2025-07-30 07:18:02
We haven’t done a mug post in a while. This is my Hatsune Miku mug, everyone’s favourite Japanese idol!
The story for this one is a bit different from the others. Clara and I had booked last minute to Melbourne a couple of years ago, and we ended up at a budget hotel that didn’t even include a proper separated bathroom or crockery. It was clean and otherwise nice, but it was a weird space.
I like having a mug of water by the bed when I sleep, so what was a person to do? On a lark we were walking past a JB Hi-Fi on the first day, and we saw Miku beaming at us from the shelf. She served us well on that trip, and I hand carried her on the flight back so she wouldn’t break.
The only downside is she’s not dishwasher safe, but she only ever has black coffee and tea.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-07-30.
2025-07-29 21:03:23
Oh hi, I didn’t see you there. I was just reading R.L. Dane’s thoughts about his favourite graphical software, and was such a spectacularly sublime software sojourn, I wished my own dear readers could also partake in a similar experience. I’ve thus collated an incomplete but otherwise enjoyable list of my own favourite graphical software, in the hopes that it’ll be as equally entertaining and enjoyable.
Let’s begin, as all good things do, in the kitchen of my NEC APEX 486.
Those of you familiar with those incipit “top ten fails!!1!eleventy!” videos and listicles that boring people regurgitate to fill vacant space and sell ads may recognise this immediately. For the rest of you, this is Microsoft Bob, and it’s one of the most charming programs ever written.
Bob entered the fray in the mid-1990s as an answer to Packard Bell’s Navigator. We may have picked up a bootleg copy from, shall we say, a venue of questionable repute when we first moved to Singapore. It was so odd! A smiley face with black-rimmed glasses staring at us, with screenshots of a home environment on the back of the box. My sister and I were utterly captivated in a way we normally only were with Maxis games. Only this was nominally productive, with the ability to launch programs as you furnished the rooms. And best of all, it had that gorgeous dithered appearance even if you were running in higher colour modes. The bleeps and bloops, the custom guides, the pretty scenery, what wasn’t there to love?
It was a commercial failure, and spawned many of those aforementioned listicles from people who doubtless never used it. I thought it was fun, and it remains a fixture of my retro PCs to this day.
If you venture over to the little breakfast table near the fridge there, you may see a binder, and a little launcher for another binder. A very special one that I’ve talked about here many, many times. Click!
Ah yes, who could forget the majesty that is Lotus Organiser! This is version 5 as shipped with SmartSuite Millennium Edition, the penultimate release and my personal favourite. Organiser started as Threadz, a personal information manager (PIM) tool out of the UK, and it was developed over the course of the 1990s and into the early 2000s.
Organizer was designed around the concept of a personal Filofax, those cute binders that organised people carried around before PDAs. To say I was captivated by it as a kid would be an understatement you could file away in a cute Filofax. I loved loved LOVED customising all the colourful tabs, the cute fake leather colours and patterns, and filling it with contacts and notes. I even got it syncing with my childhood Palm III at the time, thanks to Lotus bundling a tool to integrate with HotSync.
Years later I would find a home with nvALT on the Mac for some of what I was using this for, but no single piece of software has scratched that itch quite the same way as Organiser. It wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it was definitely mine. Freakishly so.
Let’s head back to the kitchen now, and click that handsome picture of a wheel hanging on the door there.
This is what we in the industry call a twofer! What we have here is Netscape Navigator, my gateway to the World Wide Web when I was a kid. The layout, the shooting stars around the N logo as pages loaded, the What’s New! and What’s Cool! buttons, it was all so optimistic. Remember that, when the Web was optimistic? Someone should write a post about that.
The sneaky screenshot I’ve included to maintain continuity is of the Mac OS 9.2.1 installer, and specifically the Finder in its later Platinum garb. I arrived to the Mac ecosystem much later than R.L. Dane, having received a blueberry iMac DV for Christmas in the late 1990s. But I did have some experience with System 7 at school, and I remember being so captivated by the Finder. You could rearrange icons exactly where you wanted, click that resize button to have the window snap to exactly the right size. It was so tremendously satisfying and usable in a way no other file manager has been, before or since (not even the Mac OS X Finder, or its NeXT precursor). A couple of terminal-based ones have, but that’s for another post.
