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I've run OpenBSD continuously at home without backup power for something like eight years. They probably loose power about once or twice a quarter. I have yet to detect lost data that was important. Measures are taken. If a storm is coming through, I'll shutdown till it passes.

I've been lucky with release driver support. The little Lenovo ThinkCentre's being used seem to chug along without crashing on driver issues, at least with OpenBSD releases.

The standard OpenBSD partitioning scheme is also being used. Boot time fsck has never failed when the storage was properly attached and in a good state. Backups are performed using pax. So far, so good.

With all the buzz about the return of the Commodore 64, the days of 8-bit computing and the BASIC programming language are probably getting more attention than usual.

Managing to get caught up in retro computing, I've recently bought the TI-99/4A that I always wanted as a kid. It was a 16-bit competitor that initially competed with the Apple II and TRS-80. Though the TI-99/4A failed in the market, Texas Instruments followed it with the similar but smaller Compact Computer 40, and finally the TI-74 BASICALC.

I'm highlighting the TI-74, because TI made a fair number of them, and the keyboard is a bit bigger than other pocket computers of the era. The TI-74 case is very sturdy.

To use the TI-99/4A, I had to buy a media adapter to plug it into my HDMI monitor. Though fun, it doesn't get used very much unless I'm playing old game cartridges.

My TI-74's get much more use, though basically as a calculator. If you have a thing for 8-bit computing, the TI-74 is satisfyingly sturdy, has a fairly complete BASIC, and is a bit easier to type on than its pocket computer peers with its larger keys. The display is limited, so its not a gaming platform however.

GNU Emacs is probably the easiest way to capture the spirit of working on the Lisp machines. Interlisp is an ongoing project that takes you even further down that road.

I'm using KDE Akregator. It's nice to have a consistant interface for checking the headlines, and only opening web pages to give them a closer look.

This is one of those articles that demonstrates why email should be distributed. Letting Google and Microsoft run email for the planet is just asking for problems. There are some technical demands to running email services, but they are still in reach of the technically inclined individual or organization. If for no other reason, it would help keep the big mail service providers honest.

At work, my employer is still running Microsoft products for the desktop environment. At home, assuming I'm using Microsoft products at all (rare), it's from inside the Chromium web browser on Linux or BSD.

An attempt to write English based on Anglo-Saxon runes (Futhorc) devised by Nothelm Hurlebatte.

I think it depends on your needs. Working corporate environments with 1000+ hosts, LTS operating systems are big help. On the other hand, for smaller cases, call it a work group or smaller, I think OpenBSD provides a base system that doesn't typically make drastic changes, along with a ports collection that does a pretty good job of keeping up with the third party applications. It's a good balance. I've recently seen some "Immutable" Linux distributions that are basically spins of upstream distributions. They leave the inherited distribution mostly alone and load the extras using Flatpak or the like. Sounds similar to BSD ports in a way.

The Trinity Desktop Environment is still carrying the KDE 3.5 torch. The Q4OS Linux distribution (Debian based) provides it as a primary desktop.

Another way to think about it is that the terminal has become software, like many other things. Web browsers have become a terminal of sorts too.

This clearly shows the risk of letting someone else run your email services.

I read this with some interest because I've self hosted personal email since about 2001, with experience in email management going back to 1995. The challenges presented are certainly true enough, but I still think self hosting is still worth it. I'd rather not share the management of private keys with DNS (DNSSEC) and email service providers (STARTTLS, SMTPS, DKIM, POP3S, IMAPS). I'd like to keep them, well, private. It also provides the opportunity to see the mail queue, and mail server logs. I find that helpful.

I'd call it more than a shell. It's more like a text oriented Lisp (Emacs Lisp to be specific) runtime environment with built in editing, interpretation, compilation, and debugging tools. It's also been a popular home for numerous applications that have found lives of their own, far beyond editing text.

Regarding the Common Lisp writings, I rather liked the third edition of LISP by Patrick Henry Winston and Berthold K.P. Horn (1989).

Very recently, I tried using a combination of nail(1), and calendar(1) on OpenBSD as an email and calendaring combination for home use. "nail" is provided by the OpenBSD s-nail package and provides an extended POSIX mailx style environment. calendar(1) is part of the base OpenBSD distribution.

