Like many of you, I was quick to install Let’s Encrypt once it was available. It reduced the barrier to entry significantly for HTTPS by rendering the experience of buying, installing, and renewing certificates affordable and easy. I let other commercial certs lapse because Certb … | Continue reading
Wait, we’re in October of this year now? Where does the time go. I wrote about browser monocultures back in 2021: I rasied the impending Chromium monoculture back in August last year. I raised the issue about why monocultures are bad, why it is the same thing we dealt with during … | Continue reading
Can I just say how awesome you all are? Despite my current bout of social anxiety meaning I barely have the mental capacity to reply to my ever-increasing backlog of email comments and Mastodon posts, you all pull through and solve a problem for me within a day of writing! On Sun … | Continue reading
Today’s Music Monday is a song about music, which I’m uploading on a Monday. What are the odds!? Don’t answer that. I heard this absolute pinnacle of Australian 1980s music on the radio this morning, and consider it my patriotic duty to repost it. It was the first time I saw the … | Continue reading
Joshua Coleman (web feed) has so many cool retro hardware projects. But this quote was the highlight for me today: The danger of computers becoming like humans is not as great as the danger of humans becoming like computers. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-09-30. | Continue reading
I realised my blog here has reached 940 pages. With ten posts per page, that’s a lot of posts. But who’s counting posts? Not me, I’m only counting pages. As I read that number on my site footer however, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this number held significance for some reas … | Continue reading
You know those dreams where you wake up and a wave of disappointment washes over you upon realising the thing you experienced wasn’t real? I had such a dream last night where I had a handheld SPARC machine in a fetching shade of Sun purple, and a clicky thumb keyboard for data en … | Continue reading
I’m running a bit of an experiment. I’ve got a poll on Mastodon for BSD people if they run more than one BSD. I’ve noticed I’m not the only one who run two or more stacks, depending on the requirements or my whims that day. It’s live for the next week, after which I’ll tabulate t … | Continue reading
By now I’m sure you would have seen Simone Margaritelli’s discovery of a potential security vulnerability in CUPS, the Common UNIX Print System. It requires cups-browserd be enabled and listening on UDP port 631, which permits a remote attacker to install a malicious PostScript p … | Continue reading
This is the second post in my A-Z Toolbox series, in which I’m listing tools I use down the alphabet for no logical reason. The letter B has the excellent FreeBSD Bhyve hypervisor, and the bzip2 compression utility. But bwm-ng takes the proverbial cake for a a small tool that I’v … | Continue reading
2013: Me!: “To me, Matt Mullenweg represents the good of my generation; the antithesis of Mark Zuckerberg in so many ways” 2024: TechCrunch: “Tumblr CEO publicly spars with trans user over account ban, revealing private account names in the process” 404 Media: “Tumblr and WordPre … | Continue reading
Deutsche Welle reported: A new high-speed train, operated by German rail operator Deutsche Bahn and France’s SNCF, will allow passengers to travel between Berlin and Paris in approximately eight hours, Deutsche Bahn announced on Tuesday. Deutsche Bahn is also planning other new i … | Continue reading
We’ve had crowd dynamics at coffee shops, and social norms. What about power imbalances? The title of this post may suggest a coffee shop has sufficiency high electrical requirements to warrant having three phases delivered, one or more of which might be unbalanced. This can caus … | Continue reading
This is a question that comes up a lot in the context of retrocomputer discussions. There were so many, from so many different companies, why did I end up settling on the ones that I ended up on? What is it about them that intrigues me so much? I’m interested in so many old syste … | Continue reading
Web feed isn’t a great term either, but it’s a marginally better one: “Web feed” at least hints to its functionality. I had no idea what the orange XML rectangle meant when I first saw it in the early 2000s, and even then, I wondered why it didn’t say “RSS”. Tragic XML fans like … | Continue reading
This is one of those unhelpful status updates with no detail whatsoever! But I successfully spent part of yesterday moving Clara’s and my internal DB on our FreeBSD homelab box to Postgres. Everything in our homelab (and home life) revolve around a single database, from helper sc … | Continue reading
