Rubenerd

I’m “sat here”, as my English friends would say, having a cup of tea and staring at the cursor in this text editor. It’s blinking, just like that C:\> prompt did on the family 486. Had I been born a decade prior, I might have first stared at a blinking cursor near a READY, or ], or A>, or maybe even $. Throughout all those intervening years, and despite the attempts of so many people to change, reinvent, or even obfuscate that prompt, I find myself at it again this evening. My prompt has more…

A standing ovation from me this morning for this great post: My hobby/craft/profession/practice/way of being isn’t about the things I’ve made; it is not about value, (the) economy, outcomes or output. It is about me; about what is inside of me. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-05-25.

Upgrades to Canberra–Sydney rail link ABC News: The Canberra to Sydney rail link is set for a $100 million upgrade in a bid to reduce the passenger train trip time to under four hours. Initial upgrades will include some some “quick fixes” designed to make the service more efficient, such as new boom gates and lights at level crossings, improvements to track alignments and turnouts, and station and stabling improvements. The train trip to Canberra is… scenic! But it’s not competitive in transit…

I recently updated a MariaDB server to 11.8 LTS, their latest long term support release. Immediately I started seeing issues on Textpattern 4.9.1 sites I sysadmin for people. Creating new articles works, but editing existing articles results in the following error shown across the bottom of the screen: The article was not saved due to an error. Please try again. Logs didn’t immediately indicate anything, so I restored my database backups to a MariaDB 10.11 LTS server and pointed Textpattern to…

I invoked a Betteridge headline here not because I’m not willing to commit to answer, but because I have no idea what’s going on. Yes, it’s time for another Shaggy Dog post where I think out loud about something without arriving at a useful or even interesting conclusion. Today it’s regarding desktop (aka, not workstation) Arc. ☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎ Clara and I are huge fans of Intel’s Arc graphics cards; though it’s not necessary given how cool they run compared to higher TDP units. Is that my first…

The BOOK 8088 was released a few years ago to massive fanfare among retro computer tragics like me. It was a modern laptop with newly designed parts wed to an Intel 8088 CPU and CGA graphics. The keyboard is mushy, and the screen acts more like an external panel that requires regular resolution and positioning adjustments… but I just love that such a device exists. I never thought I’d be able to sit at a cafe and work on an XT. I just wish I’d snagged a Hand 386 before they were discontinued.…

FreeBSD newcomers regularly ask me “what’s the equivalent to this Linux command?”. The most common of said commands is lsblk(8) that lists block devices. FreeBSD has a several options depending on the exact details you require: # camcontrol devlist # gpart show # geom disk list # geom -t (this gets the closest to lsblk(8)) And if you’re using GELI for volume encryption, HAST for replication, and ZFS respectively: # geli list # hastctl list # zpool status We also have prolific FreeBSD writer…

This is how I start new blog posts: $ ./new.sh permalink-for-new-post This sends a command to Hugo, the static site generator I use, to create a new file with that permalink, and generate the requisite front matter (dates, default categories, etc). It also derives the title of the post from the permalink. For example, this is how I started this post: $ ./new.sh i-just-realised-something I don’t normally do clickbait titles. But in starting this post with such a title, I forgot what this post…

It’s time to make an admission. I’ve been worn down by something. I’ve interacted with something for nigh two years at this point, and despite people insisting I’d get used to it, I haven’t. If anything, it bugs me more than when I first took it out of the box, and it continues to hinder my work. My work-issued MacBook Air is one of those new(ish) models with a black notch bitten into the screen. This was done so the Apple designers could fit the camera into the lid without requiring a large…

Eastwood is one of my favourite suburbs in Sydney. On the one side of the train station you have some of the best Cantonese food and culture in the city, and on the other has rows of Korean restaurants and supermarkets. And apparently, coffee shops! Ten Thousand has branches in the US, but I think they’re new in Australia. They’re a bakery, tea, and coffee shop chain with as many old favourites alongside Korean specialities. I’ll admit I grew up going to Chinese and Japanese bakeries, but…

I got this when upgrading a server: Fatal error: Uncaught Error: \ Call to undefined function filter_var() Easy enough install to fix: # pkg install [-j $JAIL] php84-filter Thanks to bofh@ for maintaining the port :). By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-05-17.

