He saw more of Sydney in a few days than I have in ten years! Go figure. Most importantly though, did he like our power outlets and breaker boxes? No spoilers, but he did approve of the flippy seats on our trains. There was a joke I read a few years ago that all YouTube channels … | Continue reading
Last weekend I wrote a lengthy post describing how much I’d come to hate modern smartphones, and how I wanted to start avoiding using them where I could. I resented the time I wasted mindlessly scrolling on them, and wanted more control over what I let into my life. It’s been a w … | Continue reading
Wow, three consecutive posts talking about RSS. I swear I talk about topics other than blogging and information accessibility, I promise. Is that to convince you, or me? I saw some news—through RSS, funnily enough—about an open source project website refresh: You may have noticed … | Continue reading
Brandon wrote a reply to a post from Jason Kratz about being negative, something I’ve wrestled with recently in the context of genAI. That was a lot of links. These are worth reading, but I wanted specifically to call out the syntactic choice Brandon made in his post responding t … | Continue reading
I’m retiring my static blogroll, and instead directing people to the public feed of our blog aggregator instead. Few people, if any, were using it to import subscription lists wholesale, and those who did would have quickly discovered that half the feeds were no longer online. Ri … | Continue reading
Trigger warning: Description of someone avoiding harm. Friday nights are my least favourite time to travel on public transport, with Saturday night a close second! Everyone deals with the end of the work week in their own way; some hit the local bar or pub to have a drink, and ot … | Continue reading
James Webb—no relation to the NASA engineer!—emailed me last month (sorry!) with a Lobsters comment he thought I’d get a kick out of, from Simon Willison: Simonw: After many years in the microservice mines I came to the conclusion that I value SQL joins a whole lot more than I va … | Continue reading
Normanhurst is a suburb in northern Sydney, not to be confused with North Sydney which is only north of Sydney in the sense that page two of an encyclopæedia isn’t the start. That analogy made more sense in my head. My family spent a lot of time in Normanhurst when we’d come back … | Continue reading
It’s been a long time since I (briefly) played D&D, but I’ve hung around people who still do regularly. Among the things that intrigue me are the alignment chart used to create characters. I aspire to be Neutral Good. I want what’s best for the world and its people. I obey the la … | Continue reading
Okay, I’ll admit it! After my post about server-side RSS readers, I remembered FreshRSS and fell in love with it again. It’s so good. There’s only one niggling issue with it: the default is to sort your stream by when a post was received, not when it was published. This is fine i … | Continue reading
Recently I made the shockingly fortuitous purchase of a Commodore 116, the widely-panned and limited release member of the Commodore 264 family that has since become a collectors item and impossible to find. While it’s one of the rarer Commodore machines from the time period, the … | Continue reading
For years I ran a few different server-side RSS readers including Miniflux, FreshRSS, and a horrible pile of Perl I wrote that Did The Job™ for me. This was for one specific reason: I wanted to be able to read my feeds on the desktop and the phone, so I needed to be able to sync … | Continue reading
This is a bit as my American friends would say Inside Baseball, which we’d be able to watch here because we haven’t implemented tariffs. That was wittier in my head. I have a few repos for various parts of this site that should probably be in git submodules or something. I also n … | Continue reading
Last Sunday I wrote a post explaining what the point of certain things in my life were. It mostly concerned technical questions, like why someone of my intelligence, charisma, attractiveness, and utter self-delusion would run BSD. Yes to be clear, I don’t posess any of those thin … | Continue reading
I will never not be fascinated by dreams, and in particular how time seems to move—or not—in them. Maybe it’s why I enjoyed that Inception movie perhaps more than I should have. Case in point, I caught my alarm clock switching over to 03:00 on the dot this morning, which I though … | Continue reading
I’m trying something a bit different this morning. I’m going to answer the most common questions I receive from people asking “what’s the point?” of something. My experience is that people usually aren’t asking such questions in good faith, but let’s address them earnestly. Many … | Continue reading
