AI-generated code is going about as well as you’d expect. Fun! We start with The Register: Pulumi AI and its online archive of responses, AI Answers, is a case in point. Google’s search crawler indexes the output of Pulumi’s AI and presents it to search users alongside links to h … | Continue reading
Being assertive doesn’t come naturally to me iRL. I’ve been getting better at recently, but I still let people walk over me more than they should in social settings. Some of the best advice I’ve received mirrors what this advice columnist wrote with regards to a wedding, emphasis … | Continue reading
I tend to wear my emotions on my sleeve here thesedays! And the last couple of days were awful. Back now, coffee and RSS reader in hand though, so let’s get back to it. Hope you’re going well! Is that a new hat? By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-05-17. | Continue reading
Jim! I hope this finds you well, and you’re settling into your new digs. My mum Debra and uncle Dave should have introduced themselves by now. I think you’ll get along with them like a Wheat Palace on fire; they were folk and jazz musicians, and heard a lot about you over the yea … | Continue reading
The trend among companies with open-source projects of late is to relicence them under their own bespoke terms, usually with licences that are incompatible with others. Elastic and HashiCorp are the most famous examples, though they’re hardly unique. ElashiCorp? HashiTic? This is … | Continue reading
Scorptec are a computer parts retailer in Australia, with most of their branches in New South Wales. Clara and I braved the absurdly wet weather Sydney has been drenched in for the last fortnight and went to their Macquarie Park branch over the weekend. Like most vendors in this … | Continue reading
This is an interesting security feature, intentional or otherwise! A financial account I hold has a phone app that—among other things—generates login codes for the desktop web portal. You log into the mobile app, generate the one-time code, then use this to log into the desktop. … | Continue reading
(I took this post back down after I started copping some abuse. I’ve put it back in part with encouragement from Michael Wheeler and Techrights. Bad people don’t get to dictate how I talk. Thanks for your understanding). Last year a German professor reached out to ask if he could … | Continue reading
I was getting my 10,000 steps one evening a few days ago, like a gentleman, when I noticed one of our familiar red Australia Post mailboxes had disappeared: There are a few possibilities here. I’ve noticed the parking spots in front of this mailbox are popular with SUV and Americ … | Continue reading
I’ve mentioned I’m moving my FreeBSD desktop out of a Fractal Ridge case, because its CPU cooling ceiling is too low for what I need. Rather than going out and buying a new case, I thought it’d be fun to paint our spare NR200P an “aged beige” to match our retrocomputers! Armed wi … | Continue reading
Melissa Davey reported in The Guardian: In a statement, AstraZeneca said the decision was made because there is now a variety of newer vaccines available that have been adapted to target Covid-19 variants. This had led to a decline in demand for the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is … | Continue reading
I love the phrase glitch in the Matrix. It describes the phenomena of observing something that didn’t quite generate correctly in the vast simulation in which we find ourselves. It’s all a bit of fun, though perhaps slightly more interesting if we’re to believe people like Nick B … | Continue reading
In today’s installment of things you already know, unless you don’t, did you know you can use the -p option to create multiple levels of subdirectories at once, even if the intermediate directories don’t exist? For example, say you want to make this new tree for a new FreeBSD box … | Continue reading
With thanks to Boots Chantilly! It even works with ISO-8601. For those who need a refresher, Dave Brubeck’s most famous work was Take Five, performed in the unusual 5/4 time signature. You might not know the name, but I’d wager dollars to doughnuts you recognise the tune. Or bage … | Continue reading
The Behind the Bastards podcast is one of my guilty pleasures. Hearing Robert and his guests absolutely eviscerate terrible people with meticulous writing and humour is balm to a troubled soul. With the welcome passing of Henry Kissinger last year, the team released all six episo … | Continue reading
My father was obsessed with Hi-Fi stuff, though I only started getting really stuck into it during COVID in 2020. Our house was decked out with Pioneer, Sony, Marantz, and Onkyo; I’d heard the names Kenwood, Akai, and TEAC; and I coveted anything made by Matsushita (like Technics … | Continue reading
