This post was originally typo’d with “bog” instead of “blog”. As that Oblique Strategy says, honour thy error as a hidden intention. I’ve written before about the things I look for in a blog. This time I thought I’d flip this on its head… an exercise that used to be much easier when I was into gymnastics. This is what will make me bounce...
The news of this slipped me by last year, but I just saw OpenWrt has their own hardware now, based on the BananaPi: OpenWrt One is based on the MediaTek Filogic 820 SoC and has WiFi 6, dual-band, 3×3/2×2, 1x 2.5Gbit WAN, 1x 1Gbit LAN, 1GB DDR4 RAM, 256 MiB NAND, 16 MiB NOR (for recovery), M.2 SSD, USB-C Serial console and USB 2.0. You can buy the...
Surely it can’t be that bad: $ find ./drafts/ -type f | wc -l ==> 11987 Womp womp! Admittedlly, that folder is also now twenty years old. Most of those drafts are also just a title or a topic sentence. Some are full-blown posts, with images, diagrams, and regret, while others are simply not timely anymore, are perhaps NSFW/blue in some way, or I...
Early posts on this blog—at least, the technical ones—were spent writing about my adventures getting my ideal graphical desktop going on FreeBSD and Fedora. This is as opposed to the non-technical posts, which tended to be written about adventures not involving getting my ideal graphical desktop going on FreeBSD and Fedora. Thanks Ruben, once...
You know that quip about there being ten types of people in this world: those who understand binary, and those who are sick of this joke? Well I have some additional classifiers. For example, there are people who like crunchy peanut butter, and there are those who like extra crunchy. There are early risers and late risers. There are people who...
Cory Doctorow: A rigged ballot that’s always won by the people with the thickest wallet. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-01-17.
Speaking of social media and feeds, a new site launched that’s honestly one of the more surreal things I’ve ever seen: Bluesky is an opportunity to shake up the status quo. They have built scaffolding for a new kind of social web. One where we all have more say, choice and control. But it will take independent funding and governance to turn...
This is the third post in my A-Z Toobox series, in which I’m listing tools I use down the alphabet for no logical reason. The letter C has the certbot utility which automatically provisions, allocates, and installs TLS certificates using Let’s Encrypt that you can run via cron. Speaking of cron, there’s cron and crontab, the age-old system...
This is a collection of random, unrelated things I read this week. I fell into the trap last year of wanting to comment on individual stories, but they never left my drafts because I already exceeded my self-imposed daily post limit. This format will let me post stuff that interests me, and avoids the drafts folder trap where they lose...
Clara and I had the brilliant idea of checking out a new Japanese restaurant two suburbs over last night for dinner. It was a bit of a walk, but absolutely worth it. Teriyaki salad with sesame sauce, and a small bowl of miso… wow. The way to my heart is hugs, Arabica, and simple but tasty Asian food. We’re into year two of our 10,000 steps a day...
Someone decided to make a loud call on a packed train with her phone company yesterday. I’ll spare you writing it in capital letters: “I’ve been struggling to call a number in Canada, I’ve even putting in the prefixes right but it’s simply not working. Please escalate me to someone who will assist me to resolve this…” As the train filled up, she...
A CAPTCHA asked me to select every square with a motorbike this morning. There was just one small problem: the pictured motorised conveyance was a scooter, not a motorbike. I’ve had this happen before where it asks me to select a traffic light, when only the pole for a traffic light is visible. Or a bus, where only the front of a van is visible....
If you’re a massive nerd like me, you probably buy something new the same way you dip your toes into a new hobby: with obsessive research! Armed with a list of requirements and a target price, we read the reviews, scour the product pages, watch the videos, and maybe even build a comparison matrix (… or maybe that’s just me). Then, and only then,...
I get a lot of comments asking this. As always, Techmoan has the answer. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-01-14.
Robb Knight asks: Ignoring podcasts, which has to be RSS, is there an argument for using RSS/atom over JSON feeds? You can probably implement either. Most modern aggregators support both. As long as you publish it in such a way that aggregators can find them, you’re golden. Or platinum; I tend to find gold stuff gaudy. But there’s something else...
Every morning, Clara and I walk out onto the balcony, and we see one of the XPTs fly past. This is a mid-speed interstate train operated by the NSW state government that Clara and I took to Melbourne last March. It’s fun waving at some of the people, and having them wave back! This photo from last year shows me in one of my awkward nerd poses...
We haven’t done a mug post in a while. This is my Wedgewood Stamps from Afar: Egypt mug, made in England no less: In the words of 10cc, is was a present from my mother. She and I had always intended to do all the tourist stuff around Egypt, alongside going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. We shared in so much of this stuff when I...
This is the next in my increasingly inaccurate “three part” blog post series on the PlayStation 3, Clara’s and my favourite HD console. It was embarrassingly recently when I realised the PlayStation 3 (and 4) had hard drives. My brain was firmly in late 2010s mode, and assumed they had flash storage when their capacities were reported. Derp! For...
