2026-01-02 07:41:43
I may have a (somewhat irrational) fascination with lifts, or elevators for my North American friends.
Lifts are interesting because they’re intricate, complicated mechanical devices that are otherwise not thought about much. Our buildings have these towering empty tubes we regularly propel ourselves through thanks to the wonders of hydraulics and/or electricity, and save for a few novely glass lifts and those older ones in warehouses, we see barely any of it. The purpose of this post however wasn’t to discuss the operation of lifts in any great detail; I’ve had a post pending about lifts, paternosters, and “dumb” waiters for almost a decade at this point. It’s gone into so much needless detail that I suspect I could split it out into two posts, or ten.
No, today I wanted to draw your attention to an article I found on the EUA website (they make no mention what “EUA” stands for), and it’s to do with the interesting, often liminal spaces we know as lift lobbies. Well, elevator lobbies to them.
What do you think their primary purpose is?
The primary purpose of an elevator lobby is to protect occupants from fire and smoke that could transfer from floor to floor via the elevator shaft and compromise the path of egress.
That’s a… way of looking at it that I’m now ashamed I didn’t think of first. Of course that should be its primary purpose. Only when we’re satisfied they can be installed into a building safely can we proceed with their second purpose, which is the safe and effective transport of human beings through buildings.
I wish there was such maturity when it came to the primary purpose of, say, cars. Modern American “light” trucks don’t even have a primary purpose of safely carrying cargo given their tiny beds, let alone the safety of their occupants… or heaven forbid, those gross pedestrians who are far more likely to die when being hit by one. Imagine if we reframed the debate around cars to be “a safe form of transport for those inside and outside”. But then the industry and society at large would have to confront a lot of things, from pollution to road design. Far easier just to say cars get an exception, safety be damned.
That’s right, I turned an interesting observation about lift lobbies into a rant about motor vehicles. I guess, in a way, a lift is one too. Wait, an elevator. Damn it!
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-01-02.
2026-01-01 18:55:24
Forgive the Betteridge headline, but it’s because this is a personal thought process I’m still going through myself. As opposed to a personal thought process I’m going through for someone else!? That doesn’t make sense.
Welcome to 2026! The shop next door is playing a Carpenters album, which is awesome. Rest in peace Karen, you were a legend.
Last year was a bit of a wash for me when it came to personal productivity, but I flipped the narrative hard in December. Maybe it was the festive air, or the fewer distractions doing office shutdown, but I made (a) an admission about how I work, and (2) doubled down on something I started a few years ago.
Back in May of 2023, I wrote about how I use spreadsheets as a knowledgebase and mental mapping tool. I showed a basic example of tracking parts for various old computer builds using basic project identifiers, AutoFilters, frozen rows, and a bit of colour in LibreOffice:
This is awesome! It’s a wide-open matrix of unrestrained goodness that I can filter and use to track and find exactly what I need. Here comes the proverbial posterior prognostication: but…
Despite using this for tracking certain home projects, I had still convinced myself that important things should be in their own proper task management system. By “proper”, I mean one of the multitude of tools with icons containing a tick or checkbox of some sort that promise “enterprise” features on their home page. We use one of those “proper” tools at work for tracking tasks across teams, so I should use that at home too, right?
But here’s the (unremarkable) thing: I don’t like them. You could say I detest them. Each of them come imbued with the philosophies and decisions of the designers that don’t ever align with how my mind works. It would make my life easier if I used the one tool for work and home, but in the words of Australian moral philosophers: yeah, nah.
I went the plain text route for years which somewhat worked, and I’ve tried to shoehorn my personal life into one of these larger task tracking tools. Thunderbird with Reminders synced to my mail provider has come the closest to working, but it hasn’t been quite right. Namely, assigning tasks to certain categories (such as finance, home, or hobbies) is doable with a few different hacks, but they’re all a bit clunky. It’s too… 2D.
But then something clicked for me in a widely-used online spreadsheet: they have checkboxes. LibreOffice has boolean values, but an honest to goodness inline checkbox!? Right there in a column? I’m embarrassed to admit how much this changed my life. I’ve added them to an online spreadsheet, and overnight I feel like a changed person.
I now have a huge workbook with spreadsheet tabs for all the things. Grocery lists, one-off tasks, larger projects, life goals, decisions, measurements, travel packing checklists, manga to read, stuff to fix, network notes, the list goes on. Just like that screenshot above in LibreOffice, I have tasks outlined in a sheet, only with a big, glorious checkbox at the start. Then I can filter out tasks that have been completed, or use conditional formatting to recolour them a pleasing green for that sweet, sweet dopamine. And best of all? It’s all in the one place.
