Rubenerd

Rebecca Hales was quick on the draw in response to my thocky keyboard post, a phrase I swear is real.

GATERON BLACK INK V2s! But the Creams sound better. ARE YOU SWIMMING AGAIN YET?

I’m not much yet, but the site mascot Rubi did get an update to her bio recently to say she was inventing a line of self-heating swimsuits and towels that were inspired by an… adventure. But I digress. 🥶

Michael B. recommended the same keyswitch, though he said the Creams were better if I’m still not into RGB.

The consensus seems to be that the Gateron Milky Yellows are the smoothest linear switches on a budget, the Creams are sublime if you can tolerate the break-in period to wear down their scratchiness, and the Gateron Black Ink V2 is the smoothest out of the box, but you pay for the privilege.

This is what I meant in the previous post about only knowing enough to be dangerous. I’ve never lubricated a keyboard before, and I didn’t even know key films were a thing until yesterday. Why do I get the feeling I’m piloting myself into another expensive obsession, right after paying off a huge chunk of HECS to avoid the huge spike in indexation?

Benjamin Mazer wrote a column in The Atlantic back in February that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. He puts forward the case that avoiding Covid vaccines, in light of overwhelming medical evidence, can be compared to smoking.

This is where the “new normal” of COVID might come to resemble our decades-long battle with tobacco. We should neither expect that every stubbornly unvaccinated person will get jabbed before next winter nor despair that none of them will ever change their mind.

He admits it’s not a perfect analogy; tobacco is addictive, and second-hand smoke is a somewhat less direct consequence than actively, and willingly, spreading a dangerous virus among other people. But it could be useful to approach the two in a similar way.

We haven’t banned tobacco outright—in fact, most states protect smokers from job discrimination—but we have embarked on a permanent, society-wide campaign of disincentivizing its use. Long-term actions for COVID might include charging the unvaccinated a premium on their health insurance, just as we do for smokers, or distributing frightening health warnings about the perils of remaining uninoculated. And once the political furor dies down, COVID shots will probably be added to the lists of required vaccinations for many more schools and workplaces.

Societies have agreed to tolerate smoking, because the freedom to light up trumps the freedom of bystanders to not breathe carcinogens in public. But rights come with responsibilities. Or put another way, if you choose to be a danger to yourself and others, you should expect consequences proportional to your impact.

The education campaign around smoking was also effective in reframing the debate. Tobacco companies lied for decades to downplay health effects; now smokers talk about their freedom to engage in the habit, rather than arguing that it’s healthy.

Covid is still in that early lobbying state, where people are denying it exists, that its effects are overblown, or that the vaccines will give them 5G. The debate needs to shift to the same informed consent that smokers have arrived at.

Last year I talked about going back to a split Microsoft ergonomic keyboard, because I felt some slight wrist pain. Overall is an item of clothing, and I was impressed with the build quality, especially for a cheap, mass-produced rubber dome. I found the position of my arms and wrists while typing on this to be more natural and less strained, especially during long technical writing sessions.

But then I made the mistake of bringing out my beautiful little Leopold FC660C with Japanese Topre switches again. Clara and I bought this in Osaka in 2020, and it’s simply perfection. Words can’t describe how much fun and joy it brings me. I’m grinning as I type this!

I’ve tried almost every permutation of Alps and Cherry switches, and have an IBM Model M clone with buckling springs stashed away for when I get a sound proof room in which to use it! But no switch I’ve used before, or since, match the supreme thock feel and sound of Topres. Going back to the office and using my dusty Cherry MX Brown board felt like I was going from welded to riveted rails, with all the train rattling and other metaphors. I’ve been spoiled.

I wouldn’t profess to be a keyboard expert at all, but I know just enough to be dangerous. Worse, I now know what I like, so I want to see if I can get something close to that in a split-keyboard form factor.

My dream would be to have an indie split enclosure and PCB, with switches that come close (enough) to Topres. I prefer the feel of linear switches if they have a nice base to bottom out on. Prelubed (heavens) would be preferable for a noob like me, but I wouldn’t be against learning how to do that properly.

A few of you recommended I check out Gateron KS-3 Milky Yellow Pros, or the NovelKey Creams. The latter seemed to be the darling of the tech world a few years ago, though I’ve since read and watched reviews of it being a bit scratchy. Clearly some more research is needed.

Here’s some great news from Digiconomist, even if the projection is optimistic:

As the Bitcoin/Ethereum crash continues, the combined reduction in energy consumption of these networks now equals that of a country like Austria

The reduction in global carbon emissions could be 110,000 metric tons of CO2 per day - almost as much as global CO2 reductions by EVs.

Let’s make efficiency a metric again.

I was taught in school that No. was the abbreviation for number. I saw this used everywhere from tables of figures to songs. There’s even a Unicode ligature №.

But it only just occurred to me how nonsensical that appears. The word number doesn’t contain the letter O anywhere. Where did it come from?

According to Wikipedia, № is short for the Latin word numero, which means what it sounds like. This has carried through to other romance languages, and eventually to the literary sponge that is English.

