I read another post recently that took it as given that the BSD operating systems were corporate friendly, with the implication that this was bad. They claimed that companies can lift code and lock it away in their proprietary software. That’s true, they can. From a permissive pe … | Continue reading
On Monday I wrote about why I preferred light modes over dark ones. Light modes are bright, cheerful, and easy to read for me, whereas most dark modes dilate my pupils and “burn” text into my eyes that persist even after I turn away. Not fun! But that leads to two questions. Firs … | Continue reading
For the last few years I’ve been trying to source an IIɢꜱ, Apple’s last major hurrah for the Apple II platform, and the only 16-bit model in the lineup. I know I say this about every retrocomputer, but this was a fascinating machine. Here’s the motherboard for my 1986 ROM1 unit, … | Continue reading
Whenever Clara and I need some mid-afternoon motivation when we’re in the home office, we put on Kenshi Yonezu’s 2017 masterpiece Bootleg. I realised I’ve never shared any of it, so I reckon it warrants a Music Monday: What genre does Kenshi Yonezu perform? Yes! As an aside, thi … | Continue reading
Beryl sent an email in July, to which I’m only just getting around to replying because I’m a terrible person: Hi Ruben! I hope you are doing well. A very random question, I have noticed that you seem to use light mode in most of your devices, is there any important reason for th … | Continue reading
There are many challenges that come with being a renter in Australia, and one of them concerns the quality and condition of the included appliances. Most rentals I had here prior to buying included a dishwasher and a dryer. This sounds great, until you actually use them and reali … | Continue reading
Our flat has gas. I know, it should see a doctor about it. We want to admonish the natural gas connection and get proper induction hobs installed in place of the built-in counter-top carcinogen-generators (that was a lot of hyphens), but it’s down the list of expensive priorities … | Continue reading
One of the first things I evaluate when I’m working on a new system is how it manages notifications. Specifically: What sort of notifications the system sends How often they’re sent How severity is evaluated, assigned, and presented How much the above can be customised an … | Continue reading
In past posts I’ve listed numbers that don’t have: Nine Seven Seven, again Eight Based on overwhelmingly positive feedback, today we’re looking at numbers that don’t have six. I provide this service free of charge. 6 Wait, damn it. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-08-07. | Continue reading
I appreciate that I spend a not insignificant amount of time talking about ZFS here, the only volume manager and file system I trust with my important data. ZFS came from my beloved Sun Microsystems, and today FreeBSD has the best ZFS integration outside the illumos ecosystem. Bu … | Continue reading
IBM Plex Mono is one of my favourite monospace fonts to have come out in the last decade. And it got an update in May: – stylistic alternate for /l in Roman styles – stylistic alternates for /comma and quotes – glyph /overline (U+203E) – support for Venda language (10 additional … | Continue reading
ZFS includes inline compression, meaning files are compressed and decompressed on the fly. While you might expect this to reduce IO performance, it’s been proven to improve throughput by reducing the amount of expensive reads required, especially on older spinning drives. Inline … | Continue reading
I’m a day late for a Music Monday, but I had to share this! Drumeo is such a fun channel for learning drums, and the drum theory behind popular songs. My favourite series involves the team playing the melody and vocals for a drummer, then asking them to produce a drum line. The t … | Continue reading
I only just read the news!? What a loss :(. I first learned of Om through his news site GigaOm, and his appearances on the Cranky Geeks show back in the day. I remember being surprised at the civil comments GigaOm stories attracted, which I attributed to the quality of the journa … | Continue reading
Last Friday I talked about a flaky network switch that was wreaking havoc on our wired home network. A few of you sent thoughts, which I wanted to share. Why wired? Jeremy, whom I’ve asked if he has a blog I can link to: You said you have Wifi networks. I’m curious why you use w … | Continue reading
Snow Leopard was a version of Mac OS X released in 2010. It was billed by Apple as having “0 new features”, with a focus on refining the system, improving efficiency, and fixing bugs. Those of us using Macs at the time welcomed the news after living with updates that seemingly br … | Continue reading