Amelia Watson has announced her soft retirement from Hololive EN Myth: Watson Amelia, a member of the VTuber group hololive English, will conclude all of her channel activities on September 30th, 2024. […] Though her channel activities will end, Watson Amelia will remain an affil … | Continue reading
Robyn Speer, in an article announcing the retirement of wordfreq: The open Web (via OSCAR) was one of wordfreq’s data sources. Now the Web at large is full of slop generated by large language models, written by no one to communicate nothing. Including this slop in the data skews … | Continue reading
This list is non-normative, non-exclusive, and non-useful. Wait. African and South American geography. I can pinpoint every country on a map of Europe, Asia Pacific, and North/Central America, right down to Moldova, Tuvalu, and Martinique, but there are swaths of the world I don’ … | Continue reading
A friend of mine once joked that I was great at making excuses for other people. I’m starting to realise it’s not an asset. Case in point, I was walking across a zebra crossing yesterday—like a gentleman—when a Sydney Buses driver came barreling down the street and nearly mowed m … | Continue reading
I launched Ruben’s Retro Corner back in November last year, ostensibly to organise and gather information on my growing retrocomputer collection, but also to relive my primary school days when I hand-coded HTML without a CMS. It also uses plain HTTP 1.1 and valid HTML3, so my old … | Continue reading
More than a few of you have noticed a drop in the quantity and quality of posts here over the last couple of months (not to mention some performance issues for a bit there). In short, Clara and I have spent our idle mental CPU cycles going through the motions of buying a home. It … | Continue reading
So many things are up in the air right now, but I’m sitting out on the balcony on a cool morning with a fresh brewed coffee, my Ansible scripts updated my personal servers without issue, a sulphur-crested cockatoo came to say hello, and the letter J on my keyboard has stopped act … | Continue reading
The BBC’s Science News desk reported on the returned craft a week ago: The capsule, which suffered technical problems after it launched with Nasa’s Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on board, was deemed too risky to take the astronauts home. […] it was plagued with problems soon af … | Continue reading
You know that Treehouse of Horror episode of The Simpsons where the family is bundled off for some “Re-Neducation”, and everyone’s faces are forced into a smile with tenterhooks? It’s such a visceral image I can still remember it decades later. And weirdly, I feel as though I jus … | Continue reading
Kieran Murphy on Mastodon: In 2024, Westpac (one of the largest banks in Australia) has decided that online banking needs a password more secure than a 4-6 digit numerical PIN. Welcome to the 21st Century, Westpac. You’re only 24 years late. That’s a relief! I had a Westpac accou … | Continue reading
I’d say most coffee people like both espresso and brewed coffee, but we all have a preference towards one or the other. Espresso is made from water forced through coffee at high pressure, whereas a brewed coffee is allowed to steep and filter its way to your cup. Both have their … | Continue reading
Today’s Music Monday introduses one of the all-time greats to the site. In the words of my beloved late uncle dave, George Fame could swing! Keen-eyed viewers may recognise the cover as being a similar style to Ben Sidran’s Cool Paradise, released around the same Go Jazz label. T … | Continue reading
Back by popular demand! Wait, don’t interrogate that. NetBSD’s pkgsrc has more packages than my cupboard. I’ve inexplicably lived in two Australian suburbs called $Foo Lakes. But not in the lakes themselves. My eyes are slightly green, but mostly brown. I’d look at them closely, … | Continue reading
I’ve been talking a lot with a friend recently who’s been helping us out with something, and the story he’s been telling us about his work is both ridiculous and believable. Some of you may have… let’s just say, intimate experience with such a process! Maybe go grab a coffee, tea … | Continue reading
Via Wikiquote: A country is deemed great that truly cares about its children aka pikins, and the most vulnerable. This. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-09-06. | Continue reading
I’m the first to admit that I don’t live in the real (electronic) world. As the late Jim Kloss pointed out during one of his broadcasts, we (and probably you) live in a part of the Web with ad blockers (as the FBI recommends), limited JavaScript, password managers, and a (mostly) … | Continue reading
