2025-01-20 07:11:17
This blog just reached 960 pages of posts. At ten posts per page, that’s even more than 960 posts. Neat.
I used to do this thing here where I’d look at the Tennant industrial cleaning site whenever I reached a pointless numeric milestone like this. To celebrate like old times, I checked to see if Tennant had something for me. Of course they did!
Experience a productive and efficient clean in one pass with a wide sweep path and dual side brushes on the S960 battery ride-on sweeper. Easy to use for all operators, the S960 is ideal for cleaning a variety of indoor and outdoor environments.
Here’s a photo of the unit, complete with its seat and brushes. There’s something about the tail light design I find exceptionally charming:
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-01-20.
2025-01-20 05:32:57
In no particular order:
Bedspreads
The town of Spread, West Virginia, USA
A credit or yield spread, at least in financial terms
I wouldn’t mind a spread distribution though, especially if it possesses excellent dispersion. Of peanut butter.
As an aside, I had to look up the word possesses. It looked like it had way too many letter Ss. Even “letter Ss” has too many Ss.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-01-20.
2025-01-20 05:20:40
I grew up writing C-style code, a little, like this:
sub testing() {
say("Hello, world");
}
Though lately I’ve been doing this instead for readability:
sub testing()
{
say("Hello, world");
}
These are the only bracket layouts that look good to me, though I appreciate it’s subjective. If your project style guide says I should indent brackets into something I think looks awkward, I’ll still comply.
I bring this up though, because I was going through some old assignments out of nostalgia, and remembered this truly cursed style one lecturer insisted we submit code with:
sub testing
{ say("Hello, world"); }
You’re seeing that right, the formatting wasn’t broken or changed by your browser. I remember seeing his lecture slides the first time and thinking… wait, what?
The reason for starting with a tab was so multiple lines would still line up:
sub testing
{ say("Hello, world");
&someMethod(); }
I mean, it works. So did my paintbrush attached to an old vacuum cleaner pipe, complete with handle. I wouldn’t recommend it.
Aesthetically, it’s a mess. The tab at the start means the spacing between brackets is unbalanced, unless you also remember to add a tab before the closing bracket too. Which this lecturer deducted marks for. Elegant, functional code that’s presented well can be beautiful. This ain’t it, chief!
But it gets worse. Say I wanted to add a new line above my print statement. In any other bracket layout, you’d just add the line. But you can’t here, because the first line also has the opening bracket! The number of times I accidentally did this drove me bananas:
sub testing
&methodToInsert("Whoops!");
{ print("Hello, world"); }
It reminds me of inserting code into 8-bit BASIC with numbered lines. The professor turned Java and C++ into BASIC. Incredible!
I’ve been feeling a bit nostalgic for university days again of late. But I don’t miss this. This was terrible.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-01-20.
2025-01-19 06:45:17
You know how I blogged recently about a certain VTuber’s graduation from Hololive? Unrelated to this, Nimi Nightmare debued! (Atom feed here).
It was wonderful hearing her voice and jokes again. Her artists did an amazing job matching her design to her personality as well. Caspurr Catachini, Clara’s and my favourite male VTuber, also lent his creative skills with her lore video which was a fun easter egg.
Based on the fact her merch sold out and had to be changed to pre-order within an hour of her debut, I don’t think I need to wish her any luck or success. But I will anyway :).
Apropos of nothing, I hope she’s able to collab with Dooby soon (shifty eyes). 💛💚
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-01-19.
2025-01-19 06:04:26
I have a draft riffing on something I read recently about how people don’t care about things. It started getting a bit long, and included a lot of semi-related stuff about tech that I thought would make more sense breaking out into its own post. Hey look, that’s this one!
Have you ever noticed that so many things in our daily lives often just… don’t work? How the years go by, and the number of things that don’t work doesn’t seem to be getting any better? Despite our years of accuumulated experience designing, building, and fixing stuff?
I decided to collate a list of things that didn’t work last Saturday:
A driver update for my graphics card broke my desktop. Software would freeze when launching, there were visual artefacts everywhere, and I had to type certain commands blind.
Clara and I created a shared calendar at our paid email provider, following the instructions on their site exactly. Clara didn’t see the shared calendar appear in her account, as the instructions said it would. She created a shared calendar for me, and I couldn’t see it either.
I couldn’t delete a multipart upload on an object store. The command would advise that it was deleted, but then it wasn’t. Was it not GC’d correctly? Did the command actually break? Who knows.
My work laptop decided that I didn’t really want to tether to my work phone, so I had to fall back to using my personal phone. Which also only worked after trying to connect three times.
The lift in our building now blares out a shrill beep whenever it does something. It can be heard echoing down the hallway at all hours of the night.
The POS machine at our local op shop hung using our payment card, so they had to put it through again. So far our statement shows only one transaction, but I still worry a second will appear that I’ll have to chase up.
A search engine’s unwanted AI tool suggested a command to use to fix something which, if I had followed it, would have made the situation comically worse.
We tried paying a water bill, and their site got stuck in an authentication loop, eventually resulting in a blank page.
eBay sent me a notification about a retrocomputer saved search that, when I clicked on it, informed me that it doesn’t ship to my country. It also “suggested” another item to me that didn’t match any of the keywords, and was in fact an inflatable lawn chair. They have a sense of humour at least.
