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
We’re coming to the end of my Melbourne travel posts, which may be a feature depending on what you originally came to this weird blog for! This post talks less about a specific experience, and more a general observation having spent a week wandering around. I’ve been to Melbourne … | Continue reading
These replies are apropos(1) of nothing in particular. Yes, that’ll do! What do you expect, you don’t live in the dessert [sic]. The weather forecast clearly stated rain, are you a smooth brain? It’s your own fault for not preparing, bringing an umbrella, losing your umbrella, us … | Continue reading
Intercity travellers to Melbourne might talk about the coffee and views, but the real reason transport nerds like me go back there is to explore the world’s largest tram system, known in other parts of the world as light rail, trolleys, street cars, anything but bus. Because buse … | Continue reading
I haven’t seen this many spooked infosec engineers since Spectre. I was on leave when the news broke, but many of the same lessons the industry didn’t take to heart during the OpenSSL debacle have resurfaced. Namely, the security risks posed by: Small, overworked, underpaid, unde … | Continue reading
This is a correction on my part regarding a train of thought I started last year. For some background, I’ve noticed that as I use my smartphone less, uninstall certain social media applications, turned off notifications, and become more deliberate about when I let it into my life … | Continue reading
Clara and I went to the Melbourne Botanic Gardens last week, but we didn’t get to the Fern Gully in time. But over the weekend we went back to wander, and we did find it this time. This is easily my favourite part of the park, and it even has a bench where you can sit and have a … | Continue reading
I’ll admit, it feels a bit weird saying happy in relation to a day that shouldn’t need to exist. This isn’t an event like Mothers Day where we lavish attention on people we think deserve it, it’s so trans people are seen. Still, I hope my trans friends had a nice day yesterday, a … | Continue reading
Clara and I didn’t go out of our way to find great coffee around Melbourne, but we kept stumbling across it! Here were a small selection of our favourites, in no specific order. Miyama We found this Japanese-inspired coffee shop while looking for something else on the top floor o … | Continue reading
The last few times Clara and I have been on trips I’ve copied our Minecraft server to one of our laptops, and shared the address with the other machine. It works, but we always run tight on memory. I also need excuses to deploy and tinker with new things like… someone who doesn’t … | Continue reading
Clara and I went to the Melbourne SkyDeck atop the Eureka Tower a few nights ago. It was a lot of fun! So we decided to see what it was like during the day. In short: very hazy from a bit of fog and bushfire smoke in the distance. It was eerie, like we were looking at the city th … | Continue reading
I got this email from LinkedIn Australia; maybe you got something similar: My name is $PERSON and I’m a Senior Editor at LinkedIn News Australia. I often get in touch with professionals who can add informed perspectives on news and trends. Burnout is increasingly an issue among w … | Continue reading
I’ve been fascinated with ocean liners and early twentieth century history since I was in primary school, as I’ve posted again multiple times recently. Clara and I had penciled in a day to wander the Melbourne Museum, but when we heard there was a Titanic exhibit!? Get out of her … | Continue reading
Today I got to share a bit of my childhood with Clara! I was born in Sydney, but my family moved to Melbourne before my first birthday, so I remember none of it. My parents intended to live in Melbourne permanently, so they bought a house for the cost of a sandwich in a new devel … | Continue reading
Notice anything? Their name isn’t on the cover! I was 15 when I realised they’re called The Beatles because it has the word Beat in it. It also took me reading Wikipedia to realise it was their first album that doesn’t mention their name anywhere on the front. I’m still coming to … | Continue reading
The Melbourne Botanic Gardens are Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens just south of the Melbourne CBD, hence the name. Sometimes I worry the stuff I write here is too clever… but then I raise something completely pointless like this. Clara hadn’t been before, and I’d never seen it late i … | Continue reading
Tamara Oudyn works for the ABC, and she just wrote an article on migraines that comes the closeet I’ve ever read to describing how it feels: People who know me well can always tell if I’m getting a migraine while I’m reading the news — my face is a dead giveaway. The spark leaves … | Continue reading
Clara and I have a thing for observation decks. They’re usually among the first places we visit in any new city we go to; they’re such a unique and chill way to spend an evening. I dedicate an entire tab under Travel on my Omake page to them! Alas, I was bitterly disappointed to … | Continue reading
