2026-11-03 04:56:32
Clara and I went to the local Sydney Hammerbarn recently, and decided to try somewhere new for our morning coffee. We left Thornleigh station on the Aldi side, and ended up walking past this cute cafe called the Dinoni on Railway Parade we hadn’t seen before.
The decor was incredibly charming, and the Xmas decorations were already up. We tried their breakfast rolls (technically more lunch for us at that point, cough) and our usual espressos and piccolos. They were perfect.
The warmer spring weather was so beautiful, we sat outside under the awning and watched the world go by. Railway Parade runs parallel to the busy highway, but it was so peaceful behind all the buildings here you’d hardly know. We waved at a few cyclists, were greeted briefly by a flock of cockatoos… more of this sort of traffic, please!
The location also allowed us to train watch, which was rather opportune for two massive nerds. We got a glimpse of two of the shiny new Mariyung express trains passing each other:
We even caught a freight snake passing by at a leisurely pace. Lots of Maersk and OOCL containers, so they must have come from the port down in Botany, or even down in Melbourne. Maersk is Danish, so they’re a long way from home:
This was honestly one of the most memorable and wonderful late mornings I’ve had in a long time. Sitting at a cute coffee shop with my wife in this sort of weather is peak living. I wouldn’t have changed a thing.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-11-03.
2026-11-02 11:43:05
I used to read and listen to a lot of pop psychology figures back in the day, until I heard about “effective altruism”. The underlying premise of this never sat well with me, and ultimately lead me to question a lot of the “wisdom” I’d absorbed during that time. Recently, an article in The Guardian about a dystopian new game show reminded me of another example from that time.
☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎
Imagine you’re a game show contestant, and you have $50,000 on the board. The host offers you a difficult “double or nothing” question, or you can leave with your current winnings. Which would you pick?
If you’re like me, you’d take the $50,000. The chance for $100,000 is a gamble with unfavourable odds, so why risk losing everything?
This is irrational according to pop psychology, because we’re letting “loss aversion” cloud our judgement. We’re not “losing” anything if we take a chance, because we started the game with $0. Why not let it ride?
I remember being unconvinced. True, we started the game with $0. But then we won $50,000. That’s money in the bank. The way I see it, we then started another game with $50,000, and the potential to double or lose it. This changes the calculus for me.
There’s also the corollary to consider. If another player took the risk and won, and left with $100,000, the implication here is I should feel like I “lost” $50,000 by comparison. Except I wouldn’t think this, because I never had that doubled money! It’s “loss aversion” again, but perhaps in the opposite way to what they pop psychologist intended.
☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎
There were three key lessons I took from this metaphor, contrived as it is.
Precedes two. Thank you.
What’s “rational” in a financial sense depends on your circumstances. I consider it logical to want to preserve what I’ve gained, or invest/spend it in other ways. To a millionaire, gambling $50,000 to double it might be more rational.
Risk carries reward, but in the words of the late financial analyst Kenny Rogers, you need to know when to hold em, and when to fold em. Evaluating the level of risk you’re willing to stomach, and leaving the table having made an informed decision, is how you avoid being played.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-11-02.
2026-11-02 10:59:42
More images I save from sites thesedays don’t end up showing thumbnails in file browsers. For example, Dolphin on KDE:
And the Finder on macOS:
Why is that? I assumed maybe the embedded thumbnails were getting corrupted somehow, or there was a resource fork issue saving images on my OpenZFS volumes over Samba.
No, turns out it’s much simpler than that. Browsers are getting the file extension wrong, as is the case with this tea photo:
$ file floejt-black-tea.jpg
==> floejt-black-tea.jpg: ISO Media, AVIF Image
Another common one is webp:
$ file ipmi.jpg
==> ipmi.jpg: RIFF (little-endian) data, Web/P image, VP8 encoding
What I suspect is happening is web servers and browsers are negotiating supported file formats, and the server is delivering an alternative format to save bandwidth, but the browser is still saving the file with the original JPEG extension. Hence the mismatch.
Interestingly, it doesn’t happen all the time. Some images I download are saved with the correct extension, even if the image in the page source is listed as JPEG. Maybe it’s a race condition?
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-11-02.
2026-11-02 05:49:12
I can’t remember if I told the story before, but in the Before Times™ I opened a trading account with CommSec, the public brokerage associated with Australia’s largest bank. Or I tried to, at least. After registering, I got an email welcoming me to CommSec, in which they referred to me by my full name. Except, it had a problem:
Welcome, Ruben Middle Schade.
Just in case it’s unclear, my middle name is not “middle”!
I thought it might have been a mail merge issue, but I logged in and confirmed my name was listed as “Middle” everywhere. Likewise, every piece of correspondence in print and email referred to me as such.
