Last week I saw someone with a LAN licence plate too. | Continue reading
I gave myself a few goals to meet this year, one of which was to be more aware of how I use my phones. Whenever I reach for them, I take deliberate note and have them justify their intrusion, or their flip cases remain closed. I’ve found this reframing useful; I’m not denying mys … | Continue reading
I’m sure every technical person and power user has a folder of scripts they use to automate repetitive tasks, or make their lives easier in specific use cases. I know this isn’t strictly analogous to a “standard library” in a programming language or development environment, but I … | Continue reading
Without further comment: those fetching antepartum testing defrayal awaits hither 962762151868 A raw beauty abalienate is waiting on your notecase to survey transfers now You send away too set the firing in the exposure by doing this. leash No shot. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 202 … | Continue reading
I was reading through some of Hales’ blog archives over Xmas, like a gentleman, and was reminded of his post about CGI, the simple application/web interface from the 1990s. And here’s the thing: he said it was good. He invited us to compare CGI to contemporary frameworks: No dep … | Continue reading
We share a common struggle within the BSD community, and more broadly among Unix-like OSs that aren’t Linux. Think Minix, illumos, heck maybe even big iron UNIX. Linux is now perceived as the default, meaning anyone presenting an alternative has to justify their existence on top … | Continue reading
My late mum Debra, whom I miss daily, demanded excellence with language. She pointed out that gotten isn’t a word outside the US, that saying like for example is redundant, that it’s a moot point not mute, and that we’re wont to get these wrong, not want. I cheekily messaged her … | Continue reading
In today’s instalment of things you already know, unless you don’t, you can use wildcards in scp(1) when transferring files: $ scp user@host:file-* . This came up during a customer call last year, where the engineer was running it a few times. On the backend it’s sftp(1) now anyw … | Continue reading
This is among the first maxims we’re taught during computer science or IT classes at university: The computer doesn’t do what you want; it does what you tell it. It’s useful to think about. There’s no spirit of the law for computers; they live in absolutes. A program you write wi … | Continue reading
It may shock some of you to learn that I often work from coffee shops. No, really!? They’re strange, magical places where I can focus/write/code easier than any home or work office. I’ve come to realise you either get this bizarre phenomena, or you don’t. Yes Ruben, that’s how bi … | Continue reading
The Retrocomputers section in my Omake outline has a few new things and changes: My list of old computers are now under that root heading instead of gear, to make them easier to find. Links to CD-ROMs on the Internet Archive are under their own heading, because the list was bec … | Continue reading
If you’re writing a file in Vim that will end up on a DOS machine, use these: set encoding="ISO8859-2" set fileencoding="ISO8859-2" set fileformat=dos This is also the first addition to the lunchbox for this year :). By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2023-01-03. | Continue reading
There’s furore among American talking heads, and more broadly within Five Eyes countries and allies like Australia, over whether TikTok should be banned, based on it being foreign spyware full of tracking. It won’t be the last. This reaction is generally met with bemusement elsew … | Continue reading
Last year (wow, that felt weird to say) I retr0brighted my Commodore 64C with some Australian hair developer cream. The results were spectacular; all the yellow streaks were completely gone, and the clean keyboard matched beautifully. I’ve now done the same with my Commodore 128. … | Continue reading
Paolo of Vintage is the New Old (an excellent vintage tech blog and site) posted back in February about how the pandemic and remote work had affected his podcast listening habits: It seems silly because the podcasts kept being released, but I stopped listening to them. It seems t … | Continue reading
In 2022 my blog amassed: 159,791 words 548 new posts 6 cups of bought coffee; thank you! 5 fewer VMs; consolidated to FreeBSD jails 3 podcast episodes; not many, huh? 2 OPML outlines Why have quality when you can have quantity? Wait. As for highlights: In Australia, Dymocks is s … | Continue reading
