I did something a bit silly last week. Clara and I were watching another of Jan Beta’s fun Commodore 64 restoration videos, when on a lark I went on eBay. This proved to be a fateful mistake: someone near to me in Australia was selling their PAL 64C, and for less than a third of … | Continue reading
Online store recommendation engines are always funny, whether they’re advertising mattresses to the happy owner of a new one, a guide to Windows 11 after you bought a MacBook, or cuts of meat to someone wheeling out a stack of new vegetarian cookbooks. They offer us a glimpse beh … | Continue reading
Call it follow up or something else. It was just a thought that popped into my head over coffee this afternoon. As an aside to this aside, thanks for reading this too. You have your choice of blogs to read and subscribe to, so it means a lot. ♡ By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2022-12- … | Continue reading
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about RSS, and have defended it from charges that it’s irrelevant or only useful for plumbing. But when it comes to actually reading RSS feeds, I’ve been everywhere. FeedLand is Dave Winer’s latest project to bring a social aspect to reading and … | Continue reading
@Ploum@mamot.fr reminded me of Zettelkasten when talking about writing and organising research. A Zettelkasten (German: “slip box”, plural Zettelkästen) or card file consists of small items of information stored on paper slips or cards that may be linked to each other through sub … | Continue reading
Today’s Music Monday has Jeanne Alter quoting the legendary French electronica band. Kinda. And… why does she still look so unimpressed!? Jeanne Alter is still my favourite Beserker in Fate/Grand Order. I always play defensive in everything (you could probably read something into … | Continue reading
Last year I talked about fixing my second-hand Commodore 1541 floppy disk drive. It turns on, is detected by whichever Commodore computer I plug it into, and all the mechanical components have been cleaned and lightly lubricated. But the stepping motor that controls the movement … | Continue reading
WP Engine published a resource centre article in September that explains what RSS is. It’s about what you’d expect thesedays; emphasis added: Getting content in front of your audience is a key concern, regardless of your niche. RSS feeds are a perfect way to do this. One of the m … | Continue reading
Ruby programming language giant and lovely person Chris Seaton passed away last night. Aaron Patterson has a beautiful post remembering his friend and colleague: As a college dropout, I’ve always felt underqualified. Embarrassment about my lack of knowledge and credentials has dr … | Continue reading
You know something has reached iconic status when laypeople have heard of it. Many people still recognise the Commodore 64 name, even if all they know is its a old computer. Everyone has also heard of the 747 or the Jumbo Jet since they barrel-rolled into the aviation world in th … | Continue reading
While we’re on the subject of phrases and words that make me bristle, I think it’s time journalists retired the use of the phrase elective surgery, and call out politicians to explain what they mean by it. There’s the strict medical definition, but the general public reads it ver … | Continue reading
If you’re on the 12.x branch, get it while it’s hot! From the release announcement page: The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 12.4-RELEASE. This is the fifth release of the stable/12 branch. For a complete list of new features an … | Continue reading
I love FreeBSD jails. They predate Docker et.al. by more than a decade, and I’d say they’re still more useful under most circumstances; especially when one uses them in conjunction with OpenZFS. Their only source of frustration for me has been slow starts, to the point where some … | Continue reading
Today’s Music Monday is a bit more philosophical, which is always dangerous. I can’t remember if I’ve talked about this somewhere before, but I tend to hear melodies and remember tunes rather than lyrics. It’s why I love everything from bossa nova to J-pop, without speaking any P … | Continue reading
Doc Searls wrote a post about various social media platforms early last month. Some of his functional claims of Twitter are already a bit out of date, but this is observation is evergreen; emphasis added: Not much discussed, but a real possibility is that advertising overall will … | Continue reading
Zoe Kleinman had a fun article for BBC Tech: The text message is celebrating its 30th birthday - the first was sent to a mobile phone by a Vodafone engineer in Berkshire in the UK on 3 December 1992. It was sent in order to test out the tech, and read “Merry Christmas”. Neil Papw … | Continue reading
