Eastwood is one of my favourite suburbs in Sydney. On the one side of the train station you have some of the best Cantonese food and culture in the city, and on the other has rows of Korean restaurants and supermarkets. And apparently, coffee shops! Ten Thousand has branches in … | Continue reading
I got this when upgrading a server: Fatal error: Uncaught Error: \ Call to undefined function filter_var() Easy enough install to fix: # pkg install [-j $JAIL] php84-filter Thanks to bofh@ for maintaining the port :). By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-05-17. | Continue reading
Recently I posted about our Minecraft server, and mentioned on Mastodon that I’d rebuilt our Dynmap server with MariaDB. A few of you wanted to know what I was talking about, what I did, and why, especially those of you maintaining servers for their kids. Clara and I started play … | Continue reading
He’d already started to move on by the time I was done with my morning shower, but wow. For perspective, this is just down the road from where I saw the rainbow earlier this week. I learned about Karl the Fog when I briefly worked in San Francisco. Wow, that was eight years ago. … | Continue reading
I’m a long time lurker (and occasional poster) to the netbsd-users mailing list, the official mailing list for NetBSD users. Thanks Ruben, that explanation was helpful. Back on the 16th of April, Michael Cheponis expressed interest in having the NetBSD Foundation be involved with … | Continue reading
I was up in northern Sydney today, and saw the longest and most vivid rainbow I think I’ve ever seen in my life! I didn’t have a proper camera on me, and was almost late to a meeting, but I still had to stop and take a look. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-05-13. | Continue reading
My history with web servers is entirely unremarkable, and likely mirrors yours. I first ran Apache/httpd when I was kid, before moving onto lighttpd in my first paid gig—lighty for those in the know—then onto nginx where I’ve mostly remained since, save for running Bozotic on a 4 … | Continue reading
I have no idea how I ended up on this Wikipedia article: Visoka is a village in the Kardzhali Municipality, which is in the Kardzhali Province, in southern Bulgaria. As of 1 January 2007, the population of Visoka is 2 people, making it one of the least populated villages in the … | Continue reading
evacide: If you are in your late thirties to mid-forties right now, there is a good chance that you have spent most of your life in a cycle of making some sort of home on the internet only to have it crumble beneath you like chalk and having to start over. I… can relate to this … | Continue reading
I was compelled to install the confusingly-named, generic-sounding, un-hyphenated Shop application on my mobile telephonic device recently, for specific reasons that are beyond the scope of this post. It’s also beyond the scope of the previous post about HTML fractions, which had … | Continue reading
I realised something recently: I rarely write fractions in my daily life. I might divvy up a pizza with friends, cut up pieces of round birthday cake, or refer to times as “quarter past five” instead of 17:15 in speech. But I somehow managed to avoid writing them after uni, until … | Continue reading
I mentioned on Mastodon that I was doing some maintenance on Clara’s and my Minecraft server we started together in 2020. A couple of you asked what it looks like, so I thought I’d do a little tour :). The map There are several different plugins that will generate you a web map o … | Continue reading
Thirteen years ago I posted this snippet of text from Wikipedia, and joked that it must be how it feels to talk with me when it comes to my more esoteric interests: The GTO thyristor used on 1996 stock achieves this by “chopping” the supply voltage in order to drive a sinusoidal … | Continue reading
Another day, another Linux exploit. It’s been hard to keep track over the last few months. Vulnerabilities are inevitable, but they do highlight my concerns again regarding monocultures. Any post I’ve ever written warning about monocultures and Linux (or as I’ve taken to calling … | Continue reading
eBay has updated how it charges Australian sellers. tl;dr: you can’t sell on eBay for free, despite their claims. “Free selling” announced eBay Australia sent an email back in March, emphasis added: Coming at the end of April, we’re making it free to sell on eBay.com.au for Aust … | Continue reading
I’ve adjusted the width of posts on the blog, which I think makes them easier to read. I remember reading years ago that having between 12-15 printed words to a line was optimal for text “readability”, which I’ve maintained here since 2004. Aside from the fact I haven’t been able … | Continue reading
