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
It took almost a year of tinkering, buying parts, testing, configuring, fixing, cursing, and shouting with excitement, but I now have a KVM setup that finally works, across two decades of computer history from a Commodore VC-20 to a Dell Dimension Pentium III! We start with this … | Continue reading
I’ve reached the point in my web life where I’ll read something, ruminate on it, decide it’s interesting and that I want to comment. Then I’ll go back to the source to quote it, and I have absolutely no idea where I read it, let alone who wrote it. It happens at least once a week … | Continue reading
Is it preorder or pre-order? I guess Chief Wiggum was right, every generation hyphenates the way it wants to. The problem is, I can never decide. Ruben, you’re digressing again. Last October I talked about the open hardware Tangara music player my dear friend Robin and some of he … | Continue reading
Buzzy Explores the Airport is still such a fun game after all these years. You arrive at this virtual airport where you can wander around, see the luggage being sorted, board an aeroplane, and click everything in sight. It even runs on ScummVM on modern hardware. The game is full … | Continue reading
I know it’s a bit of a troll title, but it’s a common question I get now. The short answer is I don’t! Thanks for coming, have a nice day. The longer answer comes down to two reasons. I’m too young to have nostalgia for BBSs, though I am interested in them from a technical perspe … | Continue reading
Jason Lefkowitz wrote a post in late February explaining a big reason behind WordPress’s rise in 2004: Movable Type was commercial software; there was a free personal version, and a relatively expensive pro version. This didn’t get in their way for a long time, because the terms … | Continue reading
I wrote this before reading about former quality manager and whistleblower John Barnett being found dead prior to his court appearance to give testimony. Good grief, what’s going on? Dominic Gates in the Seattle Times: Boeing’s board has killed a longshot shareholder proposal tha … | Continue reading
Danny Harmon on Distant Signal clued me into OpenRailwayMap, a OpenStreetMap-style site but for global railways. It has freight lines, passenger lines, branch lines, HSTs, light rail, and metro systems, all on the one map you can zoom into and explore. Here’s a view of the most … | Continue reading
Below is my beloved Blueberry iMac DV, albeit taken at a weird angle and on the floor because I forgot how difficult it is to photograph! It’s basically a giant reflective sphere that messes with focus and colour balance unless you have a really good quality diffused light source … | Continue reading
John Berger was an English art critic and documentarian who… wait sorry, I got another indignant email from a Hacker News reader who disagreed with my content creators post. Let’s try again! Inhales… John Berger was an English art critic and documentarian content creator who’s 19 … | Continue reading
This week’s Music Monday takes us back to the mid 1980s, and one my favourite Australian bands of the era. Electric Blue might have been the breakout song from this album, but this is the real keeper for me. I know the Rubenerd Law of Music says that everything sounds better with … | Continue reading
I got a new wireless charger for the bedside table, so I could stop fiddling with USB cables before going to sleep. The wireless charger on my computer desk works great, so I figured why not? Well, it was about to give me a reason. I turned off the lights and placed my phone on t … | Continue reading
I can’t remember where I first read about this, but it looks like a cool little box for a router or VPN endpoint: The NanoPi R2S uses Rockchip’s quad-core A53 RK3328 SoC with powerful performance. Its default frequency is 1.2GHz. The NanoPi R2S has 1GB (or optional 2GB) RAM, dual … | Continue reading
I love (abusing) the term Litmus Test as a metaphor for evaluating reactions in other contexts. Though technically my favourite indicator in chemistry was Bromothymol Blue, to the point where I did one of my papers on it, and even nearly named this blog for it in 2004! I still re … | Continue reading
This is the sort of story that if a non-technical person told it to me, my instinct would be to assume they’re doing something wrong. Because networks don’t work like this. Or do they? One of the coffee shops I love going to around here has this bizarre effect on my electronics. … | Continue reading
The GoTek (often mistyped as Gotek) is a virtual floppy drive device that can emulate hundreds of virtual disks on a single USB key. Like my FloppyEmu, SD2IEC, and Pi1541, it has made working on older DOS-era machines much easier and more fun. I tend to prefer running period-corr … | Continue reading
There’s a new editor on the block with a familiar name: Zed is a high-performance, multiplayer code editor from the creators of Atom and Tree-sitter. It’s also open source. Zed efficiently leverages every CPU core and your GPU to start instantly, load files in a blink, and respon … | Continue reading
Famed writer of Shit Rentals @PurplePingers wrote a post recently talking about fire safety in residential buildings, which caused a bit of a furore. Most people accepted the idea of electrical and fire inspections every two years; others eloquently articulated their opposition b … | Continue reading
The word exciting is overused thesedays, thanks to unimaginative marketing executives and chatbots. But NetBSD 10.0 is exciting. I remember talking with some of the devs about it at AsiaBSDCon in 2019. I spun up some arm64 and amd64 QEMU builds on my work machine while sitting at … | Continue reading
Dokibird’s ascent in the charts is such a wonderful achievement, and I couldn’t be prouder for her! For those who don’t follow this sort of thing, Dokibird left her former streamer agency after they publicly debased themselves. She went back to her old independent persona, and ha … | Continue reading
The Boeing 757 is a gorgeous plane, one of my all-time favourite conventional aircraft designs alongside the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar. I had a giant model of one hanging from my bedroom ceiling as a kid, complete with its Boeing blue and red livery. When I used to carry a sketchbo … | Continue reading
jwz on Mastodon: This is essentially the argument that there’s nothing wrong with doxxing someone if you found their home address through public records, and furthermore there would be nothing wrong with building a tool to automate that. It’s the nerd disease of: just because it’ … | Continue reading
I link to The Guardian semi-regularly here, but they’re not immune from publishing codswallop. I’d know; have you read some of what I write? Simon Jenkins writes poignant articles about public health, and I thoroughly enjoyed his history book on the Celts. But then he turns aroun … | Continue reading
Speaking of Åland in that previous Cloudflare post, this font on the side of a Bank of Åland branch is amazing, and I want it. Photo by Bahnfrend on Wikimedia Commons. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-03-05. | Continue reading
I’m down for Cory Doctorow’s description of modern web services having entered a state of enshittification. He’s discussed one prominent merchant example named for a South American rainforest, but I’ve noticed it among plenty of other stores. Specifically, spend any time on a mar … | Continue reading
A few years ago I’d come back from a trip with Clara to Hong Kong and Ōsaka, like a gentleman. It was my first trip to both Hong Kong and Japan, and still consider it one of the most special trips we’ve ever taken. But I digress. I tapped my Opal card at the Sydney airport upon o … | Continue reading
Is there any more terrifying a prospect?! Don’t answer that. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-03-04. | Continue reading
This Music Monday is so smooth, I risked melting out of my chair. I submit this as further evidence for the Rubenerd Music Law, namely that everything sounds better with brass. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-03-04. | Continue reading
The Pi1541 is a cycle-exact emulator for the venerable Commodore 1541 disk drive. It uses a Raspberry Pi with a custom hat to load and save data to SD cards, which makes it compatible with more software than even my beloved SD2IEC units. My proper review, usage notes, photos, and … | Continue reading
Clara’s and my favourite bubble tea and waffle shop is back in Sydney after nearly a decade of absence! We had our first date at the now-closed Happy Lemon on George Street in the Sydney CBD. We talked from lunchtime until the owners had to kick us out at closing time. I’d met he … | Continue reading