Rubenerd

It’s grim times in the world right now, but we got a glimmer of hope from Europe over the weekend. Via the Kyiv Independent: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s 16-year rule over Hungary came to an end on April 12 in a historic election marked by record-breaking turnout. It was such a landslide he even conceded. Another dim leader with tiny hands couldn’t even do that. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-13.

Taking stuff to e-waste comes with a bunch of benefits, from freed up space in one’s flat, to the knowledge that you’re not contributing potentially toxic stuff to a landfill. It also means you (cough) can often find other treasures while dropping off your stuff. I was taking some worn out batteries and a broken old case down over the weekend, when we saw this rather charming BenQ 15-inch monitor. The back of its case is the most yellowed thing I’ve seen since I restored a German VC-20 a few ...

A new branch of the Japanese book store Kinokuniya opened on Sydney’s north shore this month, so naturally Clara and I had to go and check it out. It was everything I hoped it would be! The store itself was quite a bit smaller than the Galleries branch in the Sydney CBD, and indeed the gigantic one in Ngee Ann City/Takashimaya in Singapore. The atmosphere was also quite different; far more like those cute Kinokuniya branches sprinkled around suburban Japan. When Borders shut their doors glob...

After two decades on .com, my blog and retro corner have a new domain! Introducing: https://www.rubenerd.au/ https://www.rubenerd.au/feed/ http://retro.rubenerd.au/ .au is the top-level domain for Australia and its various dependencies. It’s the elemental symbol for gold, two letters that are on almost opposite sites of the Latin alphabet, and the verbiage people of a certain persuasion exclaim to get your attention. AYE, YOU. This is so the first geographical top-level domain I’ve register...

Our new (to us) local library has community jigsaw puzzles! We’ve made it a habit of contributing to at least one piece each time we go. This small gesture has done more to make us feel connected (hah!) to the suburb than I would have expected. Yesterday we added a bit of a sunflower: By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-10.

I write about a wide variety of topics and interests here, but there are only a few that are guaranteed to elicit angry comments: Something critical of America’s Dear Leader™ Any passing mention of systemd not being ideal Anything to do with audio gear Wait a minute, didn’t the primary person behind systemd also give us PulseAudio? Galaxy brain! But I digress. ☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎ Whenever I mention anything to do with audio players, music formats, headphones, or other kit, I’m inundated with com...

This is the fifth post in my A-Z Toolbox series, in which I’m listing tools I use down the alphabet for no logical reason. The letter E is a tad more sparse than previous letters in this series, at least when it comes to tools I use. There’s the emacs family, but I might save that for my preferred MicroEmacs under the letter M. There’s Erlang that’s interesting for someone curious about functional programming, but I have only passing experience. I’m sure I’ll think of more just as soon as I p...

This is the fifth post in my A-Z Toolbox series, in which I’m listing tools I use down the alphabet for no logical reason. The letter E is a tad more sparse than previous letters in this series, at least when it comes to tools I use. There’s the emacs family, but I might save that for my preferred MicroEmacs under the letter M. There’s Erlang that’s interesting for someone curious about functional programming, but I have only passing experience. I’m sure I’ll think of more just as soon as I p...

Quote of the day from one of my favourite bloggers: The reality is that we usually have the power to change our lives. We just have to stop pretending that we don’t. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-09.

Quote of the day from one of my favourite bloggers: The reality is that we usually have the power to change our lives. We just have to stop pretending that we don’t. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-09.

Since buying our first apartment together in 2024, Clara and I have both been hunting for a good set of desks. It’s weird thinking about furniture we might use for a while, not something portable we can disassemble and pack every year when an overzealous landlord inevitably decided they want to squeeze us for more rent in Sydney’s overpriced market. We measured up the dimensions of the study, and decided we wanted shelves above the tables. For Clara this would her store her art and craft supp...

I’m just old enough to remember Teletext, the standard that encoded text information on standard analogue TV signals. Now thanks to Nathan Media Services and Alistair Cree, we can now interact with it again in the browser: This right here is why I still love the Web. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-08.

Here we have exibit A for why using technology to solve a social problem often doesn’t work, or has unintended consequences. There are cultures in the world that take recycling seriously, like Japan. There are those that pretend (until recently) that it doesn’t exist, like Singapore and Malaysia. In between sits Australia; the land girt by sea, and mostly on board with the idea that we should reduce, reuse, and recycle if and where we can. The problem with recycling in Australia comes down to...

Do you write plain HTML and CSS? You, Jan, and I are part of the post-framework generation, as he mentioned on Mastodon: TIL (Today I learned) that writing websites with simple HTML and CSS is now called “post-framework”. Well. I did “post-framework” even before frameworks existed and I never stopped writing that little bit of HTML and CSS needed for static pages myself. I guess I’m so old that it is considered being young again :) (frantically adding “20+ years of experience and practice w...

I was going through my drafts folder, and came across a post I’d written way back in 2018. I’m not sure what site I was browsing at the time, but it was still a fun observation. If I came across this error in a more modern context, I’d assume site owners are placing limits to deal with the onslaught of gen-“AI” DDoS attacks. ☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎ I was browsing an online store, like a gentleman, when I saw a message that sent me back to the Web 1.0 days: Due to an above average number of visitors, the ma...

The cobbler’s son walks barefoot is such a perfect English idiom to describe how professionals apply themselves in their jobs, and how this differs from their personal lives. I invoke it regularly here for this raison, a typo I’m keeping because it makes me smile. Lest the title of this post suggest I don’t do personal backups, I do. But while I’ll suggest a comprehensive discussion with a client about what types of data they have, how regularly they change, legislative requirements, their Re...

