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
I haven’t done a post series in a long time! This is the first in one I’m dubbing my A-Z Toolbox, in which I list tools I use down the alphabet for no logical reason. The letter A has a lot of great options, from the ubiquitous awk text processor, to the ack search tool, and Thom … | Continue reading
Thomas Claburn, writing for The Register: “Slack AI uses the conversation data already in Slack to create an intuitive and secure AI experience tailored to you and your organization,” the messaging app provider explains in its documentation. Except it’s not that secure, as Prompt … | Continue reading
Here’s a shower thought! There’s a real advantage coming second with physical media. Coming to market before anyone else, often dubbed the first-mover advantage, gives you the opportunity to frame a product category, define parameters, patent key components, set the price, and re … | Continue reading
I saw The Dev Encyclopedia making the rounds this morning: Find out what that Sr. Developer is talking about. Sounds like fun! I knew almost all of these, save for some of the machine language stuff. I was disappointed it was devoid of æ and camels, though. By Ruben Schade in Syd … | Continue reading
I’ve noticed more people trying to engage by sending spam in the form of a question. Then, when they inevitably don’t get a response, they’ll send a follow-up with another question: It would be great to chat about your pipeline. We work with many game studios, maybe we can learn … | Continue reading
I’m sure I speak for a lot of people of my generation, but Phil Donahue’s American daytime talk show was mandatory viewing when I’d be home from school, either because I was sick, or later when I was staying back to care for my mum after her chemo days. He sparked many a conversa … | Continue reading
I get this odd kick out of seeing hotspots. The punny ones, the ones with emojis, the ones with statements, and the ones where people didn’t change the default name of their phone. Sometimes I’m seeing it via a macOS dropdown, other times via wpa_supplicant(8) on FreeBSD. Especia … | Continue reading
I saw this in the footer of someone’s technical forum post: All files have been analysed for malware with VirusTotal, and have shown a positive output, being completely safe to install. I have thoughts! English wasn’t the person’s primary language, so I empathise and understand l … | Continue reading
Apologies for the lack of posts over the last few days; Clara and I have been on our feet all day every day doing house inspections! Well, apartments specifically. It’s a full-time job. We’ve narrowed down to a few suburbs, streests, and places which feels unreal. Among the smarm … | Continue reading
Chef’s kiss, via Mastodon: If I go by plane, it takes me 8 hours to get to my Dad’s house. If the plane flew at twice the speed, it would take 7 1/2 hours. In case you were wondering why producing code faster hasn’t made much difference to your team’s productivity. This works on … | Continue reading
Off the top of my head: Tape monitor Telekom Malaysia Ticklish marsupial Tōkyō Metro Trade mark Turing machine TYPE-MOON (desu) By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-08-17. | Continue reading
Bob Wyman linked to this policy brief by William White published in 2021, in which he quotes Herb Stein, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” As William writes, it’s such an obvious statement, but one that takes on … | Continue reading
I haven’t been to a coffee shop for a while, on account of Clara and I scrimping for an expensive move and buying a house. It was so much fun treating myself this morning, and writing a post about our first server. But I digress. Here’s some early morning Sydney coffee shop chatt … | Continue reading
We moved a lot when I was a kid, which was both a blessing and a curse. It was always a pain for my parents to have found the perfect set of furniture, only to have to shoehorn it into a new house or apartment with a new layout. But it also gave us an opportunity to try different … | Continue reading
I’ve talking a lot here about PC Screen Syndrome, the phenomena where modern PCs can’t compete with displays Apple were shipping more than a decade ago. It’s akin to a 486 owner looking at an Amiga and saying nah, let them eat Hercules! Nobody will ever need more than 640 KiB! Th … | Continue reading
👟 The 100 metre heart race It's a race track, but the sidelines are filled with crying infants, unscheduled client meetings, and endless clutter! Watch that anxiety heart rate soar! 🍃 Competitive sneezing My current independently-verified record is 29 consecutive … | Continue reading
Today’s Music Monday is less about a specific song, and more about some weird hardware you may have been forced to figure out how to play music on back in the day. TL;DR, try these drivers on Archive.org. The Dell Dimension 4100 I bought a beigetastic Dell Dimension 4100 from eBa … | Continue reading
Online search has become so bad thanks to spam and generative AI, it’s made people look fondly at Reddit again, of all places! Fans were abandoning their Digg clone a year ago for its draconian API changes, and in February given their worrying IPO: Now, Reddit — which is not yet … | Continue reading
Speaking of trees, Clara and I wandered back to Chatswood this afternoon via the Artarmon Reserve. There were some stunning Australian trees that looked (and smelled!) amazing, and only about six kilometres from the Sydney CBD. Thanks to some cycling trails, it’s possible to get … | Continue reading
I haven’t formally quantified this, so don’t take my anecdotal experience here at face value. Here comes the proverbial posterior prognostication: but…, I do tend to find BSD people to be more candid and transparent when it comes to limitations with specific platforms and tools, … | Continue reading
Clara and I adore the Racing Miku franchise of the world’s greatest virtual idol, and her 2023 design by Atelier Ryza’s Toridamono is our favourite since Racing Miku 2011! She’s absolutely adorable, and not least because I’m a sucker for teal and cute hats. Well GSR have now anno … | Continue reading
A week ago I encouraged everyone to cancel their Gravatars, on account of Automattic’s footgun pivot to blockchain. Well I just got this email: Welcome to Gravatar.com Your email now has a profile! Wait, what? But then I got this when trying to log in: Enable Account Your Gravata … | Continue reading
Elias Visontay wrote in The Guardian Australia: The NSW executive director of Property Council, Katie Stevenson, called the move from Minns a “gamechanger”. “More workers means more life, more investment and more business for our cities,” she said People were spending where they … | Continue reading