I read this last week, but it’s awesome news! The FreeBSD Foundation: Boulder, CO – August 26, 2024—The FreeBSD Foundation, dedicated to advancing the open source FreeBSD operating system and supporting the community, announced that Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) has agreed … | Continue reading
Oona McGee reported in SoraNews24 about a new travel authorisation system for tourists and travellers entering Japan from the 71 countries that have Visa waivers: The new system is said to run in a similar way to ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorisation) in the U.S., whic … | Continue reading
Smart flip phones with hardware keyboards. Not a flip phone with a creased OLED, I’m talking something like a Sony CLIÉ with a screen and keyboard on discrete slabs. Headphone jacks. I know phone manufacturers switched to Bluetooth so they could sell you another consumable with i … | Continue reading
My primary portable machine is a first-generation M1 MacBook Air, as I’ve posted here a few times. I need to edit Microsoft Office documents for work, and I don’t want to deal with the hassle of Windows in a VM, or dedicated hardware. I’ve also been a Mac user (albeit not exclusi … | Continue reading
Leviathan42 posed an interesting thought experiment on the Level1Tech forums about the future of SATA: Noticed lately that consumer motherboards are omitting SATA ports in favor of more M.2 ports. Are we ready to classify SATA ports as legacy devices yet? wonder when we will see … | Continue reading
About a week ago I noticed someone selling a working Power Mac G4 in Sydney, for local pickup only. We chatted about its condition and how best to get it from his house, and he agreed to drive to the nearest station for me. He was so nice, and it was in such great condition, I hi … | Continue reading
Ryan Smith: It is with great sadness that I find myself penning the hardest news post I’ve ever needed to write here at AnandTech. After over 27 years of covering the wide – and wild – word of computing hardware, today is AnandTech’s final day of publication. This definitely got … | Continue reading
I picked up a copy of Neil Oliver’s book on Scottish history last time I was in Melbourne, and I just got around to finishing it. It was decent, though I’m a little conflicted. Nearly half my family comes from Scotland. My dad is German, and both branches of my late mum’s family … | Continue reading
I only started noticing this recently, and it made me chuckle. Stuff just works when we’re young… well, hopefully. You get out of bed, and you go to school or uni. My main concerns at the time were forcing myself to eat breakfast because I thought I needed to (I no longer do), an … | Continue reading
Maybe there was a reason? Sometimes? I seemed to instinctively choose the road less travelled when I was in my twenties. It lead to amazing results: I wouldn’t have moved to where I am now, met the person I’m with, got the job at the startup instead of the big tech company, or ev … | Continue reading
I regularly talk about why I love web feed formats like RSS an Atom, and how my words have been available via such feeds for two decades. But I don’t think I’ve ever acknowledged why people might not want to publish them. Theft is likely the biggest reason, unfortunately. Feeds a … | Continue reading
Say you’re at a data centre and tailing logs on your work MacBook while you do other things. How do you stop the display from sleeping after a few minutes of inactivity? If it was possible graphically before, I haven’t been able to find it. Every guide online either confidently r … | Continue reading
Recently I’ve been looking more seriously at cases like the SilverStone CS382 for Clara’s and my homelab boxes. Currently our FreeBSD Supermicro board lives in an old Antec 300, which is great for airflow, but replacing drives is a pain. Our NetBSD install still lives in an HP Mi … | Continue reading
This week’s Music Monday is the titular song from Ben Sidran’s 1985 album On the Cool Side. It was Ben’s first album to make use of electronic instruments, or so his Wikipedia article says. I’d know, because I wrote it back in the day! This is one of those songs that really helps … | Continue reading
I’m conflicted by Gashapon capsule machines and their various offshoots, for a whole host of reasons I won’t get into here. Here comes the proverbial posterior prognostication: but…, Clara and I saw there was a “retro” Mini Brands series, so we got a couple for fun. Mini Brands a … | Continue reading
Australia is dealing with a cost of living crisis, as is much of the world. Jonathan Barrett wrote an article about the last full-year reporting season: [S]pending patterns remain uneven, and at times counterintuitive, leading to a mixed corporate earnings season marked by subdue … | Continue reading