Back to the kitchen now for the final program, and I think it’s time to unwind a bit with some llamas on the counter there. May I present my favourite music player of all time:
We all knew it was coming: Winamp. Specifically the later 2.xx releases, which had everything you needed and nothing else. Like Organizer’s binder, and Bob’s entire house, Winamp crammed an entire Hi-Fi stack into a small window you could float off to the side; and in far less space than those Creative or ESS decks. Dull hipsters would come to resent skeuomorphic design in later years, primarily because they lost their souls in a sea of flat UI out of which we’re only just extricating ourselves. But the fact such rich, detailed, intuitive interfaces with whimsy and flair could be represented in so few colours and low resolutions was impressive. Same goes for so much 8-bit software too, but that’s also for another time.
I would later come to love the classic iTunes interface when my library got massive, but Winamp got me through so much of school. I’d load up a playlist of classical to study, or bossa nova to relax, or 80s British synthpop when I needed a boost. It was all there, and it was awesome.
Well that’s it for today. I have so many more programs, some of which are decidedly more modern than what I’ve shared here. But this was fun. Maybe we can do the next installment in the lounge, or maybe even out on the terrace. Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to check out R.L. Dane’s post too.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-07-29.
2025-07-29 17:14:27
David Gerard shared a great post on the Orange Peanut Gallery from Anthropic, an “AI” company. They’re throwing weekly rate limits onto their code generator, and it has people concerned.
They should be! Generative AI tech is exquisitely expensive to run. Only private investment, venture capital funding, and hubris is keeping the ship afloat, and only the latter is an infinite resource. Expect to see more announcements like this.
None of these companies are profitable, so their reported revenues are also meaningless. Worse, their capital expenses are increasing as their models and GPU requirements grow. Only the shovel vendor Nvidia is making money from this pyrite goldrush, and they’re missing earnings forecasts now too. That’s a worry.
We’ve been through bubbles before. Some tech comes out the other side, like the Web after the dot com crash. Others, like the Metaverse and NFTs, are consigned to the anals of history, on account of them not making logical or business sense.
For tech that has received more hype and PR spin than anything else in living memory, it’s shocking how little it’s actually delivered, either in functionality or finances. Years into this, and these companies have failed to deliver a profitable service people are willing to pay for when subsidised, let alone for their true cost.
The fallout from this bubble bursting is going to be a mess, and everyone who’s played a role in hyping it up will be responsible. I hope next time we’ll be wiser, but I said the same thing after blockchain.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-07-29.
2025-07-27 15:43:25
I recently installed DR DOS 6.0 in a virtual machine for fun. I’d never used it before (or if I did, I can’t remember), and it was a great way to use something novel but familar when dealing with the brain fog and fatigue of a flu relapse! I was up to speed faster than I thought I would be, thanks in part to Digital Research’s excellent documentation. I should write a post about that.
Now with a functional DR DOS 6.0 environment, I wondered what the next step would be. Obviously my beloved Brown Bag Software PowerMenu and Digital Research GEM would be great, but Windows 3.1 (specifically the later Workgroups flavour) seemed like the Final Boss. Microsoft’s infamous AARD code would generate an obtuse error on early 3.1 beta installers when run on DR DOS, so it seemed fitting to name this VM AARDvark. Thank you.
Let’s attach the first Windows 3.11 disk and run A:\SETUP.EXE. Will we get a functional installer?
Well, aren’t we off to a great start! I think the last time I saw that error was back in 2015-ish, when I was messing with some old versions of QEMM386 I’d bought from someone. I’d never seen the error prior, presumably because I grew up on MS-DOS 6.0 [sic].
It’s worth pointing out DR DOS handles EMS, XMS, and the high memory area differently from MS-DOS. 286 and earlier machines can invoke HIDOS.SYS in their CONFIG.SYS, similar to HIMEM.SYS on MS-DOS:
DEVICE=C:\DRDOS\HIDOS.SYS
For 386 and later machines, you only need to load EMM386.SYS, similar to EMM386.EXE on MS-DOS:
HIDOS=ON
DEVICE=C:\DRDOS\EMM386.SYS
Evidently Windows didn’t like this, so I commented these lines out and rebooted.
