Today’s Music Monday is a song about music, which I’m uploading on a Monday. What are the odds!? Don’t answer that.
I heard this absolute pinnacle of Australian 1980s music on the radio this morning, and consider it my patriotic duty to repost it. It was the first time I saw the actual music video too. Can something be too 80s?
Joshua Coleman (web feed) has so many cool retro hardware projects. But this quote was the highlight for me today:
The danger of computers becoming like humans is not as great as the danger of humans becoming like computers.
I realised my blog here has reached 940 pages. With ten posts per page, that’s a lot of posts. But who’s counting posts? Not me, I’m only counting pages.
As I read that number on my site footer however, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this number held significance for some reason. Wikipedia jogged my memory:
The SDS 940 was Scientific Data Systems’ (SDS) first machine designed to directly support time-sharing. The 940 was based on the SDS 930’s 24-bit CPU, with additional circuitry to provide protected memory and virtual memory.
I did an assignment about this machine at uni! I think it’s one of the few interface panels that give my beloved DEC a run for their money:
With thanks to Mark Richards at the Computer History Museum for sharing this stunning machine. One day I’ll make an analogue of it with a Raspberry Pi and some Das Blinkin Lights, just you wait and see!
You know those dreams where you wake up and a wave of disappointment washes over you upon realising the thing you experienced wasn’t real? I had such a dream last night where I had a handheld SPARC machine in a fetching shade of Sun purple, and a clicky thumb keyboard for data entry. Alas, I woke up to a world where tablets killed such things, and smartphones are merely slabs of glass. Oh well, se a vida é.
How did I end up dreaming of something so specific? And… more than once? I suppose it comes down to being a bit weird, but also as a direct result of our new living arrangements.
In short, with our recent move well underway, Clara and I are faced with having to commute again. We got used to living so close to the city, but now we’re back to filling time for train trips every other day. I used to quite enjoy the forced relaxation that came with sitting in a comfy seat and reading, watching an anime, or listening to an album while I gaze at the scenery; and I intend to take full advantage of that again.
Sometimes though, I’d love to be able to hack on something! Inspiration for a bit of code, or a retrocomputer idea, can strike at any time. And it’s here as I lumber along on this train where I’ve reached a bit of an impasse.
A laptop isn’t practical to use if I’m standing, and they’re just bulky enough if I’m in a train seat. I’ve never been able to grok tablets despite my best efforts; I feel constrained by touchscreen keyboards and limited OSs. Smartphones are portable, but otherwise have the same shortcomings as tablets. Also, I don’t need notifications filling my screen while I’m trying to relax or unwind.
What I’d love already existed, but alas no more. Or… do they?
My ideal commuting device is something akin to the original OQO from the 2000s, which was a little PC with a monitor that slid out to reveal a thumb keyboard. These weren’t scaled-up PDAs, they were scaled-down computers. As such, they ran real desktop x86 operating systems and software, and could connect with desktop peripherals. This made them impractical for the kinds of things we’d use a smartphone for now, but they were the perfect form factor for a handheld PC on the go.
Funnily enough, we go back further in time for a more modern device. A few years ago, the Hand386 burst onto the retrocomputer scene, seemingly fuelled by the sucess of the unusual Book 8088. Like the OQO, this tiny machine didn’t have a hinge or folding mechanism, instead placing a rigid keyboard underneath a fixed display. Only this time it didn’t have a contemporary CPU, but an honest to goodness 80386! This retrocomputer fan is still kicking himself that he didn’t get one before they too ceased production.
I don’t blame companies for not making these devices; I suspect the target market is too niche, and their use case too unusual. But I’d still love to get one. Not a hinged PDA, or an upscaled Android phone, an actual computer in a slab form factor I can use on the train. Christian Kersting has already hinted at one that could be used to do some Commodore 64 retrocomputing which is exciting, and definitely something I’ll be exploring.
If anyone knows of other such devices, I’m all ears.
I’m running a bit of an experiment. I’ve got a poll on Mastodon asking BSD people how many of the OSs they run. I’ve noticed I’m not the only one who run two or more stacks, depending on the requirements or my whims that day.
It’s live for the next week, after which I’ll tabulate the results and post about it here. If you don’t have a Mastodon account, feel free to ping me directly.
By now I’m sure you would have seen Simone Margaritelli’s discovery of a potential security vulnerability in CUPS, the Common UNIX Print System. It requires cups-browserd be enabled and listening on UDP port 631, which permits a remote attacker to install a malicious PostScript printer driver.
Most *nix systems don’t have this enabled by default, but it’s still not great. I know of at least a few places that use it, especially in academia. Fun!
This bug is nostalgic for me though, in a weird way. The first major security issue I assisted with at uni was MICE, the Metafile Image Code Execution bug in Windows. WMF vector images had depracated printer escape codes that weren’t handled correctly even in modern Windows, which meant you could use them to deliver a payload.
