2026-06-29 06:42:21
Sendai is a city on the central-north coast of Japan, in the Tōhoku region. I was looking up its prefecture on Wikipedia because I love their flag, and ended up going down a rabbithole about its festivals. They’re most famous for the Sendai Tanabata Festival.
According to the official website:
Sendai Tanabata Festival has been passed down through the generations as a traditional event that dates back to the era of Date Masamune, the first lord of Sendai Domain. Today, the festival is known nationwide for its elegance—derived from an ancient Japanese star festival—as well as its gorgeous decorations. Tanabata festivals are traditionally held throughout Japan on July 7, a date based on the old Chinese calendar. The Sendai Tanabata Festival, however is held from August 6 to 8, based on a calendar that is one month later than the old Chinese calendar, in order to keep to the seasonality of the old festival. During the festival, the entire city—including central Sendai and neighboring shopping districts—is filled with colorful Tanabata decorations. The festival is visited by more than two million tourists every year.
Atsi Otani over on Wikimedia Commons has photos of some of the elaborate designs; they’re beautiful!
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-06-29.
2026-06-28 06:46:34
Last Thursday I talked about retiring my RTX 3070 for a new AMD RX 9060 XT. This garnered a few questions from you fine people, which I’ve aggregated here.
Price, availability, and requirements.
The AMD 9070 XT is the best graphics card for the money you can get today, and the 9070 gets close to it while offering efficiency gains I thought the industry had long abandoned. If I didn’t have other life priorities for that money, I’d have bought a 9070.
I got the 9060 XT because it was at a steep-enough discount that I couldn’t ignore it. Benchmarks also showed it being of comparable performance to my 3070. Turns out it still exceeds it in the workloads and games I care about, which was nice.
My RTX 3070 was a great, if overpriced card for my needs. As I said, it was a big upgrade over my GTX 970, and let me play games during those Covid lockdown days. In spite its thermal and heat problems, it never made me feel like I was losing out… and still didn’t when it was retired.
I did already try a deshroud, which did improve thermals and acoustics for a time, but the stability problems persisted. As mentioned, it also had no room for undervolting without becoming even more unstable.
I could do many things. Such is the joy and promise of being a human.
As I mentioned, Sapphire are considered the pre-eminent AMD manufacturer, just as EVGA was for American Nvidia customers. The Nitro+ is their most overbuilt card, with a heatsink and fans well in excess of what it probably needs. I hoped this would help with cooling, and most importantly, noise. It did!
It also fit in my Dan A4-H2O case, where the XFX cards I was looking at wouldn’t have. This is a moot point, as I’m hopefully moving back to something larger at some point so I can have a proper sound card and internal capture devices. But that’s for another post.
I did mention I was interested in the Arc, based on our positive experience with my ThinkPad and Clara’s A770. Intel’s Arc cards are great.
The decision came down to VRAM. At the discounted price, I could get the 9060 XT with 16 GiB for not much more than the 12 GiB in the B580. Though both would have been more than the 8 GiB on the 3070.
Had Intel released a higher-tier Battlemage card (say, a B770 with 16 GiB), I would have bought that instead. We’re very interested in seeing Intel succeed here.
To be an Nvidia operator requires running their proprietary binary-blob drivers. This isn’t so much an issue on FreeBSD, because its licence doesn’t preclude you from using your machine the way you want. The GPL is designed not to accommodate such drivers, so as such you need to build and install them locally yourself. We could get into the philosophical reasons for why that is, but that’s the reality. That said, the RPMFusion team do a great job making the process as easy as they can.
Either way, I don’t have skin in the game now, to use another sportsball analogy. My ThinkPad has integrated Intel Arc, and my desktop now has AMD. My interest in the topic is now non-existent.
I bought this card prior to the announcement, but it’s good to see AMD and Linux continuing to get attention in the gaming space. Downstream, we can only benefit.
Not that many, and not that often, funnily enough. I mostly play Minecraft with Clara on our world we started in 2020. It’s how we unwind, especially when we’re stressed or tired.
Occasionally I play Flight Simulator, X-Plane, Train Sim World, Train Simulator Classic, Cities Skylines, and the Atelier RPGs. Of all of these, only X-Plane and Cities Skylines II taxed the 3070, and do probably push the limits of the 9060 XT.