Today’s Music Monday features one of Paul McCarney’s sillier tunes that’s an absolute early 1990s earworm: As quoted in the Paul McCartney Project: “A very wacky thing where we decided to make something up…Trevor said ‘Have you got anything for one of the verses?’ I said ‘Well I’ve got this really silly idea…’, which is like just some French...
This has come up a few times, but Steven G. Harms was the latest to ask. Not that I need an excuse to write about BSD, mind! I ran tcsh(1) from base as my shell for most of my time as a handsome—or not—FreeBSD user. I prefer the C-style syntax for dotfile configuration and scripting, even if its use was “widely considered harmful”. I just found...
Her latest post for wreckage/salvage didn’t pull any punches. It’s about social media, corporate governance, the tech industry, and the behaviour of Mad Kings. Make a coffee, sit down, and give it a proper read. My favourite line, among too many to quote or mention: If a technological system makes human problems worse, you have to fix the system...
Clara and I were walking back from having lunch on Sydney’s lovely North Shore, when we crossed the path of what might be the best-named street of all time: George Brain was a book keeper, accountant, and New South Wales state politician who advocated for free milk distribution to school children during the Great Depression, and was an advocate...
We’re into our third and final post in my PlayStation 3 shaggy-dog story. In part one I talked about consoles in general, and in part 2 I explained why we ended up with a PS3 years after it was old hat. Last we spoke, our 2012 Super Slim had given up the proverbial ghost, assuming you were playing a haunted game of some sort. Putting the device’s...
A colleague shared this Sebastian Lague video yesterday. One day I’ll stop being taken aback by how far this meme has gone, and the lengths people will go to recreate it. Amazing :). By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-01-11.
It’s been fun seeing how many options there are for one-off KVMs thesedays. These devices let you get out of band console access to servers (or desktops) without paying the proprietary OOB tax. I can also see them useful for remote controlling my homelab boxes without having to plug in a monitor for the boot process. These seem to be the most...
It’s a Friday night after a long week back at work, so what do you do? You sit down with your partner and rank western-style fast food chains, with a healthy (hmm) dose of childhood nostalgia. Disclaimer: Fast food is bad, I should feel bad, and giving soulless multinational companies free advertising is bad. With that out of the way, here’s my...
This is a bit more of what my American friends would call Inside Baseball… which I assume would just more baseball. It’s baseball all the way down! Wait, that’s Terry Pratchet. Jeff Geerling did a retrospective last year where he talked—among other things—about clickbait titles. He said his video about replacing the AppleTV with a Raspberry Pi...
The EFF saw Mozilla, and said “hold my beer” on Mastodon: We applaud Meta’s efforts to try to fix its over-censorship problem […] Imagine seeing what’s going on, and thinking that’s an appropriate opening for a post. In the local vernacular: you what mate? They’ve since issued what could (charitably) be described as a partial retraction. But...
This is part two in my shaggy dog story about the PlayStation 3, one of my favourite ever consoles. In part one I talked about my history (or lack thereof) with consoles as a kid, how I was first fascinated by the PS3 for its ability to run Folding@home and play Blu-ray discs, and how Clara and I ended up with a couple of them. But how!? I’d say...
The way Feature Keys are downloaded for WatchGuard FireboxV evaluations has changed, at least since the last time I had to do this for a client. On the off-chance this helps someone: Log into the WatchGuard Partner Portal, and under the Products menu, click Virtual Appliance Evaluation. Next to the WatchGuard Product you want to request an...
Where we’re coming from, we don’t need no context! Welcome to the next in our series of overheard coffee shop snippets, I’m your host Yves Drop. Nah I didn’t get a break, I work for a living. Do you drink cappuccinos? No? Wait, what? Everyone is a dictator. You are. I am. We vote for dictators. Even the ones that say they’re [sic] dictators are...
Almost exactly two years ago—huh!—Cay Horstman configured his Linux machine for 2× HiDPI, including some tweaks I was unaware of. He also summarised why you’d want to do this: At first I didn’t care because my external monitor didn’t change, and just set the resolution to 1920x1200. But when I traveled over Christmas, I got curious. Would it be...
Every time I go to an industry gathering, user group, trade show, conference, weeb event, or other such gathering, I’m issued one of these lanyard things with either a name tag or card attached. Sometimes it’s to identify me among the crowd, other times it’s to verify that I—or the company!—paid for me to attend their free lunch with an event...
Clara and I are faced with a predicament thanks to our renewed interest in hi-fi and retro(ish) console gear in the lounge. Namely, how do we track what device is connected to what input? There are three key challenges: The TV only has inputs numbered 1-8, which isn’t helpful. Some devices publish a name via the HDMI spec, such as the AppleTV....
Long-time Twitter and now Mastodon friend @Franksting has a new blog, and he’s started with a topic near and dear to me: If a product team has done a good job, users will clearly understand a new feature’s value and they can turn it on whenever they choose. And this, which should be stapled to the forehead of every manager and decision maker...
One thing I didn’t do in my twenty-year anniversary post was thank the specific projects and software that make this blog possible. I apologise for this massive oversight! The Hugo static site generator is the first one I want to call out. I’ve bounced around almost a dozen CMSs here since 2004, but I’ve been on Hugo since 2016. I first moved to...
