Ukrainians are, to use geopolitical language, fucking awesome. No really, every Ukrainian I’ve met is. The war in Ukraine was started by the government of Russia. The democratically-elected leader of Ukraine is Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Ukrainian borscht is the best borscht. It is the … | Continue reading
I’ve been on record here espousing what may charitably be described as a dislike of motorised conveyances of an automobile nature. The more rational and level-headed among urbanists may be more specific in decrying car dependency over the cars themselves, but I just don’t like th … | Continue reading
I’m working remote today, so I tried somewhere new. The coffee shop/roastery smells amazing, and has bar chairs and a long, thin table overlooking the street and surrounding landscape. It’s lovely! Though let’s just say I’m glad I brought an umbrella in case. By Ruben Schade in S … | Continue reading
Podcast: Play in new window | Download 14:22 – Bit of a weirder one today; talking about the time last week when the trolls won! But I got some amazing feedback and some help, so maybe there are lessons here I can pass on. Have you heard of this thing called the block button? I s … | Continue reading
You know the feature I wish LibreOffice Calc and others would implement from Google Sheets? Or from database views, in a matter of speaking? Being able to delete columns and rows. To be clear, I don’t mean: Clear columns Remove the contents of columns Collapse columns Hide column … | Continue reading
The Fruit Company launched the iPhone SE in 2016, a handset with the same form factor as the iPhone 5. It offered people a more affordable, smaller alternative to the iPhone 6 and 6s, with the same access to software updates, and the company’s ecosystem of hardware, accessories, … | Continue reading
This was such a fun video! Teachers that can explain abstract or difficult concepts using relatable analogies are worth their weight in linear power supplies. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-02-20. | Continue reading
Yesterday I made this throwaway comment: Forget about it, as my beloved New York friends would say in an accent I can’t muster, but it doesn’t stop me trying. That public troll earlier this week must be infuriated that once again I’m quoting someone, only this time it’s… myself! … | Continue reading
I was reconciling my accounts over lunch—like a gentleman—when I went to my budget view and none of the resulting numbers made sense. All these accounts, transactions, and budget envelope amounts that had been zero’d out suddenly had wildly incorrect numbers going back to last ye … | Continue reading
This is a bit of a thinking out loud post that normally I’d push to drafts, but Wouter has convinced me that it should go out into the world anyway :). I don’t know how else to say it, but it’s a weird time to be building PCs. After a brief reprieve when blockchain guff fizzled o … | Continue reading
I’ll admit, I had three ulterior motives when posting that quote from Joan Westenberg yesterday about complexity. (1) I wanted to promote her blog which I find massively valuable. (B) I wanted to prove to a troll that quoting people is perfectly reasonable. And (三), I wanted to h … | Continue reading
Today I learned that you can stop FreeBSD jails in reverse order from when they were started. Say you have the follwing configured in your /etc/rc.conf: jail_enable="YES" jail_list="database web varnish" You can add this: sysrc jail_reverse_stop="YES" And those jails will be st … | Continue reading
When I first started making coffee for myself and my family when we lived in Singapore in the early 2000s, I reached for a few different types of beans. Illy coffee was one of them. It was consistently decent, widely available, and adverb coffee. When we moved to Malaysia, ditto. … | Continue reading
Saw this at a coffee shop yesterday: By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-02-17. | Continue reading
Today’s Music Monday is another Paul McCartney classic. My favourite Beatles song was always Here Comes the Sun by the late great George Harrison, but this always came close. That piano line is probably my favourite of any pop song, and the guitar in the coda… amazing. I bring th … | Continue reading
Australia is like Canada in the sense we have cultural ties to Britain, but we’ve also been influenced by the US. One link with the green and pleasant land is the humble scone, something we relished in partaking in during some very un-British weather in Sydney yesterday. To be cl … | Continue reading
Her entire post is worth a read, as always (RSS feed here). But these lines in particular are spot on: Mastery isn’t adding layers. It’s peeling them away until only the essential remains. Life can be simple. We choose to make it complex. The art is knowing what to keep. By Ruben … | Continue reading