We had weird issues on our home network over the last month or so: Large files being transferred over Samba and NFS would time out midway through, and rsync transfers would also fail with “Resource temporary unavailable” messages. Clara would be dropped off our Minecraft serv … | Continue reading
Josh of Espresso Tonic, and Joel of JoelChrono, are excellent bloggers you should read. They’ve both written recently not just about portable devices, but of their form factors. Their discussions on how such design has impacted their use, enjoyment, and productivity with such dev … | Continue reading
I had another of those I’m living in the future moments today when I was at an electronics retailer, and I saw a 1 TB MicroSD card. I couldn’t afford it of course, but its mere existence shook me in a way I wasn’t expecting. One terabyte. On a thing the size of my thumbnail. Heck … | Continue reading
What an incredible production. I was choking up at the end. Our friend Mike and his team should get an award for this. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-07-30. | Continue reading
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-07-29. | Continue reading
Retro-inspired cases have been a bit of theme here of late. I’ve talked at length about Silverstone’s gorgeous beige boxes, and I’ve even shared random industrial cases from the likes of AliExpress that are wonderful in their own way. I think there are two key attributes that mak … | Continue reading
I got some flattery delivered with my morning spam today: Hi RubenMy chargeback was approved, [sic] Mail merge! Can I get a mail merge for this gentleman, please? You are receiving this email because ${SPAMMER} solutions may be relevant to your role. This outreach is based on … | Continue reading
Yesterday at exactly 14:00 AEST, (almost) every phone in Australia got the following message from AusAlert: We’d been warned of this test for weeks, but the shrill siren sound still made me leap out of my skin! Mission accomplished. I was working at home with this spicy cough wh … | Continue reading
This northern suburb of Sydney made headlines last year for its Apple store closure. People were speculating on why, given it was one of their largest stores in Australia, and in the catchment area of some of Sydney’s most affluent suburbs. Well your roving reporter is coming to … | Continue reading
Recently I talked about an order I made at the start of the month for a retrocomputer in the US. After their Shopify store sent me an automated receipt and estimated shipping date, I heard nothing else. Two weeks later I was refunded for my shipping cost, but not the computer. An … | Continue reading
Speaking of Australian trains, there was some adventures further north in the state over the weekend, as reported by the ABC: Railway safety officials are looking into an incident involving a runaway coal train in the Hunter Valley. The fully laden coal train was unmanned and tr … | Continue reading
Jason asked me on a recent BSD Now if I’d made the switch to FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE. I said that I had, and that the upgrade was entirely uneventful! Which is my favourite kind of upgrade. I realise that wasn’t entirely true. My desktop that I dual boot with Fedora for games was st … | Continue reading
Our entire complex is getting new active fire damper units, and today it’s our turn. Half the flat is covered with tarp and sheets, and the loud sound of drills and saws is piercing the air and, hopefully, the ceiling where the new dampers are being installed. Fire dampers are sh … | Continue reading
Brent Simmons of Inessential and NetNewsWire fame came home from holidays to a slew of new errors he has to fix. Fun! He explained: Here’s the thing: iOS app development (and Mac, but to a lesser extent) is just constant churn. I thought I was getting a year off this year! But n … | Continue reading
Hey, I’m over my latest flu thingy! Which led me to think: what’s something I couldn’t do while cooped up inside? Carry things outside. This lead to a bit of a brainwave: everyone’s heard of a daily carry—one can only presume—but is there mass awareness of a weekly carry? I defin … | Continue reading
This has been a big month or so for my small circle of friends! I now know four people who’ve either had their permanent residency approved, or have become Australian citizens since May. The amount of work involved in doing these things is far higher and more convoluted than it s … | Continue reading
