2025-08-23 07:38:50
This is the forth post in my A-Z Toolbox series, in which I’m listing tools I use down the alphabet for no logical reason. I also definitely didn’t forget I was doing this, which is why it’s been eight months since the last one (cough).
The letter D has some essential gems:
drill is a better version of dig, the useful DNS network utility. It comes standard on FreeBSD, and carries Gurren Lagann connotations which I appreciate.
dialog, which lets you create pseudo-graphical shell applications. It can be frustrating to develop against at times, but I love it for wrapping complicated scripts I’ve written for friends and family. It deserves its own post.
dav1d is a fast av1 encoder/decoder I’ve used to learn about the format and compare it to H264 for new projects.
Berkley db5 embedded database which, despite now being owned by The Big Database Company, still has its uses which I should write about at some point.
colordiff which, while technically starting with C, adds colour to the ubiquitous diff utitliy used to compare files. Not everyone finds colour useful, but I do.
But my award for the best D utility goes to dcfldd, an extension to the ubiquiotus dd. It was developed at the American Department of Defence Computer Forensics Lab as a forensic tool, but it has a bunch of useful features including:
Inline hashing and image verification
Status/progress output, which is useful if you’re not using the GNU extended dd.
Multiple, split, and piped outputs
A more efficient default block size
Use of dcfldd looks similar to dd. For example, here I’m imaging an old Zip disk and logging:
# dcfldd if=/dev/gpt/zip-disk of=/tmp/zip-disk.img \
conv=sync hash=sha1 sha1log=zip-disk.log
You can then use it to verify images:
# dcfldd if=/dev/gpt/zip-disk.img vf=/tmp/zip-disk.img
dcfldd is one of the first tools I install on any new machine. If you deal a lot with physical media and disk images, especially ones that haven’t been looked after with a proper file system like OpenZFS, I’d consider it essential.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-08-23.
2025-08-21 12:53:59
More than a few of you have asked what’s happened over the last few weeks. I’ll admit I haven’t been in a great mental space again, which isn’t conducive to writing. But then, writing makes me feel better, so I should! I guess it’s the same thing as physical exercise: I always feel more energy afterwards, even if I expelled energy doing it.
I’ll be fine! But thanks.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-08-21.
2025-08-21 12:19:46
Sydney is dotted with Street Libraries. These little huts can be placed by anyone, and allow people in local communities to swap books and share stories. They’re a brilliant idea!
These are some of the books I’ve enjoyed swapping this year:
Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island (1995). I never thought a travelog around Britain would make me giggle as much as Douglas Adams, but wow. It was met with acclaim when first released, but it’s also a fascinating retrospective into the 1990s. So many of Bill’s problems—in a good and bad way—would be solved today with a smartphone. But then, where’s the fun in that? Easily in my top ten favourite books of all time, old bean.
Matthew Reilly, Hell Island (2005). I read this novella in one sitting. Set on an abandoned aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific, with all the suspense and toe-curlingly vivid imagery that makes an epic mystery thriller. Also, wow what a plot twist! I hadn’t read his books before, but I might try others in his Shane Schofield universe. It’s also occurred to me that’s two books with the word Island in it.
(Unfinished) Ken Follett, The Third Twin (1996). Another author who’s works I’d never read before, but I knew him from reputation. He had me hooked within the first two chapters, with some of the best characterisation I think I’ve ever read. Alas, the health-related subject matter of a relative hit a bit too close to home. I love his writing style; I’m going to look out for others.
John Grisham, The Firm (1991). I started reading John’s legal thrillers on advice from a high school teacher after marking a report I did on the Law and Order TV franchise. I’ve been hooked ever since, but somehow I’d never read his first. Wow… again, what a twist! I can see why this made an impact.
These will now be going back to the local street library, and swapped for some new ones :).
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-08-21.
2025-08-18 16:47:58
Stefano Marinelli, the illu(mos, strious, minating) proprieter of all that’s good in the BSD operating system community, has a new one for you to check out:
Think of illumos.cafe as your local gathering place for everything related to illumos-based operating systems - SmartOS, OmniOS, Tribblix, OpenIndiana and friends. It’s more than a collection of services; it’s a warm, volunteer-run space for conversation, learning, and community.
I still have a soft spot for Solaris. I used it at my first stint at university, my SPARCStation 5 is still my favourite pizzabox computer, many of the best FreeBSD features come from it, and I still run Tribblix for fun within VMs hosted on FreeBSD bhyve, and Linux Xen.
More broadly, I appreciate Stefano’s point about monocultures. I’ve been pushing back on this for a while here in the context of Linux and Chrome. The illumos family are another great alternative alongside the BSDs.
My primary Tribblix VM’s hostname is peter. It seems my next one will be stefano :).
Update: @Rubenerd is my handle if you want to follow.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-08-18.
2025-08-18 10:29:12
Here’s where we got up to last week. See if you can spot where things might have gone wrong!