I was knocked out hard by something this week. It wasn’t a flu or COVID thankfully, but it turned my head to mush and my sinuses into fire ants, which among other things made sleep all but impossible. I did in fact do a bunch of work on the blog yesterday, but it was all backend plumbing stuff. It is interesting how different parts of the brain work, and how it recovers at different speeds? I tend to find my ability to write code (at least of the rote, boiler-plate kind) and tinker at a serve...

Technically it was yesterday, but it’s still the 31st of March in some timezones, so I’ll slide this post in on a technicality! To all my beautiful trans friends: I see you, and I’m proud. You’re the current punching bag of dullards desperate for distractions, and yet you persevere and remain true to yourselves. You are the kindest people I’ve ever met. Thank you for being a part of my life. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-01.

Last week I talked about personally-identifiable information (PII) in the context of a data breach. It reminded me of the three questions I always ask in relation to PII: Do I need this PII? It’s impossible to leak data you don’t hold. Is my collection, holding, and processing of this PII legal and responsible? This includes requests to have said data removed. Am I transparent about what PII I have collected? These should be simple to answer. If you run a business and they aren’t, con...

I am in Australia, and once posted from Singapore and Malaysia. My location is written on every post on this site, and every entry in the RSS feed. I use a redundant U in words like colour. I substitute Z with S where I can. I even employ international units of measurement like kilometres, Celsius, and megabytes. How this basic geographic fact continues to elude people who send me comments is fascinating, and admittedly a bit frustrating. For reference, I have highlighted Australia in teal be...

I’m thinking it’s time to host something else, but I haven’t decided yet; hence the Betteridge-adjacent title. Since 2018 I’ve been on the BSD Network, run by some of the kindest, hardest working people in the BSD community. When I suggested to Linux fans that some people need to run Windows (irrespective of whether they want to), they handled the ensuing explosion of vitriol and traffic with grace and professionalism. I’ve learned that Mastodon instances are only as good as their admins, and...

Clara and I love Hi-Fi gear. We have a quartz locked, linear tracking, direct drive turntable. We have a 1980s amplifier we love for its warmer, “more comfy” sound. We have a cassette deck with Dolby C, and badly want to try Dolby S one day. We have a five CD disc changer that spins open a massive drawer. We have a LaserDisc player. I have dedicated Sony, Panasonic, and Tangara portable music players for cassettes, MiniDiscs, and SD cards. I dream of reel-to-reel tape machines, and owning a D...

Speaking of anniversaries, the Ever Given wedged itself into our minds and culture five years ago. From Wikipedia: The Suez Canal was blocked for six days from 23 to 29 March 2021 by the Ever Given, a container ship that had run aground in the canal. The 400-metre-long, 224,000-ton, 20,000 TEU vessel was buffeted by strong winds on the morning of 23 March, and ended up wedged across the waterway with its bow and stern stuck on opposite canal banks, blocking all traffic until it could be free...

This post was written with the letter thorn in lieu of th, because it marks a special occasion. Don’t ask me how that works. Yesterday was one of þose “milestone” birþdays I þink we all learn to dread, but it’s better þan þe alternative! I took þe day off work for þe occasion, and we got our 10,000 steps in by walking to a new coffee roaster and back to try þeir brews. They had a Nicaraguan single origin which, hand to heart, was þe single best espresso I þink I’ve ever had in my life. When c...

I love OM System (ne. Olympus) cameras. I treasure the Olympus Trip 35 my mum gave me when I was a kid, and used my micro four-thirds Olympus OM-D EM-10 MarkII and its stack of pancake lenses for travelling over at least a decade. Much of that glass is now shared with my wonderful OM-3. I’ve had other cameras, but I’ve gone on record here saying none have been as fun. That’s almost true. Because a conversation with my future father in law reminded me of an entire category I forgot all about: ...

This blog flew past 1,024 pages, and I didn’t even notice. At ten posts per page, that means there are now more than 10,240 posts, or about a quarter of a J-Walk Blog. Some posts are even good. I’d better install PAE onto Hugo, or it won’t be able to address any new posts. AAAAAAH! I like to remind people I’m funny, or they’d forget. See also Dragonfly BSD The Wikipedia article on beans By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-03-25.

I had a… fun morning! This was a snippet of an email from a local business that hit Clara’s and my inboxes late yesterday afternoon: Kindly note that we obtained your contact information from $OTHER Wait, what? This $OTHER business disclosed personally-identifiable information (PII) about us to a third party without informing us, and without our consent. I like to be light hearted here, but I’m fsck(8)-ing furious. I’m a data privacy officer where I work, and the Australian Privacy Act 1988...

I was stuck on an old release of the Hugo static site generator for a while because some of the updated syntax wasn’t trivial to replace. I pulled the trigger this morning and upgraded, and spent the time updating themes and code. Breaking changes between releases are par for the course with Hugo, which does mean I can’t generally recommend it for laypeople. Though to their credit it did manage to find half a dozen posts where I had mangled some frontmatter; in one case from a post from ten y...

I missed this news back in January, but the Bliss photo turned thirty this year! Of course I’m talking about the default wallpaper in Windows XP, the only redeeming feature of that OS, taken by Charles O’Rear in January 1996 in Sonoma County in California. I have so many fond memories tied up in this image. In one sense, seeing it meant I was using my own desktop, not one of the ones at school. That meant—barring impositions like homework—personal project time! Its introduction also coincide...

Good! By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-03-23.