25:15 β This episode is dedicated to the memory of Jim Kloss, whom I interviewed on the show in 2016. Jim was one of my dearest friends, a mentor in life, and a wonderful human being. Recorded late one evening wandering around a park in Sydney.
Released May 2023 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.
I’m incredibly awkward and nervous in photos, which was a real shame given how photogenic Jim and Esther were when we met in 2016!
Where do you being talking about one of the most important people in your life, and one of your dearest friends?
I met Jim online when he ran his independent radio station Whole Wheat Radio. He fascinated me from the start: here’s this geologist and IT gentleman who retired to a tiny log cabin with his talented partner Esther in rural Alaska. I’d load his breakfast shows onto my iPod for listening on my morning commute, and with my sister as my witness, would burst into fits of uncontrollable laughter on the crowded Singapore train.
I was on a forty-five degree pitch! I was trying not to fall down! And the bees were flying around Neil Armstrong!
Over time I started contributing to his radio wiki and chat, then over emails and calls got to know the real Jim. I learned about his past life in Ohio, and how he navigated the moral concerns of his job. I respected that one could make meaningful contributions while maintaining a strong ethical core; something precious few IT people voice or consider. What would Jim do? is among the first questions I ask to this day before embarking on a new project.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Jim was a source of strength during a painful and self-destructive period of my life; I quite literally wouldn’t be here today without his wisdom and kindness. To anyone who’d listen, I said that if I turned out like Jim, I know I’ll be doing alright.
He was a friend, a mentor, and someone whom I aspired to be. I’m not sure if he knew just how relieved and optimistic I always was after our chats and email exchanges. He had that uncanny ability to tell you what you needed to hear, but with compassion, silliness, and computer metaphors.
Thinking back to all the travelling Clara and I have done together over the last decade, the highlight remains hanging out with Jim and Esther in Philadelphia in 2016. I knew I’d made it when I mentioned something that had happened a few years prior, and he leaped out of his chair and said SEE, YOU GET IT! WHY WERE YOU EVER IN DOUBT!?
Jim made a mark on the lives of so many people, and I’m honoured to have been among them. Thank you for all you’ve done for me, independent musicians, and the community that grew so effortlessly around you.
They say you can’t pick your family, but I did. I love you Jim. Say hi to my mum for me, she knows about you. β‘
Jim was a regular reader and contributor to the blog, so out of respect for his memory I’m going to leave this as the top post for the week. I’ve also got some ideas about how I’m going to make something more permanent to remember him by, which I’ll share when the time is right. Thank you.
What we need is not one twitter to replace the old twitter but a whole armada of twitters. Like the podcastosphere with all the different players. Look at how much better that’s working. No Musk or Jack. Think about it.
He agreed with me about the anxiety-inducing state of having hundreds of web tabs and applications open, though raised a good point about how the calculus is entirely different in mobile environments:
On iOS, you are penalized for closing an app, as a cold start is much slower than waking from hibernation. And even if you close it, the app can still track you. So disabling all background activity for all apps seems to be a must.
And mobile web browsers? Forget about it!
There is no tab management. I constantly have over 100 tabs open because there is no easy way to close them. There is no tab bar, so I canβt see them. There is no quick way to close multiple, so every few weeks I declare bankruptcy and use the one button keeping all this madness - close all tabs. I waste resources because the tooling is not there.
iOS on the iPad (iPadOS? I lose track of what they call these things) is marginally better in this regard, with a tab bar and other visual cues. But you still end up with a bunch of stuff open. It unloads pages to save memory, but you’re still stuck with a wall of pages which is a cognitive load. There’s a reason I use the iPad as a glorified colour eBook and magazine reader, and my phone as little as possible.
For a while I ran Firefox Focus which explicitly doesn’t support tabs, but I ran into too many limitations when trying to juggle things, especially when travelling. I haven’t tried bookmark syncing with the other Firefox app, but using the Pinner iOS app to send pages to my Pinboard has been useful way to keep them at a manageable level. Sometimes on a long commute or while waiting for things, I’ll swipe through and pin a few dozen tabs to clear them out.
At some point I realised that having a clean slate, bookmarks, and as few applications and tabs open as possible is not how most of the world works. Which means application vendors don’t prioritise it as a use case. It’d be overstating the case that I think using computers that way is healthier, but it certainly makes using these things better for me.
Twitter admitted to a privacy breach involving Circles, the feature that lets you limit the visibility of specific tweets to a few trusted accounts. I wasn’t sure if it was an homage to the same Google+ feature from years prior.
When it was first announced, I posted that you shouldn’t trust it with anything you wouldn’t want to be public. This confused some people, who claimed that using it that way defeated the purpose of the feature. I agreed! But that’s not how the tech world works.
I’m still bracing myself for when the likes of Slack and Discord are broken into, and their messages are leaked or made public. I’ll bet there are chats buried in those services that could break careers, companies, or worse.
I really wish there was a word for “worse” that started with C. That alliteration would have been, as Gen Z says, lit. Or pog, even. It’s amazing how words I grew up with are back in vogue again, though for different reasons.
I could have made those observations in a Twitter Circle for the whole world to see. Never mind, my blog here will have to suffice.
Some of my earliest and most fun childhood memories revolve around buying computer parts with my dad. We’d pour over price lists together, spec out what we wanted to do, then head down to explore. I’ve mentioned many times my first childhood computer that was financed by a primary school writing competition; this was how we built it.
As he travelled overseas more and I got older, I’d hop on the MRT and check out the parts shops myself. It was a weekend introvert activity before I even knew the term, though I also had many a fun chat with the shop owners in Funan Centre and Sim Lim Square. Turns out, if you’re nice to people and slip in some local colloquialisms, you’re seen as a harmless angmoh instead of an arrogant tourist. What a concept!
