2026-08-10 15:10:04
Whenever Clara and I need some mid-afternoon motivation when we’re in the home office, we put on Kenshi Yonezu’s 2017 masterpiece Bootleg. I realised I’ve never shared any of it, so I reckon it warrants a Music Monday:
What genre does Kenshi Yonezu perform? Yes!
As an aside, this was among the first albums we bought when we went to Japan the second time, and realised that HMV and Tower Records were still a thing. That was almost ten years ago, wow.
Hey Ruben, why buy a tiny flat instead of a big Australian house? And how can you afford to travel? I can’t figure out the correlation!
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-08-10.
2026-08-10 11:44:04
Beryl sent an email in July, to which I’m only just getting around to replying because I’m a terrible person:
Hi Ruben! I hope you are doing well. A very random question, I have noticed that you seem to use light mode in most of your devices, is there any important reason for that or did you try dark mode and just did not like it?
I definitely prefer and use light mode when I can now, but it wasn’t always the case. It’s funny how our preferences and requirements change over time.
Copyright (c) 1976,1982,1988,1990,1991 Digital Research Inc. [DR DOS] C:\>
I used to be ambivalent when it came to modes, and use whatever the tool I was using had without a second thought. Before I started school, I’d hack on the family 486 which was either booted into DOS for QPascal and WordPerfect, or Windows 3.1/95 to run GUI software. The former had what we’d now call a dark mode, and the latter two mostly ran in light mode. But I never stopped to wonder if I could change these. DOS would have let me with the appropriate ANSI.SYS calls, and Windows certainly had their themes.
[email protected]:~ $
In my twenties, this changed alongside my shift towards Linux, then BSD and Mac OS X. I used light modes on the desktop, but my Terminals took on the familiar green-on-black “phosphor” look. Likewise, my first GeoCities pages used a white-on-blue theme, because I thought it looked like XTreeGold and Borland tools. Then I got access to a Solaris box and saw its light mode dmesg(8), and loved that too. Go figure.
SPARCStation 5, Keyboard Present
ROM Rev. 2.15, 64 MB memory installed
ok
With my older eyes however, I’ve had to retire dark modes. Looking at dark mode displays for more than a few moments burns whatever text I can read into my dilated eyes, such that it ghosts across my vision when I blink or move my head. It somewhat mimics the early-onset aura symptoms of a migraine, which isn’t ideal! I also tend to find dark themes much blurrier, especially if I’m not wearing glasses at my desk which is my preference.
[email protected]:~ ready $
There’s also a mood aspect to it as well. Light themes feel more cheerful to me, especially now that I live in a part of the world that experiences winter again. For all the stereotypes of nerds sitting in dank basements with dim lighting and Matrix-style displays, I’m a hopelessly solar-powered individual. Light means warmth, joy, and optimism, and I’ll take it whenever and wherever I can.
All that said, is a phrase with three words (thank you). I’ll continue to include dark modes on my site here, because we all have different eyes. One of my close friends claims to find light modes overwhelming, and likens black text on a white screen to ants crawling across a light bulb. That also doesn’t sound ideal, and is potentially a sign that food wasn’t properly cleaned somewhere. Sterling Archer warned us about this.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-08-10.
2026-08-09 07:39:48
There are many challenges that come with being a renter in Australia, and one of them concerns the quality and condition of the included appliances. Most rentals I had here prior to buying included a dishwasher and a dryer. This sounds great, until you actually use them and realise you’re dealing with what I referred to as rental specials. These appliances live hard lives, are generally in rough shape, and are almost always the budget model with limited capacity, slow speeds, noisy operation, high power consumption, and dodgy controls that sometimes even maybe work occasionally, sort of, possibly.
Clara’s and my last rental was wonderful, but the included dryer shook, rattled, and rolled with such veracity we feared it’d rip itself off the wall and don blue suede shoes. The dishwasher also didn’t so much wash dishes as throw tepid suds in their vicinity, then fail to rinse them off which you’d only discover when your morning coffee began foaming. Both these issues could probably be fixed with a deep clean, proper maintenance, and… throwing them away for devices that weren’t rubbish.
But there’s another issue with bundled appliances: they take up the space of potentially good appliances. Clara and I loved our tiny little washing machine we bought when we lived in studios to save for our current home, but we couldn’t have bought a better dryer or dishwasher even if we wanted to. We were tempted to stash the rental special dryer in the car park and buy a new one, then perform a switcheroo whenever there was an inspection, but that seemed silly even by our standards. Besides, it would shock you to know I don’t possess the most robust upper body strength, and the idea of carting a series of whitegoods up and down flights of stairs hardly seemed appealing or safe.