I read a few blogs and sites for transport insiders. I’m clearly not the target audience, but I still find them really interesting. An aviation site I frequent doesn’t have ads per se, but they run these unusual surveys in an iframe. I guess they’re designed to lure you in with a … | Continue reading
Some fun random things I overheard this morning: These phones don’t make sense anymore. I’m barely 30, and I don’t understand what half this crap does. It’s like, metallic goldy! But also beige. Beigy! Metallic gold beige! But I could do without the wheels. (A): I missed the trai … | Continue reading
Hi! This will be the third and final instalment in my “trolls get to Ruben” series, fun as it has been to live it since last Thursday. Sadly, it’s become clear some ground rules are required for people who want to send me messages. These will do nothing to deter the dregs, but I’ … | Continue reading
Clara and I went to get some encouragement coffee and cake after the last couple of days of online adventures, and the cups have the tiniest handles I’ve ever seen. Note the small teaspoon on the saucer for reference: The best we could do is hold the handle between our index fing … | Continue reading
Yesterday I wrote a serious post about how some personal feedback hadn’t helped my current mental health issues. Some of you asked for examples of what I was talking about, but I don’t like posting things that aren’t public. As if on cue, nuintari DM’d me on Mastodon overnight as … | Continue reading
I know I’m a bit silly here on occasion, even when discussing technical topics. But I want to be serious here for a moment, if you’ll indulge me. Writing this blog almost every day for twenty years has been one of the great joys of my life. It’s not as impressive as the creative … | Continue reading
Friend of the blog Michel asked this on Mastodon: At what volume would you consider Postgres to be not worth it, that he require too much hacking, and just look for alternatives? There are a few different ways to read this. When does your project get big enough to warrant running … | Continue reading
I did one of those terminal surveys! As in, a survey about using terminals, not a survey that’s terminal. Some of the answers are below. I didn’t include duplicate questions, or ones where the answer is just a “yes”. How long have you been using the terminal? 21+ years (… yikes) … | Continue reading
MetaFilter gave me the idea for this one. Turns out I had My little external mouse has had the unintended side-effect of removing pain in my right hand when working remote. This dead touchpad may have been a blessing in disguise! This iced long black I’m having right now is delic … | Continue reading
A friend of mine is selling his dual-wheeled motorised conveyance: This 2017 Suzuki GSX-R600 is kept in amazing condition with extremely low km’s on it, so there is plenty of time to enjoy this amazing bike throughout the summer year! There is nothing wrong with the bike, always … | Continue reading
A Mastodonian and reader of my ramblings here, and the cogent thoughts over at 82MHz, asked me if I’d be up for answering the same blog challenge linked therein. Why not? When did you first get interested in technology? This one is easy, though I don’t think I’ve ever shared it b … | Continue reading
Clara and I have an AppleTV, a curious device made by a company that seemingly cares little for it. This is fantastic news from a large IT company in 2025, because it means it has mostly escaped from being stuffed with new “features” nobody wants. This is in contrast with with th … | Continue reading
Oh hi, how are you today? Something happened last night which has me so excited I can’t sit still. I saw something new announced while on the train, and the shaking poor Clara had to endure as I took her shoulders and exlaimied they did it! could probably be felt on the upstairs … | Continue reading
Public Broadcasting of Latvia, on what finally took place over the weekend: The electricity systems of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania continue to operate independently and problem-free following their de-coupling from the electricity network that formerly linked them to Russia an … | Continue reading
I’ve talked before about how I think NetBSD is “boring”, and that it’s among the highest forms of praise I can give tech as a sysadmin and architect. But I’ve never elaborated why that is. The opposite of being bored is to be surprised, and that’s not something a sysadmin desires … | Continue reading
