Rubenerd

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 registered since I moved away from Singapore and retired my .sg addresses. As I had to with those, registering this new Australian domain entailed filling out several forms to verify and prove my eligibility. Surprisingly, there were no questions about Don Bradman, or the rural Victorian town where one can find serenity. I assume this was an oversight.

For someone who grew up moving around without a “base” or roots, staking an electronic claim on a small part of my new home felt more meaningful than I expected.

My pages continue to be encoded with en-SG, because that’s the language I (mostly) grew up under. They use 24 hour time, leading zeroes on dates and times, and they say lorry not truck. Evidently you can take the angmoh out of Singapore, but you can’t take Singapore out of the angmoh. Aiyo, and wah lao eh.

Okay, but why?

Now I can tell you’re all fascinated by this, but it leads to the obvious question of why. I’ve accumulated twenty years of inbound links, the majority of which will never be updated. Why do I this to myself? And why www?

A few reasons. I’m tired of telling people I’m not in the US just because I write in English. I’ve started putting www back into my domains again, because I miss when we had a Web, not a small collection of social network silos. I’m also increasingly viewing ties to the current US administration as a geopolitical liability, if I’m being candid. Bringing it back in-house makes sense.

Mostly though, I’m based in Australia. That also happens to be a sentence with six words.

Wrapping up

My email address is still on .com for now, while I decide what to do about that. If MWL has his way, that might yet be moved to an .au too under my own server for friends and family, as I currently do for our private chat, file syncing, game servers, and wiki.

I’m also still not on IPv6 yet, for reasons that are somewhat outside my control at the moment, but I hope to have addressed (AAAAAAH!!) soon.

I’ve updated internal links to point to my new domain, and set up redirects from the old address. Let me know if you see anything weird. Apologies if I spammed your RSS reader.

Anyway, my blog is now Australian! We invented the pavlova, flight recorder, and Wi-Fi. We make the best bikkies, scones, coffee, peanut butter, and beer. Our eagles are bigger, and our spiders more poisonous. We have the world’s ugliest national flag, and our national colours look suspiciously Brazilian. The sound of magpies at sunrise. Halal snack packs. Cabramatta Vietnamese food. Our current prime minister can speak in complete sentences. Medicare. We can fly to Asia and not worry about timezones. Hakos Baelz (Bae to her fans), Magda, and Lee Lin Chin are national treasures. Spinach and feta rolls. Cricket has hard balls. Democracy sausages. We’re girt [sic] by sea, whatever that means. Potato scallops… wait, fritters… wait, cakes. Fahrenheit, is that like a furlong? Togs… wait, bathers… wait, swimmers. Taking the metro, then the ferry under the Sydney Harbour Bridge to get to work. It’s a Farmers Union Iced Coffee, or it’s nothing.

As my German father learned to say: Australia, you’re standing in it. And now you’re reading it too. Shiok! Wait, damn it. 🇦🇺 🇸🇬

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:

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 comments for weeks from those saying I’m:

• Listening to things wrong

• I purchased the wrong device

• There’s no point to getting into audio format $FOO

• My ears are rubbish

• I’m a fool

• I’m deliberately misleading, or a liar

• Some combination of the above

The funniest part is that the unsolicited advice I receive is all contradictory, proving just how subjective all this is. A tiny part of me is curious about opening a forum and just have them fight among themselves without my input. Without my AUX, one could say.

People also seem oddly entitled to demand things of me when it comes to music reproduction. When my post about the Sony NW-A55 Walkman was mentioned on Hacker News, I was flooded by email from people indignant that I didn’t explain $FOO about it to their level of satisfaction, as though I owe Internet strangers an explanation. I apologise to those who expect formal proofs or feasibility studies like I write at work, but I’m not going to do that for a personal device I’ve bought for entertainment and fun.

If you disagree with the way I listen to music, that’s great! It means you’re a functional human being with different interests, circumstances, preferences, use cases, health, constraints, experiences, motives, priorities, and tastes. Thing is, I’m a human with these attributes as well. We can coexist!

My blog is an outlet to explore things I’ve learned or found interesting. I am not an audiophile. If you’re more of an expert than me (and that wouldn’t be hard), start your own blog and write about it. That would be far more useful for me to learn from… and it might just give you a taste for what it’s like being in my shoes.