Black Friday is a relatively recent cultural import into places like Singapore and Australia that I wished had been left in the US, for reasons that are beyond the scope of this post. But the term is an incredibly useful signal that an email sender can be unsubscribed from! You c … | Continue reading
I’ve blogged the term micropayments in lieu of something better a few times, but it’s always rubbed me the wrong way. Dave Winer expands on why: Micropayments is such an awful term. Let’s say I buy a Metrocard to ride the NYC subway. Every time I slide the card through a turnstil … | Continue reading
Time to break out the decorations once more! What a yeah, huh? By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2022-12-01. | Continue reading
I collect security FAQs. Like some of my high school essays, they often say a lot and nothing at the same time. Pardon, they impart information with sufficiently impressive volume, length, and scale without communicating anything of meaningful substance to the reader of the afore … | Continue reading
On Monday I mulled the idea of starting a Gemini or Gopher server, and either hosting a version of this site on it, or starting something new. Martin emailed with a suggestion for Gopher: I very much doubt Gemini is going anywhere. Gopher has been around since forever and still h … | Continue reading
Jeff wrote a post yesterday about burnout, and the opening is a keeper: Saying yes is easy—at first. It makes you feel better. And it makes you feel like you can do anything! And the person you’re saying yes to also gets a happy feeling because you’re going to do something for th … | Continue reading
I’ve seen a couple of variations of this: A cynical young person is almost the saddest sight to see, because it means that he or she has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2022-11-29. | Continue reading
Japan is one of my favourite places in the world to visit, but the process has understandably changed since Covid. This is accurate as of November 2022, but also check with your airline and/or travel agency before flying. Vaccinations It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a minimu … | Continue reading
The nomenclature surrounding the BitTorrent protocol has always been a bit weird; much like the word nomenclature. From the Transmission client today: You unchocked the peer but the peer is not interested. I took the Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry? Sounds a bit like kin … | Continue reading
Uploaded a few days later. I’m typing this from a plane cruising at 11,582 metres above the Pacific Ocean between Japan and Australia. It feels so implausible, unreal, and fun: Mastodon post: Using satellite Internet on a plane is one of those “wow, I’m living in the future!” fee … | Continue reading
Hi there! I’m typing this from a cute little coffee shop down the road from our hotel in Kudanshita this evening. The street is mostly quiet, but there are a row of cute keicar-sized vans making a delivery to the combini, and occasionally someone whizzes by on their bike. I’m so … | Continue reading
People have mentioned how sites like Google feel like they’re getting worse of late, thanks to SEO shenanigans and the rise of spammy, mass-produced content farms that spew pages of shallow, re-baked text that contribute nothing to the web beyond being a space for ads to be sold. … | Continue reading
Today’s Music Monday is a celebration of Bob Dylan, and of Ben Sidran’s brilliant 2009 jazz cover album. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here before, but Ben’s vocal style and delivery are so perfect for these songs. The way he acted out that famous scene in the second verse was … | Continue reading
Some things I’ve read this week: Reading the news of liberated Kherson and Mylove brought tears to my eyes. Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba hailed it as a joint victory; we’re humbled, but this victory belongs to Ukraine. A reminder that you can support their efforts by donating … | Continue reading
I’m sitting here on this dreary, overcast Sydney morning, setting my out of office notice! I’ve also redirected my work phone number, and have removed some of my VPNs. We fly out next Wednesday. It doesn’t seem real… though we’re not going to Brazil. That’s a quality currency jok … | Continue reading
In today’s installment of things you already know, unless you don’t, this is how you look up a TXT domain record with drill(1) on FreeBSD: $ drill $DOMAIN txt You’d think that I’d get that order right one of these days. On NetBSD, macOS, and Linux, the same applies for dig(1). By … | Continue reading
