Top all-time · #1614
Frederic Cambus
Personal blog · cambus.net · on HN as fcambussystemsprogramming
Frederic Cambus's personal blog at cambus.net covers systems and programming. Since 2011, 45 different Hacker News readers have linked it 135 times, most often “Spleen - Monospaced bitmap fonts”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (19) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link his posts on OpenBSD and its toolchains, the Spleen bitmap font, DNS hacks, ASCII/textmode art, and analysis of a YouTube HTTP 500 error page.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 19 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Personal site and technical blog of Frederic Cambus
Most-linked posts?
- Spleen - Monospaced bitmap fonts9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2018-09-19
- Decommissioning a free public API5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2015-11-20
- Adventures in running a free public API3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-11-11
- Speedbuilding LLVM/Clang in 2 minutes on ARM3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-05-12
- OpenBSD/ARM64 on Hetzner Cloud3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-09-20
- Decoding Youtube HTTP Error 500 Message3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-11-05
- The State of Toolchains in OpenBSD3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-05-19
- Playing with Djgpp and GCC 10 on DOS2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-05-22
- Fuzzing DNS Zone Parsers2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-07-11
- Oldest domains in the .com, .net, and .org TLDs2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-06-26
What Hacker News says?
Indeed, PTT has a lot of beautiful screens, and for those of us used to the CP437 character set, it looks quite exotic! For those interested, here are some captures of some of the menus (there is a lot more posted in conferences) : - Taiwanese BBSes and Unicode ANSi Art : http://www.cambus.net/taiwanese-bbses-and-unicode-ansi-art/ - Taiwanese BBSes and Unicode ANSi Art - Part II : http://www.cambus.net/taiwanese-bbs…
Comment linking /taiwanese-bbses-and-unicode-ansi-art-part-ii/
on “Bootstra.386 – A Bootstrap theme from the 1980s”Submitted Oldest domains in the .com, .net, and .org TLDs as a story · 276 points
HN discussionNoticed that OpenBSD includes some really ancient versions of GCC and Binutils. Found this page (2021) explaining why: https://www.cambus.net/the-state-of-toolchains-in-openbsd/
Comment linking /the-state-of-toolchains-in-openbsd/
on “OpenBSD 8.0”Submitted OpenBSD folklore and share/misc/airport as a story · 207 points
HN discussionYour font is cool, ignore the downvotes. It reminds me a bit of the default console font on OpenBSD, Spleen [1]. [1] https://www.cambus.net/spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/
Comment linking /spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/
on “MonoLisa – A font designed for developers”Submitted Decommissioning a free public API as a story · 170 points
HN discussionA similar service is here: http://www.cambus.net/interesting-dns-hacks/ Interesting about DNS stores is they save a round trip, so it's not just a weird abuse of the protocol to store content, it's also potentially a performance optimisation.
Comment linking /interesting-dns-hacks/
on “RedditStorage”Submitted File transfers via the parallel port on DOS using LapLink as a story · 130 points
HN discussionFor an introduction to pkgsrc on Mac OS X, please check : http://www.cambus.net/using-pkgsrc-on-mac-os-x/
Comment linking /using-pkgsrc-on-mac-os-x/
on “Baseline Mac OS X Support merged into FreeBSD package manager”Submitted Clang Static Analyzer and the Z3 constraint solver (2022) as a story · 107 points
HN discussionThe OpenBSD people in general and De Raadt specifically are probably the best-known objectors to Apache-2[1–4], among other things because they hold that Apache-2 is too broad to be a copyright license and thus has to be interpreted as a contract instead. I don’t know if they’re right, but their arguments did shift my opinion in their direction. Corporate lawyers seem to love it, though, because of the mutually-assu…
Comment linking /the-state-of-toolchains-in-openbsd/
on “A proposal to start “llvm-libc” (2020)”Submitted Modernizing the OpenBSD Console as a story · 100 points
HN discussionSounds like how Telize started. Look at the first[1] article from the author. He decided to bring the service down after being contacted by a malware research company that his service is used by ransomware. Would you like to risk someone contacting you and possibly threatening with legal action because they would believe you might have taken part in their data being held hostage? There was a story floating around wi…
Comment linking /adventures-in-running-a-free-public-api/
on “Decommissioning a free public API”Submitted NetBSD on the Raspberry Pi as a story · 71 points
HN discussionI used OpenBSD in production at my previous job (an ISP), in a few different roles. Lots of ISPs use OpenBSD for various purposes. HSMs from nCipher used to run on top of (a slightly modified, IIRC) OpenBSD. Just as JunOS (the OS on (some) Juniper network devices) runs on FreeBSD, I'm sure there are many other commercial products built on OpenBSD as well -- we just don't hear about them very much. --- Related (from…
Comment linking /why-openbsd/
on “Modernizing the OpenBSD Console”Submitted Clang Static Analyzer and the Z3 constraint solver as a story · 63 points
HN discussionhttp://www.cambus.net/storing-ascii-art-in-the-dns/
Comment linking /storing-ascii-art-in-the-dns/
on “EFF adds ASCII art to its DNS”Submitted Distributing files via DNS as a story · 63 points
HN discussionI don't know if the situation has changed since Spleen was first released [0], but I would desperately hope so as it is ridiculous to default in 2019 to a non-internationalized font, without support for even Latin-based Central European characters, let alone non-Latin alphabets. > Another short term goal is to add support for Central European languages, with Polish being the immediate priority. Other than that, look…
Comment linking /spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/
on “OpenBSD: New console font Spleen made default”Submitted The State of Toolchains in OpenBSD as a story · 58 points
HN discussionhttps://www.cambus.net/spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/
Comment linking /spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/
on “OpenBSD: New console font Spleen made default”Submitted Fuzzing DNS Zone Parsers as a story · 57 points
HN discussionThe text sample on the author's site[1] is from Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris , so we can deduce the font's name also refers not to the organ but the other meaning of the word "spleen": "Melancholy with no apparent cause, characterised by a disgust with everything." [1] https://www.cambus.net/spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/
Comment linking /spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/
on “OpenBSD: New console font Spleen made default”Submitted Things I Love About Go as a story · 55 points
HN discussionI'm sad that nobody added a picture of how it actually looks. I believe this is the relevant font: https://www.cambus.net/spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/ edit: I'm very stupid and apparently missed the link to this same blog post in TFA. Leaving this here in case someone else makes the same mistake.
Comment linking /spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/
on “OpenBSD: New console font Spleen made default”Submitted FreeBSD on the Vortex86DX CPU as a story · 51 points
HN discussionMaybe not as detailed as your link, but still interesting: http://www.cambus.net/why-openbsd/ Somewhat unrelated, but a very interesting read: "Why did I choose the DragonFlyBSD Operating System?" https://bsdmag.org/siju_george/ Let's give the 3rd major BSD OS more love :)
Comment linking /why-openbsd/
on “Why we use OpenBSD at VidiGuard”Submitted Window Maker Nostalgia as a story · 50 points
HN discussionAn analysis of this can be found here: http://www.cambus.net/decoding-youtube-http-error-500-messag...
Comment linking /decoding-youtube-http-error-500-message/
on “Ask HN: Decode Youtube 500 page”Submitted Adventures in running a free public API as a story · 43 points
HN discussion