Armed with this experience, we decided to do some proper research when buying appliances for the place we now own. We’d been eyeing heat-pump dryers for a few years, but we were surprised by how polarised our friends and family were about them. It reminded me of the discourse around air fryers: some of us adore our little counter ovens that heat up quickly and are trivial to clean, but just as many people are ready to chastise you for “falling” for one. I even had a Australian TV celebrity chef mock me on Twitter for daring to praise one back in the day, because that’s what well-adjusted people do in the presence of strangers who are having fun. I hope he’s okay.
Well, carpe diem, desu! Or YOLO, as people my age used to say before we (mostly) came to our collective senses. We decided to get a heat-pump dryer. I’m not only a convert to the cause, I am now an unabashed evangelist. They’re wonderful.
Regular dryers operate by heating clothes in a spinning drum, which evaporates and vents the resulting water into the room. They operate as large resistive electric heaters, into which you place your clothes and hope they come out the other side unscathed. I’m sure there are good ones (my parents had a Maytag back in the day that was built like a tank and sounded like one too), but every model I’ve ever used in a rental has been loud, slow, power hungry, and frankly filthy with the quantities of steamy dust they generate.
Heat-pump dryers maintain the spinning drum of their resistive cousins, but dry clothes with a glorified reverse-cycle air conditioner. Rather than generating resistive heat, heat-pump dryers transfer it from the environment. When the clothes dry, the water is condensed into either a water tank you can empty, or you can connect it to the drain as we elected to do.
There’s a lot going on here, so let’s break this down:
Heat-pump dryers are vastly more energy efficient. When you’re in an older flat with a circuit breaker you don’t entirely trust, we can confidently operate the dryer with other appliances without risk of tripping something. Maybe don’t read too much into that. Point is, we calculated the additional cost of the unit will have paid for itself within two years. It also remained cool to the touch.
Because they don’t vent the steam into the room, our tiny laundry room feels like… any other room. The last owners clearly ran the previous dryer with the door closed, as evidenced by the warped wood door frame and peeling veneer. Some resistive dryers can have hoses mounted to vent their steamy air outside, but that’s not an option in a flat like this. With this new setup, we might even be able to use some of the laundry space for storage, knowing we won’t be making things mouldy.
For the first time in I think forever, I went into the laundry after drying some clothes, and I didn’t sneeze. The JOY was indescribable, as was seeing the water finish draining out into the sink alongside instead of lingering in the air and condensing on the walls.
The quality of the resulting sound was also far preferable. Again, I’m comparing rental specials to a brand new heat-pump, but the whirring of the new one sounded—and I know this is silly—like that whooshing sound you hear on the Shinkansen at speed. I’m tempted to get an N700S sticker printed for the side.
The clothes also come out the other side feeling like fresh clothes, not toasted slabs of cotton, which I expect will improve their longevity.
Speed is one aspect I haven’t mentioned. I was told in no uncertain terms by well-meaning people that heat-pump dryers were awful, slow contraptions that would take forever to dry clothes, especially in winter when there’s less sunlight and you’re more likely to use them. I’m biased because I’m comparing a brand new heat-pump dryer to decades-old resistive dryers that came free with rentals, but this new unit takes about an hour to wash a full compliment of sheets and quilt covers. This is about 15 minutes more than the rental special when it was having a good day, and quicker when it wasn’t (we’d often have to split our loads in two, in which case the heat-pump dryer wins in overall speed).
An hour to an hour and a half might be a deal breaker if you’re a large family with heavy requirements, but it’s perfectly serviceable for us. The fact it operates so unobtrusively means that living within close proximity to it is also far more pleasant than being near the shorter, louder, dustier, steamier dryer we had before.
As with everything in life, you know your circumstances, constraints, and preferences better than I do. If you don’t want a heat-pump dryer, that’s fine, buy something else! I’m not here holding a cricket bat saying gee, it’d be a shame if this fine reader didn’t buy a heat-pump dryer. I will never understand why a subset of Internet people feel the urge to inform others why they wouldn’t buy or experience something. If anything, what are we supposed to do with that information? Sell our brand new device so we can go out and buy what they say they preferred to get for themselves? It’s weird, but then I suppose some people need the validation, whether they’re B-grade celebrity chefs, or passers by.
