2025-01-17 17:24:02
Early posts on this blog—at least, the technical ones—were spent writing about my adventures getting my ideal graphical desktop going on FreeBSD and Fedora. This is as opposed to the non-technical posts, which tended to be written about adventures not involving getting my ideal graphical desktop going on FreeBSD and Fedora.
Thanks Ruben, once again, that was an excellent clarification. I know so much more now after you explained some posts are about something, and other posts are not. Your wit is matched only by redundant paragraphs you put in posts chiding yourself for writing nonsense. What’s for dinner, by the way?
As a university student without much money, I’d gravitated towards second-hand ThinkPads. They were plentiful, shockingly affordable, felt great to type on, and exuded class. People had fancier laptops from other PC makers, and they looked worse than my ancient X40 or X61s. In fact I’d say Apple were the only other company making kit that looked half reasonable at the time, though their higher resell value limited access. ThinkPads were like the plague, they were everywhere. But in a good way. So, not like the plague.
This post is going great.
Fast forward a decade or so, and I still only buy refurbished kit. This is mostly directly from Apple, because I need Microsoft Office and a few other commercial software packages, and as bad as macOS is, it’s leagues ahead of Windows… though that’s setting a bar so low it may as well be used as a cross beam for a floor.
But I do still miss those older ThinkPads. I kinda want to get another one again. I think I derived more utility from that older kit than newer stuff.
This is where a post from Andreas over at 82MHz comes in, titled I will never need to buy a new computer again:
If you’re in your early thirties or older, you remember the breakneck pace at which computers were improving in the 90s and 2000s. If you brought home a shiny new 400MHz Pentium 2 system in 1998, it was literally outdated and replaced by a faster model with higher clock speed and more RAM/bigger harddrive by the time you had set it up and gotten familiar with it. But that’s not the case anymore, and it hasn’t been the case in a long time.
I’m starting to feel that same itch again. I haven’t upgraded my computer in a while, so maybe it’s time for something new?
But here’s the thing: I don’t need it. I don’t have a single usecase for which I would need this much processing power. In fact, I could still use that i5 from 2011 and it would do everything I want it to do perfectly fine.
My daily driver is a 14-year-old laptop and it still does pretty much everything I need. I’ve upgraded the RAM (4GB→10GB) and the drive (HDD→SSD), but it still runs like a champ.
And we round off with Michel, titled I may never buy a new electronic device ever again:
I get that those devices are done. Audio peaked in mid 90s, TV sets have no new cool features (4k is a LOT), a microwave is a microwave. The decision makers think that we want “more”. Maybe we do? I certainly don’t. And since “better” is no longer an option, “more” means adding useless features and gathering as much data as an internet connection can transfer.
I won’t be able to afford it now, but in few years where my 20 years old car breaks, down I will be able to pick something on the used marked and be happy with it.
I couldn’t agree more. Tech hasn’t moved meaningfully enough for me for a while now, which is bittersweet. I do miss the same joy from getting a massive upgrade. As I always say here, we use these machines every day of our lives, so it makes sense we’d want something nice.
But barring exceptional circumstances, I’m in the same boat as these gentleman. My current kit works fine. It does what I want, not what some other company wants. That’s… honestly quite liberating.
At the very least, staying a generation or two behind reaps huge benefits. And its not as though you don’t get joy out of it: I’ve been having so much damned fun with Clara’s and my PlayStation 3 Slim of late!
You know what, fuck it. I think my next machine might be a second-hand ThinkPad again.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-01-17.
2025-01-17 17:21:25
You know that quip about there being ten types of people in this world: those who understand binary, and those who are sick of this joke? Well I have some additional classifiers.
For example, there are people who like crunchy peanut butter, and there are those who like extra crunchy. There are early risers and late risers. There are people who care, and people who don’t. There are those who understand UNIX, and those condemned to reinvent it, poorly. Something something containers.
