I haven’t been able to get this quote by B. F. Skinner out of my head all week: I did not direct my life. I didn’t design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That’s what life is. I worked hard to get where I am. I studied hard, maintained hobbi … | Continue reading
In today’s installment of things you already know, unless you don’t, we’re looking at dealing with deleted files in git. Say you’ve deleted a file in a repository, either on purpose or by mistake, then run git status: On branch trunk Your branch is up to date with 'origin/trunk'. … | Continue reading
I watch a lot of YouTube and listen to a lot of podcasts, some of which have embedded ads. Embedded ads are ads that are embedded. Gee, thanks Ruben! These are ads that the presenter delivers, in lieu of injected ads that frankly sound terrifying. I’ve said ad so many times the w … | Continue reading
Today’s Music Monday is actually on a Monday for once! Who would have thought. Clara’s and my rediscovered obsession with Paul McCartney continues unabated, to the point where I introduced her to John Pizarelli’s 2015 album Midnight McCartney. So the story goes, Paul approached J … | Continue reading
Wouter recently fixed his 486 machine with a new motherboard, and made this observation: The result: it works! Well… Something else stopped working correctly. Of course it did. Repairing old hardware is like a yin yang thing: something is fixed, something else breaks. To ensure t … | Continue reading
Hydration check is one of the more endearing and fun things I see fans post to vtubers and streamers; and you know its effective based on how often you’ll hear a glug shortly after. It’s easy to get tunnel vision and be so absorbed in what you’re doing that you forget the fundame … | Continue reading
You know that bell curve meme where the amateaur starts with something simple, the genius does something complicated, and the wise sage returns to something simple? It’s an oversimplication for most situations to which its applied, but it tracks perfectly with my desktop environm … | Continue reading
Thank you, that is all :). By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-10-31. | Continue reading
My “home page” is a single private Omake file of links to commonly accessed sites and documentation, so I can quickly access what I need and sync it easily across browsers and devices. I don’t update it that often, so when I do, it’s usually for something really useful. This is o … | Continue reading
I’m running another Mastodon poll: Messing with XML::LibXML has been fine the last 5+ years, but I think it’s time to upgrade to something proper. What do people recommend? Preferences are for Postgres, and bare metal/VM install over a container. PHP/Python fine, would rather not … | Continue reading
According to the timestamp, I wrote this post in December 2018 but never published. I only just found it in a configuration folder labelled rc.conf; clearly I saved the wrong buffer! When I was in high school in the 2000s, a bunch of my cohort participated in the Duke of Edinburg … | Continue reading
This is not a autobiographical post… or is it?! What this post is supposed to be is addressing the issue of work satisfaction more broadly; or at least, what I’ve been reading about it. I keep seeing articles in newspapers and journals that Zoomers and Millennials are wanting mor … | Continue reading
As much as a coffee fan as I am, there’s still a lot I haven’t tried, and plenty of experiences to be had. Home-made coffee ground with burrs. I’ve always used bladed coffee grinders on account of cost, though I hope to rectify this soon. Coffee specifically with James. Clara has … | Continue reading
Prolific writer, emacs aficionado, and friend Michał has consolidated many of his previous disparate thoughts into one site over on CrysSite, with its own RSS feed. This is the more rational thing to do, as opposed to me sharding off something else for no good reason! I especiall … | Continue reading
I switched to my current Times New Rubenerd theme earlier this year, because I wanted something new, and I secretly liked serif fonts. They render my thoughts the way a newspaper or book would, which is fun. But I’ll admit I kinda miss my paper theme, which itself was based on my … | Continue reading
I had to get my ten thousand steps in today, but I’m coming off a bad cold and was feeling melancholic, weak, and lethargic. So I started walking in one direction down the street, at a steady and gentle pace. Walking outdoors does wonders for mental health, and I swear it helps w … | Continue reading
