Rubenerd

Last Thursday I talked about retiring my RTX 3070 for a new AMD RX 9060 XT. This garnered a few questions from you fine people, which I’ve aggregated here. Why not the 9070 XT? Price, availability, and requirements. The AMD 9070 XT is the best graphics card for the money you can get today, and the 9070 gets close to it while offering efficiency gains I thought the industry had long abandoned. If I didn’t have other life priorities for that money, I’d have bought a 9070. I got the 9060 XT…

I care little for the British royal family who, by extension, are also the royal family of Australia, a phrase that has never made sense to me whatsoever. Even the king himself expressed surprised that we weren’t a republic yet. The only thing we have going for us is that the royals have only overturned one democratically elected government in our history. Also that we can commensurate with the Canadians, Kiwis, and many others. Where was I going with this? Recently I read that King Charles III…

I tend to find myself being grumpy when it comes to web auth, let alone the broader field of modern web design. Such observations lend themselves to cranky blog posts where I pontificate on how and why it got so bad, and so on. So this time I want to address something a website did that was good! The site in question emailed me a multi-factor code (which isn’t good), which included a dash in the middle (which isn’t good), because the login form on the target site only had six boxes (which isn’t…

I have a new graphics card for my primary desktop, the Sapphire Nitro+ AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT. This replaces my Zotac GeForce RTX 3070 Twin Edge, a card with a name that’s almost as long. The tl;dr is: it’s great, for me! This isn’t going to be a technical post laden with benchmarks; there are plenty of more qualified people you can read and watch for those. Instead, this is more of a thinking-out-loud post about the upgrade process, and how one random person with their own specific requirements…

It’s so cold in Sydney this morning, I can see my breath. Parked cars have frost on them, and leaves are heavy with dew. I have to walk with my hands in my jacket pockets, because the wind is too cold. One scarf doesn’t feel like enough. This long black coffee isn’t hot enough. We had to have the central heating on this morning for the first time this year. I’m pretty sure the birds flying past were wearing mittens. Wait, how would a bird wear mittens? Why are you asking me that, I can barely…

Prism is our preferred Minecraft launcher, because it’s significantly faster than the stock Microsoft one, and includes cats. It’s also written in Qt, so it integrates well into our Fedora KDE Linux desktops. That reminds me, I’m overdue for a donation. But launching last night resulted in the following fun: GFLW error 65545: GLX: Failed to find a suitable GLXFBConfig. Please make sure you have up-to-date drivers The line about drivers was confusing, because I’d just upgraded and rebooted…

The Lowe Institute published another of their excellent annual reports on Australian public sentiment. The polling results are unsurprising: Cactus spines are produced from specialized structures called areoles, a kind of highly reduced branch. Areoles are an identifying feature of cacti. As well as spines, areoles give rise to flowers, which are usually tubular and multipetaled. That’s clearly the wrong article. Let’s try again: Australians are wary of Donald Trump’s America. Only 31% of…

I wrote about our 8-track player last Friday: Therefore, it seems fitting that the next item in our Hi-Fi stack would be the pinnacle of analogue tape format quality: the 8-track! And further down on the post, emphasis added: For those unaware of the history of 8-track, my comment about quality was most definitely tongue in cheek. You weren’t buying 8-track carts for their quality At least five comments, summarised: Ummmmm errrrr, 8-track wasn’t great quality, what are you even talking about?…

Anyone who’s ever shopped at Aldi is well familiar with what those of us in Australia refer to as the isle of shame, where the weekly specials are placed. You’d expect a supermarket to stock food, sundries, or maybe even kitchen accessories, but Aldi regularly places everything there from toys and linen, to power tools and entire washing machines. You’ll go to buy some simple ingredients for a salad, and leave with two beach towels, a light-water reactor, and a Commodore 64. What is it with…

Shane Hickey wrote in the Guardian back in May, quote marks added: Criminals use a variety of tactics to convince people that they are from McAfee and are becoming more sophisticated with advances in “artificial intelligence”, according to the company. There’s a broader discussion about the necessity of such AV tools, and McAfee’s own… shall we say, history! If you have a spare half an hour on your Sunday, do check out the history of the company and its eccentric former CEO; they read more like…

