Cambus
cambus.net · Personal blog · on HN since 2011
Personal blog of a developer and BSD user covering OpenBSD, retro DOS programs, the Spleen bitmap font, and small technical projects.
What HN saysHN links it for the Spleen font, which OpenBSD adopted as its console font, and for posts on OpenBSD and DOS file transfers.
44HN people shared it
20linked it in comments
111stories submitted
1.9Kstory points
5 months agolast shared
2011people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Spleen - Monospaced bitmap fonts9 people · 8 points · first shared 2018 · 1 comments on HN
- 2Decommissioning a free public API5 people · 193 points · first shared 2015 · 59 comments on HN
- 3Decoding Youtube HTTP Error 500 Message4 people · 3 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 4Adventures in running a free public API3 people · 57 points · first shared 2015 · 12 comments on HN
- 5Speedbuilding LLVM/Clang in 2 minutes on ARM3 people · 11 points · first shared 2021 · 2 comments on HN
- 6Why OpenBSD?3 people · 6 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 7OpenBSD/ARM64 on Hetzner Cloud3 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 8Oldest domains in the .com, .net, and .org TLDs2 people · 278 points · first shared 2018 · 133 comments on HN
- 9Clang Static Analyzer and the Z3 constraint solver (2022)2 people · 170 points · first shared 2022 · 9 comments on HN
- 10File transfers via the parallel port on DOS using LapLink2 people · 130 points · first shared 2022 · 119 comments on HN
- 11Modernizing the OpenBSD Console2 people · 105 points · first shared 2020 · 61 comments on HN
- 12Fuzzing DNS Zone Parsers2 people · 62 points · first shared 2019 · 8 comments on HN
- 13The State of Toolchains in OpenBSD2 people · 58 points · first shared 2021 · 21 comments on HN
- 14Storing ASCII art in the DNS2 people · 39 points · first shared 2014 · 9 comments on HN
- 15ANSi Web Browser concept (2012)2 people · 33 points · first shared 2012 · 25 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
cisstrd · 2016-07-24
Maybe 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 :)
heliostatic · 2012-04-12
Following up, I'm going to try implementing this post: http://www.cambus.net/creating-thumbnails-using-phantomjs-and-imagemag… over the weekend.
somat · 2026-05-27
if we are doing a survey, there is spleen which was adopted as the default console font for openbsd.
https://www.cambus.net/spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/
fragmede · 2024-05-10
fcambus · 2024-01-18
The character and color cycling effect program mentioned at the end of the article is available here: https://www.cambus.net/character-and-color-cycling-effect-in-c-on-dos/
petecooper · 2023-09-21
bobwaycott · 2023-09-21
This is a stub article. The original source is https://www.cambus.net/openbsd-arm64-on-hetzner-cloud/
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS · 2022-02-15
Your 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/
jlgaddis · 2020-09-01
I 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 the same author as this submission): "Why OpenBSD?" [0].
---
[0]: https://www.cambus.net/why-openbsd/
pavlov · 2019-01-10
The 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/
dijit · 2019-01-10
I'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.
ComputerGuru · 2019-01-10
I 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, looks good and I'm digging the French literary references.
[0]: https://www.cambus.net/spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/
mulander · 2016-02-01
Sounds 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 with the curl author receiving emails like that just because he showed up in credits. I personally would pull the plug from a free service immediately if I found out it was used by malware and I would have no accountability for the person I was enabling with my software.
[1] - http://www.cambus.net/adventures-in-running-a-free-public-api/
mmahemoff · 2015-06-04
A 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.
tobik · 2015-05-01
Have you read the article he links to? http://www.cambus.net/textmode
He's an artist and his medium is ASCII, ANSI or Teletext. I think that's fascinating.
WhatsName · 2014-02-10
An analysis of this can be found here:
http://www.cambus.net/decoding-youtube-http-error-500-message/
mananaysiempre · 2021-12-08
The 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-assured-patent-destruction clause.
[1]: http://www.openbsd.org/policy.html (see corresponding section)
[2]: https://marc.info/?i=91077.1475036864%20()%20cvs%20!%20openbsd%20!%20o… (De Raadt rants on openbsd-misc, discussed on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126178810)
[3]: https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2017-April/112300.html (Kettenis objects on behalf of OpenBSD on llvm-dev)
[4]: https://www.cambus.net/the-state-of-toolchains-in-openbsd/ (OpenBSD gives up on staying with old LLVM)