2025-05-16 15:23:33
This sat in my drafts for a couple of years, in part because I’ve courted disaster every time I’ve discussed intergenerational ideas on social media. But screw it. This is a personal letter addressed to people of Gen X. I must clarify that it comes from a western, specifically a (mostly) Australian, perspective. Different parts of the world had their own schmidt going on.
Hey Gen X,
How’s life treating you? I expect it’s probably somewhere between “okay” and “meh”, based on how the world is going right now. I hear you. My generation tried to fix that too, and look how far we got.
May I call you Gen seXy? Gen X-treme? And to think that Guardian article claimed Millennials are uncool now… I posit we never were. But I digress.
There are two key things I want to bring to your attention today. Both may come as a shock, based on interactions I’ve had online with some of you, and what little I’ve been able to read about you. You weren’t kidding about being ignored by the press and media, JFC.
The first is that younger generations hold you in high esteem. We think you’re the coolest people ever. You took the end of the Boomer gravy train in your stride, and dealt with it in a way that Millennials like me simply can’t grasp. We got angry about it. You made punk rock and grunge. Yours was the last generation to grow up without smartphones and ubiquitous web access, and some of us are now looking to you for advice on how to lead our lives with fewer distractions and more purpose. I’ve been called “basically gen X” once for my outlook and attitudes, and it was frankly some of the highest fucking praise I’ve ever received. We look up to you more than I think you realise. No, really.
But most of you do something I feel the need to point out. You seem… incapable of sharing what brings you joy in life. At least, directly. You can’t say you’re proud of something, or loved something, or be seen as too enthusiastic or eager for some reason. Everything positive you discuss has to be carefully and meticulously coached in sarcasm, irony, or a sense of aloofness.
This interests me on a sociological level; it hints at some deeper generational trauma with which I can empathise. But I want to tell you that it doesn’t have to be this way. You can be genuine!
One thing I think Gen X and Millennials like me can learn from Gen Z is their willingness to be upfront about their interests, orientations, and dreams. There’s something… disarming about hearing someone open up like that, without qualifications. And boy, if any generation has some shit to share right now, it’s Gen X.
There’s that classic Simpsons episode—a series over which Millennials and Xers can bond—where a teenager asks another if he’s being sarcastic, and he responds saying he doesn’t even know anymore. I’m telling you now: you do know. Which means now you don’t have to do it.
The next time you want to post something, and you feel the compulsion to spring up the comforting irony shield, I implore you to think again. You don’t need my permission to be earnest, but if it helps, I grant it. You’re awesome, damn it!
But trust me, on the sunscreen.
With regards,
A MillennialPS: No, I’m not being ironic.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-05-16.
2025-05-15 07:26:14
At the risk of invoking Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, I pose this post as a question because it’s a bit open-ended.
I’m in a bit of an awkward situation right now. For the longest time I used to buy whatever cheap HP Microserver I could get on eBay. They’re cheap, quiet, yet still manage to pack four hard drive bays. Tower chassis more than three times the size still usually only support the same number of hard drive bays, for reasons that utterly confound me. It’s as though everyone shook hands and said if they want more drives, get a noisy 2U rack server.
When our home needs began to outgrow these HP Companion Cubes, I cobbled together a server out of a Supermicro workstation board, 32 GiB of ECC DDR4-2133 memory, and a Xeon E3-1240 v6 CPU off Gumtree and eBay for less than AU $200 total. This was put into an old Antec 300 case with large, slow-spinning fans and eight drives. Almost five years later (wow!), and I’m surprised how well this is all still working. This four core machine is whisper quiet, sips power, and the FreeBSD host delivers:
$REASONS
Ah Monty Python. But I think we’ve reached the system’s limit, not in speed necessarily, but threads. There’s some CI stuff I’d like to try on it, and Clara and I want to try running a Stardew Valley server (cough), but I’ve already over-provisioned it as it is.