Wah lao eh.
I wish DisplayPort, but my Dell monitor only has one of each. My work MacBook Air docks to the DP, so HDMI it is. That was a lot of letters.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-06-28.
2026-06-27 07:15:00
I care little for the British royal family who, by extension, are also the royal family of Australia, a phrase that has never made sense to me whatsoever. Even the king himself expressed surprised that we weren’t a republic yet. The only thing we have going for us is that the royals have only overturned one democratically elected government in our history. Also that we can commensurate with the Canadians, Kiwis, and many others.
Where was I going with this?
Recently I read that King Charles III and Queen Camilla (I think that’s their names, don’t email me) decided to remain living in Clarence House, instead of the sprawling Buckingham Palace in London. This isn’t entirely unprecedented; I remember reading that Queen Liz wasn’t partial to that palace either. It was cold, dreary, and had a draught. But the new royals don’t even intend to move back in after renovations to Buckingham Palace in London to, presumably, address the aforementioned cold, dreariness, and draught.
Instead, the royals live in Clarence House. I’ve read that it’s a more “modest” dwelling than Buckingham Palace, but it’s still huge by any reasonable standards. I only include it here because I like it’s minimal yet classical design, as taken by ChrisO:
I’d try building it in Minecraft, but I don’t think we’d have the resolution to capture all the detail. Maybe we’d need to do a “pixelart map” hack to make it work.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-06-27.
2026-06-26 06:59:37
I tend to find myself being grumpy when it comes to web auth, let alone the broader field of modern web design. Such observations lend themselves to cranky blog posts where I pontificate on how and why it got so bad, and so on. So this time I want to address something a website did that was good!
The site in question emailed me a multi-factor code (which isn’t good), which included a dash in the middle (which isn’t good), because the login form on the target site only had six boxes (which isn’t good). Something like this:
676-767
67! It’s the new Funny Number™ we’re all supposed to regurgitate instead of 69. At least, from what I’ve been told. I feel old. But I digress.
Now at this point I wasn’t exactly looking forward to using this token in the resulting web form. I knew it wasn’t going to be the highlight of my day, but instead a minor irritation. I wouldn’t write in my journal before bed that I had a great experience interacting with a web form, nor would I insist a misguided marketing agency allow me to recommend such a form to friends and family on an arbitrary scale of 1 to 10 for some reason.
See, my experience is that copy pasting such codes into a field with a fixed number of characters sometimes results in the dash being included and the last digit chopped off. This is bad enough, but some forms I interact with even submit the form when it’s detected six characters have been entered, leaving you no opportunity to verify what you typed.
Not this time! When I absent-mindedly copied that multi-factor code with the dash in it, and pasted it into their web form, several important things happened:
The dash was stripped out
The remaining six alphanumerics were pasted into the six text boxes
The form let me review what was entered before submitting
In the words of the Fonz, Happy days! Wait, did he ever actually say that? I don’t think he would have. I never saw the show, sorry.
This may sound simple, perhaps even normal or expected, but I deal with a sufficient number of sites that don’t do this that it was a delight to encounter one that did.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-06-26.
2026-06-25 15:33:08
I have a new graphics card for my primary desktop, the Sapphire Nitro+ AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT. This replaces my Zotac GeForce RTX 3070 Twin Edge, a card with a name that’s almost as long.
The tl;dr is: it’s great, for me!
This isn’t going to be a technical post laden with benchmarks; there are plenty of more qualified people you can read and watch for those. Instead, this is more of a thinking-out-loud post about the upgrade process, and how one random person with their own specific requirements found something that worked well.
My 3070 was a decent card, and I appreciate all the fun and productivity it has enabled these past four and bit years. It was a massive upgrade from the GTX 970 I’d used before, and was my first experience with running heavier games on settings above that of “potato” (X-Plane, Train Simulator Classic, and Minecraft with shaders). Nvidia’s binary blob drivers were reliable and simple to install on FreeBSD, and even Linux played ball most of the time (well, until it didn’t, and my drivers and kernel would get out of sync. Something something tainted love).
