As the @bsdcan lists of talks and tutorials have been posted, I can officially announce my presentation:

Don't Freeze in the Cloud: Reclaiming Home Control with NetBSD

In 2010, I was taking more flights than cups of coffee. After a two-week trip, I returned home to a nasty, albeit expected, surprise: an indoor temperature of 7.8°C (46 F). Possessing more time than money, I decided to solve the problem my own way. I built a custom Python-based control system, accessible only via VPN, to manage my heating.

In 2015, after moving houses, this system was demoted to a secondary role, replaced by a shiny, commercial "smart" thermostat. However, I continued to maintain and update my custom solution for fun.

Fast forward to October 2025: major cloud providers faced significant outages. My commercial thermostat became dumber than a mechanical switch. I was reduced to manual two-hour overrides, with no visibility into settings or usage. It was a wake-up call: keeping my home warm should not depend on someone else's server.

I dusted off my solution and adapted it to modern needs - powered, of course, by NetBSD, running on the very same hardware that served my previous home for years.

In this talk, I will share the journey, the technical challenges, and the architectural decisions behind the project. I will demonstrate how NetBSD’s stability and low footprint make it the ideal operating system for long-term, "set-and-forget" home automation, allowing us to reclaim control from the cloud.

#NetBSD #BSDCan #BSDCan2026 #RunBSD #OwnYourData #Presentation #Talk

People waxing lyrical about using 'original vi', both nowadays in 2026 and back in 2006, haven't a clue what that is.

There's only one family of operating systems where 'vi' will actually run the original vi program by Joy, Horton, et al.: #Illumos and its derivatives #Tribblix, #OmniOS, and #SmartOS.

*Everyone else* uses one of the ground-up clones.

On #FreeBSD, #OpenBSD, and #NetBSD, it's Bostic's early 1990s #nvi, which was derived from Kirkendall's elvis, a clone written some time around 1990.

On Linux-based operating systems, vi either is Bostic nvi, or is one of the derivatives of STEVIE (the middle-1980s vi clone for the Atari ST that inspired Kirkendall to write elvis in the first place): Moolenaar's VIM or NeoVIM.

On none of those will you get original Joy+Horton vi in base, or indeed packaged/in ports.

Yes, Heirloom vi exists, which is Ritter's 2002 fork of 1985 Joy+Horton vi. But it's not even available in Arch Linux nowadays.

#vi #retrocomputing #ComputerHistory

This is a clever use of secmodel+kauth to implement jail-like process isolation on #netbsd

https://www.petermann-digital.de/blog/netbsd-secmodel_jail/

PSA

Your "old" computer is probably NOT EWaste.

Especially not, if the provider of your commercial OS or other paid service says so.

#E_Waste_Conoisseur

#FreeBSD #OpenBSD #NetBSD #Linux #HAIKU_OS #HaikuOS