2025-10-30 18:38:27
Please forgive the fluffy nature of this post. If you’re expecting a technical discussion, perhaps look through the archives instead today.
On Mastodon I talked about how I enjoyed being in the BSD, OpenZFS, and illumos communities, even if I only consider myself a lurker most of the time. I don’t know how else to say this, but… I really mean that. More than I could express.
These systems, and the people behind them, are the reason why I can sit here and write this post. Not just in a technical sense, but in a “why I get up in the morning” sense. It’s that stark.
When the broader industry seems hellbent on installing the Torment Nexus, these communities sit on the periphery, quietly designing, developing, documenting, maintaining, patching, porting, upgrading, testing, integrating, and discussing the tools that make my life better, and the tools I can recommend without question. Ditto for all the people who organise events, coordinate projects, manage sponsorships, mediate discussions, and engage with the public. This is all a tremendous amount of work which so often goes unacknowledged, let alone recognised.
I come home after a day of fighting with crappy systems that are ill conceived, badly designed, overpriced, inflexible, and full of hostile dark patterns that would shoot me in the back to make a line go up, and I get to use thoughtfully written, well implemented software that doesn’t chase the shiny. The fact such small teams (relatively speaking) are responsible for software that is better, easier, and more open that companies with orders of magnitude more resources is shocking to me.
I’ve only managed to meet a dozen or so of you at events or over the phone, but you know who you are. You should also know that you’ve had an oversized impact on my life. It’s cool when I read a man(1) page and your name is there, or when I log into a box and I see your handle at the end of a fortune(1).
I guess I wanted to say, in my usual roundabout way, thank you for all you do, and for entertaining my presence too. I’ll continue to work on ways I can contribute back.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-10-30.
2025-10-30 06:10:46
I had to go an Apple Store recently to procure something, and I was reminded why I prefer going to almost any other outlet to buy the same thing.
If you’ve never been to Apple Store, they’re arranged more like showrooms with rows of minimalistic tables showcasing the Purple Blue iTelephone 19 SE Pro Air Maximum Limited Sport Edition, watch bands, iPads, and maybe a computer shoved in the corner (we don’t mention those). At the rear is a large counter called, without a trace of irony, the “Genius Bar” where you can get your technical and warranty questions answered.
The latter usually goes like this:
“That’s out of warranty I’m afraid, you’ll need to pay.”
“Australian Consumer Protection Law.”
“Oh yeah. We’ll do for free.”
I kid, but warranty service remains one of the few positive experiences in the Apple ecosystem. My personal devices are always used or second-hand, but for work stuff it’s been a lifesaver at least a few times. Contrast this with almost any other manufacturer, and it’s no contest.
But anyway, did you notice something missing in my above description? Yes, there’s no checkout counter. You’re expected to enter the store, be greeted by someone (that’s strike one), find what you want, then go to someone with an Apple shirt who’ll process your payment (that’s strike two).
If you’re of a certain neurodivergent persuasion, this is almost hell. Maybe it’s purgatory. Purgatory lined with large slabs of aluminium, glass, and eager people. Ah… ah… ARGH!
My sister worked in Apple retail for many years in their Chatswood and Sydney CBD stores, and remarked at how she felt awful for the people who’d enter the store averting their gazes, then trying to figure out where checkout counters were. The Sydney CBD store did have a counter for a time, but other staff didn’t like it because people would take something from a shelf elsewhere in the store, then wander down to it. I… I know right, how awful!
Give me a store where I can interrogate the goods I require, then take them to a counter where I’m served by someone with clear social expectations. None of this “finding someone wandering in a store” then “standing awkwardly with them while they figure out how to use their portable POS terminal” stuff. It’s hard enough for me to figure out what to do with my hands at the best of times, not least when I’m standing there juggling the need to make small talk.
I’m (mostly) not anti-retail, despite my otherwise lefty instincts. I even prefer buying things in physical stores. Australians broadly seem to agree, which is why our shopping centres and malls are thriving when they’re being abandoned in the States. There’s the experience of checking something out in store, seeing how big it is, how it fits, how it works, asking for more information, weighing up options, and leaving with something you don’t need to wait a day to be posted. It’s better, for me.
That’s the key: having both makes everyone happy. If you’d rather buy online, or in a physical store, go for it.
I expect some people like Apple’s arrangement, and can’t understand why others wouldn’t. To them I’d ask them what does irritate them, then say they’re silly for thinking that. That’s the thing about humans, we all have different ways of working. Apple could have the wandering traders and a checkout counter, and we’d solve the issue for everyone.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-10-30.