Recently I posted about our Minecraft server, and mentioned on Mastodon that I’d rebuilt our Dynmap server with MariaDB. A few of you wanted to know what I was talking about, what I did, and why, especially those of you maintaining servers for their kids. Clara and I started playing Minecraft as a silly distraction during the 2020 COVID lockdowns, and we’re still playing on the same map and server today. As such, we’ve explored large swaths of the map, with coordinates stretching into the tens…

He’d already started to move on by the time I was done with my morning shower, but wow. For perspective, this is just down the road from where I saw the rainbow earlier this week. I learned about Karl the Fog when I briefly worked in San Francisco. Wow, that was eight years ago. Clara and I had such a blast over there, and in NYC/NJ with Frank and Denise, and Phily with Esther and Jim. Somehow I get the feeling we won’t be back for a while. That said though, the most intense, epic fog I’ve ever…

I’m a long time lurker (and occasional poster) to the netbsd-users mailing list, the official mailing list for NetBSD users. Thanks Ruben, that explanation was helpful. Back on the 16th of April, Michael Cheponis expressed interest in having the NetBSD Foundation be involved with Anthropic and their latest LLM bug detection tool: As most know, Claude Mythos (not released to the public) is the model that found a long-standing OpenBSD security bug. Given that 11RC3 is now being tested, I wondered…

I was up in northern Sydney today, and saw the longest and most vivid rainbow I think I’ve ever seen in my life! I didn’t have a proper camera on me, and was almost late to a meeting, but I still had to stop and take a look. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-05-13.

My history with web servers is entirely unremarkable, and likely mirrors yours. I first ran Apache/httpd when I was kid, before moving onto lighttpd in my first paid gig—lighty for those in the know—then onto nginx where I’ve mostly remained since, save for running Bozotic on a 486 with NetBSD because of course. Also IIS for a project, but we don’t speak of that. nginx is great web server and reverse proxy. It’s fast, sips system resources like its 2026 and Moore’s Law has been flipped upside…

I have no idea how I ended up on this Wikipedia article: Visoka is a village in the Kardzhali Municipality, which is in the Kardzhali Province, in southern Bulgaria. As of 1 January 2007, the population of Visoka is 2 people, making it one of the least populated villages in the Kardzhali Municipality. If you and I packed our bags and arrived in that town somehow, we would double the population. This is the sort of thing I’d absolutely attempt if I had more money than common sense.…

evacide: If you are in your late thirties to mid-forties right now, there is a good chance that you have spent most of your life in a cycle of making some sort of home on the internet only to have it crumble beneath you like chalk and having to start over. I… can relate to this. If you’re the kind of person reading this, chances are you do too. Even younger people have experienced this. I caught the blogging bug when it was the trendy thing to do in 2004. But while others had the sense (at the…

I was compelled to install the confusingly-named, generic-sounding, un-hyphenated Shop application on my mobile telephonic device recently, for specific reasons that are beyond the scope of this post. It’s also beyond the scope of the previous post about HTML fractions, which had nothing to do with shopping whatsoever. Thank you Ruben, that clarification was exceptional in its utility. This coffee shop just started playing ABBA, and now all I can think of is that I need a man after midnight.…

I realised something recently: I rarely write fractions in my daily life. I might divvy up a pizza with friends, cut up pieces of round birthday cake, or refer to times as “quarter past five” instead of 17:15 in speech. But I somehow managed to avoid writing them after uni, until I started drafting posts about turntables, and I realised I needed a way to succinctly express the ubiquitous “33 and a third” speed. One way is to construct one with: A <sup> element for the divisor A Unicode…