I first learned of pencil soldering irons while watching Adrian’s Digital Basement, and reading his list of parts he uses to fix computers. I’ve since noticed many technical YouTubers use them. There seem to be a few major benefits. They’re much smaller, which lets you be more ni … | Continue reading
As the tech guy among friends and family for years, people are surprised by my militant (that’s foreshadowing!) reluctance to buy smart, Internet-connected home devices. I wish it were based on a philosophical stance on privacy and sticking it to the proverbial man who wants to t … | Continue reading
The 80-column mode on my Commodore 128 from the imitable Screenbeard continues to produce no output, regardless of whether its involed with the 40/80 switch, or using GRAPHIC 5 in the functional 40-column mode. But I think I’ve made progress since blogging about it last year. So … | Continue reading
One of my payment cards has been flaky the last few days, to the point where multiple cafes and shops have timed out or rejected accepting it. The card has plenty of balance and isn’t physically damaged; I suspect it’s an issue at the payment processor. I have cash and backup car … | Continue reading
I’m invoking Betteridge’s law here in the hopes that the title isn’t true! Because for me it’d be a thirds life crisis. Or who knows, maybe it is a midlife one, or something else. CallMeKevin’s best video of the year wasn’t about a game he was playing, it was a heartfelt reflecti … | Continue reading
In no particular, general, specific, numerical, or other order that one may sort such a set of ideas: Going back to a server-side blog engine. Static site generation is fast, but it’s a pain in the posterior if I’m not in front of my primary computer. Not sure what it’d be. Hos … | Continue reading
On Tuesday Clara and I spent the day with friends playing boardgames and cards while eating unholy amounts of holiday treats and drinking tea. We spent Christmas with my sister and my new brother-in-law. And now I’m working out a time to meet the first friend I made in Sydney, am … | Continue reading
Brian Feldman wrote a great article in October about the game industry’s struggle to incorporate NFTs into their offerings… and not just for technical reasons: The NFTs would cost players real money and, he said, cost him both customers and his self-respect. This is exactly what … | Continue reading
This was another post forever consigned to my drafts folder, pending screenshots and more detail that I never got around to adding. I’ve decided to publish as-is. Unbeknownst to me, Blender has a built-in video sequence editor (VSE). This is cool, because Blender is available on … | Continue reading
In Australia’s previous government, attorney general George Brandis struggled to define metadata in one of the defining moments in modern political TV history. At one point he said it was details on an envelope, before recanting, then saying it was, sort of. His argument, when he … | Continue reading
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2022-12-25. | Continue reading
I mentioned on Mastodon that while the chips in my Commodore 128 barely break a sweat most of the time, there are a few in the new Commodore 64C that definitely do. The SID gets warm to the touch, and the VIC-II gets hot; enough that it made me flinch. No sooner had I posted that … | Continue reading
I want to push back a little on the idea that brand loyalty blinkers you from making good decisions (I can already feel the collective hackles raised from the likes of the Orange Peanut Gallery from here)! Brands are owned by companies, and companies are run by people. People hav … | Continue reading
Seeing the higher than expected power consumption on AMD’s new Radeon RX 9700 XT(X) cards has been concerning. Optimum Tech’s most recent video demonstrates their new drivers clearly need of work, with higher idle and video power consumption than the Nvidia 4000 series. Andrew Cu … | Continue reading
I thought I’d blogged about my new MacBook Air, but I’ve only made passing mention of it a couple of times. This is how I summarised its performance on a post about QEMU in October: But, anecdotally the responsiveness is marginally better than my last Intel MacBook Pro. That’s it … | Continue reading
Podcast: Play in new window | Download 33:53 – We’re overseas again for the first time in three years! Recorded at the busy Kudanshita Tokyo Subway station (complete with jingles!), then wandering around near the Imperial Palace one night. It’s a bit all over the place, but that … | Continue reading
On Monday I asked if commercial radio was always as bad as the current hit stations I keep hearing at our local coffee shop. Marcel weighed in with his experience: Just read your Music Monday blog post. I used to work in radio music promotion, so yeah, it has been this grim for a … | Continue reading