This is a retelling of an old debate I got into on Twitter back in the day, paraphrased in the style of a Clarke and Dawe skit. I miss their banter dearly. Brian: And your name is? Fund E: Fund E. Brian: Last name? Fund E: Mentalist. Brian: Oh Fund E. Mentalist. That’s clever. Fu … | Continue reading
Today’s Music Monday is another Paul McCartney-adjacent tune, this time with Linda and Denny Laine again in their Wings days. May they rest in peace. I thought Pete’s comment was especially apt! It’s amazing how a song written by two English men could make a Scots guy like me fee … | Continue reading
With special thanks to the imitable Minecraft Wiki for their advice, and all the reference material linked to below. Make sure you go to them over the inferior Fandom version. Clara and I have been playing Minecraft for four years now, all on the same map and server. It managed t … | Continue reading
I’ve had it on my forever list of tasks to replace the battery on our fridge-mounted magnetic clock from Muji. It’s up there with grease the fire escape door hinge, sweep the balcony, and my personal favourite, set daylight savings time on my alarm-clock radio. It’s at the point … | Continue reading
With all my discussion last year about an ultraportable computer I can use on the train, I remembered that I bought a GPD Pocket in Akihabara back in 2018 for testing BSD hypervisors at conventions. It’s hinged, which isn’t ideal for commuting when standing, but I thought the for … | Continue reading
This is a bit of a nuts-and-bolts post, but I was trying to get inline images on a page working with Content Security Policy. A target page had the following: I thought images expressed in data would be an unsafe-inline, just like inline CSS styling. I was wrong: Content-Securi … | Continue reading
I’ve been meaning to write about their excellence for a few years, but I’ve decided to collate them here for easy reference: Motherfucking Website. “Seriously, what the fuck else do you want?” Better Motherfucking Website. “Seriously, it takes minimal fucking effort to improve th … | Continue reading
I wrote about running MediaWiki with PostgreSQL instead of MariaDB (et.al) back in January: We run MediaWiki stock without extra plugins, but I’m still impressed how there’s been no appreciable difference in functionality or performance. I can now also use my little library of Po … | Continue reading
I have a thing for keyboards, as my recent post about the Kinesis mWave demonstrated. One day I hope to dust off my old Unicomp buckling spring board for use in the study, with the door closed. But this might be the greatest one I’ve ever seen. It’s eye-wateringly expensive, come … | Continue reading
I’ve shared this example on Mastodon before, but imagine our phones came with a new stabby feature that stabs you whenever you miss a notification. Most people would look at that and say “that’s dreadful”! But you’ll always get some deliberately-obtuse sealion retorting with “wel … | Continue reading
This sort of thing is normally a bit personal, but I had a blood test last week, and it’s the first time in my life that I have “normal” vitamin D! Not excellent, but “acceptable”. I’m sure it’s my lifestyle and occupation, but I’ve lived my entire life with vitamin D either cron … | Continue reading
Many of you pinged me this morning saying my site certificate had expired. Thanks for letting me know. This time certbot didn’t autorenew because I’d removed a DNS entry from a side project, and I had it as one of the subdomains for the renewal. It couldn’t issue a cert for that … | Continue reading
I haven’t talked about the whole DeepSeek thing here, save for a delicious piece of schadenfreude where an American genAI company accused them of plagiarism. You couldn’t work that into a script for a movie; you’d be accused of being too on the nose. More details about DeepSeek a … | Continue reading
We’ve all encountered that moment, faced with a corner or a set of stairs, and wondering how in the hell we’re going to fit our couch, fridge, or 42RU server rack around it. Jac Murtagh over at the Scientific American has some great news! The maximum size of an object that can fi … | Continue reading
Clara and I were walking down the street last week—as one tends to do when requiring bi-pedalled locomotion to a specific location without encountering a powered vehicle of some sort—when we noticed a large truck depositing a small shower of rocks and other debris on the side of … | Continue reading
I apologise in advance both for the topic, and my disjointed thoughts here. But it’s something that’s been knawing at me for years, and especially again in light of recent events. My impression from reading a lot on history, and witnessing it first hand, is that push factors play … | Continue reading