I should be more thankful that the systems surrounding me work as well as they do. There is so much that happens behind the scenes that make our lives possible and pleasant, from the power grid and water systems, to telephony wiring and mobile reception. I take it for granted that I plug stuff in, or connect to something, and it just works. Good...
This is a bit of a shaggy-dog story, but it was fun to think back on. It also lead me to dive back into some older hardware again, and even fix and upgrade some of it! This is part one on my series on the PlayStation 3, though it might take me a few posts to get there. I know, this surprises nobody. I arrived late to consoles. My parents believed...
Today’s Music Monday is something really special. 💙💚 I was saving this from last week, but my oshi Pavolia Reine from Hololive Indonesia did a send-off with Ceres Fauna in a cover of Invincible Rainbow Arrow, and it’s everything fans of both them could have hoped for! For context, Reine and Fauna bonded early over their love of AI: The Somnium...
Today we have a quote from Philip K. Dick, via the imitable Emil Oppeln-Bronikowski on Mastodon. Ubik has made the reading list! “The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay...
Once again, I’ve written a title that somehow manages to conjure something completely different to what I intended. Or is the imagery of an alien eating a human a thinly-veiled critique of our economic system? I’ll let you decide. Where was I going with this? I have a complicated relationship with stuff. Stuff, and more specifically, things....
One of the low-effort “engagement” tricks people used to do on Twitter would be to come up with word searches to define specific times of the year. They’d put controversial or risqué words in to drum up anger and discussion, and the “engagement” would flow! Well this year I’ve finally decided to make my own. This is based on topics near and dear...
Mozilla’s fall from grace has been so sad to see, especially for someone who used to respect them and their ideals. Now it’s just embarrassing, like witnessing your uncle stumbling drunk into a family dinner and immediately hitting on the wait staff a third his age: AI you can trust. Easily summarize emails, docs, articles, and videos across the...
It still seems like yesterday we were watching her debut, then we were saying goodbye. I’ve loved everyone in Hololive, but Fauna was up there with Ina, Watson, Reine, and Liz. I still can’t believe I won’t be able to catch a comfy stream again before work. Thanks so much Fauna, and all the best. Let Me Stay Here may be on repeat for a while. 💚...
When this blog started twenty years ago—sorry, I’m still processing that number—many of my early posts concerned setting up my ideal FreeBSD, NetBSD, and/or Linux desktop environment. I cobbled together what I needed and settled mostly on ROXFiler, urxvt, and Fluxbox, with a few other experiments. It was fun, and I learned more from tweaking my...
I was resuming the downloading of a video from a site using yt-dlp, like a gentleman, when I got this message: [download] Resuming download at byte 695556181 ERROR: unable to download video data: HTTP Error 416: Requested range not satisfiable I got the same error when looking at ranges, and the guy tried to sell me a gas unit when we...
I wrote a few posts last year talking about my desire for a portable computer in a slab form-factor I could use while commuting on the train. This is opposed to a commuting form-factor I could use while slabbing on the train. That sounds like planking. Wow, 2011 called, they want their meme back. There have been some great suggestions, some of...
I read that title back and realised it implies that refrigeration was my invention. This may surprise some of you, but I cannot take credit for inventing refrigeration. Well, I could, but that’d leave you… what’s a pun related to air conditoning? Frosty? … Michał Sapka ran a poll asking what the greatest invention of modern times was. Out of...
Mark Ericsson’s friend Gary Castle had a Corner, and he had quite the revelation in March 2007: WHOLESALE CLIPBOARD PARTS I’ve got a guy who can get me clipboard parts at a really good rate. These things are really cheap. The catch: everything comes unassembled. He keeps telling me that it’s not difficult to put them together, and that everyone’s...
2025 has been going exceptionally well. Except for the part where I somehow sprained my left index finger without knowing it, until this morning where it was so swolen and painful I couldn’t move it. How does this happen!? I went to the GP who referred me to get an X-ray and ultrasound. There was no major damage which was great news, but the...
I’ve been doing something wrong for a while, and thought it worth bringing to everyone’s attention. When you’re preparing a document for PDF to share, remember to use your application’s Export feature, and not Print to PDF. Exporting retains the metadata, structure, and accessibility features that Print to PDF strips out, which hampers screen...
My penultimate post for 2024 considered my future with Mini-ITX, and how I might be looking to expand to MicroATX again for future builds. I’ve exclusively run small form factor for my personal desktops since the early 2010s, but expansion and cooling limitations have led me to reconsider this time. Whoo-oo-ah-oo, this time ♫. It’s been fun...
This is one of my favourite accounts on Mastodon. This one from last year was rather pretty, for reasons that may be obvious if you’re reading this on the site, rather than my RSS feed: It hasn’t generated my family clan tartan from my mum’s side of the family yet, but mathematically I’m sure it’s bound to eventually. (As an aside, I thought it...