Singapore was a wonderland for computer fans in the 1990s and 2000s. It’s faded a bit now in an age of disposable, sealed smartphones and tablets, with more shops selling boring cases as genuine computer parts. But even today one can get lost in their local Challenger store.
Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia was the same. Imbi Plaza had you covered for all manner of components, parts, and accessories.
Ditto Japan. Clara and I know to reserve a solid day for Akihabara and Den-Den Town whenever we’re lucky enough to venture there, because we know we’ll be pouring over the computer shops for hours (especially second-hand stores like Hard Off, where Clara snapped that incredibly handsome photo of me above. Did I say handsome? I meant awkward)! I continue to be shocked at the niche, specific items that are available in Japanese computer stores, stuff that even Singaporean vendors had the business sense to fire sale years ago.
Some of it is window shopping. Okay, most of it is. But I do miss living in an Asian city where I could just walk down the road to get a part for a project. A 6502 CPU? Some DIMMs? An ancient SCSI cable? A modern SATA adaptor? It doesn’t matter, it’s all a few train stops or a walk away. Heck, I’d even take an American Microcentre!
And it’s not even the instant gratification; at least, not primarily. It’s hard to describe, but having a place dedicated to your hobby feels awesome. It’s a way to connect with people in real life who share your interests. They can help you with problems, appreciate your enthusiasm, and you can return in kind. It wouldn’t be a stretch to admit that I got most of my social interactions during school holidays and weekends by doing this.
Practically speaking, it also means you can iterate on ideas and troubleshoot quickly and easily. More on that in a moment.
Sydney is not like this. Granted, there are the computer stores in Capitol Square, but it’s not the same. Being an isolated continent in the middle of nowhere comes with many advantages (clean air, the world’s most amazing skies), but with a population smaller than Ukraine or Texas in a land area almost as big as the contiguous US, it seems there simply isn’t a big enough market to sustain those sorts of stores.
At any one time, I have dozens of random things in the post. I’m lucky that there’s a world of parts I can tap into, even with the de facto Australia Tax we pay for shipping things out here. I’m not sure I’d be half as engaged in any of this stuff, or my professional career at all, if it weren’t for the Internet or a precursor.
(Wait, I wouldn’t have a job at all if it weren’t for the Internet. Wow, it sounds ridiculous, but I’ve never considered this).
But in what’s probably another extreme case of first-world problems, it does make things tedious and less fun. I’d have built out this refurbished 386 motherboard ages ago. Troubleshooting my Commodore 128 and C16 would have taken days, not months. You’ll realise you need a part, order it, wait a few weeks, realise it’s wrong or not where the problem was, then sit on your hands as you do it all again.
If I had more money and time than common sense, I’d open a retro computer store parts shop right in the centre of Chatswood in Sydney, selling all manner of things that those Japanese, Singaporean, and Malaysian outlets would. Even if it were a glorified storage facility for my own interests!
Even as a train and public transport gentleman such as myself, I’m still duped by how the media presents (distorts?) coverage of infrastructure projects.
Case in point, Alan Fisher did a great video that caught my attention because it mentions California’s High Speed Rail system. The HSR is mired in controversy, with much hand-wringing in the press over its utility and value. Yet a new interstate with significantly higher cost overruns, disruption, and environmental impact warrants nay a peep in the American media. Alan does a deep dive into why he thinks that is.
It’s easy to dismiss this as whataboutism, but these are two projects in the same country with the same objectives that should be evaluated on the same metrics. The media also invite the comparison by being so lopsided in their criticism.
Australia handles this a bit better. Okay, maybe 5% better. Better enough that people are aware of the existence of maybe kinda sort of something else maybe. Demand-inducing motorways are met with opposition, and the press do report on the opportunity cost to public transit. But it gets built anyway, because that’s what car-dependent cities do. Build more lanes though, that’ll fix it!
You see this dichotomy everywhere. We’re told we don’t have the funds to raise unemployment benefits for people struggling to eat, yet nobody talks fiscal responsibility when it comes to tax cuts. Regardless of your politician persuasion, it comes down to what governments want to prioritise, and how the media frame the debate. They feed each other.
At least if it were a train, you’d could do more feeding in less space, with lower resource use, in a more sustainable way, and with a vastly reduced maintenance liability. Mmm, commuters.
I work for a cloud infrastructure provider, and host sites for friends and non-profits. I investigate each and every report sent to our abuse lines; not just out of professional duty, but because I don’t want our IP ranges or hostnames to be listed in spam databases.
A spate of new AI security companies are making this more difficult. I receive dozens of emails a week claiming to have found fraudulent material, such as phishing sites. I spend time checking each one, and they’re always benign.
That’s a false-positive rate of 100%!
Here are some other things that happen 100% of the time:
I mention something pointless on a blog post
I take a breath at least once a day
These range from trivial or critical. I’d consider the behaviour of these services somewhere in the realm of counterproductive. Worse than being additional, annoying work I didn’t ask for, notification fatigue reduces the effectiveness of other alerts that we do need to pay attention to. They’re a net negative to security.
Now I know what you’re thinking: Ruben, I don’t receive these notices, or Ruben, I get them sometimes, and they’re legitimate. That’s great, I hope it continues being so for you! Because they’ve been nothing but a monumental waste of my time.
This is another example of how AI companies externalise their costs. If you didn’t take economics at uni, these sites explain the concept:
For now, I have to live with it. I’m not going to put a blanket ban on security notices coming from domains ending in ai, because that would still be irresponsible. But they’ll have to start proving their worth pretty soon.