You know that feeling when you’ve inadvertently skirted something potentially dangerous? Dodging the proverbial bullet, as they say? I was transferring the last of Clara’s domains over to our shared registrar, when I noticed they didn’t enable transfer locking by default. I then … | Continue reading
My new coffee page now lives at ruben.coffee! It’s going to be my evolving collection of hardware, shops, links, travel, recipes, wish lists, roasters, and anything else I can think of. It started on Clara’s and my wiki, but has now evolved into its own thing using my Omake forma … | Continue reading
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-10-26. | Continue reading
Did you know masculinity is under threat? Worse than that though, it may be in irriversable and terminal decline, from which mankind will never recover!? Scary! We hear this every couple of decades or so, along with the requisite pearl clutching and moral panic over what it repre … | Continue reading
I was struggling with some flaky, tethered Optus Internet earlier this week, so I tried to ping Quad9: 64 bytes from 9.9.9.9: icmp_seq=0 ttl=55 time=115.004 ms 64 bytes from 9.9.9.9: icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=199.378 ms 64 bytes from 9.9.9.9: icmp_seq=2 ttl=55 time=71.115 ms 64 byte … | Continue reading
It’s Music Monday time! Each and every Monday… wait, it’s Tuesday. I was going to claim it might still be Monday in the US, but this video was recorded in Japan, which is basically in our timezone. Where was I going with this? Fourplay are incredible, as was this concert performe … | Continue reading
Moving house in Australia comes with so many wonderful challenges! Here are just a couple. Our new apartment has gas, which we want disconnected. Here’s what Jemena, the gas distributor, says we need to do: Customers who do not want to have the gas permanently removed can submit … | Continue reading
If you use a launcher like Prism or PolyMC instead of the offical Minecraft launcher, where does it store the Minecraft folder? I ask, because I was going bananas trying to figure out how to import a local world. When you launch Prism, click Folders in the toolbar, and choose Lau … | Continue reading
This time yesterday, Clara, my sister, my brother-in-law, and I were sitting on the floor of our new apartment in northern Sydney. The conveyancer and bank settled on Friday, Clara and I picked up the keys, and we all walked in together. It was a massive relief, and didn’t seem q … | Continue reading
I wonder who Scott is? Did they leave their mug behind? By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-10-19. | Continue reading
As an aside, what a great week number. Owen Nelson: I don’t understand why books are so heavy when you put them in boxes. Heliograph: If you don’t have the skill to audit your LLM output don’t use it Josh Simmons: My least favorite part of being an executive, of a small org, with … | Continue reading
I put out a request for comment on Wednesday regarding an odd issue Drew Jose reported. For some reason all my blog posts were only appearing with the title of the blog, not the post’s actual title. This understandably makes reading and bookmarking posts frustrating. I couldn’t r … | Continue reading
This is a quick review for a device bought under duress. Unfortunately my MacBook Air trackpad went on the fritz yesterday, and I don’t have the time right now to make an appointment to fix it. Minor things like buying a home, and all that. I went to our local electrical retailer … | Continue reading
Last Wednesday I wrote about how optics matter, especially within open source communities. I mentioned how a certain WordPress owner had conceded any technical or legal points he thought he was making with his conduct, which was troubling and sad to see. I’ve had some interesting … | Continue reading
Drew Jose emailed me recently with a strange bug. Their feed reader doesn’t show the title of posts correctly, instead just printing “Rubenerd” each time. This is, understandably, a bit frustrating for them. I haven’t messed with the RSS template code for a while now, though I di … | Continue reading
Every recent online or phone-based interaction I’ve had with a financial company—or almost any company now that I think about it—immediately triggers a prompt for feedback. Here’s an example from today: Hi there, At $BRAND, your experience is important to us. We’d like to get you … | Continue reading
Graphics cards have been in a weird place for years now. They’ve bucked the trend in price and performance of the rest of the market, and have been integral to the current hype train sweeping the industry. Most surprisingly, a lot of this has had very little to do with graphics a … | Continue reading