This year the blog turned twenty! There were 560 posts, 204,081 words, and only a singular mention of creamed corn… right there. This was a hard year personally, but also one with lots of milestones. Next year I plan to spend less time fixated on news, more time reading people, and investing into fixing things that I’ve left on the back-burner...
I like small things. I like efficient things. I like small things that are efficient. Brute-forcing a solution by making it bigger, hotter, or louder is one thing, but performing the same work with less, in a smaller space? Or taking an existing system and shrinking it down? That’s impressive. The fact Clara is that much shorter than me and twice...
I was in a public restroom washing my hands yesterday—like a gentleman—when I realised there were no taps to speak of. The spout protruded from the sink as one would expect, alongside an attractive but over-engineered soap dispenser to the side. But… how was one meant to use it? I’ll admit I spent an embarrassing amount of time just staring at...
I’ve been reading retrospectives talking about how Y2K happened a quarter of a century ago. Denoting periods of time by factions of another period of time always seemed odd to me, especially when it’s clearly designed to render something more impressive than it actually is! That’s a bit of a theme when it comes to Y2K, though not for the reasons...
I love that open, considered hardware like the MNT Reform exists, and the MNT Reform Next is set to continue this trend. The keyboard, reasonable-sized trackpad, and repairable construction all look boss. Unfortunately, it still posesses a visual Achilles’ heel: 12.5" matte IPS 1920x1080 eDP panel It’s such a shame! That pixel density is too low...
Neil Brown posted about what brought him joy in computers and the Internet this year. I agree that it could be a cathartic exercise among the gloom and doom, so I thought I’d give it a shot as well. As Neil qualifies, we are both lucky people, and these items should have “for us” appended. If you have different perspectives, that’s also fine. 1....
Hololive divas Hoshimachi Suisei and Houshou Marine had a collab with BE@RBRICK in October that I only just saw. The art is amazing! It looks like the BE@RBRICKs themselves are still available for sale if that’s your thing. And no, I wasn’t paid for this post. Maybe I was bribed by art though. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-12-28.
My post about the Minecraft Xmas Easter Egg made me want to try embedding one of my own. In the last post, I: Linked to the “wrong” article. I quoted the Wikipedia article about Nori, or Japanese seaweed/algae. Wrote the title of the post as phsycological instead of psychological. Phycology refers to the study of algae. Get it? GET IT!? I thought...
SciTechDaily reported on a new study published by researches at my Sydney alma mater about the impact surveillance, or the feeling of being watched, had on their sensory perceptions: Nori (Japanese: 海苔) is a dried edible seaweed used in Japanese cuisine, usually made from species of the red algae genus Pyropia, including P. yezoensis and P....
This has become a highlight of the season each year. I was going to say it’s an Easter Egg, but that’s another time of year. I almost don’t want to log out, because after Xmas they return to regular chests. Oh well :’). By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-12-26.
I defer to the expertise of James and James when they say they approach coffee in a certain way. But I think I might be taking a different tack from how Hoffey Coffee brews with the Clever Coffee Dripper, the steep and release brewer from Taiwan for which I now harbour more than a slight obsession. I talked about the Clever Coffee Dripper at the...
Clara and I took a train into the CBD earlier this week to tour all the decorations. It was much cooler than the summer heatwave we’d had a week earlier which was lovely… though we still saw two women in bikini tops and massive Santa hats. Because Australian summer! Here we are at Martin Place, not that far from the infamous fountain from The...
Clara and I bought a white Baratza Encore ESP grinder last month on special, to celebrate moving into our new home. It replaced this no-name blade grinder that had been my daily driver for more than a decade: I bought this for $10 at a big box store back in the early 2010s, around the time I was developing an interest in homebrew coffee. I poured...
Famed Swedish furniture store IKEA had this buying guide on their website landing page: I mentioned on Mastodon, but I’d far prefer to be in the Plant Room, not the RGB Room. Is there a Plant Room for computators? As an aside, is a phrase with three words. I’m glad that gamers are keeping the DIY computer scene alive after the rest of the...
I roll my own VPN servers for myself and my family because it’s (relatively) easy, I retain more control, and I’m wary of the usual suspects for $REASONS. But when you do, oh boy, be prepared for stuff to break! I managed to land on Reddit for a specific topic, but they immediately told on themselves that their crappy “network security” couldn’t...
Motherboards made from the late-1990s to today generally have a CR2032 cell to maintain the system realtime clock and CMOS settings when the machine isn’t operating. When these wear out, you can pop them out with a flathead screwdriver, and replace them with a new coin cell without much fuss. Prior to this, a soldered NiCD or NiMH barrel battery...
On today’s Music Monday, we’re exploring the lyrics to Alanis Morissette’s Ironic. You weren’t around in the 1990s if you didn’t know at least some of the words, or had opinions™ regarding whether the song described irony at all, or merely a string of bad luck. It didn’t matter, it was an iconic song. I thought it’d be fun to see how many of them...
(I was saving this post for when I powered on the board and ran it through its paces, but I posted about it on Mastodon yesterday and got some interest. Consider this a part one). The 80486 is unashamedly my favourite computing platform. I love every retrocomputer in existence—which has proven dangerous—but you’ll always have that place in your...
