Rubenerd

I read another post recently that took it as given that the BSD operating systems were corporate friendly, with the implication that this was bad. They claimed that companies can lift code and lock it away in their proprietary software. That’s true, they can. From a permissive perspective though, the GPL does the same thing. Importing permissive code into a GPL’d repository is a one-way street. The BSDs are corporate friendly in the way bananas are friendly to people named Jeff. Aka, they’re…

On Monday I wrote about why I preferred light modes over dark ones. Light modes are bright, cheerful, and easy to read for me, whereas most dark modes dilate my pupils and “burn” text into my eyes that persist even after I turn away. Not fun! But that leads to two questions. First, is a word with five letters. And second, are there any industry attempts to improve readability for all parties involved, not just weirdos like me? The answer is yes, kind of. Though based on my own lived experience,…

For the last few years I’ve been trying to source an IIɢꜱ, Apple’s last major hurrah for the Apple II platform, and the only 16-bit model in the lineup. I know I say this about every retrocomputer, but this was a fascinating machine. Here’s the motherboard for my 1986 ROM1 unit, in all its dusty glory: I’m missing more than a few components, as you can see. It doesn’t have a case. It has no input devices, like an ADB keyboard or mouse. It has no interface cards or memory expansion. The backup…

Whenever Clara and I need some mid-afternoon motivation when we’re in the home office, we put on Kenshi Yonezu’s 2017 masterpiece Bootleg. I realised I’ve never shared any of it, so I reckon it warrants a Music Monday: What genre does Kenshi Yonezu perform? Yes! As an aside, this was among the first albums we bought when we went to Japan the second time, and realised that HMV and Tower Records were still a thing. That was almost ten years ago, wow. Hey Ruben, why buy a tiny flat instead of a…

Beryl sent an email in July, to which I’m only just getting around to replying because I’m a terrible person: Hi Ruben! I hope you are doing well. A very random question, I have noticed that you seem to use light mode in most of your devices, is there any important reason for that or did you try dark mode and just did not like it? I definitely prefer and use light mode when I can now, but it wasn’t always the case. It’s funny how our preferences and requirements change over time. Copyright (c)…

There are many challenges that come with being a renter in Australia, and one of them concerns the quality and condition of the included appliances. Most rentals I had here prior to buying included a dishwasher and a dryer. This sounds great, until you actually use them and realise you’re dealing with what I referred to as rental specials. These appliances live hard lives, are generally in rough shape, and are almost always the budget model with limited capacity, slow speeds, noisy operation,…

Our flat has gas. I know, it should see a doctor about it. We want to admonish the natural gas connection and get proper induction hobs installed in place of the built-in counter-top carcinogen-generators (that was a lot of hyphens), but it’s down the list of expensive priorities right now. Wait, pause there for a moment. Last time I talked about gas stoves in the negative, I had more than a few comments from people expressing their preference for natural gas, and questioning why I was so dim…

One of the first things I evaluate when I’m working on a new system is how it manages notifications. Specifically: What sort of notifications the system sends How often they’re sent How severity is evaluated, assigned, and presented How much the above can be customised and filtered We’ve been building systems to do this for decades at this point, and I’d say most I interact with still get barely a passing grade. It’s wild to me that we keep making the same mistakes; and I’d argue the stakes for…

In past posts I’ve listed numbers that don’t have: Nine Seven Seven, again Eight Based on overwhelmingly positive feedback, today we’re looking at numbers that don’t have six. I provide this service free of charge. 6 Wait, damn it. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-08-07.

I appreciate that I spend a not insignificant amount of time talking about ZFS here, the only volume manager and file system I trust with my important data. ZFS came from my beloved Sun Microsystems, and today FreeBSD has the best ZFS integration outside the illumos ecosystem. But the topic came up on a call recently: what did I used to do before this combination of FreeBSD jails, bhyve, Xen, and ZFS spoiled me? I’ll admit, I did nothing exotic. I basically had workloads split into two “NAS”…

IBM Plex Mono is one of my favourite monospace fonts to have come out in the last decade. And it got an update in May: – stylistic alternate for /l in Roman styles – stylistic alternates for /comma and quotes – glyph /overline (U+203E) – support for Venda language (10 additional characters) – support for Arabic transliteration (10 additional characters) – support for Hebrew transliteration (1 additional character) – support for Sanskrit transliteration (18 additional characters) – combining…

ZFS includes inline compression, meaning files are compressed and decompressed on the fly. While you might expect this to reduce IO performance, it’s been proven to improve throughput by reducing the amount of expensive reads required, especially on older spinning drives. Inline compression is wonderful. I don’t need to rotate logs to compressed files. I can temporarily expand virtual disks to raw images without taking up the entire maximum space of the disk. It’s also great for thwarting…

I’m a day late for a Music Monday, but I had to share this! Drumeo is such a fun channel for learning drums, and the drum theory behind popular songs. My favourite series involves the team playing the melody and vocals for a drummer, then asking them to produce a drum line. The twist is the drummer has never heard the song before, and often its a genre in which the drummer has no familiarly. I only just got around to watching Kristina Rybalchenko’s video from seven months ago, but hers might be…

I only just read the news!? What a loss :(. I first learned of Om through his news site GigaOm, and his appearances on the Cranky Geeks show back in the day. I remember being surprised at the civil comments GigaOm stories attracted, which I attributed to the quality of the journalism and lack of clickbait. In later years I especially followed him for his photography. I was lucky to have a few conversations with him on Twitter too back in the day. One in particular I remember was scheming with…

