Speaking of new tea shops on Sydney’s north shore, Hornsby also has a new one in the form of a delightful pun: Auntea Jenny! Auntea Jenny is a bubble/boba tea chain that first opened in Shanghai, and has recently been expanding internationally. According to Wikipedia, they’re op … | Continue reading
Last Saturday I introduced the 250466 longboard from 1986 I bought for my Commodore 64 “Aldi” machine. I’ll admit, I could barely contain my excitement, for this was the first longboard C64 board I’d had in years. But does it work? Today I wanted to find out, and take a closer lo … | Continue reading
Back in the mystical early 2000s, the world was introduced to the idea of FOAF, or Friend of a Friend. I always pronounced it like LOAF, but that could have been wrong. The perils of only having read something. But I digress. FOAF was a machine-readable RDF schema that let you d … | Continue reading
I love a good synchronicity! I was literally just talking about the Commodore 64 longboard I bought locally, and how much fun it’s been restoring, testing, and building it into my Aldi 64 shell, not to mention comparing it with my 64C shortboard. Now we have some news that I’m fr … | Continue reading
Those familiar with bridge cameras and mid-2000s chat speak may get a kick out of this post. Seventeen years after the format was officially retired by its backers, I’ve managed to track down a new xD card reader from a certain large mainland Chinese website. And here it is, with … | Continue reading
Speaking of the new Kinokuniya in the best suburb of Sydney, Tea&Co also opened a branch just off the Victoria Avenue mall. The queues snaked around the block for weeks after their opening, so we ended up walking past. But we managed to catch them when they weren’t so busy over t … | Continue reading
I swore I’d written about this before, but I can’t find it in the archives. If I’m rehashing here, let’s pretend this is (1) a novel post, or (b) a substantive update on what I’ve mentioned before. Brilliant! Let’s jump in. Clara and I love playing music on our hi-fi setup. We ha … | Continue reading
This is my beautiful old Commodore 64 “Aldi” case and keyboard I picked up in September 2023 from a seller in Germany: Note the somewhat unusual combination of beige keyboard paired with the darker breadbin case. When most people think “Commodore 64”, they likely picture a dark … | Continue reading
I posted on Tuesday about handwriting, and how I struggle to read much of it thesedays. I attributed this to a lack of practice, and perhaps an over-reliance on typeset and computer text. I mentioned: My late mum was a professional calligrapher, and had some of the most beautifu … | Continue reading
Podcast: Play in new window | Download 11:15 – What… what are we doing? Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade. Released April 2026 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel foc … | Continue reading
Australia is a stunning place. I fully expected to move back to Singapore after my degree, but gosh darn it if this wide open land didn’t rub off on me. We have the best skies and food in the world, and this time of the year the weather is just perfect. Sydney even has halfway de … | Continue reading
Today I was thinking that there’s… pardon, give me a moment, someone is sending me a message. Reaches into pocket. … Wait, there’s nothing there? Then where’s my… oh. The phones are on the desk. Not my pocket at all. And they didn’t receive any messages. I could have sworn I felt … | Continue reading
I accidentally published a few hundred drafts yesterday. I was messing with a new Hugo build pipeline, and symlinked something where it shouldn’t be. It was less destructive than getting the if and of wrong in dd(1), but it still wasn’t ideal. I heard you like infinite recursion, … | Continue reading
The world’s best, most portable OS turned 33 this week. 🧡 I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but I cannot express how much I enjoy NetBSD. Linux gets the job done at work, and FreeBSD is excellent with its tooling and features. But in a way that’s intangible and har … | Continue reading
My late mum was a professional calligrapher, and had some of the most beautiful casual handwriting I’ve ever seen. My sister also has lovely writing, as does Clara. I have what can best be described as scrawl. There was a point in the late 2010s where I hadn’t written anything fo … | Continue reading
Optimism is being challenged on multiple fronts. First in the literal sense; we definitely have a lot of stuff to be decidedly un-optimistic about in our current political, tech, and climate… climates. But people are also pushing back on the term itself, and the idea it represent … | Continue reading
Last year Australia’s teen “social media” ban came into force, garnering world headlines. Here was a middl(e/ing) power with a population smaller than California standing up to the established American tech giants and saying enough. Or at least, that’s the story its proponents li … | Continue reading
I’ve been making liberal use of planets since I did my last RSS cleanup, and have discovered dozens of new blogs and people in the process :). Many large technical projects aggregate blogs from multiple people and sources into a single site “planet” and RSS feed, letting you easi … | Continue reading
Happy Sunday, hope you’re having a good one. I thought we’d start with something lighter this morning with a list I’ve been thinking about for a while, and one of critical importance (cough). Top five Bergerac. Clara and I have been borrowing the DVDs from our local libraries, … | Continue reading
I’ve stared a new Navidrome library for FLAC files. Yay! Starting fresh with a new library has given me the opportunity to carefully import each album one by one, verify their metadata, make sure they have the correct cover art, and add more touchy-feely attributes like “mood” w … | Continue reading
Visiting client sites and moving offices over the years has granted me unique insight into the functioning of commercial bathroom spaces. In particular, my focus has centred on the hygiene aspects of bathroom operations, including (but not exclusively) the washing and drying of h … | Continue reading