2025-10-29 11:12:36
Thanks to all of you who emailed comments in response to my post about what to call this site. Here are the aggregated results:
12 said it’s a blog, though two said it could also be called a weblog to make it sound less like a swamp
3 said it was a journal, diary, stream of conciousness, or similar nomenclature
Nobody said it was a Kartoffelpuffer, which was surprising to me
5 of you said the name didn’t matter
I’m leaning towards weblog then. It has a bit of nostalgic charm, yet still contains the word blog.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-10-29.
2025-10-29 05:25:56
Clara and I have been playing the same Minecraft world for the last five years, running on the same two FreeBSD servers. Once more, my hat goes off to the java@ and OpenZFS teams on FreeBSD who’s porting and maintenance efforts have made this possible.
While we’ve stuck with our original map and server, we’ve also spawned separate worlds for experimentation and projects. Being the nostalgic fool that I am, I want to preserve them. There are four options:
Stash them away as a backup file. Probably the most rational, but the least fun.
Keep these secondary worlds local to our machines. This works, but I’d rather have them on the server for access and backups.
Use Multiverse to import them into our server, and connect them with portals. This is the most straightforward, though it’s become a bit hairy tracking them all. It also seems like a lot of overhead for some worlds that are relatively small.
Import/merge them into our original map somehow.
Recently we’ve tried that last option, and it’s been an interesting experience. The idea is to have your primary world, and import other worlds into it. This works if your primary world is the biggest, and you have smaller secondary worlds. You can then use a tool like WorldEdit to copy the parts of your secondary world, and paste them into the primary.
First, a few words of caution. It’s easy to mess this up, so backup your primary world after each paste. Second, you need a lot of RAM and a lot of patience if you start copying multiple chunks at the same time. And third, re-read that first point about backups.
WorldEdit lets you copy any arbitrary sized area, though I prefer copying based on chunk borders so it’s easier to manage. You can bring up chunk borders by pressing F3+G.
Spreadsheets are the best tool I’ve found for preparing secondary worlds for import. If you make columns and rows into large boxes, you can track what X and Z coordinates you want to move, and which you’ve done. For example, this was a small world with four chunks in an L-shape wanted to copy across:
| X → Z ↓ |
64 | 80 | 96 | 112 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| -97 | - | Base | - | - |
| -81 | - | Base | - | - |
| -65 | - | Base | Base | - |
| -49 | - | - | - | - |
Next, you want to figure out the coordinates where you want to paste into your primary world. Note that depending on how you use WorldEdit, this will replace all the blocks in that part of your primary world with this pasted layer. Make sure there’s nothing there you want to keep!
WorldEdit is an amazing mod. With it you can generate, copy, move, rotate, save, and load everything from small structures to entire chunks of a world. Once you’ve installed it, I encourage you to start with a blank world and run some experiments to make sure you’re comfortable with using it.
The WorldEdit commands we’ll be using are:
//pos1, for the lower-left point of the area to copy//pos2, for upper-right point of the area to copy//copy -eb, copies that area with entities and biome//schem save, saves the area to disk//schem load, loads that area from disk//paste -eb, pastes that area with entities and biomeThe trickiest thing for me to learn was that the copy and paste commands depend on where you’re standing. My rule of thumb is to face north and stand a block away from //pos1 when issuing the //copy, then making sure you face north and stand a block away from where you want to //paste.
Okay, you’ve decided to copy a chunk from your secondary world. The steps are:
Open your secondary world.
Run //pos1 X,Y,Z to denote the coordinates for the bottom left of what you want to copy. The Y refers to where you want it to start vertically. You may just want to copy from the dirt up, or from lower if you want to include caves beneath you.
Run //pos2 X,Y,Z to denote the coordinates for the top right of what you want to copy. I generally set Y to something high in the sky like 200 so I make sure to capture everything like trees.
Walk back to a block away from where you defined //pos1, and face north. Note this is the position you’ll be standing where you paste in your new world. This was the trickiest part of this to get my head around, so again, do some experiments in a throwaway world first.
Run //copy -eb, which will copy the target 3D area you’ve defined, along with any entities -e and the biome -b of the area. You may choose to omit one or more of these.
Run //schem save NAME to save the area, where NAME is a label you choose. I make a note of this on my planning spreadsheet.
Now we can paste this area into our primary world. The steps are:
Open your primary world on the same server or host. If its on a different host, copy the contents of the plugins/WorldEdit/schematics folder across first. This folder should contain all the named schematics you’ve created with //schem save.
Walk over to where you want to paste the chunk, face north, and stand in the same position you did when copying. For me, that’s a block away from where I defined //pos1 starting.
Run //schem load NAME to load the area you saved earlier.
Run //paste -eb, which will paste the area you defined along with entities and the biome of the area.
If this went well, you should have that chunk from your secondary map now pasted on your primary.
The amount of memory you’ve loaded Minecraft with will probably determine how big an area you can paste at once. I’ve done 16 × 16 chunks from bedrock to the sky on my FreeBSD server, and it took about 5 minutes. Interestingly, a friend with a more recent machine and additional memory crashed his Debian box with the same sized paste.