I mentioned on Mastodon that I was doing some maintenance on Clara’s and my Minecraft server we started together in 2020. A couple of you asked what it looks like, so I thought I’d do a little tour :). The map There are several different plugins that will generate you a web map of your world, upon which you can place pins and lines. We still use Mike Primm’s excellent Dynmap to track where we place our underground rapid transit system, our Nether Shinkansen, and all the various things we find.…

Thirteen years ago I posted this snippet of text from Wikipedia, and joked that it must be how it feels to talk with me when it comes to my more esoteric interests: The GTO thyristor used on 1996 stock achieves this by “chopping” the supply voltage in order to drive a sinusoidal current in the motor windings (pulse width modulation), creating the characteristic audible whine associated with the stock and with the Class 465 Networker trains that share its traction drive system. The sound changes…

Another day, another Linux exploit. It’s been hard to keep track over the last few months. Vulnerabilities are inevitable, but they do highlight my concerns again regarding monocultures. Any post I’ve ever written warning about monocultures and Linux (or as I’ve taken to calling my home desktop, KDE/Linux) is received with howls of protest, especially when they escape containment and end up on the usual news aggregator sites. I’ll either be accused of misunderstanding Linux, or overstating the…

eBay has updated how it charges Australian sellers. tl;dr: you can’t sell on eBay for free, despite their claims. “Free selling” announced eBay Australia sent an email back in March, emphasis added: Coming at the end of April, we’re making it free to sell on eBay.com.au for Australia-based sellers up to $25,000 annually. We’re removing transaction fees in all categories for eligible sellers. So you’ll make more money from every sale because you won’t have to pay up to 13.4% in variable fees…

I’ve adjusted the width of posts on the blog, which I think makes them easier to read. I remember reading years ago that having between 12-15 printed words to a line was optimal for text “readability”, which I’ve maintained here since 2004. Aside from the fact I haven’t been able to find any concrete, scientific basis for this claim, I also know it’s not true for me. So I’ve widened it a bit. This should make sharing code snippets much easier too, without constantly resorting to breaking up…

One of the coffee shops I frequent puts a litre bottle of slightly chilled water on the table when you order coffee. I’m used to this at Australian restaurants, but even getting this level of service when you’ve only bought a single beverage and proceed to “nurse” it at your table for the next hour is rather fabulous (if I do say so). I’ll admit, I initially I thought it a bit weird when they started doing this. Why give me an entire bottle of water when only a single glass would suffice? I…

I’d like to start here (as opposed to somewhere else?) by putting something on the record. Or the cassette tape, or whatever. Travan tape? LTO? My esteemed BSD Now podcast co-host Tom says he has enough computers; sentiment to which I can relate. I have enough of these electronic contraptions to last me a lifetime of tinkering, upgrading, maintaining, maintaining, maintaining and did I mention…? Naturally then, I’d like to clarify that I have absolutely no need for additional machines in my…

The speaker on this train: Please mind the gap between the BZZZ! your next stop is Wahroonga BZZT! on the seats. Thank you. Cal Newport, Reality Check: What you’re going to get out of the LLM is a reasonable-sounding plan (they’re story completers). Reasonable-sounding plans… get you in trouble. You need correct plans. Let’s just say, anonymous: Person A: Why didn’t you do the thing? I told you to do it. Person 1: I did. I linked to it directly above. Person A: Well… um, my point was about…

It has been a busy start to the week! If you don’t live or work in web hosting circles, you may still have been impacted by a significant cPanel vulnerability that has wrecked havoc across the web. I don’t host any cPanel, but by golly, I work with some clients who do. And let’s just say… they’re having fun right now. If you know anyone who deals with cPanel, there may be some #hugops in order. I’ve also been dealing with an odd amount of urgent personal tasks that seemed to confirm the whole…

Recently I’ve done a three part series building out an uncommon Commodore 64 motherboard and case combo, and posted twice about new tea stores in Sydney. I may have even been working on that aforementioned 8-bit computer while drinking a beverage from one of those establishments. I could have even written and saved a review for the drink, then transferred it to my desktop for publishing onto the site you’re currently engaged with reading. Now, is a word with three letters. I don’t consider…