2025-10-09 10:15:19
I let the cat out of the bag on Mastodon, but I recently bought a Filofax online to organise my life. This was to be in lieu of all the technical systems I’d tried and failed at implementing recently. I’d written a long draft going into my history with these sorts of binders, my love of the skeuomorphic Lotus Organiser, and chasing that elusive personal productivity goal with something a bit whimsical, nostalgic, and fun.
So imagine my surprise when I got a call from the local Filofax distributor in Australia saying my order was being cancelled because they had no stock. Welp.
I thought I was an oddball getting back into paper organisers again, but they’re “flying off the shelves” if you’re to believe the distributor. It wasn’t just the size and colour I ordered that were unavailable, they’re facing stock shortages across nearly everything. You can get official Filofax financial and budgeting pages… maybe their warehouses and distributors need to track stock with these (cough)!
I guess I’m looking elsewhere now once the refund comes in. A large American online retailer supposedly has stock, but I don’t buy from them. It’s a shame they’re not really stocked in physical stores here.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-10-09.
2025-10-09 08:16:21
Given my vocal antipathy towards gen-“AI”, a few of you have asked me why I don’t have one of the many “Written by a Human” badges gracing my pages. Here’s a cheerful example from Not by AI:
It’s cute, and I like the idea in principle. Such badges push back against “AI” slop in a positive way, by reframing human works as more desirable. You probably wouldn’t boast about your site being “AI” generated, unless you’re a cursed LinkedIn influencer or selling a gas-powered theft machine yourself. Such badges also invite people viewing them to think about an issue they otherwise may not have.
But I also overthink everything! So I have a few reservations.
First, remember those email signatures of yore that would attempt to assuage security concerns by proudly boasting they’d been “scanned by an antivirus”? It evidently proved successful enough at lowering people’s guard that it became part of the standard toolkit for sending malware. Why not, when it’s so trivial to add, and there’s no verification of the claim? I worry that these “written by a human” badges are ripe for abuse in the same way, given any site could sport them. Frankly, it’d be the first thing I’d add to my slop site; lying about the origin of my sewage doesn’t seem like a stretch when I don’t even have qualms about plagiarism or planet-sapping tools.
I hate that this is the case, but I instinctively question sites that have these badges. Has this person included it because they’re taking a principled stance against a corrosive and unsustainable technology, or are they trying to social engineer me for nefarious reasons? I guess you develop these self-defence mechanisms when you’ve been on the web long enough, even if it’s prone to false positives (better that than false negatives, right?).
I also have concerns about some of the sites spruiking these badges. “Not by AI” uses the word “content” everywhere, which plays right into the hands of those who see creative works as disposable slurry with which to fill containers; exactly the kind of thing a gen-“AI” could replace. Patrick (H) Willems did a great job discussing this reframing on a video a couple of years ago. This may be unintentional, but the effect is the same. I’ve had people email saying they disagree, but it’s hard for me to say da Vinci was a “content creator”, and certainly not you. I guess I’m old fashioned like that.
My hope is these badges are also redundant, at least for the kind of people who’d include them on their sites. I ramble like the best of these “AI” chatbots, but I make spelling mistakes, go on tangents, add pointless anecdotes, and illustrate posts with photos. People regularly call my blog frustrating, but I’ve only had a few accuse me of using “AI” to write. It’s the same when I read other blogs: they have a voice and a personality that can’t be replicated. As I mentioned above, I almost feel like these “written by a human” badges detract from this, by making me second guess what I’m reading. They’re not reassuring, despite their best intentions.
Finally, I also hope that whatever utility these badges have, they ultimately prove temporary. Nobody has to put on their sites that they’re “not powered by blockchain” or that NFTs are “no fucking thanks”. It’ll be a good sign when we don’t have to see these, because at the moment, they remind me of something I’d rather forget.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-10-09.
2025-10-08 07:21:00
I’ve been reading reports that “highly-processed food” is bad, which it almost certianly is. Someone might want to tell Australia Post, because a parcel from overseas has been stuck processing in the same two facilities for almost a fortnight, according to the tracking information:
2025-09-25 Thursday: Sydney:
“Item processed at sorting facility”
2025-09-25 Thursday: Sydney South West:
“Arrived at facility”
2025-09-25 Thursday: Sydney South West:
“Item processed at sorting facility”
2025-09-26 Friday: Sydney South West:
“Item processed at sorting facility”
2025-10-01 Wednesday: Sydney South West:
“Item processed at sorting facility”
2025-10-02 Thursday: Sydney South West:
“Item processed at sorting facility”
2025-10-06 Monday: Sydney South West:
“Item processed at sorting facility”
2025-10-07 Tuesday: Sydney:
“Item processed at sorting facility”
It took less time to be shipped from Europe to Sydney than it has been to get from Sydney to… my part of Sydney. Granted Sydney is a sprawling place, but this is a bit silly.