Using an online spreadsheet also solved the syncing issue, because turns out I like capturing information on the go as well. Or should I say, I need to. My brain will remember that I need to measure our wardrobe for a new shelf while I’m at the local Japanese supermarket getting bonito flakes, which makes absolutely no sense. Thanks brain, that’s the exact kind of actionable information I need right when I’m doing something else!
This has even subsumed some of the stuff I had previously allocated to my local personal Postgres database too, which I’m perhaps more ashamed to admit. But maybe only temporarily?
I was a very strange child. I learned how to write a BASIC program before I grokked tying shoelaces, and didn’t see an issue with it. I also enjoyed tinkering with personal database tools over games the majority of the time. Before Access took over and was left to rot on the vine there were dozens of them. FileMaker was awesome. Delphi! dBase! The old FoxPro! Fuck computers used to be so cool before we coalesced on the few massive providers who then enshittified everything. Remember Bento?!
As I said in that earlier linked spreadsheet post, I think in matrices. These lend themselves effortlessly to spreadsheets, but I also think they could work in a proper database structure as well. Then my task management could benefit from all the goodies databases provide, like proper views and triggers.
I thought I’d take a stab at writing my own little GUI program to do this, because while the databases themselves are robust and capable, the linchpin to a tool like this is rapid and easy entry. If it’s not easy and malleable, I’ll get frustrated and stop using it. I reached for Perl, but I’ve since decided to take a stab at it in Go given how enamoured I’ve become with it last year.
Baby steps, but I’m hoping 2026 will be the year I get more organised with a tool that works exactly as my brain does :). Who knows, maybe someone else might like using it too.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-01-01.
2025-12-31 16:50:46
I used to do a wordle cloud every year, until the original site went down and an online game pilfered the name. Which is a shame, because it’s such a cool concept!
Here’s one for 2025, fed on 592 post titles from the year. Thanks to the Free Word Cloud Generator for making this so easy ^^/.
SciArtSeptember featured heavily, owing to the fact I did an entire series on that back in September. Japan was also mentioned a lot after our trip earlier in the year. Lots of coffee and FreeBSD too, which is encouraging. Alas, I still haven’t got around to talking about Vietnam, so I guess that will appear in the one from 2026. And there still isn’t enough NetBSD goodness.
☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎
As this is the last post for the year, I wanted to take this opportunity to thank each of you for your readership and kind words this year. I started this blog as a labour of love when I was a teenager, and I never thought it would come to be such a big part of my life. To know that you—yes, you!—take time from your day to read my thoughts, concerns, ideas, fanboying, troubleshooting, and dreams means more than words can express. Ironic, considering that blogs are literally words.
If there’s one thing I want to change in 2026, it’s my use of passive voice. Haiyo! But also the way I approach feedback and comments. It’s clear the way I’m doing things isn’t working, with most of you waiting months (cough years) for replies. Part of this is still social anxiety that’s reared its ugly head again lately, but it’s also basic logistics and time. Michał put the idea of an old school mailing list in my head which I can’t shake, but I have other ideas too.
In the meantime, as I used to always end my posts with: peace, health, and happiness. Let’s hope the world gets a bit more of all three in 2026.
Run NetBSD!
Cheers. ☕︎
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-12-31.
2025-12-31 10:42:45
I have been on the market for a monitor stand I can use with machines like the Commodore 128 for seemingly ages. Sure, I could have built one myself with non-existent power tools in an apartment building without a shed but… wait, where I was I going with this? Oh yeah, I was attempting to defend myself from Internet strangers; I need to stop doing that.
For those unfamiliar, most 8 and 16-bit home computers integrated their motherboards and keyboards into the one desktop chassis. Think of it as a precursor to the modern laptop or notebook, only without the monitor attached (well, barring outliers like the Commodore LCD that regrettably never came to pass). The motherboard was typically mounted below the keyboard where there was plenty of free space, or behind it with respect to where the operator sat.
This was an advantageous arrangement for a few reasons. They were cheaper to manufacturer and ship, because you were only building, packaging, and sending off a single unit. This also made them more portable, and reduced the amount of assembly required when at home. That is, until you needed additional peripherals and disk drives with their associated power bricks and data cables, something laptop operators would also learn the hard way many years later. But I digress.