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 publish this post.

That leaves us with Phil Harvey’s excellent ExifTool. It can do a tonne of stuff, but my primary use case is removing EXIF metadata before uploading an image to the interwebs.

To use it against a target image:

$ exiftool -ALL= "$IMAGE"

This will create a backup of your image. To safely remove the metadata in-place:

$ exiftool -overwrite_original_in_place -ALL= "$IMAGE"

With thanks to devnull(at)apt332 for the FreeBSD port, and gdt for NetBSD/pkgsrc.

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.

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 supplies, and for me it’d help me organise all my soldering kit and computer repair tools, especially when they’re not in use. We’d been using a couple of IKEA LISABO kitchen tables since our first studio apartment together, but they get messy quickly given we had nowhere to put things, especially projects that were in progress.

Armed with this specific requirement, we hit the furniture stores and soon discovered… desks with integrated shelves aren’t really a thing anymore. I remember being a kid in the 1990s and 2000s, and these being absolutely everywhere. They’d have spaces for a tower PC, a monitor, and a couple of shelves for things like printers, PC speakers, a stack of books, and maybe a scanner or fax machine. Now, the best you can hope for is a business-oriented desk with a single shelf above the table, and a business price to match. I suppose it’s not that surprising, but it was disappointing.

Living in an apartment does limit our ability to build our own furniture with loud powertools, and we weren’t in a hurry to spend what we had after the house deposit on some custom furniture (though that would be the dream). We did briefly entertain the idea of drilling shelves directly into the wall, but that came with other fun challenges I may discuss in a future shaggy-dog story.

But then a thought dawned on me: is a phrase with seven words. AAAAAAH! I was walking past a line of IKEA desks, and noticed they were at least 30 cm narrower than the kitchen tables we were using as desks. We scurried back to the shelving department, and noted a BILLY bookshelf case was… about 30 cm deep.

We scurried home and did some rough sketches that were definitely not done with box-drawing characters (cough). This was the space we determined the LISABO took up:

┌────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ LISABO Dining Table                    │
│                                        │
│                                        │
│                                        │
│                                        │
│                                        │
│                                        │
│                                        │
└────────────────────────────────────────┘

Two full-width BILLY bookcases, a half-width BILLY bookcase, and a LAGKAPTEN table top fit in the exact same horizontal footprint, and with barely 10 cm additional depth into the room. We ordered all the parts, then had it delivered a few days later.

┌───────┬────────────────┬───────────────┐
│ BILLY │ BILLY          │ BILLY         │
│ Case  │ Case           │ Case          │
├───────┴────────────────┴───────────────┤
│ LAGKAPTEN Table Top                    │
│                                        │
│                                        │
│                                        │
│                                        │
│                                        │
└────────────────────────────────────────┘

The plan was to use shelves in the BILLY cases to extend the desk into, then have shelves above for doors and components. I measured the height of a LISABO table, then place shelves in the BILLY cases that match that as closely as possible. Then using some height-adjustable legs, I set the height of table to sit flush with those shelves.

I’m pretty chuffed with how it turned out. I’m also loving the wooden vibe I’m getting from it as well; just like what my dad had in his study in the early 1990s. It also pairs perfectly with my existing bookcase and doors to the right.

It’s not perfect, and I haven’t put everything back yet. My OCD side would have preferred the narrower BILLY case be in the middle for symmetry, but having it on the side meant I didn’t have as many vertical supports in the middle of the table where they’d be a pain. The tower computers also don’t push all the way back, because those middle BILLY shelves are structural and fixed in place. But otherwise, this is so much better than what I had before.

I’ve never had shelves beneath a table before, but turns out this is great for cable management. I can have the power points route their cables into a couple of plastic tubs, and other lesser-used items can sit in boxes out of the way. I have all of my tools within easy reach, and in a pinch I can get stuff down from the cupboards at the top.

I’ve got the desk and shelves separated about a centimetre for feeding cables through, but the next step will be to push them against each other properly, then drill some cable grommets.

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.

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 a small group of people who ruin it for everyone else. I can’t say the number of times I’ve removed a single person’s bag of smelly garbage and cigarette butts from the blue paper recycling skips in our building. I’m almost envious of those who live their lives without a care in the world like that, but then I’d be the kind of person who doesn’t care about others, and that would make me a sociopath (who smokes, apparently).