Okay, let’s try again. A:\SETUP.EXE:
That looked better! I could proceed with the installer as normal, though I soon got an error that I was running with an EGA card instead of VGA, which it doesn’t support. This was unrelated to DR DOS, so I fixed this and restarted.
The first two disks copied over just fine. But when it prepared to enter the GUI part of the installer, we got some fireworks:
It references an error running in Standard Mode, so I thought it might still be an extended memory error. I noticed the setup program loaded an “XMS memory manager” when first starting, which might not play with DR DOS. Maybe if I could get DR DOS’s EMM386.SYS working, we’d be off to the races.
I wondered if the shockingly good DOSBook reference manual had any information about Windows. It was easy enough to invoke:
C:\>HELP windows
It returned this in its index:
Windows
/WINSTD option
EMM386.SYS
Interesting! I looked up and:
DR DOS 6.0 came out in 1991, which predates Windows 3.1x. But is Windows 3.0 similar enough? I updated my CONFIG.SYS:
DEVICE=C:\DRDOS\EMM386.SYS /WINSTD
Then I ran SETUP.EXE again. Alas, though perhaps unsurprisingly, I was back at Attempt 1 with an incompatible XMS implementation.
Now, if I were living in 1991, I would have called the provided DR support number, or logged into a BBS to see if anyone else had the same issue. Doing either would have likely landed me on this same file provided by Novell Desktop Systems in 1992: The DR DOS 6.0 Update for Windows 3.1. Thank you, Internet Archive!
According to the supplied README.1ST file:
The files and information enclosed in this Windows 3.1 update contain enhancements for your DR DOS 6.0 operating system specifically and only in the area of Windows 3.1 compatibility. These enhancements include:
Full support for Windows 3.1.
The DR DOS EMM386.SYS memory manager now supports upper memory while running Windows 3.1 in Standard and Enhanced Mode.
Nice! It also claims that the DR DOS equivilents of SMARTDRV.EXE and HIMEM.SYS that Windows 3.1 installs are superior, so you should remove these from your CONFIG.SYS.
I extracted the ZIP to a disk image, then ran the update. Note the space; the parameters are for the target drive, and the target folder:
A:\> UPDATE C: DRDOS
Donezo. I restarted, ran SETUP.EXE again, and success!
The installer proceeded as normal, and I was left with a familiar Windows 3.1 desktop. I’ve installed drivers, applications, Central Point PC Tools, and the Windows Entertainment Pack, and have had no problems whatsoever.
Certain Windows applications require SHARE.EXE to be running, which DR DOS also includes:
:: AUTOEXEC.BAT
C:\DRDOS\SHARE.EXE
I let the Windows for Workgroups setup detect applications already installed on the system, which lead it to create shortcuts for the default XY Write tool invoked with EDITOR, and an interesting screen locking utility:
I also took the liberty of rebranding Program Manager, and the MS-DOS Prompt to something more DR DOS-like. Seeing that VER string in a window on Windows 3.1 is such a damned novelty, I can’t help but grin!
I think I might have a new favourite pre-Windows 95 environment. DR DOS 6.0 feels like it boots faster than MS-DOS 5.0 (the closest analogue from Microsoft), and the tools are more sophisticated. But that’s for another post.
If you scrolled to the end and didn’t want to read the journey, get a copy of the DR DOS 6.0 Update for Windows 3.1 and you’ll be good. Or run DR DOS 7.0, which I assume has these patches pre-insalled.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-07-27.
2025-07-27 07:21:48
First of all, I wanted to thank everyone who sent comments regarding my last post about tech optimism. I suspected nothing I wrote in that was novel or unusual, but it’s clearly a feeling many of us are having. I still don’t think I fully articulated why the modern tech space makes me feel so despondent, but I’m glad I at least got the feeling out there.
Anyway! I do enjoy writing about interesting and cool things, so I thought as an entremón I’d share some tech I used this weekend that made my life better.
What we consider essentials like electricity, running hot water, refrigerators, and microwaves. The fact I can press a button to receive energy, heat, and cooked food is not something I ever want to take for granted.