My top-of-the-line iPhone can’t scroll smoothly anymore. I feel like I’m back on my 2007 Palm Centro, and that thing was at least affordable and fit in a pocket.
The Sydney Trains turnstile at our local station refused to engage and open when I tapped my Opal card. Of course when I tapped again, the gate refused to move, citing the fact that I had “already tapped on”.
We had to use one of those self-service checkouts at a restaurant, and the thermal printer jammed printing our receipt. I’m so used to this happening, I fortunately was able to snap a photo of our order number before the screen cleared.
A website I tried to access had a cookie permission popup that was impossible to dismiss. I ended up right-clicking and blocking it with UBlock Origin. But because it had a randomly generated HTML class, I had to do it again when I went to the next page.
Our TV refused to see the HDMI signal from our homelab box, despite being able to SSH into it. A reboot was required.
That was over the course of one day. And I’m sure I’m missing a bunch of other smaller issues.
Now I know what you’re thinking. Ruben, I don’t have that many issues, it’s PEBKAC. Or it’s confirmation bias: I see patterns and behaviour when I seek them out. Technology is infinitely more complicated and complex than it used to be, so in some sense it’s miraculous the number of problems hasn’t jumped up by a similar amount. Legacy tech had its frustrating problems too, back in my day we had punch cards and literal bugs. It’s because of enshittification, specific economic systems, Wall Street, Mercury retrograde, and all that.
I’m sure it’s all true, or at least has whiffs of being so. I’m just pointing out the fact that thirty-something me feels like he’s having the same amount of problems that twenty-something me did. And I have this nagging feeling that fourty and fifty-something me will too.
Do you think that’s part of the reason so many of us are anxious, exhausted, and a bit angry thesedays? We have to use this tech more and more (and more), and the stuff just doesn’t work. They’re like microagressions that build up over the course of a day, until I reach a point where I say NO MORE! So I reach for the TV remote to unwind for a bit, and ABC iView has crashed.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-01-19.
2025-01-19 05:23:10
I slept in yesterday. I’d had a rough Friday at work, and I wasn’t feeling it when I got up at my usual time Saturday morning. I rolled over expecting to sleep for another half an hour, and woke up… at 10:30.
Great! I hear the normal among you say in response. Sleeping in is a wonderful treat for days off, and certainly something many of you don’t get to partake in as often as you’d want. Some of you have young children who get up when they want to, others have early commitments you’d desperately rather substitute for something commencing at a more civilised hour.
Sleeping in is one of those unassailable cultural touchstones. We have this image of the late riser, feeling relaxed and under no time pressure, sauntering into the kitchen in their pyjamas to have a late morning coffee, maybe some orange juice, and a slice of Vegemite toast, perhaps with or without Art Garfunkel. Life is grand. We’re living the dream. We got to sleep in.
Alas, that’s not how my brain works. Having inadvertently slept in, I spent most of my subsequent Saturday in a foggy, lethargic stupor, as though I hadn’t slept enough. It took forever for my brain to turn on, and when it finally did, it was bed time. My head hit the pillow that night feeling tired, a bit irritable, and disappointed. I was granted another day on this beautiful planet, and I spent it feeling disconnected from my brain. Blech! Blech I say!
This happens every time I sleep in, and I tell myself never again. Sleeping in and I aren’t compatible. We harbour no ill will towards each other; there’s no restraining order required. We just implement different ABIs. We respect that about each other. I don’t sleep in, and life is good.
You see, I’m one of those weirdos that likes going to bed early, and rising early in the morning. I have been my whole life. My sister and I used to joke that during school holidays, hers and my sleep patterns would drift further and further apart, until she was heading to bed around the time I was waking up. For those precious moments where we were awake at the same time were cause for celebration, and a reason to get some tasty food.
Mornings are wonderful. The air is probably the freshest it’ll be all day; “smelling of Pears Soap” as Norman Lindsay wrote in The Magic Pudding. Most people are still asleep, so you get some quiet time free of distractions. In places like Singapore, the early morning is the coolest part of the day before the heat and humidity set in, making it perfect for long walks or hikes in the nature reserves.
Perhaps most critically, I also feel as though my brain only engages when it’s woken up in the morning. I need that mental time to prepare for the day, but it’s also more fundamental than that. If my brain doesn’t have that tasty coffee, the fresh morning air, and some RSS, I feel unfulfilled, listless, and… lazy?
To be clear, this isn’t exactly a negative revelation. Early risers are seen as being more studious, lumped in with those people who have “side hustles” or those who are “addicted to studying”. Tell a recruiter that you like getting up early is akin to saying your biggest weakness is that you “work too hard”. It’s certainly convenient preferring early mornings when most of working society is configured to expect people turn up to jobs at that time.
Like most stereotypes though, I don’t think it’s entirely fair. I don’t feel any more productive, happy, or useful than anyone who gets up later. In fact, the most intelligent people in my life would all probably get up at 14:00 if society let them. In the case of where I work, some of the most talented engineers have negotiated exactly that.
Not me though. Give me early mornings. Well, that is, unless I’ve had a bad night or was forced to stay up late the previous day. Then I probably will need the sleep in. Or not, sometimes I find getting up at the same time is important. Maybe. It depends. Sleep is hard.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-01-19.