Jay from JaysTwoCents had an impromptu chat with Steve from our local Australian Hardware Unboxed channel where they discussed a bunch of issues around modern PC building, or lack thereof thanks to the proliferation of “AI” investors and their unprofitable, all-encompassing activities. This lead them to remember what they considered the golden age for the hobby. I will never miss the opportunity to wax lyrical about old and retro computers here! This also concerns a part of my own tech history…

For much of the day Sydney time, the VM hosting this site and a few for my family have been smashed with traffic with spoofed headers, but from IP ranges associated with the Alibaba Cloud, specifically these: 47.79.200.0/24 47.79.206.0/24 47.79.207.0/24 They issued a sufficient number of requests to overwhelm my php_fpm pool, resulting in sites sometimes returning a 502 Bad Gateway. Bad gateway, bad. I’ve blocked the entire damned ranges for now and bumped up my server specs, which seems to…

I’ve been getting into FLAC this year, on account of having some minor ear surgery in Vietnam and realising I could now perceive a difference! It’s been a joy rediscovering old favourites, and listening to new music in higher fidelity than I could appreciate before. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there are entire instruments and detail in songs I heard growing up I didn’t even realise existed (yes, this has as much to do with the mastering process and other attributes, not just the…

Data centre providers usually provide a “smart hands” service that lets you hire one of their engineers to perform remote maintenance on your behalf. They can accept delivery of a drive and install it for you, patch a new cross connect, perform inspections, bump things by accident, and so on. We just got a pricing update for one of our providers at work, with their four tiers listed below. See if you can spot the issue: “Normal Working Hours Rate if Flexible Scheduling selected (Hourly)” “After…

I was more than a little interested with flags as a kid. I loved learning about the history of their designs, what they represented, their aesthetics, and how they’re used in different settings. Point out a national flag (and even some supranational and subordinate flags), and I’ll almost certainly be able to tell you the political entity it represents, the symbolism behind specific features, and what flags upon which they’re based (where applicable). Have you ever wondered why the five pointed…

This post was backdated, because we were in transit at the time. This was the last day of our Vietnam 2026 trip. While it couldn’t hold a candle to our journey last year that also took us to Hà Nội and Đà Lạt, it’s still the most fun week I’ve had in a long time. Vietnam is, in case you haven’t noticed by my posts by now, one of the most incredible places in the world. I know it’s easy for someone like me in Australia to get to, but even if you’re further away reading this and have the ability…

This post was backdated, because I didn’t get around to publishing at the time. On the penultimate day of our Vietnam 2026 trip, we packed our bags and bid farewell to the beautiful Vũng Tàu peninsula and made our way back to Ho Chi Minh City. In case my views of this area weren’t clear, it’s all so beautiful! The image below, as with all photos in this post, is unedited for colour saturation and/or brightness. It was just so warm, lush, and green everywhere we went. We first went to the Museum…

This post was backdated, because I didn’t get around to publishing at the time. Today was our second and last day in Vũng Tàu on our Vietnam 2026 trip. This coastal peninsula is an administrative part of greater Ho Chi Minh city, but it’s such a different place. It’s just as hot and humid, but it feels more tropical and relaxed. The ocean breezes are beautiful, the roads are less chaotic, and everyone is more laid back. Ho Chi Minh City is one of my new favourite places in the whole world, but…

Today we bid farewell to Ho Chi Minh City on our Vietnam 2026 trip for a couple of days to stay in Vũng Tàu on the coast. The small peninsula was a popular retreat for the French colonialists, and is famed within Vietnam for its seafood and large beach. HCMC has become so big that the Vũng Tàu is officially considered part of its metro area, but it still has its own distinct history, character, and charm. Before setting off, we had a salt coffee with condensed milk and a baguette from a local…

We had our first tropical storm of the trip today, as evidenced by my soaked clothes and shoes! We’d taken a short trip to the Vinhome Mega Mall in District 9, and the rain came completely out of nowhere. Well, from the sky specifically. We came to the Vinhomes Grand Park area in the eastern periphery of Ho Chi Minh City to see family of my in-laws yesterday, and it became our base for a couple of days. Vinhomes is a massive residential property developer in Vietnam, and the Grand Park precinct…

