Rubenerd

I came late to game consoles. My parents preferred buying computers when my sister and I were kids, which was fine with us given they were more capable and could play better games like the SimCity franchise (versions existed on consoles, but they weren’t the same). Save for a Nintendo Wii when I was a teenager, the only consoles I ever used were with family friends. But then something dangerous appeared as I got older: curiosity. It wasn’t even an interest in the games per se, but I realised ...

Clara and I are thinking of getting a Raspberry Pi 400 (or 500?) as a lounge computer. Currently we use an Apple TV and a PlayStation 3 [sic] as our media playback devices, but the app(lication) selection is beginning to limit what we can do with them. For example, we also want to move off Plex, and the options for Jellyfin aren’t great. The rational thing would be buy to buy a mini PC of some sort, connect it to the TV, then use a wireless keyboard/trackpad combo to control it. But then, whe...

I’ve been on record—geddit?—here stating that MP3s are my preferred audio format. MP3 is no longer patent encumbered, it’s widely compatible with anything I throw them onto, and the quality difference between 320 Kb/s MP3s and higher fidelity formats like FLAC (and ALAC) were imperceptible to me. That was true at the time, but I’ve since proven myself wrong. I can hear the difference. Though it took a few changes in my circumstances to realise. Last year in Vietnam (shoot, I still haven’t pos...

Moving stuff off my personal machine to my new ThinkPad (and clearing up a bunch of state while I’m at it) lead me to a folder of webloc files I must have dragged to my desktop at some point. Turns out, they’re just regular Apple plist files in XML: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> <plist version="1.0"> <dict> <key>URL</key> <string>https://rubenerd.com/</st...

This was a funny one on the work machine yesterday. Why yes client, let’s review these together next weeks! By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-03-21.

Recently I bought and received a ThinkPad E14 Gen 7 to replace both my personal MacBook Air, and my ThinkPad X230 writing machine. I’ll admit this was more in response to what the Mac has become, and ThinkPads were the closest hardware to MacBooks I’ve ever enjoyed using. But truthfully, I had no idea whether it was a good idea. I have been… pleasantly surprised! To understand why, let me discuss first where I’m coming from. Mac people are used to certain things: Crisp, bright IPS displays...