In past posts I’ve listed numbers that don’t have seven, then did it again, and then clarified numbers that don’t have eight. Today we’re looking at numbers that don’t have nine. I provide this service free of charge. 42 Nine Wait, damn it. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-05-05. | Continue reading
I mentioned in my post about the otherwise-excellent Peerless Assassin CPU cooler that it has an awful name. Because it does! Alas, it’s not unique in this regard. So many modern PC parts lack things like taste, and marketing usually saddles them with names like BALLISTICS and CO … | Continue reading
I had to run curl(1) recently for some automated tests, which needed cookies for authentication. I could export these manually from a logged-in session in Firefox, but I wanted something easier. cookies.txt puts an icon in your toolbar, and gives you the option to export all cook … | Continue reading
All my talk lately of urbanism and public transport has lead some emails concluding that I hate cars. I’m sympathetic to this potential mischaracterisation, especially when I’ve referred to them as smoke machines, death traps, and other accurate descriptors. To clear the air firs … | Continue reading
TL;DR: They’re about the same. Get whichever is available! I’ve read several reviewers praise the Thermalright Peerless Assassin CPU air cooler, not for its awful name (all modern gaming tech does this), but for the performance it delivers for comparatively little money. I’ve sin … | Continue reading
A recent episode of The Urbanist Agenda was eye-opening for exposing just how much cars cost. Reece from RM Transit joined Jason from Not Just Bikes laid down everything from… well, I’ll let Reece summarise: Reece: You don’t ever really know how much it’s going to cost to own [a … | Continue reading
Outlets from ABC News to The Guardian are reporting on the collapse of Bonza, the upstart Australian airline that took to the skies a year and a half ago. Ian Verrender had a poignant line: Former Qantas boss Geoff Dixon used to regale clients and investors with a standing joke e … | Continue reading
In my unintentional series about comments, today I want to address the other unproductive responses I get when I’m mentioned on sites like Hacker News run by well-adjusted people. Nothing here is unique or special, to be clear! But I suspect following these guidelines will get yo … | Continue reading
I’ve been on the Web long enough to know that responses to a technical opinion fall into one of two camps: How something got to be the way it is. Why (or the corollary: why should it still be that way). My experience is that people who don’t understand the difference tend to answ … | Continue reading
There are some Americans at this Sydney coffee shop next to me. I order large here, because their coffee is small. Congress voted for Ukraine aid! Fucking finally. We’ve lived here for two years, and I’m still not used to their bacon. It’s really good, but it’s not bacon? No, I c … | Continue reading
What can I say, this was a dream come true! We got into Hololive during Covid, so to see them iRL (in a matter of speaking) was incredible and a bit unbelievable. This was their first performance in Australia, and they slayed it. Bae hails from here, and got emotional talking abo … | Continue reading
Poor VMware. I refer to them as the Brussels sprout of enterprise IT; constantly shifted around the plate between new owners, never seeming to land anywhere good. Their current owners Broadcom haven’t exactly endeared themselves to the industry or their customers, as any quick we … | Continue reading
In February last year I wrote about running a FreeBSD desktop, and concluded that sometimes you need to give yourself permission to tinker. Well recently I’ve started tinkering with Alpine Linux! It’s been recommended to me for years, so I’m finally getting around to checking it … | Continue reading
For nearly two years, an Australian billing company (pardon, an “energy retailer”), has been sending threatening letters about cutting off our non-existant gas supply. This is the most recent letter we’ve received: DISCONNECTION WARNING NOTICE TO THE UNREGISTERED ENERGY USER Impo … | Continue reading
Have you ever wondered how IPv6 even managed to make port numbers awkward? Poul-Henning Kamp, of Varnish and FreeBSD fame: Colon was chosen [for IPv6] because it was already used in MAC/ethernet addresses and did no damage there and it is not a troublesome metacharacter in shells … | Continue reading
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