Suburbs around northern Sydney are undergoing some “hazard reduction backburning”, now that the weather has cooled down and there isn’t too much wind. The sky looks unreal. My XD card reader finally arrived for my inherited 2007 Olympus bridge camera, so I used its massive teleph … | Continue reading
Beautiful: Some things I’ve learned/am learning: 99% of things aren’t about you. Only you can complete you. Let people enjoy things. Kindness is imperative. Actions > words. Stop, look, & listen. Love others. You’ll grow. Laugh like it’s your job. Never stop learning. By Rube … | Continue reading
Almost a month ago to the day, I wrote about this ritual I have to perform each time I make an appointment with this specific clinic. It went like this: I add a card to their web portal, and set it as my “default” payment method for all new appointments. I make an appointment … | Continue reading
The only thing more satisfying than writing code is being able to remove it (this is, incidently, yet another reason why slop coding anything you care about is nonsense). I was talking with a client in the UK a fortnight or so ago now who’d written his own file store system he’d … | Continue reading
Thanks to all of you who sent in comments regarding my domain migration, and for pointing out that I missed (more than!) a few things. In particular I want to thank Rebecca H, Simon Ruderich, and Andrew Wheeler for taking time out of their day to detail exactly what needed fixing … | Continue reading
I’m an ocean liner tragic. Clara and I specifically went to Melbourne for the Titanic exhibition, and to Long Beach when we were in LA to see the Queen Mary. Here’s a younger version of me on the bridge: Therefore, I consider it my responsibility to correct the record when news … | Continue reading
It’s grim times in the world right now, but we got a glimmer of hope from Europe over the weekend. Via the Kyiv Independent: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s 16-year rule over Hungary came to an end on April 12 in a historic election marked by record-breaking turnout. It … | Continue reading
Taking stuff to e-waste comes with a bunch of benefits, from freed up space in one’s flat, to the knowledge that you’re not contributing potentially toxic stuff to a landfill. It also means you (cough) can often find other treasures while dropping off your stuff. I was taking som … | Continue reading
A new branch of the Japanese book store Kinokuniya opened on Sydney’s north shore this month, so naturally Clara and I had to go and check it out. It was everything I hoped it would be! The store itself was quite a bit smaller than the Galleries branch in the Sydney CBD, and ind … | Continue reading
After two decades on .com, my blog and retro corner have a new domain! Introducing: https://www.rubenerd.au/ https://www.rubenerd.au/feed/ http://retro.rubenerd.au/ .au is the top-level domain for Australia and its various dependencies. It’s the elemental symbol for gold, two l … | Continue reading
Our new (to us) local library has community jigsaw puzzles! We’ve made it a habit of contributing to at least one piece each time we go. This small gesture has done more to make us feel connected (hah!) to the suburb than I would have expected. Yesterday we added a bit of a sunfl … | Continue reading
I write about a wide variety of topics and interests here, but there are only a few that are guaranteed to elicit angry comments: Something critical of America’s Dear Leader™ Any passing mention of systemd not being ideal Anything to do with audio gear Wait a minute, didn … | Continue reading
This is the fifth post in my A-Z Toolbox series, in which I’m listing tools I use down the alphabet for no logical reason. The letter E is a tad more sparse than previous letters in this series, at least when it comes to tools I use. There’s the emacs family, but I might save tha … | Continue reading
Quote of the day from one of my favourite bloggers: The reality is that we usually have the power to change our lives. We just have to stop pretending that we don’t. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-09. | Continue reading
Since buying our first apartment together in 2024, Clara and I have both been hunting for a good set of desks. It’s weird thinking about furniture we might use for a while, not something portable we can disassemble and pack every year when an overzealous landlord inevitably decid … | Continue reading
I’m just old enough to remember Teletext, the standard that encoded text information on standard analogue TV signals. Now thanks to Nathan Media Services and Alistair Cree, we can now interact with it again in the browser: This right here is why I still love the Web. By Ruben Sc … | Continue reading
Here we have exibit A for why using technology to solve a social problem often doesn’t work, or has unintended consequences. There are cultures in the world that take recycling seriously, like Japan. There are those that pretend (until recently) that it doesn’t exist, like Singap … | Continue reading
Do you write plain HTML and CSS? You, Jan, and I are part of the post-framework generation, as he mentioned on Mastodon: TIL (Today I learned) that writing websites with simple HTML and CSS is now called “post-framework”. Well. I did “post-framework” even before frameworks exist … | Continue reading
I was going through my drafts folder, and came across a post I’d written way back in 2018. I’m not sure what site I was browsing at the time, but it was still a fun observation. If I came across this error in a more modern context, I’d assume site owners are placing limits to dea … | Continue reading
The cobbler’s son walks barefoot is such a perfect English idiom to describe how professionals apply themselves in their jobs, and how this differs from their personal lives. I invoke it regularly here for this raison, a typo I’m keeping because it makes me smile. Lest the title … | Continue reading