As Allan Jude one quipped at an AsiaBSDCon, the biggest challenge with homelab servers is that they often become production. Those above use cases make it eminently useful, but it limits the live tinkering I can do with it. I don’t want to be responsible for a backup failing, or a game not loading, or the TV not working, because I’m messing with some optimisations or experimental builds. Clara is the most accommodating person in the universe, but I suspect even she has limits! As do I.
My plan, such that it is, is to build a slightly more modern home server, maybe with 8 cores or more if it doesn’t push the power envelope too high. That can run our production home stuff, and I can relegate this older machine to tinkering and testing. I haven’t run the -CURRENT FreeBSD branch in years, which is a poor showing for someone so invested in the platform.
The thing is, I have no idea what’s out there. At work I live in “enterprise” server land, which is all way too hot and expensive for what I’d need. AMD might be fun, but is their consumer silicon really ECC compatible? I’m not that worried about IPMI or equivalents, because I use inexpensive network-attached KVMs. I’m a big fan of buying two generation or older hardware, because it’s (a) tested and (2) significantly cheaper, which perhaps rules out AM5 for now? Not sure.
I haven’t had to research a new budget server for a while, so I’m interested to see what I can get. Something second-hand, a bit older, and something we could stand hearing as it runs in the corner of the room.
Hey look, another open-ended post! Aren’t those great?
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-05-15.
2025-05-15 07:26:04
It’s been a while since I got a ping about a substantive update on the Oracle Solaris RSS feed. Wow.
The Common Build Environment (CBE) release for Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 81 is now available via “pkg update” from the release repository or by downloading the install images from the Oracle Solaris Downloads page. As with the first Oracle Solaris 11.4 CBE, this is licensed for free/open source developers and non-production personal use, and this is not the final, supported version of the 11.4.81 SRU, but the pre-release version on which the SRU was built. It contains all of the new features and interfaces, but not all of the final rounds of bug fixes, from the 11.4.81 SRU.
The previous version was the CBE for 11.4.42, so there’s more than 3 years worth of changes between these two releases.
I run the OpenSolaris/illumos-derived Tribblix thesedays for my Sun needs, but I’m oddly… happy this is still being maintained?
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-05-15.
2025-05-14 07:34:48
Earlier this week I was searching an electronics retailer site—like a gentleman—when I came across exactly what I was looking for: a replacement foil for my electric razor. Yay!
Wait, let me stop there for a moment. Merely mentioning electric razors online is guaranteed to generate all sorts of negative comments and recommendations to use something else, because using safety razors/knifes/kerosene blowtorches are superior, faster, easier, more traditional, more cost effective, and more manly than an electric razor which is imprecise, slow, doesn’t offer a close enough shave, has to be charged, and most importantly, isn’t as manly. Manly. MANLY!
I acknowledge your preferences, but electric razors work best for me. I’ve tried them all, save for the aforementioned incendiary approach. They don’t irritate my skin, their cartridges last a year, and I find them ergonomic, simple to use, and easy to clean. If you don’t want an electric razor, you don’t need to purchase one.
Where was I going with this?
I attempted to click the correct search result for the razor, which thanks to modern web frameworks caused the thumbnails for other devices to shift around for no reason, resulting in me clicking on an epilator. Not enthusiastic to rip the hair from my face, I clicked back, and thanks again to the use of modern frameworks the page scrolled to somewhere completely different, and I had to scroll back down to the cartridge. Finally on the second attempt, and despite the best efforts of React or whatever, I was on the correct product page. Yay!
But there was another problem. To my grave concern, I noted that this replacement cartridge was advertised as having a one star rating out of five. Huh, remember when star ratings were the nominal topic of this post?! What do you think your readers are Ruben, chopped liver?! An EPILATOR!?