I was cleaning out my Gith Ub account after their latest volley of spam, and I had some impressively outdated forks: This branch is 5050 commits behind textmate/textmate:master. This branch is 47232 commits behind Homebrew/legacy-homebrew:master. This branch is 232760 commits behind Homebrew/homebrew-cask:master. I’ve had pull requests accepted,...
It’s official, my blog is now older than some people attending university today! And driving! And drinking outside the US! Have I mentioned I’m in my late thirties and feeling old? I went for an eye checkup today, and the word bifocals was mentioned for the first time. NO SIR, I REJECT YOUR MEDICAL ADVICE! Where was I going with this? I’ll be...
Dominic Giannini and Tess Ikonomou: Australia will reopen its embassy in Kyiv and give cash to a recovery fund as it doubles down on support for Ukraine “at a critical time in this conflict”. Foreign Minister Penny Wong toured Ukraine and met with Ukraine’s Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha and Energy Minister Herman...
I just realised I haven’t been to the landing pages of these languages for years. I thought it was interesting how they present themselves. Groovy: Apache Groovy is a powerful, optionally typed and dynamic language, with static-typing and static compilation capabilities, for the Java platform aimed at improving developer productivity thanks to a...
The last two posts on this site were as follows: Our 912 partners 128 years of the Glasgow Subway! This is now the 003rd consecutive post to include a three-digit integer somewhere in its title. Hot ziggity. Could I have said the third post instead? Absolutely. Was this post pointless? Almost certainly. Did I post it anyway? I mean, yes, you’re...
I used a fresh browser install this morning without an adblocker, and saw this incredible popup: Responsible use of your data. We and our 912 partners process your personal data, e.g. your IP-number, using technology such as cookies to store and access information on your device in order to serve personalized ads and content, ad and content...
Via Wikipedia: The Glasgow Subway is an underground light metro system in Glasgow, Scotland. Opened on 14 December 1896, it is the third-oldest underground rail transit system in the world after the London Underground and the Budapest Metro. The Subway operates as a loop line, with some of the coolest looking rolling stock in the world. They’re...
Clara and I were having lunch yesterday, as people tend to do in the middle of the day, when a couple sat at the table next to us. I don’t make a habit of eavesdropping on people, but sometimes the volume of their speech makes it unavoidable. We quickly released it was an actor, and a theatre company employee who wasn’t a recruiter or talent...
Related to my post about self-hosted bookmarking tools (thanks to everyone for the suggestions!), I’ve been exporting my bookmarks from various sites so I can eventually aggregate them into once place. It’s a lot of work, and it might mostly be for naught. I expected some of the links to not resolve, but the results were far more grim than I ever...
Photo by Dough4872 on Wikimedia Commons. This is a hotel on Daytona Beach in Florida in the US, and I absolutely love everything about it. The colors, the Art Deco font, the rounded shapes. I might have my next desktop wallpaper for after the holidays. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-12-16.
I had a series of roles in my old Ansible library that were configured, a little something, like this: ./roles/ └── bootstrap/ └── tasks/ ├── debian.yml ├── freebsd.yml ├── illumos.yml ├── main.yml └── netbsd.yml The tasks folder contains playbooks for the most common OSs I use, which were automatically...
I was a massive fan and user of del.icio.us back in the day, then I moved to Pinboard when the renamed Delicious was Yahoo’d. It works great, but I’m self-hosting most other things, and this seems like a prime candidate. Before I learn more Python and bake one myself (or do it in Perl), anyone have any they like? I don’t need it to be a “read...
I grew up watching shows like CSI, and true crime like Forensic Files and The New Detectives. It’s interesting now with retrospect seeing what the people on these shows got wrong, or where the science was overstated, or what we’ve learned since (I also think white collar crime is underrepresented on such programming too, but that’s a separate...
I’ve talked about this a few times on Mastodon, but thought it was worth sharing the saga here too. Australia has a partially privatised power grid, meaning there are companies between customers and producers. These middlemen speculate on the wholesale price of electricity to generate profit; or what often happens, go out of business. Clara and I...
The emergency phone button in a lift, train, bus, aircraft, blimp, or spaceship capsule. That ZFS send/receive target at a remote location, because your primary array blew up in a power surge, because your UPS isn’t what it was cracked up to be. Or maybe, it was cracked too much. Wait, what? Universal healthcare and/or insurance. Your remote...
I’m sure every country has a channel like Dash Cam Owners Australia. As the name suggests, it features videos submitted by Australian drivers of events caught on their dashcams, from cars doing dangerous things, to Thomas the Tank Engine crossing an intersection. It’s tempting to write off such videos as clickbait, sensationalist, or even...
It was such a stunning day yesterday, I walked across the Harbour Bridge with a wrap for my lunch break. And hey look, a Cunard ship! By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-12-12.
It’s hard not to read the news about that insurance executive in the US. His passing has brought a whirlpool of resentment, frustration, and anger to the surface, from people across all walks of life. It might be wishful thinking to assume this will bring about change by itself, especially with the incoming administration over there. But at least...