I found a scanned 1992 purchase order for a PC-Line 486 SX-25 desktop back in March. This was our first family PC, and the first computer I ever used. It was unfortunately ewasted a long time ago, but I thought finally having the specifications would be a great opportunity to try … | Continue reading
I’ve posted here many times how I have a love/hate relationship with smartphones. Where once the tech used to excite and interest me, I see them today as a necessary evil; a ball and chain that makes me accessible 24/7 in a way I didn’t accept, approve, or opt into. But the key w … | Continue reading
This is not to be confused with the Firth of Forth, as described in Wikipedia: Discover the World of Lviv Croissants That’s clearly the wrong article I pasted from my Good News Train. But still, I would LOVE to try that! Where were we? The Firth of Forth (Scottish Gaelic: Linne F … | Continue reading
To make up for yesterday, I thought we all needed some good news. Here’s what I’ve read this week: Ruben Schade got a Commodore 116. Apparently he was waiting for one for almost two decades, that’s wild. Whoa, so this is what it’s like to talk in the third person. Kyiv Independen … | Continue reading
Last week I finally got to ride in the new NSW Mariyung intercity express trains on a beautiful (cough) drizzly afternoon! They entered service from Sydney in December last year, and while I’d seen some of them flying past, I’d never got to see one up close. Unlike the ancient V … | Continue reading
I love blogging! Writing about a couple of things that interest me every day or so is one of the highlights of my life. That so many of you now read my ramblings as well is that much more lovely. I don’t dare take it for granted. Unfortunately, there are also topics that impact m … | Continue reading
Most of you are likely aware of the Ship of Theseus thought experiment. If not, it grapples with the question of whether something is still the same object if all its parts have been replaced over time. In the original example, imagine if the sails were replaced with a new canvas … | Continue reading
After months of saving and indecision, we’ve finally booked the hotels and flights: Flying into Tōkyō, and spending a few days there. We generally prefer flying to Kansai because Ōsaka is our favourite Japanese city, but we got some jaw-dropping rates with JAL. Maybe it has somet … | Continue reading
I read a lot of technical newsletters, product announcements, feature update notices, and related messages as part of my job. I guard my personal email like a hawk, to the point where I have a filter that matches on the word unsubscribe. At work, I have to keep tabs on our suppli … | Continue reading
In all my years of collecting, writing software for, tinkering with, and learning about 8-bit home computer hardware from Commodore, I never, never thought I’d see the day where a 1984 Commodore 116 would be on the table with my other 264 machines! Almost two decades of saved eBa … | Continue reading
I’ve talked again recently about my frustrations with certain Linux desktop fans directing their ire not at commercial software companies that are making the lives of people who don’t have a choice that much worse, but instead towards… the people who’s lives they’re making that m … | Continue reading
Transport Heritage NSW did another steam train event this weekend, ferrying Edwardian-era engineering fans from Central Station in Sydney up to leafy Hornsby in the northern suburbs. We met up with her at Hornsby Station to say hi. What a gorgeous machine! The Transport Heritage … | Continue reading
It’s been a while since I’ve shared a Wikipedia picture of the day when a cute bird is featured. This is the chestnut-naped antpitta, taken by Sharp Photography. It sure is! From Wikipedia: The chestnut-naped antpitta (Grallaria nuchalis) is a species of bird in the family Gralla … | Continue reading
I love the people behind Digital Photography Review, but there’s something so infectious about the enthusiasm of Micro Four Nerds. This is someone who, increasingly like me, is swayed by qualitative things over specification sheets. Though as she points out, this camera is amazin … | Continue reading
Last year when I was the Main Character™ in Linux social media for suggesting some people need to run Windows, a common reply was that switching to Linux rendered that point invalid. I wanted to ask those people if it was appropriate for them to be operating their smartphone or c … | Continue reading