The tech press are largely ambivilent towards AMD’s new Ryzen 9600X and 9700X CPUs, but Wendell from Level1Techs added some context 📺: And then I come back to the power, and AMD is doing this in their 65 watt TDP, 88 watt board power envelope. That’s lower power than the … | Continue reading
The plot of Star Trek: First Contact involved the Vulcans detecting our first warp bubble, which gave them reason to finally take us seriously and make… first contact. My love of the film was but one of many reasons why I got a kick out of this research, as reported by the Univer … | Continue reading
For Christmas when I was 8 years old, my dad built me a wooden chest of drawers in the shape of a robot! He had a workshop in the garage at the time, and built most of our furniture. He ended up in storage when we started moving internationally, but I was happy to get him back wh … | Continue reading
I was talking with fellow Australian BSD gentleman Tubsta on Mastodon yesterday, and he said this: You need green in your life to make you feel real. Honestly, this. I find if I’m feeling overwhelmed, even tired, walking among big trees and beautiful plants can make all the diffe … | Continue reading
I love 86Box for emulating classic PC hardware, but it doesn’t come with a VM manager by default. Instead, the software will always boot the last VM configuration you set. Programs exist to give you a more VirtualBox-like experience, where you can select, configure, and boot a ra … | Continue reading
This was so wonderful. My cheeks still hurt from smiling too much. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-08-05. | Continue reading
Gravatar announced some “decentralised” identidy management, and it’s as grim as you think it is: Imagine having complete control over your personal identity information without relying on a centralized authority. Well, that’s absolutely possible with decentralized identity manag … | Continue reading
I talked a lot about adding bulk IDE storage to retrocomputers here a few years ago. It’s one of those aspects of building, upgrading, and repairing old machines that can be delightfully simple, or devilishly frustrating, depending on luck and what basket of parts you have. And i … | Continue reading
I donate to enough independent people on Patreon that I’ve noticed a pattern, especially when things aren’t going well for someone. Invariably, if they’re in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, or Europe: I’ve had a serious health issue. I will be taking a break while I recover. Than … | Continue reading
I rediscovered Adrift’s blog recently, and specifically this post about an early 2000s TV show I hadn’t thought about for years! Emphasis added: After finishing Star Trek: Picard, I watched all 42 episodes of Dark Angel (yeah yeah, embarrassing – WHAT ISN’T?!?). What’s interestin … | Continue reading
We’re perl -e 'print 8/12' ==> 0.666666666666667 of the way through the year, depending on your level of precision. This has felt like a long year, and an exceedingly short one. Again, depending on your level of precision. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-08-01. | Continue reading
macOS is a certified UNIX platform, and at times it has enough in common with other Unix-like OS to be useful. Every time I use a Windows machine, I get frustrated that I don’t have the same shell and utilities that macOS supports natively (and no, Cygwin and WSL don’t count). Bu … | Continue reading
The Hitchhikers release of the 86Box PC System Emulator is out now, and it has cool new features and bug fixes. Some of my personal highlights from the blog post: The inclusion of a Hayes-compliant serial modem! Several fixes to the virtual Matrox card, including a bug that would … | Continue reading
I saw this reposted on Mastodon from back in May, and it’s excellent: This Recall thing is a prime example of how bad we are at understanding when something is a systemic problem. It doesn’t matter if you disable it. It doesn’t matter if you install Linux. It doesn’t matter if yo … | Continue reading
Not all Music Mondays showcase songs that I like! Today’s meandering musical menagere of maddening mediocrity concerns a song I heard everywhere a while ago, and that would stick in my mind like a meandering musical menagere of maddening mediocrity. Maddening. The bulk of the lyr … | Continue reading
The Tailscale people have been a refreshing voice of candour on a lot of online infrastructure, such as their position on IPv6. Candour sounds like a budget German airline. Wait, that’s Condor. Didn’t they get bought by Thomas Cook? Wait, they’re independent again? Huh, the more … | Continue reading
Wouter Groeneveld (web feed) and Luk Weyens (web feed) recently shared some of the edutainment games from their 1990s childhoods, so being of a similar vintage I thought I’d take a look too. Edutainment titles aspired to be the “hidden vegetables” of games, where kids would have … | Continue reading
This is my Codeberg public activity graph. There are many like it, such as those green ones on GitHub, but this one is mine: What does it tell you? Does it say I’m prolific, or productive, or professional? The truth is, it says basically nothing. It’s a pretty graph that mildly g … | Continue reading
The Sorted gents have a fun show format where they ask cryptic questions to determine how to cook someone’s dream meal. It’s all quite silly and tenuous, but that’s the whole point! Ben was the latest to be interviewed, so I thought it’d be fun to answer the same questions. Moist … | Continue reading
The Olympics are now underway in Paris, just on the off chance you didn’t notice. I’m only really interested in table tennis, gymnastics, and badminton—you can take the boy out of Singapore, but you can’t take Singapore out of the boy—but it’s impossible to walk around in Austral … | Continue reading
I spent some time fixing the performance issues some of you reported earlier this week; hopefully things look better now. It’s all actually configured and running correctly now! My plan is to eventually replace a bunch of stuff with the imitible Poul-Henning Kamp’s Varnish, but o … | Continue reading
American psychologist Lee Roy Beach, as quoted in WikiQuote: Decision making is essentially social behaviour, even when there is nobody else present, because one anticipates how others will react and factors this into the decision. […] Organizations per se do not make decisions, … | Continue reading
Clara and I found some Pentium III-era parts on the kerb earlier this month, and I’m finally getting around to cataloguing, cleaning, testing, and hopefully fixing what I can. On the bench today is a Samsung 12x DVD-Master IDE drive, model SD-612. The barcode sticker says it was … | Continue reading