Clara and I went for a lunch break walk yesterday. The leaves and sky were gorgeous. People use the phrase touch grass as a bit of an insult thesedays, but honestly, it’s probably one of the best things you can do. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-04-24. | Continue reading
The inventor of ELIZA didn’t mince words in 1982, and they still hold true in the current hype cycle: I would put all projects that propose to substitute a computer system for a human function that involves interpersonal respect, understanding, and love in the same category. I th … | Continue reading
Elsa Court reported for The Kyiv Independent: Children in Latvia will no longer learn Russian as a foreign language in schools from 2026, but instead will be required to learn a language of the European Union or the European Economic Area, Latvia’s Education Ministry announced on … | Continue reading
Let’s do an experiment! Everyone likes experiments. It’s what separates people who engage in experiments from people who don’t. As they say, there are ten kinds of people in the world: those that understand binary, and those sick of this joke. If you’ll stop interrupting me, I’d … | Continue reading
This always trips me up, so I’m putting it here for posterity. It assumes you’re running Ghost, and proxying it through (free)nginx. First, install and configure Ghost as though its running on localhost. I do this in its own FreeBSD jail, and with a ghost user, so node doesn’t sp … | Continue reading
This is just a short post to remind everyone that PmWiki is excellent, and you should consider it. I’ve been running a local install of it for my own note-taking uses for two decades, and I recently flipped another public MediaWiki install to it… ours! I maintain, and have mainta … | Continue reading
Today’s Music Monday is an announcement! I just got pinged from his newsletter that Ben Sidran’s latest album Rainmaker is available for preorder. I’ve been listening to Ben since before I could walk. His influences span across jazz, fusion, and bebop, to dabblings in electronica … | Continue reading
The fallout from suggesting to (certain) Linux fans that some still need to run Windows continues. I’m ignoring social media for a bit, but I’m still getting regular angry email. As I said in my follow-up, I’m done. My apologies to those of you I’ve yet to reply to, but I’m going … | Continue reading
This was a draft post from November 2023 I just found again. Jewel Stolarchuk wrote in The Independent, a Singaporean news website: SINGAPORE: With statistics showing that Singaporeans have begun to delay the age at which they have children, with the situation worsening over the … | Continue reading
I prefer matte displays over glossy, on both phones and laptops. Colours don’t pop like they do behind glossy, which is probably why they’ve been disappearing on consumer-facing hardware. But matte displays are easier to calibrate, and diffuse light rather that reflect it, which … | Continue reading
I’ve been watching the current debate over memory-safe programming with interest. On the one have you have Rust and Go advocates talking about the need to replace C with its buffer overflows and other security problems, and on the other you have different fingers. And people say … | Continue reading
A person with the handle “steveccc” left this big brain comment on a Sydney Morning Herald Covid article in 2020: Get a grip guys. The worst flu season in recent years killed 80,000 worldwide. The sentiment was absurd even at the time. Anyone who’d been paying attention knew we w … | Continue reading
This was one of those posts I started writing, but in the process of putting text to console, I changed my mind about part of it, and figured out something much more interesting. Or at least, interesting to me. Text to console is my way of saying pen to paper. I say it because I’ … | Continue reading
Sorting is one of those classic Dunning-Kruger topics in information science: you think it’s easy, until you start uni and learn how to implement it. Sorting algorithms vary in complexity, efficiency, and speed, and are optimised for different data sets, structures, and systems. … | Continue reading
Kingship Coffee opened in Mascot, near Sydney Airport. It’s pretty great, and just what I needed :). By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-04-17. | Continue reading
I haven’t watched it through yet, but a vtuber playing one of my favourite games of all time!? It was a salve to a troubled mind. The downside to mostly following streamers from Hololive is that getting permissions can be trickier for a large agency (at least, from what I’ve been … | Continue reading
(I wanted to take a break from writing about tech today, so here’s something random that’s been on my mind! Or I suppose, in my mind, given how microplastics are now a thing. Thanks for reading). You know when you’re a little kid and full of a million questions? My parents kept a … | Continue reading
Last Saturday I made the mistake of asking Linux people not to tell those who need Windows to use Linux, and answered the most popular replies. I thought it was innocuous, but at the time of writing, it has over a hundred (visible) comments, five hundred reposts, and a thousand l … | Continue reading
Last Saturday I made the mistake of asking Linux people not to tell those who need Windows to use Linux, and answered the most popular replies. I thought it was innocuous, but at the time of writing, it has over a hundred (visible) comments, five hundred reposts, and a thousand l … | Continue reading
A post by jbauer on Mastodon about zebra crossings made me evaluate how I cross the street too. Like with many juristictions, zebra crossings in Australia require cars to stop to let you cross. At least, in theory. They’re popular around schools, or long blocks where the nearest … | Continue reading
In no particular order: Is a phrase with four words. Mmm, that’s quality humour. There were a few elements not showing up properly in dark mode on single pages. You might need to force a refresh to get the most recent CSS. Some Dublin Core metadata wasn’t quite correct. I didn’t … | Continue reading
We’re well into the wrong decade for these Antipixel-style 80x15 website buttons. But they’re delightful, and I’ve started including them in my blog theme and their own page again. We have a few different ones for the various BSD operating systems, but there wasn’t one for ZFS. S … | Continue reading
Hi! My name is Ruben Schade, and I’m a solution architect for an indie cloud company who mostly runs Linux, but tries to use FreeBSD and NetBSD where he can. This is my story. LAW AND ORDER DUN DUN The post Yesterday I saw the news that Microsoft will be including ads in an upcom … | Continue reading