It worked far better than expected. The only thing missed was age calculations for birthdays. I never figured that out. Using the Emacs Diary provided that sort of thing though.

I've since moved to KDE Kontact for mail/calendaring. It works more smoothly if you do a lot of calendar sharing with others, but I could see going back to nail(1)/calendar(1) if Kontact disappoints.

Maybe this will provide some momentum to SeaMonkey or other browsers?

I wanted the TI-99/4 that was marketed at the beginning of the 80s. As it turned out, I didn't own a computer until buying a Tandy PC-6 pocket computer in the mid-eighties.

Fast forward to buying the later TI-99/4A in the beige case in 2023. Booting it up into the Basic prompt gave me a nice flashback to learning Basic in High School on the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I.

I've also bought its cousin the TI-74 BASICALC. Given hindsight, the TI-74 is my favorite TI-99 for retro computing, even though the similarity is limited to a subset of the TI Basic from the TI-99 family. The TI-74s are rugged and available. It's very useful as a desk calculator.

I'm familiar with a site that once had around 30 Vaxen for scientific computing in the late 1980s. This included Vax 11/780s, 11/750s, uVax I's, uVax II's and eventually a Vax 8800 used to feed a Cray Y-MP. All long gone. Linux has moved in and taken over.

I don't. A laptop is used for email when needed.

I run email for myself with OpenBSD. The only spam mitigation is spamd(8) in blacklist mode, using nixspam. DKIM isn't checked for inbound mail. Outbound email is signed using the opensmtpd-filter-dkimsign package. There's some spam that makes it through, but not enough to take additional measures.

I also skipped using IMAP or POP3. There's a mail server with global IP addresses, that forwards inbound mail to my local workstation over WireGuard. My email clients read mail directly from /var/mail. Remote email access is via ssh terminal sessions. Not for everyone, but that's what I do.

I think running daemon mode has significant advantages. You can have frames running on multiple virtual desktops for different uses. You can also step away from a buffer, and return to it, maybe from some other location on a different computer.

One thing about Emacs, is it's not really just an editor anymore. Comparing it to other editors kind of misses the mark. It's more like an integrated Lisp development and runtime environment. It reminds me of Smalltalk environments, say Squeak or Pharo, albeit in a very text oriented way.

The world could probably make room for an integrated Lisp development environment that makes GUI programming more of a first class citizen. Maybe something like Medley Interlisp?

I've become a fairly loyal OpenBSD user in the last 3-4 years. The base OpenBSD load includes a substantial amount of network capabilities, and is cleanly implemented. It's almost too cleanly implemented, to the point of making me feel sort of guilty when I start to clutter up an install with a bunch of packages...

If my needs for storage were more complicated, I would probably use FreeBSD ZFS, but UFS suffices for my rather modest needs.

I use OpenBSD for desktop, web and mail services. There are some limitations, but none that are serious enough to warrant dealing with running another BSD, or Linux distribution.

I prefer Debian as a workstation, though I tend to use FreeBSD for storage (ZFS), and OpenBSD for network edge servers.

American Cloud has an OpenBSD beta out. I'm sure they'd be happy to have more testers.

/var/mail

No listener required, or the services, authentication and encryption that go with them. In this case I run email for myself. Email gets pushed from an Internet MTA with global addresses, to a local MTA that happens to be my workstation. I either read the email from the console, or ssh in through a jump host.

If you can piggyback on an existing system, you may only need to pursue using the RMF assess only process with the gaining system owner. Once the assess only process is approved, the hardware, software and PPSM in the gaining system would be updated to reflect the new components. Those approved software lists don’t get updated very quickly. Using an assess only process may move things ahead more quickly.

I think maintaining the MUA access to the mail server is one of the more complicated issues. A globally accessible IMAP or POP3 service faces a lot of abuse. These days, I use MUA's the that read directly off the spool. Old fashioned, but heads off all kinds of badness.

I worked through the first 9 chapters of the Touretzky book as a preparation for PAIP recently. It's very thorough. If you work through the exercises in the book, you'll learn a lot.

It depends on the kind of beginner. GNU Emacs has a built-in tutorial to get started on using the editor. After that, there's an introduction to Emacs Lisp as part of the info documentation in most packaged versions of Emacs. Extending Emacs is as practical a way to learn Lisp as others.