A fortnight ago I bought a Commodore 64C because I’d always wanted one, though I rationalised it by saying it was so I could try out carts that aren’t compatible with my 128. It was in excellent working order, but the keyboard was a bit gross, and the case had an ugly, blotchy ba … | Continue reading
I haven’t felt strongly about sideloading software on phones either way; maybe I should have. But Bruce Schneier’s latest submission to the US Senate Judiciary Committee makes a compelling case for granting third party access. This is from paragraph three on page four: Giving tec … | Continue reading
Clara’s and my dear friend, costume maker, cosplayer, DJ, performer, and perennial self-doubter for no valid reason @_BADCATBAD shared Good Smile Racing’s 2023 Racing Miku on her timeline this evening, and it was necessary for me to pass this on: I haven’t got around to writing a … | Continue reading
This Music Monday is more an observation. Clara and I started going to a new coffee shop in the mid-morning to work, which sometimes streams one of those Top 40 radio stations. What struck me is how awful the radio is! Regardless of your views of current music, everything from th … | Continue reading
La Niña continues to soak Eastern Australia for the third year running, which has lead to the weird sensation of being cold around Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere. We’re supposed to be on the beach enjoying summer, listening to Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow with a wi … | Continue reading
When Apple moved from PowerPC to Intel, there was sufficient performance headroom in the new architecture for us to run legacy software on Apple’s Rosetta translation system. I ran the PowerPC Macromedia Fireworks on Intel for several years without feeling any difference. It’s fe … | Continue reading
The NCASE M1 and CoolerMaster NR200P have been so much fun to build in, and have been a great introduction to the Mini-ITX ecosystem for someone in a tiny apartment. But I’ve been keeping an eye out for new ones that could potentially save more space. Fractal’s new Ridge case loo … | Continue reading
Clara and I were waiting in line at the checkout counter of an Aldi supermarket, when the woman in front of us couldn’t pay for her groceries. She tapped a series of iDevices against the POS machine; first a watch, then the watch again, then a phone, then another phone. The queue … | Continue reading
I’ve been thinking about this problem on and off for ages. Subscription pricing is a point of consternation, a word I had to look up because that doesn’t look like the correct spelling. Software subscriptions and online tracking are two sides of the same coin: they’re attempts to … | Continue reading
This is one of my end-of-year rituals. Here are a bunch of disjointed thoughts from the last twelve months, with as much context given here as I gave myself: I had an epiphany recently on why religious and political officials don’t have qualms with hypocrisy: when they do it, it’ … | Continue reading
I did something a bit silly last week. Clara and I were watching another of Jan Beta’s fun Commodore 64 restoration videos, when on a lark I went on eBay. This proved to be a fateful mistake: someone near to me in Australia was selling their PAL 64C, and for less than a third of … | Continue reading
Online store recommendation engines are always funny, whether they’re advertising mattresses to the happy owner of a new one, a guide to Windows 11 after you bought a MacBook, or cuts of meat to someone wheeling out a stack of new vegetarian cookbooks. They offer us a glimpse beh … | Continue reading
Call it follow up or something else. It was just a thought that popped into my head over coffee this afternoon. As an aside to this aside, thanks for reading this too. You have your choice of blogs to read and subscribe to, so it means a lot. ♡ By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2022-12- … | Continue reading
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about RSS, and have defended it from charges that it’s irrelevant or only useful for plumbing. But when it comes to actually reading RSS feeds, I’ve been everywhere. FeedLand is Dave Winer’s latest project to bring a social aspect to reading and … | Continue reading
@Ploum@mamot.fr reminded me of Zettelkasten when talking about writing and organising research. A Zettelkasten (German: “slip box”, plural Zettelkästen) or card file consists of small items of information stored on paper slips or cards that may be linked to each other through sub … | Continue reading