Today’s Music Monday is an etymological road trip from Paul Simon’s 1983 album Hearts and Bones. The album was a commercial failure relative to his other works, but it happens to be one of my favourites. This cheeky song is mixed in with some of his most beautiful tunes. Clara a … | Continue reading
It might shock you to know that I put in an order for a retrocomputer earlier this month. Alas, it’s not going as well as one may hope. After saving and searching for this specific machine for months, I eventually tracked one down in serviceable condition on a US store that ran o … | Continue reading
A client recommended the Three Capes Track in Tasmania recently, and it looks stunning. From the Tasmania Parks and Wilderness Service: The 48-kilometre track has been designed as an achievable experience for a wide range of ages and abilities. It has been built to a dry-boot s … | Continue reading
I saw this on AliExpress, and I may be more than a little obsessed: The entire case is made from 1.2 mm-thick steel, with support for the following features: Full ATX motherboards 120 × 25 mm front fan behind a removable panel 7 expansion slots 1× 5.25 drive bay, and 2× 3.5 dri … | Continue reading
I’m conflicted whenever I feel the compulsion to discuss “AI”. I am beyond bored of it as a topic, and there are far more interesting and wonderful things I’d rather be spending my time here sharing. But it’s also the most consequential story in recent tech history. As I mentione … | Continue reading
Hot on the heels of seeing the 3801 steam by in all its restored glory, I was looking out the window and saw the R-766 steam by as well. Wait, WHAT!? I didn’t have my camera set up in time, so instead have this press image from the Picnic Train website, the organisation that curr … | Continue reading
Last April I shared some of what I called my post-smartphone devices, including the following: I still use that Tangara music player interchangeably with my Sony NW-A55. I also read a lot more books from those street libraries than I do the Kobo, though that still does get use. … | Continue reading
It’s surprising to me how I haven’t spent a great deal of time exploring Italian coffee culture, especially given my proclivity for consuming said beverage. I’ve been reliably informed that Australia’s coffee snobbery was derived in large part by waves of Italian and Greek immigr … | Continue reading
I’ve mentioned here before that I think we’re living during the golden era of retrocomputing. Designing, producing, and selling PCBs and other components has never been more accessible. The fact people are teaching these old computers new tricks, and in some cases even replacing … | Continue reading
We haven’t had a Music Monday for a while, my ongoing blog series where I post about music on a Monday. Thanks Ruben, that clarification was not only helpful, but prescient. Wait, no it wasn’t. I have been getting back into Massive Attack again, and I can never decide what my fav … | Continue reading
Minecraft lets you define your own world border, which limits the world to a specific size. This is helpful for sysadmins to limit the growth and file size of a map. For players, it keeps the map more compact, which also potentially lets you render new biomes closer to home when … | Continue reading
I’ll admit, I’ve felt a little trepidation approaching this new device, despite it ostensibly ticking all my boxes. It has retro styling. It’s taking a stand against the smartphones and social media platforms with which I’ve increasingly harboured resentment and frustration. It’s … | Continue reading
We haven’t had a tier list here for a while, so I thought it’d be fun to do one to celebrate 2026-07-11. Japanese convenience stores are ubiquitous, tasty, and a cultural institution in their own right. I’ve decided not to include places we haven’t been to in a separate list this … | Continue reading
I’ve talked here about devices I’ve bought over the years that weren’t just good, but something that fit my use case so perfectly that I can still remember them years later. A few examples: The iPod 3G from when I was a kid The Olympus OMD E-M10 MkII mirrorless camera The t … | Continue reading
Did any of you play The Sims or The Sims 2? I can’t speak to the latter iterations of the game, but I did spend a not insignificant amount of my childhood designing and building houses. That worked out well in my family, because my sister was far more interested in designing the … | Continue reading
Did any of you play The Sims or The Sims 2? I can’t speak to the latter iterations of the game, but I did spend a not insignificant amount of my childhood designing and building houses. That worked out well in my family, because my sister was far more interested in designing the … | Continue reading