2026-10-13 17:24:17
Last Friday I shared a fun live webcam of the Sydney CBD. I thought I’d check it out again this evening, on account of the foggy weather.
It looks like the worst of the rain has passed, but it still looks eerie. I wouldn’t have wanted to be on one of the Sydney Ferries during that!
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-10-13.
2026-10-13 10:19:58
I’m helping my father in law with a project that has entailed me looking up some hardware specifications for something. I might share what that something is at some point, but it’s kind of irrelevant for this post. All you need to know is the 1998 iteration was as good as what they release now. And in some specific technical specifications, the 1998 version was better.
1998 was almost three decades ago, to put that into context. Yes, I feel old, and I apologise if I’ve now made you feel that way too. I was using a Palm III in school at that time. Lou Bega’s cover of Mambo No. 5 hadn’t even come out yet. And this specific hardware device was better back then. As in, objectively better.
That gives me pause.
I’m into retrocomputers (no, really!?), but I’m the first to admit my modern machines have better hardware than my Commodore 116, or my Atari ST. The rapid pace of development that occurred between those machines and the low-end laptop upon which I’m writing this is wild. We went from measuring RAM in kibibytes to gibibytes. I could tile my Atari ST’s GEM desktop dozens of times across my current display, and still have space left over for a machine code monitor or RS232 console in the corner.
But this isn’t universal. It’s a reality of our current world that the best versions of a lot of hardware (for any and all definitions of “best”) is behind us. Which feels weird. All the news and CEOs are keen to spruik a future to us that’s less precise, less efficient, less performant, less accurate, less good. Their stacks, software, and tools have fewer features, or at least, fewer features for us. But hey, there’s… more of it now! And it’s easier to crank out! Y-yay?
It feels like history inverted. It doesn’t feel right that after three decades of innovation and scientific progress, I’m seriously considering a second-hand thing from 1998 on account of it being better. It would be like someone from 1998 trading in their Pentium for a 4004, or someone stepping off an early 20th century ocean liner and saying nah, sails were better.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-10-13.
2026-10-13 07:01:41
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
36:07 – There’s a Hippopotamus on the Roof Eating Cake. Also brewing a caffeinated beverage, the fact we can still run and program old things (I know, right?), visual novels, ScummVM, the PalmPilot, 35 mm photo slides from Hong Kong in the 1950s, Tame Impala’s Deadbeat album, Calliope Mori from Hololive’s Deadbeats, and using Navidrome to self-host our own music streaming site. Recorded Friday 9th October 2026.
Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.
Released October 2026 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts; this one notwithstanding. Hosted graciously by the Internet Archive.
Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-10-13.
2026-10-12 13:10:17
I was back on Mastodon for less than a week before I’d seen a few Takes™ linked to that were so banal, so contemptuous, and so absurd, I felt the need to write about them. I’d know, because I’m looking at my drafts folder now.
Hundreds of words. I didn’t like writing them. You wouldn’t have liked reading them. I left my lunch break feeling deflated not accomplished. fsck(8).
The answer here isn’t sticking my head in the sand. Here comes the proverbial posterior prognostication: but… letting complete strangers on other sides of the world dictate my mood and emotional well-being also doesn’t seem healthy. I clearly need to find a better balance.
All I will say though is: punch up. It’s incredible to me that people invariably flip to doing the opposite once they have the readership or authority.
I’m a cautious optimist, so I don’t think we’re living through the worst possible timeline. Hand to heart. But oh boy do some people make maintaining this worldview difficult.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-10-12.
2026-10-12 07:22:08
Today’s Music Monday is another of my happy songs. If you need a pick me up, here it is.
I loved the Far Side, but I disagreed with Gary Larson’s tongue-in-cheek assertion that accordions are what you’re given in Hell. All good music has accordions. They’re the brass of the keyboard world. Wait, what?
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-10-12.
2026-10-12 06:21:07
Underlined text has always been a bit of an issue in HTML and CSS. For example:
The colour of the underline could only be inherited from the text.
The CSS specification doesn’t define an underline thickness, leaving it to vendors to decide how to derive it. The end result was some browsers rendering thicker underlines than others, especially at larger font sizes.
The workaround for decades was to eschew (gesundheit) underlines entirely, and use a border as a pseudo underline:
a {
border-bottom: 1px solid;
text-decoration: none;
}
a::after {
content: "The bird is the word";
}
This always struck me as inelegant and ugly, because underlines should cross characters with descenders like g and y, and borders don’t.
Fortunately, starting in 2019 we’ve had these attributes to play with, and it appears all major browsers vendors have now implemented them:
a {
text-decoration-line: underline;
text-decoration-color: teal;
text-decoration-style: solid;
text-decoration-thickness: 1px;
}
This makes me happier than it should.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-10-12.