One of the coffee shops I frequent puts a litre bottle of slightly chilled water on the table when you order coffee. I’m used to this at Australian restaurants, but even getting this level of service when you’ve only bought a single beverage and proceed to “nurse” it at your tabl … | Continue reading
I’d like to start here (as opposed to somewhere else?) by putting something on the record. Or the cassette tape, or whatever. Travan tape? LTO? My esteemed BSD Now podcast co-host Tom says he has enough computers; sentiment to which I can relate. I have enough of these electronic … | Continue reading
The speaker on this train: Please mind the gap between the BZZZ! your next stop is Wahroonga BZZT! on the seats. Thank you. Cal Newport, Reality Check: What you’re going to get out of the LLM is a reasonable-sounding plan (they’re story completers). Reasonable-sounding plans… … | Continue reading
It has been a busy start to the week! If you don’t live or work in web hosting circles, you may still have been impacted by a significant cPanel vulnerability that has wrecked havoc across the web. I don’t host any cPanel, but by golly, I work with some clients who do. And let’s … | Continue reading
Recently I’ve done a three part series building out an uncommon Commodore 64 motherboard and case combo, and posted twice about new tea stores in Sydney. I may have even been working on that aforementioned 8-bit computer while drinking a beverage from one of those establishments. … | Continue reading
Yesterday we had a brief power outage that could be attributed to something that happened in our building, not the wider neighbourhood or power grid. There’s a lot going on in our block concerning power, hot water, painting, and whatnot, which has brought much… fun into our lives … | Continue reading
We’re onto the third instalment of my Commodore 250466 series. In the first post I explained how and why I bought the last C64 longboard, and in the second I explored the board in more detail and confirmed it worked! Today, it’s time to install this beautiful piece of mid-1980s 8 … | Continue reading
Here are some things that happened on the first of May: I published this post. Thank you. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-05-01. | Continue reading
Speaking of new tea shops on Sydney’s north shore, Hornsby also has a new one in the form of a delightful pun: Auntea Jenny! Auntea Jenny is a bubble/boba tea chain that first opened in Shanghai, and has recently been expanding internationally. According to Wikipedia, they’re op … | Continue reading
Last Saturday I introduced the 250466 longboard from 1986 I bought for my Commodore 64 “Aldi” machine. I’ll admit, I could barely contain my excitement, for this was the first longboard C64 board I’d had in years. But does it work? Today I wanted to find out, and take a closer lo … | Continue reading
Back in the mystical early 2000s, the world was introduced to the idea of FOAF, or Friend of a Friend. I always pronounced it like LOAF, but that could have been wrong. The perils of only having read something. But I digress. FOAF was a machine-readable RDF schema that let you d … | Continue reading
I love a good synchronicity! I was literally just talking about the Commodore 64 longboard I bought locally, and how much fun it’s been restoring, testing, and building it into my Aldi 64 shell, not to mention comparing it with my 64C shortboard. Now we have some news that I’m fr … | Continue reading
Those familiar with bridge cameras and mid-2000s chat speak may get a kick out of this post. Seventeen years after the format was officially retired by its backers, I’ve managed to track down a new xD card reader from a certain large mainland Chinese website. And here it is, with … | Continue reading
Speaking of the new Kinokuniya in the best suburb of Sydney, Tea&Co also opened a branch just off the Victoria Avenue mall. The queues snaked around the block for weeks after their opening, so we ended up walking past. But we managed to catch them when they weren’t so busy over t … | Continue reading
I swore I’d written about this before, but I can’t find it in the archives. If I’m rehashing here, let’s pretend this is (1) a novel post, or (b) a substantive update on what I’ve mentioned before. Brilliant! Let’s jump in. Clara and I love playing music on our hi-fi setup. We ha … | Continue reading
This is my beautiful old Commodore 64 “Aldi” case and keyboard I picked up in September 2023 from a seller in Germany: Note the somewhat unusual combination of beige keyboard paired with the darker breadbin case. When most people think “Commodore 64”, they likely picture a dark … | Continue reading
