2026-04-25 09:22:33
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 been a charcoal grey colour, but it’s developed an oddly pleasing Farmers Union Iced Coffee patina which I can’t bring myself to retrobright. I expect South Australians get that reference, and nobody else.
My plan had been to use this as a testbed keyboard and case for a modern reproduction board, for which we’re spoiled for choice. I thought it’d be fun to hand solder a faithful reproduction board myself, then source some modern replacement ICs. Alternatively, I could try one of the new FPGA boards that come with all the bells and whistles for connectivity, storage hardware emulation, and display output.
But something gnawed at me, and eventually I decided to see if I could source an original board instead. It seemed… wrong somehow to put a modern board in an old case; even more than doing the opposite. It was screaming out for something of a similar vintage, or at least authentically classic Commodore.
The question was: which one? Spoiler: this one! :D
The Commodore 64 came in many different revisions over its incredible production run from 1982 to 1994. The most well known was the shift from the original breadbin inherited from the VIC-20, to the slimline 64C which matched the Commodore 128. At a passing glance, they look like entirely different machines.
While the difference in design language was striking between these machines, internally there was even more variety. Commodore 64 motherboards can be broadly broken down into three types:
Original motherboards, retroactively dubbed the longboards. These were included in the original breadbins, and took up the entire width and depth of the case. Not to be confused with longboards of a wheel-based nature, though I’m sure you could write a longboard game on a longboard.
The later shortboards, which consolidated components on a physically smaller motherboard with fewer ICs and newer manufacturing processes. Not to be confused with… etc.
Bespoke boards as fitted to the SX-64 luggable, and the later Commodore 64 Games System. I suppose one could classify the MAX Machine here too.
My Commodore 64C has a PAL shortboard as pictured below, and I think it’s beautiful. But I don’t have a longboard, so it seemed fitting to find one to put in the Aldi machine to compare and contrast. Adrian Black notes on his Digital Basement channel that the SID sounds markedly different between the two, for example.
I went searching for an appropriate longboard to pair with this Aldi case and keyboard, and decided on the 250466 from 1986. This was the last longboard Commodore released; some even appeared in early 64Cs. It retained IC compatibility with earlier boards, but consolidated the number of RAM chips down to just two. This likely explains why it’s such a popular choice for people building modern reproductions.
I put in a saved search for this, among the other longboard revisions into the usual auction sites and the like, and waited. A year or so later, and I was pinged by someone selling theirs in reportedly working order. They were also local, which saved massively on postage. Floating on an island continent in the middle of nowhere often leads to shipping costing more than whatever I’ve bought.
And here it is!
The empty space in the lower left looks so weird; I love it:
And here’s the model number and date:
I’d already removed most of the dried thermal paste, but I still need to do some proper cleaning. I also need to dig out my C64 power supply and the requisite cables, which weren’t in the location I was sure I put them last. Because of course they weren’t.
When I find them and finish cleaning, I’ll post a part two with some testing, and hopefully installation into the case :).
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-25.
2026-04-25 04:09:04
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 for mischaracterising your comment. If you really were being a dick, have fun with that. Either way, I thought it might be a fun topic to discuss.
A professional calligrapher is someone who writes for a commission or fee. Unlike a typist or scribe who writes to transcribe ideas into text, calligraphers also approach their craft as art. The style, or way in which the words are written, matter as much as the words themselves.
My mum did classical Western calligraphy, though in Singapore she had also been studying traditional Chinese with ink stones and those beautiful large brushes. She had a few different types of client, but most of her work came from wedding planners. She would receive a couriered list of names, then carefully write onto seating allocation cards for tables, invitations, menus, and signs. While the advent of ubiquitous and affordable desktop publishing and printers made this sort of skill more niche, she was always fielding requests even into the late 1990s. Turns out people like the human touch!
Anyway, professional calligraphy, it’s a thing. I’d share some of my mum’s here, but I couldn’t bare the thought of it being fed into a slop machine. Soz.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-25.
2026-04-24 11:38:23
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 client.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-24.
2026-04-24 06:50:46
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 specifically. We have gloriously long days here by world standards, which is great for someone who professes to be solar powered. I couldn’t live somewhere cold because I can’t stand the weather, but also on account of having such short days in winter. Give me all the sunlight! No damn it, that’s not enough! Okay that’s too much, I do need to sleep sometimes.
But you don’t get something for nothing, and sunshine pulls in a dependency in the great package manager of life: UV. Why yes, I did just coach a comment about the real world in the context of a specific computer tool, because I’m absolutely hopeless. Life should really be running pkgsrc; it’d make things much nicer.
Point is, Australia basks in UV, even more than Southeast Asia. I could spend a day wandering around Singapore or Kuala Lumpur without a care in the world beyond the humidity, but here I need to slather myself with sunscreen and wear long-sleeve shirts lest I end the day looking like a ripe tomato. Nobody needs that in their life, even those with a vitamin D deficiency.
Now that’s not the end of the world. Collared shirts are basically my “uniform” anyway, and I substituted my moisturiser for one with sunscreen as well. You… you do use moisturiser, don’t you? Recently though I even started carrying a sun umbrella during the middle of the day to prevent the worst of it hitting my frame, and it has been game changing. I even wrote a terrible poem about it, which a teacher even asked if they could use for their class and I died of embarrassment.
Even with years of such precautions however, I noticed a tiny black mark on my arm while having a shower. A lot of things come to me in the shower: blog ideas, technical solutions, water. But the realisation that I could have a skin cancer was enough to make me shake as though the hot water had gone off. What do I do?
The answer was obvious: see a specialist. As it happens, our local medical centre where Clara and I see our GP now has a dermatologist, so I booked an appointment and proceeded to have nightmares about metastasised cells overnight. Family history, and all that. Fortunately, upon seeing this tiny mark on my arm, the specialist laughed and informed me that I “almost certainly” had a blue mole, something I had no idea was a thing. They’re considered benign, but just to be sure it’s not something more serious I’ve got an appointment next week for removal. The relief was indescribable.
(Also, she claimed I was the first adult male patient to have one in a “long while”. Gender dysphoria cough)!
Anyway, the point of this post wasn’t to get gross, but to let you know that if you’re at all unsure about a mark on yourself, and you live somewhere that gets a lot of sunshine (or maybe even not, the sun doesn’t discriminate), get yourself checked. It could be among the most consequential decisions you make.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-24.
2026-04-23 06:25:21
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 sometimes quite useful, but it comes with a lot of baggage I’m increasingly unhappy about. But lately it’s as though my body is having a physiological reaction to notification fatigue. I know people who’ve had phantom vibrations in their pockets for years, but it’s only started affecting me in the last couple of years. It’s creepy. I didn’t sign up for this. How do I turn these phantom vibrations off? How do I opt out?
I figure that if we can invert sound waves to create noise-cancelling headphones, we can invert movement and create vibration-cancelling slabs. Surely that’s how that works, right? Right? I could build one and put it on Kickstarter, and sell it as a health device to recover from excessive phone use! I could call it the pocket vibrator to… hmm, maybe I should workshop the name and… pardon, give me a moment, someone is sending me a message.
Reaches into pocket.
…
DAMN IT.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-23.
2026-04-22 05:59:13
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 legislation that could be summarised as “the tech won’t work” would take so long.
Apologies for the spam. When you come to Rubenerd, I want you to get complete nonsense, not half-baked :).
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-22.