But lately I’ve found one other, oddly specific way that’s been illuminating. Say you’re approaching a light switch to turn off a light, surprising though it may seem. Someone observing you doing this will react in one of two ways:
Not say anything.
Ask us to turn off the light.
The people in group (1) I’d consider… normal. We’re walking towards the light switch to turn it off. The actions are in progress, and the outcome is already known. There’s no point telling someone to do something they’re already doing.
Or is there? Because the people in group (2) think there is. They know the switch is about to be turned off, they can see this action is being performed, and yet they still want to issue the instruction. It’s fascinating.
I can think of reasons for this, some of which may overlap:
They want to take the credit for turning off the light. They realised it was a good idea, and/or are miffed they didn’t think of it first.
They want to feel as though they contributed to a positive outcome. As Barney said on The Simpsons: “Wait, you didn’t do anything”, to which Leonard replied: “Didn’t I?”
It’s a weird power play, flex, or performance to be seen bossing around or directing the actions of others. It’s a zero-sum game, power is nothing without perception of power, and so on.
They’re… not pleasant people.
Now this is a contrived example, and I’m clearly speaking in subtext here. But I’ve known a shocking amount of people, in my personal life and professionally, who behave like group (2). It’s one of the signals I use to inform whether I like a person, or will want to engage with them voluntarily.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-01-17.
2025-01-17 05:17:25
A rigged ballot that’s always won by the people with the thickest wallet.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-01-17.
2025-01-16 08:00:58
Speaking of social media and feeds, a new site launched that’s honestly one of the more surreal things I’ve ever seen:
Bluesky is an opportunity to shake up the status quo. They have built scaffolding for a new kind of social web. One where we all have more say, choice and control. But it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app. We want to create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart. Free Our Feeds will build a new, independent foundation to help make that happen.
Bluesky can do things that Mastodon can’t. I’ve been told their moderation tools are far superior for example, though that wouldn’t be hard. But still, the whole site feels like something a person knocked up with a genAI tool one afternoon. It has that… uncanny valley vibe that’s hard to describe.
I have so many questions, but these are the top two:
Why is there no mention of ActivityPub, or Mastodon, at all? You know, the protocol that isn’t tied to one app? At best, this reads like not-invented-here syndrome. At worst, it’s obfuscation.
Why can’t Bluesky use some of their millions from investor funding to do this? Wasn’t that the whole point of “decentralisation”, and the creation of the Bluesky Public Benefit Corp? Or put another way, what were people investing into Bluesky for, if not for exactly this?
Okay, those were more than two questions. But I agree with Tante, there’s something deeply fishy about this whole thing. And not the good kind of fishy that you could post a photo of using Pixelfed, or any other number of ActivityPub-compliant applications.
It does make me wonder if I’m going about donations here wrong though. Maybe I need to launch a donation site called Free Our Rubenerds, in which I talk about how Rubenerd.com needs to have independent funding to create something truly powerful. A nuanced, disruptive paradigm synergy, one could say.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-01-16.
2025-01-16 06:19:25
This is the third post in my A-Z Toobox series, in which I’m listing tools I use down the alphabet for no logical reason.
The letter C has the certbot utility which automatically provisions, allocates, and installs TLS certificates using Let’s Encrypt that you can run via cron. Speaking of cron, there’s cron and crontab, the age-old system utilities for scheduling tasks. There’s cdrtools, which lets you author and burn optical disc images with options that make it suited to modern and legacy machines across a host of different OSs. checkbashisms is useful for determining if you’ve written your shell script in a portable fashion, which makes it useful for the BSDs and illumos, among others. And calcurse is a fun personal organiser that runs entirely out the shell.