These integrated units were fine when the machines had small motherboards, as with the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and Amstrad CPC. But as home computers became more sophisticated and required more discrete chips and circuitry, motherboards began to grow larger than the footprint of a keyboard. The only way to grow was backwards, which took up more desk space and made positioning monitors difficult. A common site in photos from the time are stands that place the monitor above the computer to overcome this additional depth.
(It should be noted the Apple II line was always built with sufficient strength and space to place a monitor on top. But even Apple eventually split the keyboard out from the rest of the unit with the IIGS, alongside Commodore with the 128D, and Atari with the Mega ST. I can only imagine an IBM PC engineer shouting “called it!”).
Finding such a stand today was surprisingly difficult. Stands from certain Scandinavian meatball restaurants and Australian office supply stores are more designed to elevate monitors than place things underneath. As such, while they may offer sufficient vertical clearance for the device (plus ventilation space), they were almost always too narrow. I’m looking at you SIGFINN, and your frustratingly tapered sides!
But then a little (cough) chain of stores called DAISO appeared, offering what they call a Computer Table. And yes, it fits the Commodore 128 perfectly!
Even the Atari 1040 STᴱ worked in a pinch, which was surprising.
This is not an ad for DAISO, of which you can probably be confident given I doubt their designers would have been thinking of these machines when making this table. But now I have a table I can use on this bench for these horizontally-challenging devices.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-12-31.
2025-12-29 06:57:36
Clara and I would like to replace our current Brother laser with a new printer setup. It’s served us dutifully over the last decade, and will be going to a good home where I’m sure they’ll be as impressed as we’ve been.
But our list of needs and wants has changed:
We want to be able to print double-sided. Technically we can achieve the same thing with the current unit by printing odd pages, then flipping them back into the paper try, and printing even pages. But life is too short.
We want to print colour. Monochrome lasers are the best for documents and travel stuff, but Clara especially would love to print more photos.
Something with an internal paper tray would be a bonus, to keep the desk uncluttered and to prevent dust ingress.
Faxes. Yes, the idea of publishing a fax number tickles me in an exceptionally silly way. It would also come in handy for the one time out of a million where I do need to send one. I’d also be known as “the guy” among family and friends who can send/receive faxes. The cachet. The prestige! Yes HN readers, that’s sarcasm. Or… is it!?
Our scanner is also on its last legs, having valiantly scanned thousands of pages of stuff during Covid lockdowns when we were desperately trying to get rid of stuff. I could repair it, or I could upgrade.
If only there was a common solution to all these problems.
Turns out… there isn’t. You need an inkjet if you want to print photos, and you need a laser if you want a laser for documents. I know, shocking. This means we’ll be looking at a minimum of two devices, barring some mythical hybrid printer that merges the two technologies.
But here’s the thing, one of them can be a multifunction device. I have fond memories of my HP multifunction printer/scanner/fax/copier I took with me to uni back in the day, before their print division became enshittified. I’ve also been impressed (unsurprisingly) with the Brother multifunction colour lasers at work. The conventional wisdom is that individual devices will always perform their job better than an all-in-one, but my personal experience runs contrary to this.
So the options are:
A multifunction monochrome laser printer, with a separate inkjet.
A multifunction inkjet, with a separate monochrome laser.
Both have their pros and cons. Standalone lasers tend to be smaller, so it’d save space compared to a dedicated inkjet. Integrating a colour scanner with a colour inkjet make sense for copying, but realistically we won’t be doing that. Having a separate inkjet could even perhaps allow us to get a larger one for A3 prints. But wait, didn’t I just say I’m concerned about space? 99% of the time we’d be printing black and white laser prints anyway, so we could get that first with all the integrated goodies, and get the inkjet later. If that paragraph sounded convoluted, welcome to how my brain works.
We agree with the Mastodon poll, and are leaning towards the first. We always had EPSON inkjets growing up, so many it’d be an opportunity to check in with what they’re doing.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-12-29.
2025-12-28 07:41:25
The pkgsrc developers are proud to announce pkgsrc-2025Q4, the 89th quarterly release of pkgsrc, the cross-platform packaging system. pkgsrc contains over 29,000 packages. More information on pkgsrc is available at https://www.pkgsrc.org/.
Since the last release (2025Q3), 112 packages were added, 2326 packages were updated (1472 distinct ones), 2 packages were downgraded, and 20 packages were removed.
The release announcement includes more detail, including updates to PostgreSQL, QEMU, and LXQt. Is it silly to admit that I’m also unreasonably happy to see CDE in these sorts of announcements as well?
A huge thank you to the team for putting this together again, and to all the tireless maintainers. You give me more optimism than I can express.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-12-28.