Anyway, I wondered why so many people hated this specific replacement razor cartridge. Did they not last as long as the original cartridge shipped with the initial razor? Were there fit and finish issues? Had the company’s standards slipped? Had they jacked up the price? I clicked the reviews tab to find out, and saw this single (paraphrased) comment with a one-star rating attached:
Ordered the wrong cartridge, this one has the same model name, but it’s for a different unit. Retailer offered me a full refund or replacement with the correct model, which was great customer service!
I… admit to being surprised by this. They seemingly had a positive outcome from this experience, but they left a poor rating. Huh? This—finally—gets to the first concern I have with star ratings on retail sites: what are we rating exactly? Is it:
The device someone is purchasing, using, and evaluating?
The purchase experience, including searching for the item, creating an account, calculating shipping, paying for it, and receiving it on time?
The customer support and service associated with the store or vendor?
Or is it all three?
My initial thought is that star ratings should be limited to reviewing the device, and maybe customer support from the vendor, because who’s seeing star reviews on a retailer site and concluding anything else? If I see a one-star review, my immediate thought is the device being sold doesn’t meet functionality requirements, is bad value for money, isn’t intuitive, has shoddy build construction, ships with bad instructions, is poor quality, or the vendor refuses to fix problems.
This is worth stressing. In this specific case, the cartridge would have operated fine on the correct shaver. I would know! To the reviewer’s credit, they make no comment about the functionality of the device’s intended operation, they only praise their customer service experience. Which is also a bit odd, because they still conclude this is worth giving one star. Are they punishing the store for having a confusing listing? If so, is that the fault of the device, or the manufacturer? Maybe, but maybe not.
eBay have attempted to address this with their feedback system, where star ratings are split out across several different criteria, including whether the item was as described, whether it arrived on time, and whether the seller had good communication. These are hidden from public view and from the seller though, so it’s unclear to me outside weeding out obvious scammers how useful this is.
There are other issues with star ratings. A big problem is that they tend to be set in stone. You may review the device during the early stages of ownership, when novelty might cloud your objectivity. Put another way, you’re less likely to find fault with something you’re currently enjoying, especially if it was expensive. Likewise, a device that works now might not age well, in which case your positive review is unintentionally inaccurate.
Then there’s the phenomena with which every retail and hospitality worker is familiar: people are more likely to leave negative reviews over positive ones. Feeling slighted or wronged is a powerful motivator, whereas positive experiences are expected (I’ve been trying to correct this behaviour myself and leave positive reviews where I can).
And finally, how can we even trust whether star ratings on a retailer’s site are even genuine? The reviews themselves may have been bought and paid for to hype up the device, or by a competitor to make it look rubbish. The store may also be selective in which reviews they choose to showcase, and which ones to quietly hide or delete. To the credit of the aforementioned shaving retailer, they left that one-star rating up on their site, despite the fact I think it’s misleading and casts the devices they sell in an unfair light.
The thing is, I’m not sure what a better system would look like. Star ratings are a low-friction way for customers to publicly express their (dis)satisfaction with something they’ve bought and used. Maybe they need to be independent, somehow. Or like all information online, you need to do the work to be informed yourself, and not blindly trust one metric you read.
Since posting this, I’ve left a five-star review for this razor cartridge which has worked as fantastically well as the last three I’ve bought. That has bumped the star rating for it to three stars. As it’ll say on my tombstone: slightly better than nothing!
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-05-14.
2025-05-14 07:20:31
I want a socially-acceptable way to be able to share my table at crowded restaurants and coffee shops.
If I’m having coffee alone, or a client has called to cancel a meeting, I’d love to be able to offer other seats at this table to people who need it. They’re wasted otherwise, so why not?
Maybe I need to print a card to put on tables I sit at, that says people can.
Only thing I’d be worried about is mixing up billing, because most coffee shops and restaurants track orders by table number. I suppose it’d only work for places where you order and pay first.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-05-14.
2025-05-13 07:08:58
For someone who enjoys travel as much as me, to the point where Clara and I bought a smaller apartment and live our lives optimising for that specific activity, it’s ironic that I also find parts of the experience utterly nerve-wracking. Everywhere I look, there’s some system that can go wrong, and can have dire consequences when it does.