There may be a better term for this, but I’m going with it! But first, one of my shaggy-dog introductions. As a tragic late-thirty-something, I’m old enough to remember when CSS was being debated and introduced. Source code for web pages in the 1990s was a hot mess, with content intertwined with presentation like pasta with so much sauce...
I’ve said it here before, and I’ll say it again: I love Perl. I’ve used so many languages over the years, but writing Perl code feels natural. It feels like an extension of my brain. It’s expressiveness, data structures, and near limitless flexibility meant I reached for it whenever I had a problem to solve (it’s probably why I had fun with Ruby...
France24: Jubilant Syrians poured into the streets in celebration on Sunday after a lightning rebel offensive reached the capital Damascus, putting an end to the Assad family’s 50 years of iron-fisted rule over the Middle Eastern nation scarred by war. ABC News Australia: Said Ajlouni from the Melbourne-based Australian Syrian Association told...
In no specific order: By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-12-09.
After writing the title for this post, I can’t get that Who song out of my head. Back to Serif… again? Hey look, another inadvertent Music Monday, courtesy of a train of thought that made no sense. What was I talking about again? I posted this almost a month ago to the day: The serif fonts have been retired. It was fun, but they weren’t as...
Abigail—who has an awesome site, and who encourages you to have your own space as well—emailed asking what database system we used to organise stuff, as I described in my ill-advised MAC address filtering post: Clara and I maintain a personal DB which includes all sorts of data, from budgets to media collections. One of the tables tracks our...
We’re getting a delivery from a Swedish furniture manufacturer this morning, so I was doing some measurements and calculations to confirm where they’d go in the apartment. One cabinet is going to be a place to display some of our retrocomputers, and I wanted to make sure they’d fit. I was looking at the Computer History Museum to figure out...
This is the first post written from the balcony of our new apartment. One of the criteria Clara and I used while house hunting was whether the unit had a balcony to start with, had a nice view, was shaded, and if it avoided direct sunlight first thing in the morning. Sitting outside is important to me. I wake up faster with fresh air, and I’m...
I loved this retrospective by Klint Finley: Perhaps most importantly, he taught countless people the joy of programming. _why showed veteran coders and n00bs alike a curious, adventurous, and creative side of programming. He demonstrated that code could be more than just a form of technical problem solving: it could be a form of self-expression...
Should you filter devices by MAC address on your Wi-Fi access point and/or network? Almost certainly not. But while I’ll probably get in trouble for admitting it, Clara and I do. We have for years, and it works fine for us. MAC address filtering is considered a Bad Idea™ for these reasons: They’re transmitted in plaintext, so an attacker can...
This was one of those shower thoughts that came to me, surprising though it may seem, in the shower. It’s not a tautology though, because it isn’t one. Now that I’ve clarified that, like so much butter, we can get onto the substance of this post. The butter, you could say. Or not. When I was a kid, the authors of the books I read, the actors I...
It hasn’t been a great year for Hololive fans. The trailblazing Amelia Watson graduated in all but name back in September, with Sakamata Chloe following suit as an “affiliate”. Minato Aqua left permanently in August, and Yozora Mel was dismissed. Now Ceres Fauna of Council/Promise has announced she’s leaving as well, citing a disagreement with...
I read this section on Alex Russell’s recent post on web “frameworkism”, and thought it was brilliant: Code that runs on the server can be fully costed. Performance and availability of server-side systems are under the control of the provisioning organisation, and latency can be actively managed by developers and DevOps engineers. Code that runs...
Today’s Music Monday a is beautiful, but a sombre affair for those following the news of Ceres Fauna and her graduation. I’ll have a proper post about this shortly, but in the meantime I thought her original song was apt. 💚 By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-12-02.
This morning was Clara’s and my first time using our new Baratza Encore ESP grinder, and the Clever Coffee Dripper, a Taiwanese take on a filter or pourover-style coffee maker. It’s too much fun! While superficially resembling a Hario V60, Bee House, or the funnel of a Chemex, the Clever is a full-immersion brewer, meaning the water is only...
We put up the family tree at my sister’s this year, and I think it turned out great! If you look very closely at a couple of the baubles, you might see us smiling and waving. Feel free to use if it will help bring your desktop some cheer. 🎄 By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-12-01.
My older FreeBSD homelab server runs on a Supermicro X11SAE-M workstation board with a Xeon E3-1275 v6. This is a photo of the motherboard: This board has two USB 3.0 headers, seen in the photo as small cyan rectangles at the bottom. These headers are generally used to attach to the USB connectors on the front of a case or chassis. They’re a...
Back in 2022 I talked about my dream all-flash NAS setup. I say dream because it literally was. Some people have cool dreams; I dream about storage. I can’t recall if I also dreamed about OpenZFS, though I can’t imagine wanting to run anything else. Clara’s and my homelab will need a storage upgrade on the sooner side, so I started looking into...
Via The Mastodons: The more I learn about cryptography, the more I think Alice and Bob should probably just talk in person. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-11-29.