OpenZFS snapshots. I’m running a few personal projects to collate, organise, and clean up all my years of accumulated music and other media, but I’ve also accidently deleted a few things as I go. Doing a snapshot before each large merge has prevented me losing stuff, and with almost no effort whatsoever. I say this knowing it sounds like bluster, OpenZFS is one of the greatest technologies of our modern era.
Minecraft. This open-world game is just about the greatest thing ever, whether you have someone else to build a world with, or if you’re going solo. I never thought anything would overtake the classic Maxis games from my childhood, but it is.
HTML 3.2. Okay, not exactly modern tech unless you compare it to refrigeration or irrigation, but I loved that I could tweak my retro site on the weekend and look up a single document for the syntax required.
Flat Cat8 Ethernet cable. I didn’t even know we were up to Cat8. Either way, I ran some flat cable underneath a carpet to connect up a server, and it’s so much less obtrusive than the round cable that snaked its way around before.
Perl. I’ve (finally) been learning Python, and enjoying Go a lot more than I thought I would. But I had a specific bulk operation I had to do for family, so I reached for the Swiss Army Chainsaw. Modern Perl 5 has everything we loved about the original versions, but it’s even better now.
Mastodon. I lamented the rise of social media on that tech optimism post, and I do likely spend more time on there than I should. But in controlled doses, on my terms, and without notifications, Mastodon is a breath of fresh air after what Twitter turned into, and what Bluesky now is.
Wireguard. I went to a coffee shop—no really?—this morning, and I love that I can dial back home to retrieve a document and to upload stuff. That’s not intrinsic to Wireguard specifically, but I love that it was such a breeze to configure after laboring with OpenVPN and IPSec at work.
I should do a blog post about every one of these.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-07-27.
2025-07-25 06:19:44
This has been a theme here of late, and among many of you I follow and read. I’ve nibbled at the periphery, discussing dark patterns, tracking, and slop on one side, and the enduring BSD operating system family, explosion in indie hardware, and the fun retrocomputing revival on the other side. But this is the first time I’m tackling the issue directly. I can’t keep it down.
I miss being optimistic about technology.
Not mostly, or somewhat, or with caveats. No “leaving aside…”, or ifs, or buts. Just unabashed, unashamed… wow, isn’t tech cool!?
My start with all this stuff likely mirrors yours. I remember wandering past my dad’s study as a kid, and seeing that glowing CRT with that blinking DOS prompt, and being utterly transfixed. What was this box of wonders? How does it work? What can you do with it? I couldn’t sit still at school, because I couldn’t wait to either get home to tinker with this thing, or run back to the labs to mess with the ancient Apple IIs… it didn’t matter! I’ve been chasing that high ever since.
Keen to nurture this hobby/obsession in their son, my parents bought me subscriptions to everything from Quest to PC Magazine; there was also a Wallace and Gromit themed kids periodical that was as charming and delightful as you’d expect. I also got stuck into Australian shows like Beyond 2000, and when we moved to Singapore, the Discovery Channel. Common to all this media was the premise that modern technology could—and indeed, would—solve so many of the world’s problems. And we were coming along for the ride! If you’ll pardon the French, FUCK it was awesome.
(As a fun aside, my sister’s and my first job in school was voiceover work for Discovery Channel Asia, of all things. I can still recite entire passages, though I can’t remember my last mobile number. And yes, many of those ads were tech shows for kids).
There was this palpable sense that we were living on the cusp of true breakthroughs in everything from engineering, science, and medicine, thanks to the wonders of these newfangled computers. The humanities, architecture, and culture would also flourish with all these new innovations. It became overused to the point of cliché, but it did feel as though our imaginations were now the limiting factor, or soon would be.
I remember reading about hypersonic aircraft that would take me to Tokyo from Melbourne in an hour, then flipping the page to the advances in CAD that make Frank Gehry’s latest crumpled building possible. Detailed simulations based around holograms would let us explore our favourite books in a whole new way. We’d live longer, happier lives, with medical devices that opened up the world to everyone regardless of physical abilities. All because computers would get cheaper, more ubiquitous, and more powerful.