The shipment was automatically added to my Australia Post account, so they must have correctly identified the name and address initially. Maybe the front fell off, and it’s been bouncing around ever since?
This parcel is a router, ironcially enough. Maybe someone at Australia Post didn’t implement their OSPF correctly.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-10-08.
2025-10-08 05:30:29
Back in July I discussed how I missed being optimistic about technology. I grew up starry-eyed about the possibilities, but that the modern world’s obsession with dark patterns, hostile behavior, and terrible tech like blockchain and gen-“AI” felt so crass and cynical. I didn’t want to face my childhood self and disappoint him with how The Future turned out.
Torb responded last month with an article about tech optimism with caveats, which contextualised what I was feeling in useful ways:
You won’t find a lot of this in the for-profit tech world. My guess is that the commercial side of tech have been dishonest in their idealistic claims. Maybe even to themselves.
The post concludes that:
Tech can help make society better, but you have to pair it with the right ideas. We probably have to fight for those ideas. Political aspects can’t be ignored. We have to consider what kind of tech we want, not merely how much.
An honest outlook will make us better able to grasp actual opportunities to do good.
There are some interesting observations here that I missed in my (admittedly slapdash!) post.
The first is the idea that interesting tech need not be looked for in the commercial space. In fact, some of the most interesting, era-defining technology we use—from the Internet and World Wide Web to the graphical interface itself—came from academia, government, and research. I touched on the BSD operating system family in my original post, but didn’t make the obvious connection that this software is built by people and supported by non-profit foundations and a loose knit community of developers, writers, and artists around the world. Ditto Linux, KDE, and so many other tools and software I rely upon and enjoy.
(I remember reading an article a while ago about the “trillions” of dollars in “value” that had been created “for free” by such software, and thinking to myself how completely they missed the point. But when you live under certain systems, doing what’s right, nice, ethical, or even useful is secondary to how much you can squeeze people to pay for it).
I’m also intrigued by Torb’s idea that you can’t divorce tech from context. I agree that tech isn’t neutral; it’s imbued with the developer’s ideas and perspectives. It’s why facial recognition software (already a dubious idea) written by sheltered white people struggled with those who have darker skin tones. You know, billions of our fellow human beings. Or that people in sunny California couldn’t write a weather app that didn’t word wrap when a negative temperature was displayed. The tech was either built for a specific and misguided purpose, or it represented an opportunity cost that took funding away from other tech. Both of these are political acts.
But there are people out there who do care. They’re just drowned out, ironically, for the same reason other tech companies not doing “AI” have been. Our world has been built around glorifying investment and business outcomes, not what makes the material and mental lives of people better. Sometimes they’re one and the same. Otherwise, we have to look elsewhere for inspiration. And it’s there if you want to look.
I do defer to Torb’s expertise here, and not just because I’m envious of their beautiful hair. Being in charge of developing interfaces, literally the thing we use to interact with systems on a daily basis, would offer a valuable perspective here on the direction of tech more broadly. It also looks to be another key battleground between dark/user hostile patterns, and tech that makes our lives better.
I’ve always billed myself as a cautious optimist. I’ll apply this to tech as well.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-10-08.
2025-10-07 05:47:27
This is a bit inside baseball as my American friends would say—or inside Banana Ball as Clara would say—but it’s something that’s been on my mind lately with regards to specific types of posts I’ve been struggling of late to collate and write. Go the Savannah Bananas!
I love reading, and I love writing. I enjoy writing about places I’ve been, and including photos illustrating it. It’s the most fun thing I do with computers and travel, sometimes to the point where writing about them is as enjoyable. I half joked here years ago that text editors were my favourite “games”, because I get as much fun out of using them.
I want do the same thing with old computer exploration and repairs, but I run into mental road blocks each time. Merely pulling apart this SGI Indigo2 to clean it, see how it works, how it’s put together, and how I might go about repairing it, has generated almost 200 photos. Where do I begin compiling a succinct set of interesting images from this set to illustrate a post? How would I write text around it to make something logical and cohesive?
Every time I’ve written a post about a new (well, old!) piece of kit I’ve received, I’ve also started a deep dive blog post about cleaning it and getting it working. But while I’m able to write posts about many things, I’ve struggled doing these follow-up posts which I think would be far more useful and interesting. This means the blog has mostly turned into a “look at this cool old piece of tech I got!” and then… nothing. A few of you have asked where all the enthusiasm I professed for these old machines went after the fact. That’s the long and short of it.