It all starts during the booking process. You’re on a computer and you choose your flights, connections, trains, and hotel rooms after studiously studying the best options. You provide your payment details, they’re booked. Except, were they? We’ll come back to that.
You get to the airport, and proceed to check in. Most airports now use those self-checkin kiosks, which means you’re interfacing directly with the system. You might be asked for the ticket information, your passport, and/or the card used for payment. The systems required to retrieve information about all of these have to be online and working. What if my bank is offline? What if the ticket system for the airline is under load and something times out? What if the kiosk itself crashes, or someone bumps a cable, or it loses network connectivity halfway through? Can I start over, or will it finish, or will I be stuck in transaction purgatory?
On our most recent Japan trip, the printer for our luggage tags failed, but the kiosk reported to the baggage system that we’d still been supplied with them. We had to go to a counter to get it sorted out, and even then it involved explaining why the system reported printing a tag and we didn’t have it. Had we put the tags on bags and forgotten about them? Did we drop and/or lose them, but didn’t want to admit it? No no, it was a printer issue!
Then you go through immigration. The passport gets scanned. Even leaving aside geopolitical concerns, is the government who issued your passport maintaining access to their databases? Does your ID pass verification? Is there a problem with the scanner? Did the previous immigration offer stamp hard enough to be legible, or remember to place the correct sticker, or recorded you in the system having arrived or left? Do the details in the local system match your documents? What if they don’t? What if the return flight details from your airline aren’t clear, or can’t be verified?
Finally you get to your gate. There aren’t as many things here to make me nervous, though perhaps there should be. What if the flight was oversold? What if for some reason the boarding pass was printed wrong, and both you and Alice have been assigned Seat 32C? What if your special meal wasn’t recorded correctly?
Then you arrive at your destination, and it’s time to pick up your bags. Remember the luggage tag adventures from before? Well what if the tag was still not recorded correctly? What if you won the barcode “lottery”, and your stuff is now in Sydney, Canada? What if the system flagged the tag as being invalid, and your bags never left the original terminal? What if the barcode on the tag, and the barcode on the sticker don’t match, or the thermal printer crapped out halfway through and printed one or both poorly?
Finally, you arrive at your hotel, only to discover the booking you carefully made in advance never went through. Or the room is no longer available because the booking system hiccuped, or is offline. You show them your payment details, but they may not recognise it if you’re overseas. Or maybe the payment processor is having issues at the same time. Now you’re in a foreign city with nowhere to sleep and (hopefully!) all your baggage.
I kid for dramatic effect, but most of the things I’ve described in this post have happened to me at some point. The worst is when multiple things happen at once. I was stuck in Kuala Lumpur when I was a teenager because the airline’s ticket system was down, they couldn’t scan passports, my bank card wasn’t recognised in any of the ATMs, and I forgot to pack the charging cable for my laptop. Despair doesn’t begin to capture it.
Travel is a stressful confluence of factors. There’s endless complexity that straddles multiple government and private sector systems across international jurisdictions. We (mostly) all agree how passports and payment systems work, but every system, and every interface between these systems, and every scrap of data between these systems has to be working, available, and correct. For someone who doesn’t trust his local package manager not to break his Linux boot loader after doing a basic update, that’s a tall ask.
Complexity breeds insecurity, and renders systems more brittle. This observation has made me a better system administrator, designer, and technical writer, but boy does it make me a nervous traveller.
My mitigations? Come slavishly prepared. Have some local cash exchanged in advance. Print absolutely everything: tickets, bookings, payment details. Arrive three hours before any international flight leaves. Things going wrong is bad enough, but you don’t want to throw on time pressure or futzing about on your phone finding the correct details. Oh wait, you forgot to charge your phone, or your laptop chose this specific time to decide to not come out of sleep? Yeah, about that!
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-05-13.