We’re officially not renters anymore! 🔑 Related: We’ve moved in! We own our own home! Goodbye to an old spreadsheet House inspections Unrelated: If you like piña colada~ By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-11-28.
404Media provides us an example of Betteridge’s Law: Are Overemployed ‘Ghost Engineers’ Making Six Figures to Do Nothing? The answer may surprise you! The author quotes a Stanford researcher’s… let’s charitably refer to them as findings: “It is insane that ~9.5 percent of software engineers do almost nothing while collecting paychecks,” $he...
Friend of the blog Josh has a locked account, so I’ve paraphrased: I’ve wanted to leave comments on your posts before, but I’ve probably only been able to muster it 10% of the time. It floors me that some people want to take the time to do this via email to sent something rude, rather than positive. And mms: how many readers do you have?! Such a...
In my continuing quest to implement All The XML Things, this morning I implemented a lexicon.pls file. Specifically, a Pronunciation Lexicon file, as recommended by the W3C. From the introduction: The Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS) is designed to enable interoperable specification of pronunciation information for both Automatic Speech...
I posted this on Mastodon, but thought it was fun to share. I’m not doing Writing Month, or the AI-infested original, but according to my blog repo, I’ve written: 177,555 words this year 15,474 words in November It ain’t no book that’s for sure. But better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick? I’ll publish one of my actual silly books one...
A few of you have said you enjoy it when I get stuck into car culture and public transport, so here’s one for you! Last week I received a newsletter from the New South Wales state government, with the following subject line: Claim a toll rebate up to $340 a week Oh I definitely have some thoughts already. But let’s look at the substance of this...
I’m pretty good at a few things. You have a technical system you need described and documented? A complex application with a database, load balancers, and caching you need help installing, configuring, or pushing from dev to production? You need to migrate between providers, or from bare metal to a VPS fleet, or a VPS to a cloud, or Windows...
Paul Kafasis concluded a post about the recent elections in the US with this, but I think it broadly applies: Even as cruelty is ascendent, we must not be done with kindness. Let us also not be done with joy. Instead, we should locate humor wherever we can and revel in it. The darkest times still contain something to laugh about. We’re going to...
I love that this exists. By Potch: If you’re here, that likely means a project linked you here. Thanks so much for being interested in that project! Open Source is rewarding- but it can also be exhausting. The linking project’s code is provided as-is, and is not actively maintained. The author(s) of that project invite you to peruse their code...
AAAAAAAA! A year of house hunting, applying for finance pre-approval from a cooperative, legal adventures that threw a massive and unexpected spanner in the works (maybe a topic for another time), interstate travel, putting in offers, anxiety attacks, weekend after weekend of inspections, having an offer accepted, negotiating, conveyancing,...
Yesterday I blogged about The Scunthorpe Problem, and included this (emphasis added): […] because they dared to to talk […] I didn’t notice the duplicated word to, because the line happened to wrap between them in my text editor. It wasn’t until I saw the post published that the words lined up with each other on the same line, and they stuck out...
I was talking with a friend recently about an email of theirs running afoul (🐔) of another aggressive filter system, because they dared to to talk with someone called Dickson. I know right, they’re the absolute worst. For those unfamiliar, this is the The Scunthorpe Problem. As Wikipedia describes: The Scunthorpe problem is the unintentional...
I asked on Mastodon, but posting here as well. What 10G Ethernet cards are people using on NetBSD thesedays? Are there any in particular you would recommend? I just buy used Intel X550 cards for FreeBSD and Penguins, but I’ve never messed with 10G on NetBSD. Ideally it would also work in 2.5/5 mode as well. This is for a new homelab cluster and...
It’s time to play another game! We haven’t done one of these for a while. I was shopping for a new laundry appliance last week—like a gentleman—when I saw this incredible public answer posted on a seller’s website. Your challenge, should you wish to accept, is to determine what the person asked based on this answer: Hello Annie, We appreciate...
To be clear to the journalists covering the current Ukrainian War, it did not start a thousand days ago. Crimea was invaded ten years ago. What you are referring to is a thousand days in the escalation in this unprovoked, unjustified hostility against a nation of people who just wants to live peacefully in Europe. Love to all my Ukrainian...
It’s Music Monday time! Each and every Monday, except when I forget, I regale everyone with tales of a specific tune, album, artist, genre, or combination of all of the above. Except when I forget. Today we have a bit of a treat. English jazz extraordinaire Chris Standring’s Bossa Blue has been in my playlists for years, but I only just heard him...
I tongue-in-cheek referenced the 418 status code in my ultimate multi-function device post. I’m relieved that past attempts to buzzkill it out of existence were met with such enthusiastic and ongoing repudiation. @romellem put it best: I for one like fun little easter eggs that you find throughout a programming career. To me, it shows that...
Don’t worry, this isn’t a post about an overengineered access protocol I last talked about a decade ago. Or… is it? In 1978, Michael Franks began his search for the perfect shampoo. My mum heard a friend play that song on their turntable in the 1980s, and it began a lifelong obsession with the singer/songwriter and his works. She passed this onto...