And yes, we still hang out our laundry if/when we can. It’s the best thing you can do for fabric, the environment, and even mental health (at least, for me). There’s something oddly calming and meditative about standing there on a balcony with pegs in one hand and a basket of fresh, lovely smelling laundry alongside. It cleanses the soul in a way not even a heat-pump dryer can achieve. Maybe that’s the next model.
Finally, I still harbour reservations about the longevity of modern appliances, but those concerns are sadly universal. If we’re going to make a deal with the modern devil, it may as well be for a device that massively improves our quality of life between now and when it fails. Which this does! I’m unreasonably happy.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-08-09.
2026-08-08 07:30:32
Our flat has gas. I know, it should see a doctor about it. We want to admonish the natural gas connection and get proper induction hobs installed in place of the built-in counter-top carcinogen-generators (that was a lot of hyphens), but it’s down the list of expensive priorities right now.
Wait, pause there for a moment. Last time I talked about gas stoves in the negative, I had more than a few comments from people expressing their preference for natural gas, and questioning why I was so dim for not liking them. SODIMM? Anyway, I have excellent news for such people: you can buy whatever stove you want! My preference for induction has no bearing whatsoever on your own purchasing decisions! Isn’t that awesome!?
Anyway. In the meantime, we’ve been using induction hobs on the counter next to the gas hobs. This works, but it eats even further into the limited space we have available in this small kitchen, not to mention it feeling like a waste. It was as though the gas hobs were glaring at us the whole time, mocking us for using something else. Oh, you think you’re better than us? Huh? HUH!?
…
I started wondering if I could go to our local Hammerbarn and get some wood cut to make a little shelf to sit on top. That way, we could put the portable induction hobs on it, and reclaim counter space for important things like our burgeoning collection of coffee makers (cough).
Turns out you can get these. They’re called stovetop covers, surprising though it may seem given their function and application:
This was from an Etsy seller in Australia we ended up buying from. It arrived earlier last week, and it works a treat! We can now have the induction hobs above the gas ones, until there comes a time where we can get a built-in unit installed.
Now I know what you’re all thinking. You’re thinking but Ruben, surely it would have made more sense to put the cost of this stove cover towards replacing the hobs with induction, thereby negating the point of this entirely. That’s a good point, but we could also pass it onto friends or family who rent, and couldn’t replace their gas hobs even if they wanted to.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-08-08.
2026-08-08 06:55:07
One of the first things I evaluate when I’m working on a new system is how it manages notifications. Specifically:
What sort of notifications the system sends
How often they’re sent
How severity is evaluated, assigned, and presented
How much the above can be customised and filtered
We’ve been building systems to do this for decades at this point, and I’d say most I interact with still get barely a passing grade. It’s wild to me that we keep making the same mistakes; and I’d argue the stakes for getting it wrong have never been higher.
If you’ll forgive the tautology, notifications are supposed to notify! You notify people to advise them of an event or circumstance, such that they can monitor it or take an action. To be an effective notification, it has to be clear, timely, accurate, reliable, and actionable. This is System Design 101. But the purpose of a system is what it does, and it seems most notification systems are designed to function as spammers.
Take a facility operator for example. As an engineer on their mailing list, I used to receive notifications for when they’d be performing impacting works, and advisories of potential hazards. This is good. In the same mailing list however, I’d also receive dozens of messages telling me about lift maintenance, window cleaning, and break room refurbishment, all with the same templates and subject lines (I made one of those up, and no, it wasn’t the break room). This lead me in the past to building increasingly-complex mail filters, which eventually lead to a legitimate hazard window notice being filtered out. That ended up not being impacting, but it was a sobering experience.
(Of course, slop fondlers would argue the solution here is a chatbot that can parse a wall of notifications, “summarise” them, and present the most important ones to you. This is telling the person being hit with a hammer that you can sell them a larger helmet… though given “AI” was involved, I’d expect the helmet to be made of papier-mâché, or appear on one’s posterior for no discernible reason).
A system that spams people isn’t useful, as people will learn to tune them out. Ignored notifications are worse than useless, because the assumption is made that people are monitoring them… otherwise, why are we sending out notifications for people in the first place?
If I was an adversary to a system like this, the first thing I’d do is overwhelm communication so I could bury important notices regarding my nefarious activities. If people aren’t seeing the important messages, I’ve already won half the battle. Though it seems I could rest assured that for so many systems and businesses, they’re busy spamming themselves already.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-08-08.
2026-08-07 10:49:17
In past posts I’ve listed numbers that don’t have:
Based on overwhelmingly positive feedback, today we’re looking at numbers that don’t have six. I provide this service free of charge.
Wait, damn it.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-08-07.