I subscribe to a couple of “channel” focused IT publications in Australia, because I work at a company that only deals B2B. I didn’t realise until I started working there that “channel” referred to such an arrangement; I thought it was a passage of water permitting the traversal … | Continue reading
I resisted making another account for two decades, but the time finally came. I couldn’t believe how much was the same as I remember. The Tiki Tack Tombola! There’s plenty of blame to go around here, but the bulk of it goes to my sister. She has the second-oldest active account o … | Continue reading
This put a smile on my face this morning: Note: - Though this is not an automated email, (i.e., to ensure that we do not contact you again for this matter), please send a blank mail to it with NO as Subject. Not automated! This post wasn’t written by me as I drink coffee either! … | Continue reading
He would buy the best; But never something new. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-04-12. | Continue reading
I’ve never heard of Claynel before, but they’ve already manufactured some impressive figs, including Clara’s favourite Hololive JP character Kanata, and the legendary Takina and Chisato duo from Lycrois Recoil. This rendition of Ryza from her namesake Atelier franchise is adorabl … | Continue reading
Here are some footpath-related observations I’ve made recently (or sidewalk for my North American friends), that have caused me considerable concern. The first is a farewell to an Australia Post and Express Post mailing box, which sat on the side of this footpath for decades befo … | Continue reading
It’s funny that I field almost as many sysadmin questions about Minecraft than I do BSDs thesedays. Even Minecraft on BSD! This post addresses the most common question after running Minecraft on FreeBSD, and on NetBSD. I’ll assume here that you have a functional server, and know … | Continue reading
Miku Expo 2024 has launched in North America, with sell out concerts featuring everyone’s favourite virtual idol. On the good side, we have hatahiro’s art for the event which is fscking spectacular! She’s clearly a manga-inspired character, but the Gotham-style landscape and the … | Continue reading
Nicholas Jordan and his taste testing team of taste testers tasted and tested various Australian instant coffees. Taste test! Their results confirmed what Clara and I have long suspected, and were equally surprised about: Aldi instant is shockingly decent, especially for the pric … | Continue reading
I’m not sure if this is a side-effect of using my own VPNs and a bunch of privacy and security extensions, or that FreeBSD/Firefox is unusual enough to raise eyebrows. But I’ve been triggering these checks constantly, at least half a dozen times a day. I’ve decided my time is wor … | Continue reading
The subject of smartphone frustration and dependence has become an unintentional theme here of late. Whether my work and personal phones are the root cause, or exacerbating existing anxiety, I’ve decided I’d rather not have them in the bedroom before I sleep. I now reach for a bo … | Continue reading
I picked up the ZOTAC RTX 3070 Twin Edge graphics card right at the peak of blockchain scams, back when we were stuck at home and few cards were in stock. I paid way too much for it in retrospect, but the joy and entertainment it’s provided over these last couple of years are als … | Continue reading
I just created an account, and got a welcome email. Cool! Hi there, Thanks for trying Kagi! To get the most out of your trial, consider: Kagi is a little different from other search engines. Get familiar with our unique features with this Quick Start. I’m sold so far. Your Kagi s … | Continue reading
It’s Music Monday time! Each and every etc, I something here for stuff. Today we have one of Rodriguez’s best songs from his seminal 1970 album Cold Fact. It still blows me away that this talented American singer/songwriter was huge in South Africa and Australia, but relatively o … | Continue reading
I’ll admit, I use retrocomputers in exceeding boring ways. Everyone I watch and read restores these machines as a means to play games, and it’s kind of assumed everyone does. I mostly use them to tinker and explore how legacy word processors, spreadsheets, databases, and Pascal e … | Continue reading
Dynmap is one of those plugins that feels integral to Minecraft once you start using it. I’ve joked with Clara that I spend as much time cataloguing, mapping, and exploring our Dynmap than I do playing the host game itself, which perhaps says more about me than I care to admit. T … | Continue reading
New Zealand’s new attire… New (Zealand, attire)? Damn my compulsive need to factorise all the things. I saw a few outlets reporting on this, so I went to the source: Gymnastics NZ Regulations – All Codes [..] Athletes may choose to wear gymnastics shorts or leggings over their le … | Continue reading
Daylight Savings (do we capitalise that?) ended across south-east Australia early this morning, so it’s now 05:16 and I’m wide awake. Specifically, awake enough to know you won’t be getting back to sleep. I tended to find that I’d go to sleep earlier and wake up earlier during sc … | Continue reading
I haven’t done a book review here in years. Today we’re looking at this beautiful collection collated and written by historian Eric Sauder in 2015 that arrived from the UK: Does the slotted balcony table and plant look at all like I’m sitting at her first class Verandah Café? Pro … | Continue reading
From their latest Hardware News recap of the week. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-04-05. | Continue reading
Self-driving cars are one of those technologies that flew under my LIDAR (thank you) until I started seeing their social effects. I’d previously lumped them in with hyperloops, cryptocurrency, and generative AI as mediocre tech in search of problems. Or at least, gullible investo … | Continue reading
I’ve had a good run with memory cards and USB keys, given their reputation for flakiness relative to other storage tech. It worries me how many MicroSD cards are running boot volumes on single-board computers and routers around the world, quietly grinding down their wear-levellin … | Continue reading
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-04-04. | Continue reading
This is the penultimate post in my Melbourne 2024 series! Today we have the results of a small trip Clara and I took the day before we flew back to Sydney. I haven’t had telephoto capability for a long time, so thought it would be fun to capture some small details on various buil … | Continue reading
I had a dream a few nights ago in which an ice cream vendor asked me which SAS backplane I needed. Before I had time to answer, he’d already connected the cone to a 2U server somehow, and the ice cream starting shorting things and blowing up circuits, which I then had to explain … | Continue reading