Rubenerd

Yesterday we had a brief power outage that could be attributed to something that happened in our building, not the wider neighbourhood or power grid. There’s a lot going on in our block concerning power, hot water, painting, and whatnot, which has brought much… fun into our lives over the last month! The good news is that the most recent power failure happened almost on the dot at midday. I say “good news” regarding the timing, but can you think of why? While you ponder that over your Sunday…

We’re onto the third instalment of my Commodore 250466 series. In the first post I explained how and why I bought the last C64 longboard, and in the second I explored the board in more detail and confirmed it worked! Today, it’s time to install this beautiful piece of mid-1980s 8-bit computing into my empty breadbin: This is the case and keyboard for an unusual Commodore 64 variant sold by the discount supermarket chain Aldi in Germany during the mid-1980s (either Süd or Nord, not sure). They…

Here are some things that happened on the first of May: I published this post. Thank you. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-05-01.

Speaking of new tea shops on Sydney’s north shore, Hornsby also has a new one in the form of a delightful pun: Auntea Jenny! Auntea Jenny is a bubble/boba tea chain that first opened in Shanghai, and has recently been expanding internationally. According to Wikipedia, they’re open in London, New York City, and Kuala Lumpur… and now Sydney :). It proved difficult to take pictures in the packed store to demonstrate, but the whole place is done out in this stunning art deco design, right down to…

Last Saturday I introduced the 250466 longboard from 1986 I bought for my Commodore 64 “Aldi” machine. I’ll admit, I could barely contain my excitement, for this was the first longboard C64 board I’d had in years. But does it work? Today I wanted to find out, and take a closer look at the ICs that make up this specific board. Before testing though, a few of you asked for a better comparison between the longboard and newer shortboard variants of the Commodore 64 motherboard. Here’s a (slighly!)…

Back in the mystical early 2000s, the world was introduced to the idea of FOAF, or Friend of a Friend. I always pronounced it like LOAF, but that could have been wrong. The perils of only having read something. But I digress. FOAF was a machine-readable RDF schema that let you define your “social graph”, aka the people in your life with whom you have connections. Think family, friends, partners, colleagues, idols, and the like. You would publish your FOAF linking to people, they would publish…

I love a good synchronicity! I was literally just talking about the Commodore 64 longboard I bought locally, and how much fun it’s been restoring, testing, and building it into my Aldi 64 shell, not to mention comparing it with my 64C shortboard. Now we have some news that I’m frankly giddy about. Peri Fractic and his relaunched Commodore team has just announced an Utimate Commodore 64C, and it even uses the same moulds as the original! It will come in RGB and Gold versions like the relaunched…

Those familiar with bridge cameras and mid-2000s chat speak may get a kick out of this post. Seventeen years after the format was officially retired by its backers, I’ve managed to track down a new xD card reader from a certain large mainland Chinese website. And here it is, with my two xD card specimens: xD-Picture Cards, as they were officially named, were sold from 2002 to 2009. The format was developed by Fujifilm and Olympus for their digital camera lines, and manufactured by Samsung and…

Speaking of the new Kinokuniya in the best suburb of Sydney, Tea&Co also opened a branch just off the Victoria Avenue mall. The queues snaked around the block for weeks after their opening, so we ended up walking past. But we managed to catch them when they weren’t so busy over the long weekend (… or so we thought!), so we ventured inside. It’s a cool space, very modern, and the smells were amazing. They use a similar setup to Chicha and other modern tea stores with machines that look (and…

I swore I’d written about this before, but I can’t find it in the archives. If I’m rehashing here, let’s pretend this is (1) a novel post, or (b) a substantive update on what I’ve mentioned before. Brilliant! Let’s jump in. Clara and I love playing music on our hi-fi setup. We have a Kenwood cassette tape deck (nothing special, only 2 heads), a Sony DVD changer we use for CDs, and a Technics linear tracking, quartz locked, direct drive, track selecting turntable which may be one of the single…

This is my beautiful old Commodore 64 “Aldi” case and keyboard I picked up in September 2023 from a seller in Germany: Note the somewhat unusual combination of beige keyboard paired with the darker breadbin case. When most people think “Commodore 64”, they likely picture a dark brown keyboard similar to later VIC-20 machines. This unit was sold in Aldi in Germany, and unlike the later 64G, had a double-shot keyboard with PETSCII characters printed on the front. My unit would have originally…

I posted on Tuesday about handwriting, and how I struggle to read much of it thesedays. I attributed this to a lack of practice, and perhaps an over-reliance on typeset and computer text. I mentioned: My late mum was a professional calligrapher, and had some of the most beautiful casual handwriting I’ve ever seen. A couple of people DMd me to ask what such a job entails, though coached in language that suggested they were trolling or attempting to take the piss. If you were sincere, I apologise…

Podcast: Play in new window | Download 11:15 – What… what are we doing? Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade. Released April 2026 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts; this one notwithstanding. Hosted graciously by the Internet Archive. Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast…

Australia is a stunning place. I fully expected to move back to Singapore after my degree, but gosh darn it if this wide open land didn’t rub off on me. We have the best skies and food in the world, and this time of the year the weather is just perfect. Sydney even has halfway decent public transport, something I thought Anglo countries couldn’t figure out beyond London and our beloved NYC (hopefully we get to go back one day). There’s just one hitch: the sun. Or what it puts out, more…

Today I was thinking that there’s… pardon, give me a moment, someone is sending me a message. Reaches into pocket. … Wait, there’s nothing there? Then where’s my… oh. The phones are on the desk. Not my pocket at all. And they didn’t receive any messages. I could have sworn I felt a message arrive though. What even is this. I spend a lot of time here talking about the negative effects of ubiquitous, always-on communication and the slabs of glass in our pockets that make this possible. It’s…