I posted on Mastodon that I’d failed a CAPTCHA, but it reminded me it’s been happening a lot lately. Here are some more: Failed to select a motor scooter when it asked for motorbikes. Failed to select a crosswalk. We don’t use that term here, so that’s an i17n failure. I assumed … | Continue reading
Clara and I are in Melbourne for leave and a few other things, so we decided to do something a bit different and take one of Australia’s remaining intercity passenger services, the XPT. Trains have lower carbon emissions, and it would be a way to see some of the Australian landsc … | Continue reading
Today’s Music Monday is a presentation of one of the greatest songs of all time, and an apology! Ça plane pour moi was one of the songs of my childhood, and I still consider it one of the greatest of all time. When I decided to add a nonsensical Capacitive Duractance section on m … | Continue reading
Facebook’s Twitter clone Threads has joined the Fediverse; a sentence so dense with random words it barely makes sense even to me. I almost envy those of you who just read French. More specifically, Threads has implemented ActivityPub, the W3C’s decentralised social network proto … | Continue reading
My first paid job was voice acting. My sister and I auditioned for the Discovery Kids programme on the Discovery Channel, and both got the gig. We did promos and those “coming up next” bumpers. I’ve been to Auckland, Colombo, Dallas, Darwin, and Dubai, but never left the airport. … | Continue reading
Peter Hannam in The Guardian Australia: The CEO and director of the Bureau of Meteorology, Andrew Johnson, revealed to staff the cost of its delayed IT overhaul – one of Australia’s most expensive ever – despite repeatedly telling senators such details must be kept under wraps fo … | Continue reading
A sixth Release Candidate of my other favourite OS was made available on the 12th of March. From the NetBSD blog: RC6 fixes a few issues with the new named/bind imported for RC5 plus several minor issues. If you want to test 10.0 RC6 please check the installation notes for your a … | Continue reading
My post yeterday about the WITCH computer mentioned that Nick Cartron had shared it with me. This was wrong, his nickname is Nico. I’d messaged three different Nicks yesterday, so I guess my brain was primed to write it as such. Pardon, Nico! As an apology, I encourage everyone t … | Continue reading
Back in December I talked about using old computers for new writing. Provided one is careful to back up their work on hardware that might be old and flaky, it can be a fun and distraction-free way to write, along with being a bit of a novelty. Emil Oppeln-Bronikowski posted on Ma … | Continue reading
Nick Cartron noted my post on Monday about the women behind Bletchley Park, and shared a video he took back in 2013: This is a demonstration of the Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computing from Harwell (WITCH) computer at the Bletchley Park museum. Seeing those valves, and … | Continue reading
I mentioned Kuala Lumpur in my post about a computer workbench, which made me nostalgic. Me? Never! We used to go up to KL fairly often when we moved to Singapore. Even as a little kid I was obsessed with public transit and stations, and KL’s metro was really interesting. It was … | Continue reading
I hated our massive family house in Kuala Lumpur when I was a teenager. The serviced apartment we had before was amazing; it was close to public transport, amenities, and things to do. We could see much of KLCC from the lounge! By comparison, that house in far-flung suburbia may … | Continue reading
One of my earliest childhood memories involved being excited for the box fan my parents would put in my bedroom over summer. The gentle whirring sound of its blades cutting through the air and blowing it across the room was comforting in a way I couldn’t describe, to the point wh … | Continue reading
Mentour Pilot recently posted a video about MH370 📺, the Malaysia Airlines flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing that vanished over the Indian Ocean in 2014. Petter’s discussion of the flight was empathetic, articulated clearly, and well researched. I recommend it to anyone … | Continue reading
There’s something so delightful/silly/pointless about using a wood theme in a browser. The material is making a comeback in so much interior design and architecutre, why not lend a bit of texture to your browser too? The one I’m currently using is HORIZONTAL wood by bloochiz12, w … | Continue reading
Today’s Music Monday is all about the latest Hololive vtuber concert Capture the Moment. I’ll admit, it was bittersweet. Clara and I had won tickets in the limited lottery, which we were going to head to Japan for, then head over to Taipei for AsiaBSDCon. But bad life things happ … | Continue reading
This exhibit by The University of Cambridge’s Newnham College made it across my Mastodon timeline this morning. More than 70 students and alumnae were secretly recruited for World War Two codebreaking work at Bletchley Park, thanks partly to the personal connections of three Newn … | Continue reading