This leads me to envy people I admire like Jan Beta who make video. Video lets you show what you’re doing and the outputs in real time. Sure, you have to figure out where to make cuts, and what to include, but it’s a much higher bandwidth medium. Depending on how you edit it, you also get those genuine “aha!” moments of joy you can’t script, and that text written after the fact will never truly capture.
Admittedly, I’m already doing this. I shoot video (albeit at rubbish quality!) when I pull apart old computers, just in case I need to retrace my steps or remember how I did something. The worst feeling is having a cable and two positions it can fit, and you forgot to mark it, and there’s no online documentation. Why not get some better lighting and release these, even if the editing sucks?
(This isn’t to downplay the work people like Jan Beta put into their videos. There’s a massive difference between recording a defacto live stream like I’m discussing here, and a high quality video you’ve edited into something interesting, with credits, music, and multiple camera angles. This is another reason I bristle when techbros talk about “creators” and “content”… it is so much more than electronic fluid to fill a container).
Many of you have told me you prefer reading, and that it’s preferable to read concise text over having to watch a video tutorial. Ditto Discord “servers” being sources of documentation. I get that, and I’m with you.
The challenge for me isn’t that a “recorded livestream” would replace a text post, but that the text post never gets written in the first place. It’s sufficiently time consuming and difficult (for me) that I don’t enjoy writing them. At the risk of disappointing some of you, this blog is a hobby and not a job, so I won’t do it if it isn’t fun. If I give myself permission to acknowledge this, maybe I could give this whole “recorded livestream” thing a try.
(And yes, I acknowledge that “recorded livestream” sounds like a contradition in terms. I liken it to a stream of conciousness that you’ve recorded, as opposed to a produced video with proper editing. Maybe there’s a better term for that).
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-10-07.
2025-10-06 19:55:08
Back in September, the ReCollect64 blog shared Born64, an upcoming game designed to emulate the look of the Nintendo 64, and I couldn’t help but smile:
Recently, I have noticed a surge of indie titles, made exclusively for PC, that are heavily influenced by the synchronising nuances that culminate in what we lovingly call Nintendo 64 games. One such Unreal Engine 5-powered title that captivated my eye is Born64, a graphically fresh-yet-familiar action-adventure title. It begins with a slayer, the main protagonist, who is sent to a village called San Andrés by the Hunters Association. Here, strange events are unfolding. Villagers are being transformed into demonic creatures, and it’s up to you to uncover the truth behind the curse!
Based just on the video from the Born64 YouTube account, they’ve nailed the brief. Seeing this triggered something in my lizard brain that’s hard to explain, but it was more powerful than any new software has in a long time:
I didn’t have game consoles growing up, but I did use the family PC to play early DirectX games on Windows. At the time I didn’t think they looked “realistic” necessarily, but they were such a visual improvement from what came before that I was able to suspend disbelief and enjoy them. It did kinda feel like I was driving in a real city in Midtown Madness, and flying a real plane in Flight Simulator 98, and operating a real locomotive in Train Simulator, and putting on a real course in Golf 3.0. Okay, that last one was a bit of a stretch, but you get my point.
Each new graphics card or rendering engine would improve the textures, add polygons, improve lighting, and make the games work and look better. If you asked anyone playing games at the time (or even now) if they’d prefer smoother graphics, more frames, and higher resolution textures, of course they’d always want more. But now we’ve come so far that those graphics have entered… wait for it: The Nostalgia Zone.
I hop into the cab of a Luxury Super Express outside Odawara in the original Train Simulator on my Dell Dimension 4100, and the blocky graphics go from something I would have preferred my hardware could do better, into an art form in an of itself.
This was something I realised in myself recently: these aren’t limited worlds anymore to me, but stylised ones. And I love it, to the point where I regularly return to these blocky, polygon worlds over their more modern versions. There’s something about them that’s hard to explain, as though I’m safely perched on a mountain side, well above the uncanny valley in the distance where modern games reside. It makes them comfortable to play in a way that can’t be explained by simple nostalgia.
Okay, that got more philosophical than I meant it to. Retro graphics!
Seeing these games in retrospect also gives me renewed appreciation and respect for the creativity that comes from working within certain constraints. Which renders (hah!) what the Born64 developers are doing that much more impressive. Building a captivating, engaging, visually interesting game within the self-imposed limitations of Nintendo 64-style graphics would not be easy.
Computer games went through an 8-bit, 1980s-style revival and obsession over the last decade. Maybe it’s time to bring early 3D back more broadly too :).
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-10-06.