How did this happen? I had a few theories:
I absent-mindedly wrote my name as “middle” on the signup form, which slipped through.
A system internal to CommSec transcribed my name incorrectly. I have family and friends who work in finance, and it’s surprising how many manual processes are still involved.
Cocaine’s a hell of a drug.
Number (1) seemed more likely at first, so I was ready to blame myself. Except, there are systems that are supposed to catch such mistakes. Signing up to a new financial account in Australia requires 100 points of ID. These documents clearly, and unambiguously, refer to you by name. If I did write my name wrong, how did CommSec’s systems not flag this obvious discrepancy between that mistake and my real name, and immediately fail to activate the account?
To be crystal clear, “Middle” wasn’t listed as my middle name on any of my provided documentation, yet their identity verification erroneously matched them, and proceeded to create the account. That’s… more than a bit worrying. I’d blame people using “AI” for this mistake in 2026, but they didn’t even have that as an excuse back then.
So what about option (2)? How likely was it that I failed verification, but that my account was created in their system anyway? Or was it a transcription error? Again, I find both of these difficult to understand.
As for option (3), I wouldn’t dare cast stereotypes about people who work in a specific industry. This was merely a joke, like listing someone’s middle name as “Middle”, then verifying it against documents where the person’s name isn’t “Middle”. That’d be funny.
What proceeded felt like a comedy of errors. I enquired to CommSec asking if I could change my middle name to… my middle name. I expected this to be easy, because it was such an obvious mistake. That was on me.
Their support team rejected my initial request, telling me I’d need to request a “change of name form”. I objected, because I wasn’t “changing” my name, I was correcting a mistake with my real name. But fine, I downloaded the form, completed it, and returned it with a cover letter explaining the bizarre situation. CommSec’s system denied the request, citing insufficient evidence for my name change.
I wasn’t changing my name, I was fixing my name! GAH!
I’ll admit at that point I lost interest, and went with another broker. This turned out to be a fateful decision, because I ended up paying much lower fees, and I got access to some foreign markets. The capital gains from these investments were instrumental in Clara and I buying our first home. So, thanks CommSec! I think?
Every month or so since, I’d receive a newsletter from CommSec advising me of market conditions, and new features I couldn’t use. This was quite funny. But it wasn’t to last:
Dear Ruben,
We are writing to let you know that your account(s) will be closed, as they have no holdings or balances and have not been used to transact for an extended period of time. These accounts may have been opened directly with CommSec, CommBank, or with one of the brokers CommSec has acquired. Please note that your account may be suspended prior to closure.
As part of this account closure process and in accordance with ASX Settlement Operating Rule 7.1.11(a) and CommSec’s Terms and Conditions, we are also formally notifying you of the termination of your CHESS sponsorship agreement.
Goodbye, Mr Middle, we hardly knew ye.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-11-02.
2026-11-01 05:20:50
Last Wednesday I asked if it was time to get into domestic LTO. I reasoned that with the growth in slop-fuelled demand for hard drives and silicon, enterprise tape backups were interesting and potentially viable again, even in a residential or homelab setting. I also not so subtly implied that even if this wasn’t true, I like tinkering with different tech.
The response on Mastodon and in email was surprisingly supportive of the idea, acknowledging that its trade-offs were offset by having airgapped backups on a dependable medium that hasn’t seen prices skyrocket; at least to the extent other storage mediums have.
(Usually when I talk about any tech at all, a loud chorus will approach me telling me why it’s terrible and Here Be Dragons. I also had two people explain to me what LTO was, despite the fact I explained I had commercial experience with it. I guess some people like explaining things).
Less than a week after I posted that, Nick Indge over on Ars Technica caught this Fujifilm press release:
TOKYO, October 29, 2026 - FUJIFILM Corporation has decided to invest approximately 10 billion yen at its Kanagawa Factory, Odawara Site to increase its production capacity for data storage magnetic tape by approximately five times. The investment will strengthen Fujifilm’s stable supply system for magnetic tape in response to growing data archiving demand accompanying the spread of generative AI.
Magnetic tape can store large volumes of data over long periods at low cost and can also be physically isolated from networks.
As an aside, Odawara? One of my favourite cities in Japan!? I wonder if they do tours of their tape facilities, and/or give out free samples (cough)?
That’s decided then, Clara and I are going to give it a shot. Watch this space.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-11-01.
2026-11-01 05:16:29
Writing this post was a journey. It was turning into one of the longest I’d ever written. In the end, the process of writing it lead me to conclude that the entire exercise was a bad idea, so I’ve reduced it to the stub you’re reading now.
NFS is sufficiently broken on the Mac that it’s not worth using. Stick with Samba.
I’ll be adding more notes onto our family wiki if you really want to try, but I can’t recommend it.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-11-01.
