Microsoft continues to make some of the earliest chapters of its operating system history open-source and freely available. Earlier this week, it announced that Tim Paterson's DOS listings, containing source code of the 86-DOS 1.00 kernel, various PC-DOS 1.00 pre-release kernels and utilities, and the Microsoft BASIC-86 Compiler runtime library, were available on GitHub. Microsoft VP Scott Hanselman tied the release to 86-DOS 1.00’s 45th anniversary. The exec confirmed that the code, transcribed from reams of old dot matrix printouts found in a garage, was perfect, "and recompiles byte for byte to the original binaries.”

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age is a simple, modern and secure file encryption tool, format, and Go library.

It features small explicit keys, post-quantum support, no config options, and UNIX-style composability.

Record and share your terminal sessions, the simple way.
Forget screen recording apps and blurry video.
Experience a lightweight, text-based approach to terminal recording.

asciinema [as-kee-nuh-muh] is a free and open source solution for recording terminal sessions and sharing them on the web.

Cryptography engineers have been tearing their hair out over PGP’s deficiencies for (literally) decades. When other kinds of engineers get wind of this, they’re shocked. PGP is bad? Why do people keep telling me to use PGP? The answer is that they shouldn’t be telling you that, because PGP is bad and needs to go away.

There are, as you’re about to see, lots of problems with PGP. Fortunately, if you’re not morbidly curious, there’s a simple meta-problem with it: it was designed in the 1990s, before serious modern cryptography. No competent crypto engineer would design a system that looked like PGP today, nor tolerate most of its defects in any other design. Serious cryptographers have largely given up on PGP and don’t spend much time publishing on it anymore (with a notable exception). Well-understood problems in PGP have gone unaddressed for over a decade because of this.

Two quick notes: first, we wrote this for engineers, not lawyers and activists. Second: “PGP” can mean a bunch of things, from the OpenPGP standard to its reference implementation in GnuPG. We use the term “PGP” to cover all of these things. //

If we’ve learned 3 important things about cryptography design in the last 20 years, at least 2 of them are that negotiation and compatibility are evil. The flaws in cryptosystems tend to appear in the joinery, not the lumber, and expansive crypto compatibility increases the amount of joinery. Modern protocols like TLS 1.3 are jettisoning backwards compatibility with things like RSA, not adding it. New systems support just a single suite of primitives, and a simple version number. If one of those primitives fails, you bump the version and chuck the old protocol all at once.

If we’re unlucky, and people are still using PGP 20 years from now, PGP will be the only reason any code anywhere includes CAST5. We can’t say this more clearly or often enough: you can have backwards compatibility with the 1990s or you can have sound cryptography; you can’t have both. //

This isn’t going to get fixed. To make actually secure email, you’d have to tunnel another protocol over email (you’d still be conceding traffic analysis attacks). At that point, why bother pretending?

Encrypting email is asking for a calamity. Recommending email encryption to at-risk users is malpractice. Anyone who tells you it’s secure to communicate over PGP-encrypted email is putting their weird preferences ahead of your safety.

A daemon that scans program outputs for repeated patterns, and takes action. Designed for ease of configuration and hackability.

Easy configuration
Few concepts to grasp, no hidden config. Easy to adapt to your needs

Flexible configuration
From IP bans to service restart: react to any log, and do anything in response

Performant
Save your CPU cycles for your services. Written in Rust with a focus on performance

Advanced Password Generator
It is a program for creation the passwords. Its advantages are:

• Creation of euphonic passwords - there is no other programmes with such feature.
• Random and keyword-based passwords.
• Dynamic charset change.
• Create list of passwords.
• Small size (69 Kb only).
• Both DOS and Windows version.

Blackman's Random Generator is the software for large random and pseudorandom sequences generating with capabilities to estimate and improve sequences' characteristics.

Program's advantages are:

• Several random and pseudorandom sequences generators.
• Filters set for improvement of random sequences characteristics.
• Set of tests and others sequence quality rating techniques.
• Enhanced result exports capabilities.
• Great performance.
• Minimal size.
• Multilingual interface.
• Detailed help system.

All published programs are made by the author of this site and their status is freeware. You may free use them and distributed without the commercial purpose. Software is distributed without any warranties whether expressed or implied. No responsibilities for possible damages or even functionality (right or wrong) can be taken by author.

• Blackman's E-mail encoder - prevents detection of your e-mail address by spam-bots.
• Advanced Password Generator - passwords generator with small size but huge facilities. For example, it can generate euphonic passwords and passwords by keywords. It is easy to setup charset used for their creation. Lists of passwords can be created.
• Blackman's Random Generator - is the software for large random and pseudorandom sequences generating with capabilities to estimate and improve sequences characteristics.
• Phone card reader - software for reading phone cards. This standard includes almost all types of phone cards which used in Russia and Europe.
• Blackman`s Book Reader - Simple e-book reader. Has low system requirements. Automatically unpack files from archives, has "Boss key".
• Blackman`s eBook Converter - a program for transformation books to the convenient format. It automaticaly reformates book, creates table of contents and font selection, saves results in following formats: HTML, RTF, TXT.