Last Friday I talked about a flaky network switch that was wreaking havoc on our wired home network. A few of you sent thoughts, which I wanted to share. Why wired? Jeremy, whom I’ve asked if he has a blog I can link to: You said you have Wifi networks. I’m curious why you use wired ethernet at all. If a device supports wired Ethernet, I’d rather plug it in. Maybe I’m old school like that. It also keeps the Wi-Fi spectrum free for devices that need it. Our Token Ring network also wouldn’t…

Snow Leopard was a version of Mac OS X released in 2010. It was billed by Apple as having “0 new features”, with a focus on refining the system, improving efficiency, and fixing bugs. Those of us using Macs at the time welcomed the news after living with updates that seemingly broke as many things as they introduced with each release. This idea is so powerful—and so longed for—that it’s escaped containment among the Apple crowd. I’ve seen everything from Linux distro to phone updates referred…

We had weird issues on our home network over the last month or so: Large files being transferred over Samba and NFS would time out midway through, and rsync transfers would also fail with “Resource temporary unavailable” messages. Clara would be dropped off our Minecraft server after an indeterminate amount of time playing. KDE on Fedora would constantly spam me with “Connection established” alerts multiple times an hour. Our Apple TV would pause a video with a spinning wheel of death for a…

Josh of Espresso Tonic, and Joel of JoelChrono, are excellent bloggers you should read. They’ve both written recently not just about portable devices, but of their form factors. Their discussions on how such design has impacted their use, enjoyment, and productivity with such devices got me thinking how it’s impacted me as well. There are so many places I could go with this, but today I’ll focus on three types of devices. I sense a series. Handheld game consoles and tablets Josh spends much of…

I had another of those I’m living in the future moments today when I was at an electronics retailer, and I saw a 1 TB MicroSD card. I couldn’t afford it of course, but its mere existence shook me in a way I wasn’t expecting. One terabyte. On a thing the size of my thumbnail. Heck, even this picture of a card from my preferred vendor is likely larger than the card itself, depending on your viewport: The 486SX tower my dad brought home before I started school had a one hundred megabyte hard…

What an incredible production. I was choking up at the end. Our friend Mike and his team should get an award for this. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-07-30.

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-07-29.

Retro-inspired cases have been a bit of theme here of late. I’ve talked at length about Silverstone’s gorgeous beige boxes, and I’ve even shared random industrial cases from the likes of AliExpress that are wonderful in their own way. I think there are two key attributes that make a great modern retro case: A retro aesthetic. This goes without saying. I’m talking beige or brown side panels, pseudomorphic elements like floppy drive bezels, and more traditional elements like power switches in…

I got some flattery delivered with my morning spam today: Hi RubenMy chargeback was approved, [sic] Mail merge! Can I get a mail merge for this gentleman, please? You are receiving this email because ${SPAMMER} solutions may be relevant to your role. This outreach is based on our legitimate interest in sharing relevant information with computation technology professionals. Computation technology professional has a nice ring to it. I don’t work in IT, I deliver exceptional computational…

Yesterday at exactly 14:00 AEST, (almost) every phone in Australia got the following message from AusAlert: We’d been warned of this test for weeks, but the shrill siren sound still made me leap out of my skin! Mission accomplished. I was working at home with this spicy cough when it went off, but a friend working remote joked about how every phone went off at their local cafe at the same time. In kind of a weird way, it’s fun that we all had a shared experience. Them: Hey, Ruben! Where were…

This northern suburb of Sydney made headlines last year for its Apple store closure. People were speculating on why, given it was one of their largest stores in Australia, and in the catchment area of some of Sydney’s most affluent suburbs. Well your roving reporter is coming to you live (cough) from the former Apple Store outlet, and it’s now a homewares store, and an upcoming branch of that famed Hong Kong jeweller. Interpret this outcome how you will. I have to say, the Hornsby Westfield is…

Recently I talked about an order I made at the start of the month for a retrocomputer in the US. After their Shopify store sent me an automated receipt and estimated shipping date, I heard nothing else. Two weeks later I was refunded for my shipping cost, but not the computer. Another week, and three messages to their sales team later, and still nothing. Well some good news at least. I disputed the charge with my credit card company, which entailed giving them a description and basic…

Speaking of Australian trains, there was some adventures further north in the state over the weekend, as reported by the ABC: Railway safety officials are looking into an incident involving a runaway coal train in the Hunter Valley. The fully laden coal train was unmanned and travelled several kilometres, including through level crossings. Gulp. Can you imagine? Sitting there waiting for the boom gates to go back up, only to see one of the heaviest trains possible cruising through the…

Jason asked me on a recent BSD Now if I’d made the switch to FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE. I said that I had, and that the upgrade was entirely uneventful! Which is my favourite kind of upgrade. I realise that wasn’t entirely true. My desktop that I dual boot with Fedora for games was still on FreeBSD 14.4. Over this weekend I upgraded that, and all its jails, to FreeBSD 15.1. Again, absolutely nothing to report. I’ll admit, I feel slight trepidation over what will change in each new Linux distro…

Our entire complex is getting new active fire damper units, and today it’s our turn. Half the flat is covered with tarp and sheets, and the loud sound of drills and saws is piercing the air and, hopefully, the ceiling where the new dampers are being installed. Fire dampers are shutters designed to block the flow of hot air and smoke through ventilation ducts in the event of a fire. Along with fire doors and walls/floors rated to specific fireproof ratings, fire dampers are designed to stop the…

Brent Simmons of Inessential and NetNewsWire fame came home from holidays to a slew of new errors he has to fix. Fun! He explained: Here’s the thing: iOS app development (and Mac, but to a lesser extent) is just constant churn. I thought I was getting a year off this year! But nope. There’s always something. My theory is that the automatic split view collapsing, which NetNewsWire uses, is just no longer an option, and I’ll have to specify a separate compact view controller. So that’s just a…