Michael Dexter @[email protected]
Dexter's Law: Only proprietary software vendors want proprietary software and only fascists want fascism. Toots are my own. Self-employed. Father of three.
I aim to keep this to technical topics relating to bhyve and OpenZFS, and the occasional humor and Latvia.
Joined Apr 2018
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Dexter’s second law: The pendulum that swings twice as high lasts half as long.
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Having spent days making PkgBase easy on #FreeBSD…
The (highly opinionated) Sum Total of computer history:
0. BSD Unix
1. Macintosh
2. Packaged Base in Red Hat 5.2
3. Squiggly underline spell check
4. FreeBSD Jail to manage the fustercluck that are RPMs on Red Hat
5. Two-finger scrolling
6. Hardware-assisted virtualization
7. ZFS v28
8. NVMe
TCP/IP is taken for granted, as it is not vendor/platform-specific.
Flat screen displays are a TV crossover technology, as are WiFi, GPS, and fancy batteries.
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Call For Testing: Major #OccamBSD updates
occambsd.sh - More-consistent syntax
propagate.sh - Propagate PkgBase installs
imagine.sh - Image boot images from the others and upstream
sideload.sh - Push (much of) a #FreeBSD configuration to a new installation
rc.local.sh - Semi-idempotently configure basic aspects of a system
They’re never done, never perfect, but they do exactly what I have envisioned in various ways and given talks about for 20+ years.
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Emerging observations on how lockdown was great for #opensource:
Work from home was blessed as a valid thing
Sci-fi-like casual video conferencing without hesitation around the world is now the norm for some of us, only limited by time zones and languages.
Group video chat is equally familiar and commonplace, with excellent self-policing of audio quality and behavior.
Events are focusing on quality over quantity, complimenting the above.
Basically, the “open source seems to be where drunk guys pinch your butt while mansplaining you” factors were globally nipped in the bud.
Good work everyone!
These are delightful times!
❤️❤️❤️
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Repost: It took time, but #bhyve #hypervisor development is back to a robust pace on both #FreeBSD and #illumos with a good balance of new features and subtle refinement.
I have begun posting recordings of the weekly Jails/Zones, #OpenZFS, and bhyve Production Users calls:
https://youtube.com/@callfortesting
The running minutes documents are linked from https://callfortesting.org
Heads-up: There are many ways to participate and lots to do!
Michael Dexter
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@dexter it is on github : pog5/minecraft-freebsd
For tomorrow’s call… what FreeBSD jail-based app repo are you using like iocage offers/offered?
Michael Dexter
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oh my God. it was so easy to setup minecraft in FreeBSD. installing lwjgl3 via pkg and modifying minecraft-runtime from pog5/minecraft-freebsd are sufficient.
EDIT: it runs on intel. let's try to push to gpu
EDIT #2: now I can play with my GPU
Michael Dexter
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I distilled my four hour Rust training course for FOSS developers into a web page. I hope it's useful to people.
This is the first full draft. It's probably going to need updates and fixes. Please reply to this message if you spot anything wrong. But feel free to boost and share if you want.
https://liw.fi/distilled-rust/
Edit: I've fixed the problems pointed out to me.
Michael Dexter
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Michael Dexter
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The #BSDCan 2026 Call for Participation closes Saturday the 17th!
All are welcome and we would love to hear about the exciting BSD projects you are working on and stories you have to share!
@mwl If performance is a concern…
https://www.printables.com/model/454399-crocs-race-car-spoiler
@richlowe I ran into issues with the 'make illumos' step of arm64-gate using OmniOS r151054. Is there a preferred build environment? Where should I report the errors?
Michael Dexter
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If you are an EU citizen: move your data away from US techbro's right now. There are decent EU alternatives for most things: European alternatives for digital products 
(and yes, for the techies among us, this list isn't perfect and you should selfhost - but let's be inclusive and take one step at a time for the people whom aren't nerds like you and I)
Michael Dexter
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Vancouver School Board are planning to deploy Microsoft Copilot in classrooms.
We are collecting signatures to show VSB that we are concerned about the effect on our children, and do not consent.
If you are concerned about AI being used in classrooms, please sign and share this petition.
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/voice-ai-concerns-to-vancouver-school-board
Michael Dexter
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5 days left to get your @bsdcan talk submitted! Join your friends in Canada to discuss the state of the *BSDs. See talks by leaders of our industry, parents of the Internet, and that person you've been seeing on mailing lists for years!:
Michael Dexter
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NYC*BUG Jan 2026: Upcoming 4th edition of The Book of PF, CRA and more, Peter Hansteen
Michael Dexter
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ICYMI: NYC*BUG had a bonus video meeting over the weekend:
Video meeting - upcoming 4th edition of The Book of PF, CRA and more, by Peter Hansteen
Meeting Sldies
* https://www.nycbug.org/media/sbom.pdf
* https://www.nycbug.org/media/nycbug_20260110.pdf
Event Video
* Peertube / Toobnix.org:
https://toobnix.org/wbQPtKXKqJMdeYDbzhrrkEa
* Youtube:
https://youtu.be/HOCsvcCm1Ec
Please visit https://www.nycbug.org/ for more details.
#runbsd #pf #cra #informingthesuits
Michael Dexter
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I made the pictures in preparation of a talk at the 2006 edition of the infamous #OpenCON (a conference in venice purely focused on #OpenBSD organized and run by the #OpenBeer Usergroup in Italy :)
Slide-Deck from back then is here: https://hazardous.org/static-files/talks/opencon06-umts/
Michael Dexter
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publish.sh — a companion shell script for ssg.sh.
it rsyncs the `dst` directory to a remote host and runs sha256 there to verify that local and remote `dst` are identical.
as you may have noticed, the outputs of ssg.sh and rsync are aligned.
use case
- change `.ssg.logo.sh`: remove an empty line
- rebuild the site: only files depending on that script are updated
- publish `dst` to the remote server: only `.ssg.src` is uploaded, since the other files have identical hashes after rebuilding
Michael Dexter
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🔰 🇦🇺
Riffing on a post @davidgerard shared again recently about Xfce.
In spite of all the pressures to change, it hasn't. And I think that's a massive relief.
OMG WireGuard, OpenSSH, tmux, OpenZFS with ‘allow’ delegation, and Zelta are good.
Dexter's Law: Only proprietary software vendors want proprietary software and only fascists want fascism. Toots are my own. Self-employed. Father of three.
I aim to keep this to technical topics relating to bhyve and OpenZFS, and the occasional humor and Latvia.
Joined Apr 2018