Clara and I are unusual by Australian standards, in that we (a) don’t have a car, and (2) live in an apartment building instead of a house. Beyond a few pockets of Sydney and Melbourne, much of Australian society is not designed to handle such edge cases, whether it be asking for a drivers licence for ID, or delivery couriers asking if they can drop parcels “in your front yard”. Oh they missed you? No worries, you can drive to their warehouse in whoop whoop!
As such, the national postal delivery service named (surprisingly) Australia Post, has a parcel locker service. It works like this:
You register for an account, whereby you’re given an “address” to send parcels to. This includes a unique, 10-digit identifier that’s unique. Nice tautology Ruben, that really helped.
You offer this address when buying something. This will be distinct from your billing address, for obvious reasons.
When the parcel arrives, you receive a text message on your phone, as well as a QR code notification from the AusPost phone application (pardon, “app”).
You go to the parcel lockers at your local post office, scan the QR code you received, and the parcel locker pops open revealing the retrocomputer part or nail polish you ordered.
It’s a neat system, and one we use constantly to ensure parcels don’t get left in common areas outside our apartment block, where they’re liable to be lost, stolen, damaged, or somehow more than one of the above. We’re not always at home to accept deliveries, because we have jobs and live our lives sometimes. I know, right!?
Some of my more astute readers may already see some potential problems in this system though, one of which bit me this morning.
Last week, I was beginning to worry about a shipment of SIMM chips I’d ordered for an i486, like a gentleman. The parts were due two days earlier, and there had been nay a peep from AusPost. I looked up the tracking number I’d received from the merchant, and pasted it into the AusPost tracking site. It gave me the following answer:
LATEST: Awaiting Collection at $SUBURB PARCEL LOCKER
I… wait, what?
Normally parcels that are addressed to me are automatically added to my AusPost mobile application when they’re addressed to my parcel locker and scanned at the originating post office. Curiously, this one never showed up. I had no record of the parcel being sent, or delivered, or being available in the parcel locker.
I added the tracking number manually, only for it to tell me the same thing as the website. My parcel was at the local parcel locker, awaiting collection… and they didn’t tell me.
This is where we get into a quirk of AusPost’s parcel locker system (maybe it affects other services like Amazon as well, I wouldn’t know). There’s no way to use the mobile application to unlock the parcel lockers without a notification. Tapping the notification opens a hidden screen with the QR code. If the application never sent a notification, it’s impossible to get to the screen with the QR code… even if you can see the parcel listed! I’m not sure why this is; maybe it’s a misguided security policy.
But here’s where I started getting an inkling about what was going on. I also never received a text message from AusPost telling me my parcel was sent, or on its way, or that it was available for pickup. As far as I was concerned, I only noticed it was received by manually looking up the tracking number myself. And when I did, I was only told it was awaiting collection at the parcel locker. That’s it… no mention of which parcel locker, or what code I would need to open it even if I knew!
I waited over the weekend, staring mournfully at this i486 PCI board without any SIMM chips, then went to the post office this morning. I handed over the tracking number, and was told politely that I could collect it from the parcel lockers outside with the notification I would have received on my phone. I explained that I never received any notification, which caused some confusion. I asked if they could check out the back.
Eventually, the postal worker returned… with my parcel! Hurray!
Want to take a guess what the problem was? Give it some thought, I’ll be here making a coffee while I wait.
Okay, I’m back. The problem was the sender wrote the wrong mobile phone number on the parcel.
There’s… a lot to unpack here, as a postal worker may say. But let’s start with the obvious issue that the parcel was otherwise delivered exactly where it was supposed to be. It had my 10-digit unique identifier, my name, and all the details of the post office correct. I’ve had parcels received with these exact details on it (and no mobile number), and there has never been an issue.
AusPost’s system saw the mobile number listed on the package, and directed all notifications to that instead of the number that was on file. Fine, I suppose that makes sense. But then when it arrived at my local post office, they failed to match that mobile number to my AusPost parcel locker account, so the mobile application also didn’t receive any notification.
I would have thought my parcel locker ID was my unique identifier, but it seems mobile phones are. Which is odd, because what’s the point of that parcel locker ID then? Sure, I might not have received text messages if the number was wrong, but surely the system should have matched my parcel locker ID when it arrived, and pushed an update to my account, which would have triggered the AusPost mobile application to send me a notification. Again, I’ve received parcels without a mobile phone number listed, and I’ve received notifications for them.
It’s all a bit weird. The good news is, the parcel wasn’t in postal purgatory as I feared, and I was able to get a bit more of this i486 working. I also notified the seller that it was likely a transcription mistake, but to be careful when attaching phone numbers to parcel locker shipments.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-08-18.
2025-08-17 09:13:29
I was looking at Notebook Check before buying a used ThinkPad X230—like a gentleman—when I saw this:
Lenovo: Lenovo (“Le” from English legend, novo (Latin) for new) was founded in 1984 as a Chinese computer trading company.
I… didn’t know that. I did know that the earlier version of the company was called Legend, in part because of retrocomputer shenanigans I’ve been researching.
This is as Earth-shattering to me as realising they were spelled The Beatles because the word had beat in it. I was almost sixteen by the time I figured that out. It wasn’t embarrasing though, becuase I said so. Is that how that works?
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-08-17.