But I didn’t win the silicon lottery with this card. Overclockers know that not all ICs are created equal, they’re only designed to pass minimum tolerance checks after leaving the foundry. My 3070 ran hot, close to its thermal limits within minutes, even with aggressive fan curves and a later re-paste with the best Thermal Grizzly had to offer. It also had no margin for an undervolt without becoming immediately unstable, which could have helped with temperatures. Worse was Zotac’s anaemic heatsink on the Twin Edge model, and two thin fans that made my late Power Mac G5 sound quiet under load.
I briefly ran it with a deshroud, which mitigated the high temperatures and noise… until it didn’t. In the last couple of months the image started cutting out or even panicking the host after half an hour of use. If my card was marginal while under the good graces of a warranty period, it became far less stable in its old age. I swapped back to the original shroud and fans just in case the larger Noctuas were somehow drawing too much current for it to handle, but the issues persisted.
Everyone has their own priorities and requirements when it comes to computer parts. That Zotac card taught me that heat and noise were key concerns for me, to the point where I’d actively throttle down its performance and run games at lower settings to avoid destroying my ears. This also addressed the card’s persistent stability issues, which with hindsight probably indicated I got a dud. But hey, during Covid Blockchain (which one was the disease?) we were lucky to have anything at all, and I couldn’t justify the later cost to replace it out of warranty.
These were my ideal replacement criteria:
Something for not too much money. In this economy!?
Something that matched (or ideally beat) my 3070 in performance.
Something that runs cool and quiet. I deal with enough loud fan noise in data centres, I don’t need an angle grinder on my desk. The bigger, the better.
Something I could drop into my existing machine. I use DaVinci Resolve and ffmpeg, both of which are hardware accelerated with the 3070.
Something from either AMD or Intel. Again, the drivers worked fine on FreeBSD, but they’re a moving target on Linux.
I briefly looked at getting an Arc B580 given Clara’s success with the Arc A770. I also looked at the AMD RX 9070, which reviewers said offered great power efficiency for its rendered frames.
The decision was almost made for me here. I had enough for an RX 9070 in savings, but I couldn’t bring myself to spend that much. Then a local Australian retailer were offering the lower tier 9060 XT at such a steep discount for a short time that I said screw it!
Sapphire and Powercolor have been long considered the best Radeon OEMs, and I’d always wanted one of their cards. The Nitro+ is Sapphire’s top tier SKU, with an almost comically large heatsink and three fans. This specific card starts to nip at the heels at the lower-end RX 9070 cards for price, but a RX 9070 with an equivalent cooling solution to the Nitro+ would have been close to twice as expensive. Hence, not being able to justify it before.
I’ll admit, I hadn’t looked that seriously at the 9060 XT, because reviewers noted a decent performance drop from the 9070 and 9070 XT. Then again, those same reviewers praised the Zotac 3070 Twin Edge I got for being “exceptional value”, and I ended up regretting the purchase. Turns out there are more qualitative factors at play than merely frames per dollar.
The Nitro+ 9060 XT measures 300 x 118.25 x 55.1 mm, rendering it basically a three-slot card. It’s the largest, heaviest, most over-engineered 9060 XT on the market (though the XFX is slightly longer). Even the styling is relatively restrained, not that I’ll ever be looking at it.
This is all hard to visualise until you look at it on top of my 3070, a card with a higher power draw! Your eyes don’t deceive you either: the 3070 uses two 8-pin connectors, whereas the 9060 XT only needs one.
I’ll admit, I did have a bit of trepidation when buying this card in lieu of the 9070. Did I make the right choice, or would I be stuck with a functional downgrade over what I had before?
The 3070 was a mid-tier card in the Nvidia RTX 30 series. The AMD 9060 XT is closer to an entry level card, albeit two generations newer. In the past this would have still resulted in a nice performance uplift, but in our modern times I’d have still been happy with something equivalent or slightly better in performance. In my real world use, it is. Except, it’s also much more! I’ll explain.
The 9060 XT feels faster, which is a pleasant surprise. The 3070 in its standard configuration running Minecraft at 4K with Complementary Shaders on Medium could sit at 58–60 FPS, and the fans would be running so loud it’d wake the neighbours’ cat, shatter windows, and trigger a visit by the local fire department. By contrast, the 9060 XT hit the maximum 60 FPS I defined, and sat there comfortably while it sipped power. Both cards delivered similar performance, but the experience of being in the room with each of them was night and day.