We all joke about how bad printers are, save for Brother units. It’s weird to think even they can be a vector for attack, indirectly or otherwise. But I suppose as Mikko Hypponen says, if it’s smart, it’s vulnerable.
This is the second post in my A-Z Toolbox series, in which I’m listing tools I use down the alphabet for no logical reason.
The letter B has the excellent FreeBSD Bhyve hypervisor, and the bzip2 compression utility. But bwm-ng takes the proverbial cake for a a small tool that I’ve found indispensible more times than I can count.
The Bandwidth Monitor Next-Generation—cue Star Trek theme music—is a live network bandwidth monitor that runs on everything I care about, so FreeBSD, NetBSD, illumous, and various Penguins.
Here it is running on a relatively idle server:
bwm-ng v0.6.3 (probing every 0.500s), press 'h' for help
input: getifaddrs type: rate
\ iface Rx Tx Total
========================================================
igb0: 0.12 KB/s 0.49 KB/s 0.61 KB/s
lo0: 0.00 KB/s 0.00 KB/s 0.00 KB/s
--------------------------------------------------------
total: 0.12 KB/s 0.49 KB/s 0.61 KB/s
And here it is on a busy FreeBSD jail running Samba:
bwm-ng v0.6.3 (probing every 0.500s), press 'h' for help
input: getifaddrs type: rate
\ iface Rx Tx Total
========================================================
igb0: 33495.43 KB/s 232.99 KB/s 33728.41 KB/s
lo0: 0.00 KB/s 0.00 KB/s 0.00 KB/s
--------------------------------------------------------
total: 33495.43 KB/s 232.99 KB/s 33728.41 KB/s
I’ve used it to troubleshoot paravirtualised drivers, and a crude bandwidth monitor for file transfer tools that don’t have an easy progress bar or activity indicator. At least with bwm-ng, I can see that it’s doing something.
With special thanks to Volker Gropp for writing this awesome tool, and to Tim Bishop and Paolo Vincenzo Olivo for maintaining the packages on FreeBSD and NetBSD pkgsrc.
2013:
2024:
TechCrunch: “Tumblr CEO publicly spars with trans user over account ban, revealing private account names in the process”
404 Media: “Tumblr and WordPress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools”
The Register: “WP Engine hits back after Automattic CEO calls it ‘cancer’” [classy –ed]
Baldur Bjarnason: “There’s something rotten in the kingdom of Wordpress”
Well, I got that wrong! What a difference a decade makes.
A new high-speed train, operated by German rail operator Deutsche Bahn and France’s SNCF, will allow passengers to travel between Berlin and Paris in approximately eight hours, Deutsche Bahn announced on Tuesday.
Deutsche Bahn is also planning other new international connections. Among them are routes from Munich to Milan and Rome, in collaboration with Trenitalia, scheduled for 2026.
Say what you will about the reliability of DB of late, but this Australian on a far-flung, isolated continent can only look on with envy. I’d love to travel to the capital of another country in eight hours by train, and especially these two!
Clara and I are hoping to get to Europe in the next couple of years. This may now be on the itinerary… and not just because we’re massive train nerds.
As an aside, I’d love a high-speed train between Sydney and Melbourne. Alas, I doubt I’ll see it in my lifetime.
We’ve had crowd dynamics at coffee shops, and social norms. What about power imbalances?
The title of this post may suggest a coffee shop has sufficiency high electrical requirements to warrant having three phases delivered, one or more of which might be unbalanced. This can cause all manner of problems, though in some ways they’d be easier to solve than other such issues with a similar name.
I was sitting at a coffee shop yesterday—surprising nobody—when an older gentleman and a young woman sat at the table next to me. I surmised they must have come from an important business meeting, based on their formal attire and conversation. The man was either her manager, or someone senior in the business. I’ve seen them here more than a few times, so they must work around here, or come often for meetings.
After discussing whether or not they’d succeeded in convincing the client of something, the older gentleman proceeded to tell some of the more inane stories I’d ever heard, interspersed with some racist jokes (she was a Chinese Australian, like Clara). Boomer energy, as the kids say. It was clear he thought he was imparting some serious wisdom, with the delivery of a sage, comedic genius. The younger woman laughed and nodded at the appropriate times, though he never let her get a word in during his breathless monologue.
As I prepared to leave myself, the man rose to pay the bill, and I caught the eye of his colleague. Her eyes widened, and she beamed at me before slumping into her chair and pinching the bridge of her nose. I shook my head in silent sympathy, with an embellished shrug that I hope communicated “some people, amirite!?”
I hope she’s not dealing with that all the time; or if she is, that she has an exit. The worst is when you’re dealing with someone who wields more influence, control, or rank in a situation, and you have to grit your teeth and take it. Privilege—earned or otherwise—is when you can walk away from such a situation.