But for me—as opposed to anyone else?—the tool that makes it to letter C in my toolbox is the venerable cowsay, seen here informing me what OS I’m running:
_______
< uname >
-------
\ ^__^
\ (oo)\_______
(__)\ )\/\
||----w |
|| ||
Wait, that’s $(cowsay uname), not $(uname | cowsay). Let’s try again:
_________
< FreeBSD >
---------
\ ^__^
\ (oo)\_______
(__)\ )\/\
||----w |
|| ||
cowsay is one of those utilities you don’t need, and also desperately need at the same time. She imparts a sense of joy and levity into what may otherwise be a dry day of technical implementation. Ansible even supports her, and buzzkills failed in their attempt to remove her by default.
Life is too short to not have cowsay. Get her and be happy. Or as cowsay herself may say:
_______
< uname >
-------
\ ^__^
\ (oo)\_______
(__)\ )\/\
||----w |
|| ||
Wait, damn it.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-01-16.
2025-01-16 06:18:37
This is a collection of random, unrelated things I read this week.
I fell into the trap last year of wanting to comment on individual stories, but they never left my drafts because I already exceeded my self-imposed daily post limit. This format will let me post stuff that interests me, and avoids the drafts folder trap where they lose timeliness.
From ABC News Australia:
Now one of Australia’s biggest casino operators is facing the prospect of losing it all, with a top analyst predicting Star Entertainment Group has a 50 per cent chance of going into administration.
It’s impressive to see a casino of all businesses face the prospect of losing money. They have the ultimate business model: hoover money out of the vulnerable, and give them nothing in return. How do you fsck(8) this up?
Star is now battling legal action, with the corporate watchdog ASIC alleging Star’s board and directors had “failed to give sufficient focus to the risk of money laundering and criminal associations”.
Quelle surprise!
I had to wade—AAAAAAH—into this story about a Sydney council policing dress because this section from Lauren Rosewarne, an associate professor from the University of Melbourne, was absolute fire:
“The undercurrent of these stories is that somehow women are doing something with their bodies to distract men in ways that make men feel as though they’re being tempted, and it’s up to women to sort themselves out … Somehow, the responsibility is on women not to stir desires in men, because then men might act badly and be punished, so we have to put the responsibility of morality on to women’s shoulders.”
It’s the same nonsense I hear female friends being subjected to when they cosplay at events. I know right, the worst! Expecting women to wear/not wear specific things because it’ll “trigger” men infantilises everyone. It denies women freedom and basic respect, and reduces men to witless clods without agency or self control.
“So long as [practicality] and safety are considered it shouldn’t be any one else’s business what I’m comfortable swimming in,” one person commented.
This. Also, wade. I was proud of that. I shouldn’t be.
Gesundheit.
Apple’s Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai are among the Big Tech leaders planning to attend [U.S. President-elect’s] inauguration on Monday, according to media reports on Wednesday.
This has done wonders for my self esteem and mental health, and it should for you too! We stand taller than the richest people on the planet.
I don’t care too much for money. Money can’t buy me spine. Can’t buy me spiiiiine! Spiiiiine! Can’t buy me spiiiiine! ♫ Hey, I worked a Beatles reference into a post. Maybe I need to do Wings next. You’d think that people would have had enough of silly… posts? ♫.
This was announced last November, but I’m just getting aroud to reading the release notes after it made it to openSUSE news.
Through its new component
lxqt-wayland-session, LXQt 2.1.0 supports 7 Wayland sessions (with Labwc, KWin, Wayfire, Hyprland, Sway, River and Niri), has two Wayland back-ends inlxqt-panel(one forkwin_waylandand the other general), and will add more later. All LXQt components that are not limited to X11 — i.e., most components — work fine on Wayland. The sessions are available in the new sectionWayland Settingsinside LXQt Session Settings. At least one supported Wayland compositor should be installed in addition tolxqt-wayland-sessionfor it to be used.
It wouldn’t surprise you to know I have… mixed feelings about Wayland. But it’s where the industry is moving, so news like this is encouraging.
I haven’t tried LXQt in a long time. I know Allan Jude of FreeBSD and OpenZFS fame runs it, and it could be a nice Qt-flavoured stepping stone from KDE. I’ll add it to my neverending list of things to try.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-01-16.