Maglev trains! Carbon-fibre space lifts! Infinite storage! Immediate headache cures! Computers we could wear… on our wrists!? It was all coming “tomorrow”, but it all felt feasible. WOW!
Good heavens, let me have a cold shower.
Now the steely-eyed realists among you may have already spotted the naïvety in such statements. Technological progress wasn’t universally positive, and was unevenly distributed. I was lucky enough to grow up in a middle class Western household to even read about this stuff, let alone benefit. Some of those inventions, like electric cars, would only serve to entrench existing problems (and Space Karens).
But I do want to underscore that this optimism felt like it could change the world. We’d free everyone from want, hunger, and disease. And in the parts of Asia where I was growing up, technology was the driving force behind raising living standards, and access to the world. It was literally why my dad’s company transferred us to Singapore in the first place, and then onwards to Malaysia. I’d wander into Funan Centre, Sim Lim Square, and Imbi Plaza as a twelve year old, and just window shop all the awesome new stuff.
By the late 1990s the Web had taken over, and everyone could publish their thoughts on the same level as a newspaper or large corporate. I have a separate post about this specific time pending, but there’s a reason so many of you talk about missing it (if not their the loading times)! It was how I kept in touch with friends and family when I went back to Australia to study. It landed me all my jobs. It’s even where I got to know Clara, my soulmate and partner for life. I owe so much of my life, vocation, and livelihood to the World Wide Web.
I suppose somewhat related, there was also so much colour and personality in tech from the time. Apple weren’t the first to employ shockingly bright, translucent enclosures for their hardware, but the iMac set off a wave of such devices from alarm clocks to game consoles in the closing years of the old millennium. My most vivid memory from 1999 was walking into a recording studio, and passing the rows of all these iMacs and Power Mac G3s on everyone’s desks. It was cheerful, optimistic, and functional. I sorely miss that feeling.
Then… something started to shift.
In the space of two decades, people began wearing shirts proudly boasting that it was a mistake to teach sand to think. We became tired, jaded, and deeply cynical. Part of this was snapping back to the mean after years of unfettered optimism, but then the pendulum swung so far it embedded itself in the opposite wall.
I’m not about to unpack all the reasons why here in any great detail; that wasn’t the point of this post. In short, you could attribute this malaise to the dot com bubble, rent-seeking platforms, the rise of social media, the ubiquitous use of smartphones… the list goes on. I assert we lost our innocence when online advertising transitioned from being banner ads on a page, to something that needed so much personal data and tracking that they know more about us than our family or governments. It was tech people put up with, rather than asked for. And it had a devastating effect on everything from accessibility to privacy.
The 2010s took this violation of our trust and dreams, and strapped on the rocket packs we were promised. Cynical crypto-“currency” and blockchain tech. Insincere NFTs. Soulless rubbish like the metaverse and “memojis”. Brazen, naked exploitation by LLMs. I remember reading about the potential for “artificial intelligence”, and it wasn’t the industrial manufacturing of slop.
It all feels like a calamitous cavalcade of computerised crapulence. Spruikers don’t care if tech makes peoples lives materially better, or more beautiful. They just want to cash out before the next person, and fuck everyone else.
It’s all that’s propping the industry right now. Have you looked at the US stock market recently? Everything’s moribund right now except for a small handful of companies who are promising the moon, burning creative people and the planet in the process, and can’t possibly deliver. The future? Nah, who gives a shit.
I’m not going to sugarcoat this anymore. This all makes me angry. But much worse, it makes me upset. Bitterly so. I’ve cried about it. I’ve imagined having a chat with my childhood self about what all the nerds around me are doing now, and seeing that look of joy melting away from his face breaks my heart.
All that wasted potential. All those missed opportunities.
I refuse to believe this is entirely down to getting older, or picking up rose-tinted glasses. Sure, many of these same commercial pressures and realities always existed. But it didn’t have to turn out specifically like this. Remember when you could pick up a magazine or newspaper, and see some tech that solved a problem, or made the world better, or was at least exciting? I genuinely do. Now? I see a software update from Apple, and it makes me grimace.
I want my optimism back. Potential. Dreams. The future.
Wow, the future. Remember that? 💔
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-07-25.