I mentioned the joys of browser monocultures again recently, which has lead to the inevitable question: what am I running if Gecko-based browsers have been relegated to the “couldn’t be bothered to test/support/etc” camp once more? I wish I had a better answer, but it’s Chromium … | Continue reading
This is a silly story to tell for one lowly spreadsheet workbook, but it’s been such a dependable and significant part of my life for so many years that I feel like it deserves a send off. The year was 2015, and I’d come into some money. Technically it was mine to start with; pay … | Continue reading
Michael Larabel reported in Phoronix: GCC 15 had planned to remove Itanium IA-64 support to close the book on that Intel architecture. That GCC move followed the Linux kernel removing Itanium support last year and more distributions ending Itanium support although many did so yea … | Continue reading
I’ve talked a lot recently about my research into homelab server racks and clusters. But I was also reminded today that 10-inch racks exist. If my primary school mathematics taught me anything, it’s that a 10-inch rack is a full 9 inches narrower than a standard 19-inch server ra … | Continue reading
William Hanson, via Wired: If you do not say please, thank you, and sorry; as a human being walking on this Earth; then you should be put into Etiquette Room 101, and the key should be thrown away. Those are the absolute basic fundamental things of being a human being. By Ruben S … | Continue reading
(I couldn’t sleep last night, owing to whatever bug it is I currently have, so I wrote this. It’s not one of my better ones, but maybe there’s something here)? Picture the scene. A managing director had to inform his staff that promised pay increases must be deferred or cancelled … | Continue reading
This is going to sound silly, but I’m so relieved and oddly validated that these things exist! I have no idea how the industry tolerated how this was done before. I’ll explain what these grinders are, but first let me wind back the clock to the early 2000s. The short-lived swing … | Continue reading
Speaking of homelabs, I’m looking forward to building a small cluster in Clara’s and my upcoming 25 RU home server rack. I’ve got used to Xen and Bhyve for one-off or mirrored hypervisors, but I’ve only ever used large clusters at work. The plan would be to use this to test distr … | Continue reading
Did you know that this utilitarian soap dish has the following standout feature? Smooth clean lines to suit modern bathrooms I do like smooth lines. Jaggered lines probably mean I’ve cracked a tile, the repair for which in a rental would be marked up ten times and taken from my b … | Continue reading
Via Atari fan vertical_blank, a reference to the vertical blanking interval first employed in early broadcast television to encode additional information, as well as early home computers: dumbfunk low level netbsd admin guy with a silly fedora and a shitty blog thinks he is [sic] … | Continue reading
I’ve waxed lyrical here about the AeroPress. I have all manner of kitchen gadgets to make coffee, including my beloved plastic Hario V60 I bought in Japan, but the AeroPress is my default. I can prep the exact amount of grounds and water I need the night before, so when I wake up … | Continue reading
Hey, remember Crowdstrike? That update to Windows security software that affected airports, hospitals, supermarkets, schools… and clients who called me desperate to know why their VMs had vanished? It was fun! By which I mean it was an unmitigated disaster, and the ultimate examp … | Continue reading
It’s fascinating to me how scale affects perceptions. At work we regularly buy dozens of 2U servers, loaded to the gills with DDR5 memory, dual CPUs with more cores than all the computers in my home combined, and terabytes of SSD storage. When a client asks for a hybrid cloud, or … | Continue reading
The depracated syntax for pagination was removed in Hugo 0.135.0. I had this line in my theme: {{ .NextPage.Permalink }} It generated this error: ERROR deprecated: .Page.NextPage was deprecated in Hugo v0.123.0 and \ will be removed in Hugo 0.136.0. Use .Page.Next instead. So I … | Continue reading
Podcast: Play in new window | Download 41:19 – A few things today, but mostly a discussion of our beloved Amelia Watson wrapping up her regular English vtuber activities with Hololive, and the adventures of buying our first home! When one thing ends, another thing starts. ♡ Micro … | Continue reading