I overheard another conversation between the manager of this coffee shop and a customer this morning: I woke up today without back pain, so it’s a great day. Beautiful. At my age, I woke up today, so it’s a great day. I miss when I used to use images on posts, so I went digging a … | Continue reading
I’m tired, can’t sleep, and remembered something I needed to write about. A large American automaker published a press release discussing a proposed new mobile app designed to make roads safer. Paragraph six contains the most pertinent details: The concept smartphone app running … | Continue reading
Hi everyone. I’ve mentioned in a few posts that we’re going through some issues. Many of you have since emailed some kind messages for which I’m hugely grateful. I suspected readers of this blog over the last eighteen years were wonderful people, and now I have proof. You know w … | Continue reading
For someone who’s been using virtualisation tools since Virtual PC on a 1999 iMac DV, and who makes his living documenting and architecting systems on Linux Xen, I had no idea of the existence of PCem, and of the 86Box fork. ozzmosis sent me a screenshot on Mastodon, and I’ve bee … | Continue reading
The imitable Alan Baxter brought me out of my self-imposed blogging break with this great observation: Book buying is aspirational af. One day I’ll have time to read them all. You can read when you’re dead, right? Surely I haven’t done the exact same thing… right? I checked my be … | Continue reading
Liviefromparis has been doing a great job uploading footage from this year’s World Gymnastics Championships, which have been a most welcome respite from current family issues. Skoko Miyata’s uneven bar and beam routines showed a lot of promise, but her floor routine was so much f … | Continue reading
I’ve been reading a lot to keep my mind off things. Here’s a selection: This article by Philippa Perry in the Guardian is one of the best I’ve read about self-care in a long time. I feel the guy’s guilt at feeling selfish. Wouter over on Brain Baking had such a fun trip down me … | Continue reading
We’ve got a lot going on for the next couple of weeks, so I’ll be spending all my time on that instead of writing. I couldn’t remember how many breaks I’ve taken here over the years, so I appended the first four octects from a Data::UUID output, like a gentleman, so I’d have a un … | Continue reading
I thought it was worth doing a post like this in light of more difficult family news. My personal health is good. I only wish it extended to more people I care about. No, this is supposed to be positive! Poppyseed bagels with smoked salmon and cream cheese, and a place locally … | Continue reading
In today’s installment of things you already know, unless you don’t, I’m visiting the stupendously useful tee(1) command. I use it daily, yet I see plenty of scripts that brute force alternatives to it. It’s one of the most common superfluous uses of cat(1) I see. tee(1) duplicat … | Continue reading
The conventional wisdom among Westerners is that Russian military commanders are targeting civilian infrastructure to lower morale, for revenge, because their guidance systems are compromised as a result of sanctions limiting component supplies, and/or because they don’t give a s … | Continue reading
@yaakov_h shared what he’d want in his dream home, regardless of budget or worldly constraints. I answered with my own: A view of the Kansai region or Outram Park. I wouldn’t be able to decide, so I leave that as an exercise for the person granting me this ridiculous residence. … | Continue reading
Australian economist and ABC finance fixture Alan Kohler had a clear and concise article in The New Daily about the rise of remote work. He used a meeting of one of Australia’s largest banks as a lens to describe the trend: Two and a half years after the pandemic began, half of t … | Continue reading
ServeTheHome did a quick review of a new Supermicro motherboard yesterday which is worth a read: The Supermicro X13SAE-F is an ATX motherboard measuring 12” x 9.6” and a feature set straddling the line between the workstation and server. It sports an Intel LGA-1700 (H5) socket, w … | Continue reading
Clara and I scan a lot of stuff. More than any rational person would. I’m so afraid of clutter and paper than anything we get goes through the scanner and archived. When we’re not doing that, we’re scanning boxes of old stuff, either ours or for my old man. We literally wore out … | Continue reading
It’s funny how we forget so many important things, and remember such trivial ones. Here are some that I remember, some going back to my childhood: In primary school I had a friend who called the sport shutput. Maybe he was my first interaction with a Kiwi! My networking lecture … | Continue reading