I posted on Tuesday about handwriting, and how I struggle to read much of it thesedays. I attributed this to a lack of practice, and perhaps an over-reliance on typeset and computer text. I mentioned: My late mum was a professional calligrapher, and had some of the most beautifu … | Continue reading
Podcast: Play in new window | Download 11:15 – What… what are we doing? Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade. Released April 2026 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel foc … | Continue reading
Australia is a stunning place. I fully expected to move back to Singapore after my degree, but gosh darn it if this wide open land didn’t rub off on me. We have the best skies and food in the world, and this time of the year the weather is just perfect. Sydney even has halfway de … | Continue reading
Today I was thinking that there’s… pardon, give me a moment, someone is sending me a message. Reaches into pocket. … Wait, there’s nothing there? Then where’s my… oh. The phones are on the desk. Not my pocket at all. And they didn’t receive any messages. I could have sworn I felt … | Continue reading
I accidentally published a few hundred drafts yesterday. I was messing with a new Hugo build pipeline, and symlinked something where it shouldn’t be. It was less destructive than getting the if and of wrong in dd(1), but it still wasn’t ideal. I heard you like infinite recursion, … | Continue reading
The world’s best, most portable OS turned 33 this week. 🧡 I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but I cannot express how much I enjoy NetBSD. Linux gets the job done at work, and FreeBSD is excellent with its tooling and features. But in a way that’s intangible and har … | Continue reading
My late mum was a professional calligrapher, and had some of the most beautiful casual handwriting I’ve ever seen. My sister also has lovely writing, as does Clara. I have what can best be described as scrawl. There was a point in the late 2010s where I hadn’t written anything fo … | Continue reading
Optimism is being challenged on multiple fronts. First in the literal sense; we definitely have a lot of stuff to be decidedly un-optimistic about in our current political, tech, and climate… climates. But people are also pushing back on the term itself, and the idea it represent … | Continue reading
Last year Australia’s teen “social media” ban came into force, garnering world headlines. Here was a middl(e/ing) power with a population smaller than California standing up to the established American tech giants and saying enough. Or at least, that’s the story its proponents li … | Continue reading
I’ve been making liberal use of planets since I did my last RSS cleanup, and have discovered dozens of new blogs and people in the process :). Many large technical projects aggregate blogs from multiple people and sources into a single site “planet” and RSS feed, letting you easi … | Continue reading
Happy Sunday, hope you’re having a good one. I thought we’d start with something lighter this morning with a list I’ve been thinking about for a while, and one of critical importance (cough). Top five Bergerac. Clara and I have been borrowing the DVDs from our local libraries, … | Continue reading
I’ve stared a new Navidrome library for FLAC files. Yay! Starting fresh with a new library has given me the opportunity to carefully import each album one by one, verify their metadata, make sure they have the correct cover art, and add more touchy-feely attributes like “mood” w … | Continue reading
Visiting client sites and moving offices over the years has granted me unique insight into the functioning of commercial bathroom spaces. In particular, my focus has centred on the hygiene aspects of bathroom operations, including (but not exclusively) the washing and drying of h … | Continue reading
Suburbs around northern Sydney are undergoing some “hazard reduction backburning”, now that the weather has cooled down and there isn’t too much wind. The sky looks unreal. My XD card reader finally arrived for my inherited 2007 Olympus bridge camera, so I used its massive teleph … | Continue reading
Beautiful: Some things I’ve learned/am learning: 99% of things aren’t about you. Only you can complete you. Let people enjoy things. Kindness is imperative. Actions > words. Stop, look, & listen. Love others. You’ll grow. Laugh like it’s your job. Never stop learning. By Rube … | Continue reading
Almost a month ago to the day, I wrote about this ritual I have to perform each time I make an appointment with this specific clinic. It went like this: I add a card to their web portal, and set it as my “default” payment method for all new appointments. I make an appointment … | Continue reading