I’m out on the balcony this morning, and some gentle rain has just started falling on the national park outside. I was knee-deep in reading about the new Linux container framework Incus, and now I find myself looking at the clouds, and listening to the pitter patter of the rain i … | Continue reading
I’m a big fan of ImageMagick, and use it regularly for all sorts of random tasks. It didn’t occur to me when I wrote my post about dithering images yesterday that I could use it for that as well. @cerement to the rescue: magick $INPUT -dither FloydSteinberg -remap netscape: $OUTP … | Continue reading
The Australian Associated Press reported, via SBS News: A program allowing expedited clearance upon arrival in the United States will be expanded to include Australian passengers, after laws passed federal parliament. The US Global Entry Program allows travellers to get faster en … | Continue reading
That came out of nowhere! Getting dinner with my Cantonese inlaws tonight, who are lovely. To celebrate, I’ve had money in savings for a saved eBay search since at least 2006 (!) and it just pinged me earlier this week. The seller was even local, which I also took as a sign. You’ … | Continue reading
This is something a bit different! Rebecca H. heeded my recent bat signal, and emailed me with some exciting news from her latest adopted home in Seoul, South Korea. Firstly, I was jealous of where she was living before let alone where she’s ended up. Secondly, is what comes afte … | Continue reading
Bluefrog emailed with a question earlier this month: I came across your retro-designed website. Mine is similar in design (basic HTML with a bit a CSS). I like how you stylized your in-line images to look like compressed images with low color depth. I’m trying to achieve the same … | Continue reading
I had a wander around a few electronics stores in Sydney recently—like a gentleman—and was immediately struck by the phone sections each time. Not literally, they thankfully outlawed that form of “direct” advertising many years ago. I kid, but I remember walking around department … | Continue reading
A bit light on blog posts today, on account of doing backend work on the server instead. I hate the word backend, it sounds like I’m… let’s just stop that sentence before it goes any further. Among some changes: I’ve reworked my ZFS datasets, though more for our wiki than the blo … | Continue reading
Via Mastodon: One way of archiving your messages is to include a reporter in all your chat groups. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-03-25. | Continue reading
This is probably the newest song I’ve featured on a Music Monday for a long time. But I overheard it at a restaurant with Clara over the weekend, and the 1980s-style synths and compsition were a lot of fun. I didn’t know about Chappell Roan until yesterday, but wow. By Ruben Scha … | Continue reading
The men on my mum’s side of the family all had hair throughout their lives. My dad, and the German side of my family, not so much. I wasn’t sure whether I’d win the genetic lottery or not. In the last few years it became apparent I hadn’t. What’s strange to me is that everyone lo … | Continue reading
Mentour Pilot’s latest episode about Jet2 Flight 2152 was thankfully an example of a near miss, not an incident. His team also keep doing a stellar job; the production values of his channel, and his clear explanations, have long surpassed all those Air Crash Investigation-style s … | Continue reading
I was in a melancholic mood last night, that may or may not have been partly the result of reading dystopian news stories. So I went back to my childhood and tried running Winamp in Wine. It worked! I did nothing exotic whatsoever. I had my old Winamp installer I’d downloaded ont … | Continue reading
I love virtual machines! They’re a computer, in my computer. They let me tinker, test, and build things, then blow them away and start from scratch. We can even run different architectures on our computers, albeit with a performance penalty. We can emulate an entire machine from … | Continue reading
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-03-21. | Continue reading
On Tuesday I wrote a post about upgrading from an iPhone 15 Pro Max to a refurbished 2022 iPhone SE. This generated a bunch of comments (thank you!) which I’ve aggregated and summarised below. It’s not really an upgrade though, is it? Yes, the title of the post was a bit cheeky. … | Continue reading
This is not something I expected to write, but turns out writing about fun things is fun. This is especially true when you can turn something bad into something good! I had terrible insomnia again earlier this week, so I found myself at the computer idly scrolling. I don’t recomm … | Continue reading