Today was our first full day in Ho Chi Minh City again on this trip, and the weather almost held out for the whole day! It was humid and sticky, just like I remembered every day in Singapore feeling. There was some light drizzle later in the afternoon and into the early evening, but it brought a refreshing, cool change which was beautiful. I think the Little River Band did a song about that. I wish I had kept a travel journal for our first Vietnam trip which we took last year, because I’d love…

My inlaws and I had so much fun in Vietnam last year that we deciced to come back again, if only for a short week this time owing to available leave and other commitments. The plan this week is to stay around Ho Chi Minh City and the southern part of Vietnam, and explore some of the sights we ran out of time to explore last time. Last time was also a bit of a wirlwind, so I didn’t get as much time to write about it. If I hadn’t made it clear last time, Vietnam is one of my new all-time…

Sometimes Sydney Trains runs a special train, just for me! Or at least, I pretend they do. How luxurious. As an aside, for those of you who live in cities with double deck train carriages, do you sit upstairs or down? I tend to sit downstairs, because the rocking motion of taller carriages is reduced slightly… though I admit the upper deck is more fun when I know I’ll be crossing the Harbour Bridge. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-06-05.

Calling this a security model is probably a stretch, but the first thing I do when installing any web-facing software is determine which features I can remove, disable, or otherwise make unavailable. I’ll review: Dependencies, to see if I can avoid installing any. For example, I don’t need XML-RPC packages if I never intend to use features that depend on them, and won’t ever have them enabled or exposed. Plugins, add-ons, extensions, and extra themes which are moved, then deleted when confirmed…

I’ve been migrating WordPress blogs I host for people over to Textpattern. It’s a quality of life thing for all parties involved. In the process of replicating how people had their WordPress sites configured, I uncovered a subtle bug in the way Textpattern resolves URLs. tl;dr: If your article links 404, define an empty section with something other than the side default URL pattern, and your links will work again. This will be addressed in 4.9.2. How Textpattern defines pretty URLs By default,…

So here’s the thing. Late last year I bought the excellent SilverStone FLP02, a retro-themed computer case with modern component support. It was absolutely, jaw-droppingly gorgeous, and has easily become my favourite modern case alongside the legendary NCASE M1. It’s big, relatively easy to work in with just a few caveats (a topic for another time), and yet looks the part so well. I’ve since moved our FreeBSD bhyve/jail server into our FLP02, and am giving serious consideration to an additional…

Clara and I finally tied the knot after more than a decade. It was a short ceremony at the Pyrmont registry with close family, but it was lovely. The celebrant joked that it was “her first Sanrio wedding” on account of all of Clara’s Pompompurins, many of which her brother and fiancé brought for her. It was adorable. We met at our university anime club. We hung out, and gradually it turned into something more. Our first “date” involved us sitting at a bubble tea shop and talking from midday…

This is going to come as a shock—a SHOCK—to some of you, but I harboured a not insignificant obsession with liners when I was a teenager, both of the ocean and air kind. I loved reading about commercial ships and planes of yore, learning about how they were operated, and contrasting them to how we get around today. Some of my favourite tomes were technical reference manuals and so-called “coffee table” books that explored these incredible machines. You could keep your books on cars and…

People in my area keep getting rid of some amazing kit. Last week I was walking back from our local coffee roaster—like a gentleman—when I chanced upon these two panels covered with autumn leaves by side of the road. Clara said words to the effect of “uh oh, more stuff we have to take back?” Yes, yes indeed. I’m sorry. The widescreen is a Dell something something. I don’t know what the model is, and I don’t care much to look it up. I hate 1080p for robbing us of the vastly superior WUXGA and…

It was busy this morning. “New research shows green isn’t a real colour” (I… may have misheard that, but I thought it was funny). “I coach a team … the aquatic centre across the street … they’re not playing soccer in the pool, I can tell you that much.” “Lot of Sydney trucks Trains going past this morning, wonder if there’s an issue? Wait, Sydney trucks Trains. SYDNEY. TRAINS. TRUCKS.” American accent: “Yeah, I got the hell out of dodge!” “I dunno, it has some AI bullshit in it. I work in the…