Taking stuff to e-waste comes with a bunch of benefits, from freed up space in one’s flat, to the knowledge that you’re not contributing potentially toxic stuff to a landfill. It also means you (cough) can often find other treasures while dropping off your stuff. I was taking som … | Continue reading
A new branch of the Japanese book store Kinokuniya opened on Sydney’s north shore this month, so naturally Clara and I had to go and check it out. It was everything I hoped it would be! The store itself was quite a bit smaller than the Galleries branch in the Sydney CBD, and ind … | Continue reading
After two decades on .com, my blog and retro corner have a new domain! Introducing: https://www.rubenerd.au/ https://www.rubenerd.au/feed/ http://retro.rubenerd.au/ .au is the top-level domain for Australia and its various dependencies. It’s the elemental symbol for gold, two l … | Continue reading
Our new (to us) local library has community jigsaw puzzles! We’ve made it a habit of contributing to at least one piece each time we go. This small gesture has done more to make us feel connected (hah!) to the suburb than I would have expected. Yesterday we added a bit of a sunfl … | Continue reading
I write about a wide variety of topics and interests here, but there are only a few that are guaranteed to elicit angry comments: Something critical of America’s Dear Leader™ Any passing mention of systemd not being ideal Anything to do with audio gear Wait a minute, didn … | Continue reading
This is the fifth post in my A-Z Toolbox series, in which I’m listing tools I use down the alphabet for no logical reason. The letter E is a tad more sparse than previous letters in this series, at least when it comes to tools I use. There’s the emacs family, but I might save tha … | Continue reading
Quote of the day from one of my favourite bloggers: The reality is that we usually have the power to change our lives. We just have to stop pretending that we don’t. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-09. | Continue reading
Since buying our first apartment together in 2024, Clara and I have both been hunting for a good set of desks. It’s weird thinking about furniture we might use for a while, not something portable we can disassemble and pack every year when an overzealous landlord inevitably decid … | Continue reading
I’m just old enough to remember Teletext, the standard that encoded text information on standard analogue TV signals. Now thanks to Nathan Media Services and Alistair Cree, we can now interact with it again in the browser: This right here is why I still love the Web. By Ruben Sc … | Continue reading
Here we have exibit A for why using technology to solve a social problem often doesn’t work, or has unintended consequences. There are cultures in the world that take recycling seriously, like Japan. There are those that pretend (until recently) that it doesn’t exist, like Singap … | Continue reading
Do you write plain HTML and CSS? You, Jan, and I are part of the post-framework generation, as he mentioned on Mastodon: TIL (Today I learned) that writing websites with simple HTML and CSS is now called “post-framework”. Well. I did “post-framework” even before frameworks exist … | Continue reading
I was going through my drafts folder, and came across a post I’d written way back in 2018. I’m not sure what site I was browsing at the time, but it was still a fun observation. If I came across this error in a more modern context, I’d assume site owners are placing limits to dea … | Continue reading
The cobbler’s son walks barefoot is such a perfect English idiom to describe how professionals apply themselves in their jobs, and how this differs from their personal lives. I invoke it regularly here for this raison, a typo I’m keeping because it makes me smile. Lest the title … | Continue reading