if you’re thinking of going.  It’s the 10th anniversary of the event!
• PHP 5.3 is coming to pkgsrc as default, soon?  The PHP 5.2 -> 5.3 transition seems to mess up a lot of code because of some changes in the way things are handled, or at least that’s my experience, so watch out.
• Make sure you aren’t running mod_deflate on your Apache 2.x server.
• Kristaps Dzonsons, the fellow behind mdocml (which is in DragonFly now and mentioned here before) is working on a mdoc manual.  It’s an actual book, with examples.  It’s titled “Practical UNIX Manuals: mdoc”, which sounds like part of a series, though I don’t know if there’s anything else.  I’d sure like it if there was.  (via Undeadly.)  Look very closely at the mdoc web page and you will see the markup, too.  Neat!
• Breakout treated as a musical instrument, in 1983.  That’s too glib a summary of this explanation of an old book studying the game Breakout and playing it.  Really, read the article, and remember that the book described would just be lost in a sea of blog posts noise today.  (via)

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Wonderella.  This is the comic that ruined Batman for me.  I can’t unthink it.