We’ve all seen those multi-function devices people use in small offices and when working from home. They’ve been invaluable to me over the years, but they’ve always lacked a certain Je ne sais quoi. This would be my dream device: Monochrome laser printer, for expediency and legibility for things like tickets and reservation forms. Colour inkjet...
I overheard a few techbros having a conversation next to me at this coffee shop. It was easy, they weren’t using their indoor voices: Dude A: Day one seems to all be about accessibility. They have workshops and… Dude B: Well that’s a massive wank. Day two? Being an older millennial, I can still remember when nerds were on the side of the...
I read a lot of blogs. My public blogroll is woefully out of date; I probably have close to a third more feeds in my reader than what I have published there. Independent writers are my favourite, because I get enough curated, sanitised corporate media in my $DAYJOB and other places. I realise though that while I’ve mentioned how to start...
It might shock some of you to know I spend time in coffee shops. Apothecary Coffee is my favourite on Sydney’s North Shore, tucked away next to the Zenith building in Chatswood. They do great espresso, but I’m a particular fan of their pour-overs. This is opposed to a pour-on, which I’ve thankfully only performed at this coffee shop twice....
In no particular order: The parameters for FORMAT in DOS to prepare a 720 KiB double density floppy disk, instead of high density. When Funan Centre in Singapore was The IT Mall. How to answer a phone call that’s a fax. “Hello, Ruben speaking…” PSSSHHHHHHHHHH aaah hang up and press the button! How to recover a PC bitten by the Chernobyl virus,...
I loved reading syndicated comic strips when I was a kid. I had all the Garfield Fat Cat Three Pack volumes, and oodles of Far Side and FoxTrot. It was also so much fun as a kid seeing them adopt Xmas decorations at that time of year. And yet, I never really made the transition to web comics; Matchstick Cats from my friend Neil notwithstanding. I...
Did you go to university, polytechnic, or a similar institution? If so, do you remember… group assignments? No two words combined strike as much fear in the minds of undergraduates in my experience, other than perhaps pop quiz. I worked with some standout people during some of my group assignments, including Vadim and Clara. But the majority of...
I was fixing a page at work—like a gentleman—but I couldn’t figure out why a simple link wasn’t being respected. I must have read over the output of this script at least a dozen times, if not more. As always, the W3C Validator came to the rescue: Line 36, Column 308: there is no attribute “HERF” Heh, HERF. No wonder. As an aside, I might have a...
Today’s Music Monday is less a specific song, and more an exploration of a band that was a huge part of my childhood. Mad World! Sewing the Seeds of Love! Everybody Wants to Rule the World! Shout (Let it all out)! If you’ve never seen Trash Theory before, the channel explores the rise of popular bands, with a specific interest towards the 1980s....
This is great news, via the Fedora Pagure: As discussed at Flock, the Fedora KDE SIG and the newly forming Fedora Personal Systems Working Group that will oversee the SIG are requesting that the Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop spin be upgraded to Edition status for Fedora Linux 42. amoloney: This request can now be considered APPROVED (+9, 0, 0)....
In no particular order: The serif fonts have been retired. It was fun, but they weren’t as legible on non-HiDPI/Retina displays. You might need to clear your cache or press SHIFT when refreshing to see any change. I’ve added Ninomae Ina’nis and Ceres Fauna to my fan section on the sidebar. They’re talented, comfy streamers who have done wonders...
I’ve struggled mentally with the idea of blocking people. I internalised the oft-repeated idea that I was being closed minded each time I reached for the big red button, and that I could be the “bigger person” somehow (whatever that means). I got around this before by claiming I blocked people for mental health. I’d say I wanted to help and...
Last year I signed up for one of those online book summary services. I’d been curious for a while, and they were offering a steep discount for the first year. I figured I could give it a shot, and cancel it before renewal if I didn’t find it useful. This service promised to “distill” books to their “essence”, and deliver a summary in a half hour...
The Atari ST family of machines are my favourite of the 16-bit era. Introduced between 1985 and 1993, they weren’t the most technically advanced available, nor did they achieve significant marketshare against incumbents like Apple, Commodore, or the ever-expanding PC clone market. But they had so much home computer history soldered into their DNA...
I love filter and immersion brewing at home. I’ve talked about how much I love the AeroPress as a daily driver, and the Hario V60 is a fun treat when I’m feeling a bit fancier. Some nice single-origin beans from a local roaster, fresh water, and those cheap coffee machines make some incredible brews, and they can taste markedly different...
Social media was flooded with pictures of a smoky grassfire at Sydney Airport this afternoon, after an aircraft bound for Brisbane experienced an engine failure on take-off. Fun! Qantas released a statement: Qantas engineers have conducted a preliminary inspection of the engine and confirmed it was a contained engine failure. While customers...
It happens after every big political and sports event. Pundits are publishing their analyses, and they already have tidy, convenient explanations for the outcome. $FOO clearly failed because of X. $BAR clearly succeeded because of Y. Thing is, if the outcome had been different, they’d offer the exact same explanations. $FOO clearly succeeded...