Anyway! This happens in Australian food courts too, and places like IKEA. Most have red bins for rubbish, and yellow bins for bottles and cans. Naturally, there’s a small subset of people who don’t care, and stuff their rubbish into the yellow bins which then some poor soul has to sort through after the fact. Ask me how I know how that feels!

The first bit of technology to address this came in the form of a modified aperture for waste disposal. Most garbage bins have large openings to permit a wide variety of refuse, but some clever spark in waste design realised that cans and bottles have a uniform shape across at least one of their axis. Aka, they’re circular! By shaping the recycling bin slot into the shape of a circle, disposing of recyclable items becomes easy, and other forms of rubbish like square lunch trays and bags becomes trickier. I’m a massive fan of simple, functional design like this.

There was just one problem. While such a design must have cut down on the amount of rubbish ingress into the recycling bins, it evidently didn’t entirely solve the issue. Because while taking my can of beverage to a North Shore food court a few weekends ago, I was presented with following interface (forgive the awkward position, I was in a hurry):

That’s right, the simple circular opening had been closed off behind an electromagnetic flap, and the passive interface of throwing away something has become a process. According to the instructions on the device, one needs to first “scan” their drink container before being granted permission to “drop” it.

Now, to a technical person like me with experience working in recycling centres (albeit briefly), I can see the benefit. By forcing people to scan whatever they’re about to dispose of, the system can verify it’s eligible for recycling. This means the material in the bin will only be recyclable containers. Wonderful, right!?

Well, not quite. I have a smart, practical, and above all attractive readership, and I’ll bet you can think of at least a few theoretical ways why introducing this may be an issue. But I can even speak from practical experience. In the time I was sitting near one of these machines, I saw at least a dozen people approach the bin, attempt to force their bottles through the shut door, get confused, and instead throw them away in the rubbish bin next to it.

This illustrates several key flaws in such a technical design:

• Most people will choose the path of least resistance. If there’s a large, open rubbish bin next to a recycle bin that requires work, they will choose the rubbish bin.

• When (and I use the term deliberately, not if) the computer or its system goes down, you have an inoperable recycling bin. I love computers and spend my life using them, but that also makes me keenly aware of their limitations, especially in a rough-and-tumble environment like that.

• The interface was sufficiently obtuse, confusing, or at least novel, that you even had people who want to do the right thing giving up. I only noticed while writing this post that the arrow on the device has a stylised barcode on it; that’s really poor documentation.

The latter issue may eventually address itself with time, as people get used to seeing these reverse-vending machines everywhere. But I’ve also lived in the real world for long enough to know the first point will likely win out, despite what greenies like me may otherwise want or expect from our fellow humans. The outcome will be cleaner recycling, and a lot more bottles and cans in landfill.

☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎

I’m reminded of that old Far Side comic where Gary Larson drew a red indicator light above a bathroom, which would fire off a klaxon every time someone exited having not washed their hands. In my perfect future, we’d have a similar device that would detect someone throwing rubbish into the recycling, and shine a spotlight on them for all to see. Of course I’m kidding! Cough.

I’ll be interested to see if these recycling bins still exist in six months. My hunch is they’ll be removed.

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 with post-framework web design” to my CV ;)

I feel (a) old and (2) relieved we’ve come back around to this :).

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 maximum number of connections have been reached. Please try again later.

I wonder how many other sites still have a codified ceiling on the number of visitors? It reminds me of the old days of CGI.

This used to be much more common in my experience, but thesedays sites are expected to scale indefinitely. Or in the case of one of our banks, let their servers grind to a near halt when too many account holders try to log in at once. If I were more cynical, I’d claim they do it because they have plausible deniability among a client base who may not be tech savvy. “Not sure what you’re talking about, it loads fine for us! Have you tried turning your modem off and on again?”

Calculating these limits when you’re talking about database transactions, processes, threads, or memory is somewhat easier, because you’re dealing with finite, measurable metrics. But my favourite are those (almost always rude) client calls that begin by asking how many clients can access a remote desktop, without any context about what applications the clients will run, or what their connections are. Sure thing, and how long is a piece of string, good sir?