If you get an error that the schem couldn’t be found, double-check you saved it, that you used the correct name to load it, and confirm the file exists in plugins/WorldEdit/schematics.
If this all sounds too complicated, maybe stick with Multiverse instead. I empathise that it’s a lot work.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-10-29.
2025-10-28 10:54:58
I’m old enough now to know that some things aren’t targeted at me, and that my distaste of something doesn’t translate into broader artistic merit or usefulness. That said, I watched my first YouTube shorts today, and left more… confused than I thought!
I don’t even know how it started. One minute I was catching up on someone talking about a Sanyo MBC system from the 1980s, and the next I was watching a vertical video about a carved watermelon lamp with single-word subtitles that looped for some reason.
To be clear, is an idiom. Vertical video makes sense, given people are watching this sort of disposable media on their phones. I’m all for the accessibility subtitles provide, though I’d prefer they weren’t baked in and didn’t take up half the screen. The looping I don’t get; whenever I see people watching these sorts of videos they’re swiping as soon the previous video finishes.
Curiously, it was the stilted audio I found most jarring. The Overcast podcast app was made famous for the somewhat grim idea that contemplative silence isn’t a natural part of speech, but wasted time to be cut so you cram even more audible thoughts into your brain hole. But this takes it to a level where the previous word is barely finished before the next begins. I’m trying not to make a broader point about attention spans here, but it’s unavoidable. Are we that time starved? Or will people stop watching if the wholevideoisn’tonelongrunonsentence?
I know, I know, get off my lawn!
But there was one other aspect to this where I think criticism is warranted. I’d say at least half the videos that were regurgitated to me started with the same voiceoveer:
In this video, we can see this person…
Half of these videos aren’t even original. They’re stolen wholesale, and overlaid with text and an AI voiceover that explains in painfully obvious detail what we can already see.
… is building a beautiful desk. The first step involves picking up a hammer, which he uses to hit a nail into the side of…
No, really!? He was using a hammer to drive in a nail? Not a tool to bludgeon himself in the head!? In his DAMNED HEAD!?!?!?!
I’m perhaps showing my ignorance here, but I thought YouTube had famously onerous and overzealous piracy protections? I’m surprised these videos aren’t being flagged almost immediately. Or maybe they are, and the shorts I watched earlier today are already gone.
It makes me wonder what a Short would be for NetBSD.
I’m going to show you how easy it is to install package source! This is the tool that lets you install software on your NetBSD operating system! First, run
suand pipe thisfetchintokshwhich…
Hmm, maybe not.
So how would I summarise my first—and hopefully last—experience with YouTube Shorts? I dunno, that seems like a waste of time given you’ve already read the post. You do you, but I’ll continue to steer well clear of this sort of content (a deliberate word choice).
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-10-28.
2025-10-28 06:14:59
There was a time before Chrome where software versions were comprehensible to mere mortals. They still are for some software, but I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head (or any other body part) what version of Firefox I’m currently running, or LibreOffice, or honestly even macOS on my work machine. There’s something to be said for remembering version numbers, and maybe even the idea of “living specifications”, but that’s a discussion for another time.
What I can say is that I do remember specific version numbers for software that had an impact on my life in positive ways. Here are just a few:
NetBSD 1.6/macppc: This was my first BSD, which I ran on an iBook G3. It felt like such a massive performance upgrade from those early versions of Mac OS X. I still remember sitting at school pouring over the NetBSD Guide and getting it configured; it felt like electronic LEGO.
FreeBSD 7: I first ran 6.x, but it was 7 where I really hit my stride with it. I still have all the installer ISOs for it, and the disk image backup from my first home server that ran it. I’ve been using it ever since.
Debian Wheezy. This was the Linux distro and release I first supported at my longest job. Incidently, it was the last version not to mandate systemd.
Lotus Organiser 4: This was the release that came with my old man’s work ThinkPad back in the day, and what I ended up using as my life organiser for many years.
KDE 3: This was peak UI. I’ve come to love Plasma, but I’m struck by great it is every time I fire up a retrocomputer.
TextMate 1: I settled on MacVim as my primary GUI editor on my Macs, but that original TextMate was stupendous. I’ve since moved to Kate from the KDE project for more complicated projects, but I’m still hit in the feels when I launch it on my classic machines.
Lotus SmartSuite Millennium Edition and Microsoft Office 97. I used these well into the late 2000s for school work, uni assignments, and personal projects. I’ve long since moved to OOo/LibreOffice, but I think these represented the usability peak of graphical Office software. I’m surprised that they feel more responsive on my Pentium 1 than Office for Mac does on my current work M3 MacBook Air.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-10-28.