Anecdotes aren’t data, so here’s an anecdotes after playing the aforementioned game. In this case the fans didn’t even come on!
My oddball configuration of 4K/60 FPS is well within the reach of this card for the games I play, and the hardware I run, with the visual quality I’m after, which is perfect.
(Again, if you want charts and benchmarks that actually mean something, seek professional advice elsewhere. Likewise, if you think running 4K/60 is weird, feel free to run something else).
While LACT reported the 3070 hot spot temperature running close to 80 degrees within minutes of any reasonable workload, I haven’t been able to push the 9060 XT above 45 degrees. This is wild! Likewise, the fans run whisper quiet, to the point where I can’t hear it over the ambient noise in the room, or the Corsair fans on my AIO liquid CPU cooler.
This is likely down to a few factors:
The 3070 is usually wrapped in an expensive leather jacket, which hinders thermal dissipation. For Orange Peanut Gallery readers, this was a joke, please don’t email me that this is incorrect, actually.
The 3070 is rated for 220 W, whereas 9060 XT is rated for 182 W. This is a testament to AMD’s focus on efficiency this generation, which I appreciate.
Sapphire’s awesome Nitro+ cooling system has three deeper fans instead of two shallow ones, and a heatsink at least a third longer and a bit deeper than the Zotac. So it uses less power, and it has far more thermal mass and kinetic energy to cool that part down. Shiok!
Clara and I played some games for an hour last night, and not once did I hear the Sapphire card. I haven’t even bothered to apply my own fan curves or an undervolt, it works that well. It feels like what that 3070 should have been.
That’s weird, this doesn’t feel like the correct way to the meeting room, and I know that perfectly well. Still, it was worth coming to the employee lounge first, just to admire it.
They’re obvious: a newer, more power efficient card with a massive heatsink and more fans runs cooler, quieter, and a bit faster than an older but higher-end card. Who could have predicted?!
I haven’t mentioned that I got the 16 GiB model of the 9060 XT, which in the open world games I play may offer it an edge over the 8 GiB 3070. There’s an 8 GiB model of the 9060 XT, but I wouldn’t touch that will a barge poll, and neither should you. This is something upon which the reviewers and I can agree, even if I’m one of those weird people who think acoustics and efficiency are as important as performance.
I expect that for most people, the AMD RX 9070 (or even the 9070 XT) would still make more sense if you can afford it. It has much better performance without too much more power draw, and you get the same driver support advantages on Linux. But for a budget option, the 9060 XT has exceeded my expectations, and I’m happy.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-06-25.
2026-06-24 06:29:21
It’s so cold in Sydney this morning, I can see my breath. Parked cars have frost on them, and leaves are heavy with dew. I have to walk with my hands in my jacket pockets, because the wind is too cold. One scarf doesn’t feel like enough. This long black coffee isn’t hot enough. We had to have the central heating on this morning for the first time this year. I’m pretty sure the birds flying past were wearing mittens. Wait, how would a bird wear mittens? Why are you asking me that, I can barely hear myself over my chattering teeth.
If this weather keeps up, it might get to freezing. As in, the temperature at which water becomes… ice! I know, right?! This has never happened anywhere ever before.
And people say I’m out of touch. Of course I am, I’m wearing gloves. Friggen touchscreen phone grrrr, I need those gloves with capacitive fingers. No iOS, why did you autocorrect my scrawl into a series of words I’ve literally never typed in my life before, instead of the phrase I most definitely have? GAH!
Is this what people read my blog for?
☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎
I’ve been a bit glib about the current US administration here of late, but I do still one day want to go to Montana for some hiking. The plan would be to take the Empire Builder train from Chicago to Seattle, but stay in Whitefish along the way. That sounds wonderful, but it would also be cold. Colder than this. I’d better get acclimatised first. Acclimated? Is that the word? Sorry, I had to take my gloves off to type this, and I already can’t feel my index fingers.
Ooh, the sun just came out. That’s quite nice. I might sit right here where this beam is for a bit.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-06-24.