I accidentally published a few hundred drafts yesterday. I was messing with a new Hugo build pipeline, and symlinked something where it shouldn’t be. It was less destructive than getting the if and of wrong in dd(1), but it still wasn’t ideal. I heard you like infinite recursion, so I…! Only one made it through to the RSS feed I think, and it was my evolving thoughts on Australia’s teen social media ban which is proving much harder to write and cite than I expected. Who would have thought that…

The world’s best, most portable OS turned 33 this week. 🧡 I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but I cannot express how much I enjoy NetBSD. Linux gets the job done at work, and FreeBSD is excellent with its tooling and features. But in a way that’s intangible and hard to describe, I feel at home when I boot and log into NetBSD. It’s that trusted friend that’s been there for years, whether its booting on an old PowerPC Apple, or a modern Pi. Being involved in the NetBSD community has also…

My late mum was a professional calligrapher, and had some of the most beautiful casual handwriting I’ve ever seen. My sister also has lovely writing, as does Clara. I have what can best be described as scrawl. There was a point in the late 2010s where I hadn’t written anything for so long I’d even started to lose some of the muscle memory, which I didn’t even think that was possible. I used to joke that the only words I ever wrote were on immigration cards when travelling, and even then I was…

Optimism is being challenged on multiple fronts. First in the literal sense; we definitely have a lot of stuff to be decidedly un-optimistic about in our current political, tech, and climate… climates. But people are also pushing back on the term itself, and the idea it represents in the first place. Every second podcast I listen to, and book I read, wants to tell us that optimism is the blind belief that things will “just get better” irrespective of what we do. This is contrasted with…

Last year Australia’s teen “social media” ban came into force, garnering world headlines. Here was a middl(e/ing) power with a population smaller than California standing up to the established American tech giants and saying enough. Or at least, that’s the story its proponents like to tell. It’s had such an impact, countries like the UK are openly referring to it as precedent for their own laws. Despite it being among the largest and most consequential pieces of Australian technology…

I’ve been making liberal use of planets since I did my last RSS cleanup, and have discovered dozens of new blogs and people in the process :). Many large technical projects aggregate blogs from multiple people and sources into a single site “planet” and RSS feed, letting you easily subscribe en masse. It’s a great way to dive into a world without committing to subscribing to hundreds of separate blogs at once. Some are officially sanctioned by their titular projects, others are maintained by…

Happy Sunday, hope you’re having a good one. I thought we’d start with something lighter this morning with a list I’ve been thinking about for a while, and one of critical importance (cough). Top five Bergerac. Clara and I have been borrowing the DVDs from our local libraries, and may currently be obsessed. George Fenton’s funky reggae and French accordion tune is perfection. Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was science fiction, but optimistic! Screw cyberpunk, inject this right into my ears.…

I’ve stared a new Navidrome library for FLAC files. Yay! Starting fresh with a new library has given me the opportunity to carefully import each album one by one, verify their metadata, make sure they have the correct cover art, and add more touchy-feely attributes like “mood” which matter to me more now than genre. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-18.

Visiting client sites and moving offices over the years has granted me unique insight into the functioning of commercial bathroom spaces. In particular, my focus has centred on the hygiene aspects of bathroom operations, including (but not exclusively) the washing and drying of hands, digits, fingers, and other associated anatomical components. Last September I wrote a review of an office hand dryer. I concluded that while its mediocre performance left a lot to be desired, the audible and tac...

Suburbs around northern Sydney are undergoing some “hazard reduction backburning”, now that the weather has cooled down and there isn’t too much wind. The sky looks unreal. My XD card reader finally arrived for my inherited 2007 Olympus bridge camera, so I used its massive telephoto zoom to try some evening shots. Aside from setting a -1 exposure compensation, this is straight out of the camera without any colour tweaking. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-16.

Beautiful: Some things I’ve learned/am learning: 99% of things aren’t about you. Only you can complete you. Let people enjoy things. Kindness is imperative. Actions > words. Stop, look, & listen. Love others. You’ll grow. Laugh like it’s your job. Never stop learning. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-16.

Almost a month ago to the day, I wrote about this ritual I have to perform each time I make an appointment with this specific clinic. It went like this: I add a card to their web portal, and set it as my “default” payment method for all new appointments. I make an appointment. I get an email asking me to confirm my payment method, otherwise the appointment is cancelled. I log back into their system, select the “default” card as my payment method, and it works. Repeat steps 2-4 for e...

The only thing more satisfying than writing code is being able to remove it (this is, incidently, yet another reason why slop coding anything you care about is nonsense). I was talking with a client in the UK a fortnight or so ago now who’d written his own file store system he’d carried around for years. It stored metadata for each file in a database, which also included a hash of each file, and basic attributes he wanted to track. Upon retrieval of each file using a vaguely object store-like...

Thanks to all of you who sent in comments regarding my domain migration, and for pointing out that I missed (more than!) a few things. In particular I want to thank Rebecca H, Simon Ruderich, and Andrew Wheeler for taking time out of their day to detail exactly what needed fixing. I’ve fixed: Assets referenced in the site CSS Metadata in the site header, including humans.txt Image of me in the About box on each page Links in the RSS feeds Image embed code, which kept adding the old ...

I’m an ocean liner tragic. Clara and I specifically went to Melbourne for the Titanic exhibition, and to Long Beach when we were in LA to see the Queen Mary. Here’s a younger version of me on the bridge: Therefore, I consider it my responsibility to correct the record when news outlets miss the mark on this specific, niche interest. The ABC (Australia) published a history quiz today that asked: Question 8: The Titanic — then the world’s largest ocean liner — hit an iceberg at 11:40pm on Apr...