Multiple accounts

Sync all your Google Drive, OneDrive, and Dropbox accounts
Selective syncing

Sync only the files you need and save your local space
Plug n' sync

Sync your network & external drives, SD cards, and thumb drives
Keep your file structure

Sync any file or folder from anywhere in your local storage
Distribution support for Linux

Work with your cloud files locally whether you're on Ubuntu, Debian, or Fedora.

A self-hosted bookmark manager designed to be minimal, fast, and easy to set up.

I'm a fan of Pi-hole and Uptime Kuma, as both work incredibly well after the first deployment. Vaultwarden is another gem that I never had to worry about after I began using it instead of a paid password manager.

Resource-heavy tools like NextCloud and Paperless-ngx need frequent tweaks to work correctly. I use them in combination with Immich for photos, but I cannot call them “deploy once and forget” tools.

Self-Hosted Notes

Simple & Private

A lightweight, self-hosted memo hub for effortlessly capturing and sharing your ideas. Open source, no tracking, free forever.

These are simple utilities to manipulate Microsoft Virtual Hard Disks (VHD/VHDX) from the command line.

This utility copies files and directory trees while fully preserving all timestamps, and when possible, NTFS compression and encryption attributes.

The primary benefit to using vcopy is that it preserves all timestamps and NTFS compression and encryption attributes, when possible. Normally, copy operations will fail to preserve any of the timestamps on directories and the creation and access timestamps on files. Especially in the case of directory timestamps, this default copy behavior wreaks havoc on people who depend on their files and directory trees having meaningful timestamps.

You can also suppress and strip out certain file attributes from being copied; for example, the read-only attribute when copying files from a CD-ROM.

Additionally, vcopy can compute hashes for files as they are being copied, eliminating the need for a wasteful second read pass.

Notepad2 is a free, open-source text editor created by Florian Balmer. I have been a user of Notepad2 for a few years; it is the primary text editor that I use every day. This page was created as a way for me to share some of my Notepad2 resources.

The HashCheck Shell Extension makes it easy for anyone to calculate and verify checksums and hashes from Windows Explorer. In addition to integrating file checksumming functionality into Windows, HashCheck can also create and verify SFV files (and other forms of checksum files, such as .md5 files). It is fast and efficient, with a very light disk and memory footprint, and it is open-source.

1. It should be both free and open source.
   1. The file format should be open or well-documented for future migration options.
2. It should be multi-platform: in order to be proposed as a standard, anybody must be able to use it. The program has to run on at least Windows and Linux, preferably including Mac OS.
3. It should have a (large) standard collection of electric/electronic components, with an extensible library: this way it will not be necessary to draw components from scratch, and, just in case, it will be necessary to do it just once.
4. Connections should be better than just lines. They should attach to components, default to right angles, move when the components are moved, autoroute around objects, and so on.
5. It should not require the user to learn a great deal of distracting or convoluted methods to draw schematics.
6. It should have Bezier curves to allow the creation of good audio curves, since most weighting curves are specified by points, not by an equation or circuit model.
7. It has to help the schematic drawing with the option to "snap" components to a grid (otherwise it will be hard to make a precise drawing).
8. Optional: It should be part of a complete, easy to use, drawing package, not just for circuit diagrams (though a 'circuit mode' might be good).

Part 2 There's a wealth of highly usable free software for the big proprietary desktop OSes. You can escape paying subscriptions and switch to free software without changing your OS.

In the first half of this short series, we looked at how to freshen up an aging Mac or Windows 10 PC, and ideally, how to wipe it and install a clean, bloat-free copy of its OS. That is all well and good, but this leaves the problem of what to put on that OS to get out of the trap of software you paid for but don't own. //

Compare OpenAlternative.co, which is snazzy and effects-heavy, with the decidedly low-tech Best FOSS Alternatives, which is very simple and austere. The latter has nothing to sell; it's just a plain, simple categorized list of FOSS tools. If you scroll to the end, it even has a short list of alternatives to itself. //

On a fresh new copy of Windows, the easiest way to get up and running is Ninite. https://ninite.com/

Ebooks Everywhere

Create ebooks for every platform: Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books, and more. Each specialized file can guide readers to buy your next book in their favorite store.

Completed a series? Combine everything into a box set in just a few steps.

• Validated Files in EPUB 3 / EPUB 2
• Image Optimization + Compression
• ARCs for Beta Readers in EPUB + MOBI
• ACE-Approved Accessible Output

Vellum Ebooks $199.99
Create Unlimited Ebooks

Vellum is only available for Mac
https://www.macincloud.com/