The article also states that the pound sign # is more commonly used in North America, which explains a ton of examples in technical documentation that I’ve read of late. I might even prefer it; it’s certainly more succinct.

Backblaze publishes drive reliability data at scale, but what about a random person on the Internet with his small homelab setup? For all my talk about drives over the years, I’ve never shared my own broad experience.

These are the drive manufacturers I’ve had since 2017, with failures defined as having multiple ZFS scrubs detecting bad sectors, or the drive outright failing to turn on.

• 8× Western Digital Red and Red Pros, no failures
• 5× Seagate, 3 failures, including 1 DOA
• 8× HGST and WD Ultrastars, 2 failures

The odd-numbered Seagate was an external unit I originally intended to shuck, but ended up being scratchspace for Clara’s Mac which is still going strong. I also haven’t bought a Toshiba since the IDE days, if only because nobody has ever had much stock in Australia or Singapore, though I’d be tempted to try.

There’s no variable control here whatsoever. Two of the HGST drives were in my Debian Xen test boxes with XFS and DRBD over InfiniBand, but the rest were in various FreeBSD towers with OpenZFS, including a Microserver up at my dad’s place I do ZFS send/receives of family photos up to. Two WD drives were also briefly in a NetBSD box when I was testing version 9.0’s ZFS support.

Therefore, these stats are almost completely pointless! I just thought it was interesting that while my experience with Seagate broadly correlates with what others have said, the former industry darling HGST has stung me too. The sounds of their 8 TB drives failing harkened back to the IBM DeathStar days.

I’m weird and ended up always running personal drives in ZFS mirrors or RAID1. It just makes buying and replacing drives easier, especially when you can only afford a new drive every few months. In that way, a dead drive is an inconvenience rather than a disaster while I deal with warranties, returns, and replacements. But it’s still a pain, which is why I value reliable drives.

I haven’t been impressed with WD’s SMR shenanigans, but they earned my trust when it comes to reliability. Maybe I can ask work one day if we can publish some of our larger cluster data next time we do a fleet upgrade.

Today’s the Queens Birthday in Australia. That, coupled with her recent Diamond Jubilee celebrations, lead me to read up again on the Whitlam Dismissal:

Governor General Sir John Kerr removed Whitlam as Prime Minister [on the 11th November 1975], the first and only time this has ever happened in Australian history. John Kerr’s Secretary David Smith read a proclamation dissolving parliament and Kerr appointed Liberal Malcolm Fraser as caretaker PM.

For overseas readers, the “Liberals” here are the nominally right-of-centre party which govern in coalition with the Count-ry/Nationals. They also tend to be the most enthusiastic about the monarchy, whereas the Labor and Greens parties lean towards republicanism.

The dismissal was seen as an “assault on democracy”, and shocked the country. Whitlam famously said on the steps of Parliament House, “Well may we say God save the Queen because nothing will save the Governor General.”

There’s a video on YouTube of that address. It surely ranks among the most memorable in Australian history. My parents told me they were furious, and couldn’t quite believe it.

The decision to remove Whitlam was highly controversial. John Kerr was in close touch with the Palace during this period, but under the cover of personal correspondence, all documents were locked away and embargoed by the Queen. After a protracted legal campaign, the correspondence between John Kerr and the Palace was finally released last year.

Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and other Commonwealth monarchies have a Governor General representing the Crown domestically. They’re largely seen as figureheads, but the Whitlam dismissal reminded us that an unelected British monarch is still above our democracies. You could even still appeal an Australian or Canadian court decision in the UK as late as the 1980s. But hey, we get a public holiday and commemorative cookie tins.

I think former PM Paul Keating put it best in an interview when Whitman died in 2014:

He changed the way Australia thought about itself.

I love hitting the Wikipedia random article link until something related to computers, jazz, or travel comes up. Today we got the Rémilly–Saarbrücken railway, which is:

a French and German 55-kilometre long railway line, that connects the French Lorraine region to the German city Saarbrücken. The railway was opened between 1851 and 1852. It is part of the international railway connection between Paris and Frankfurt am Main.

There’s no photo on the English Wikipedia page, but the German one included the above image by Lantus from April 2008. I’d love to go to that exact spot and take another photo now.

If the upgrade on my cloud instance went smoothly, you should be reading this. If not, you won’t be reading this. Which means, who would I be talking to?

Hmm, that’s a bit meagre for a blog post, even one that’s an announcement of a job well done. Maybe it’d seem less pointless if I padded it out with a meandering paragraph of redundant prose that contains no meaningful substance whatsoever. But from which words would I construct such a literary device? And surely the modest, attractive, intelligent people who read this blog on a regular basis would see right through such an obvious charade? Fair call, I should probably avoid doing that.

Run FreeBSD!

I was at a coffee shop last week, when a meathead and his tired son walked in and started looking at the menu.

Dad: Get whatever the fuck you want, I don’t care.

Teenage son: Okay, I’ll have the spanish omelette.

Dad: What the fuck? You could get that anywhere! Get something else, for fuck’s sake.

His son stood in place for a few moments, shook his head, and walked out. His dad stood there stunned, then looked at the barista and groaned “fucking kids, am I right?”

Good on the kid. Mess around with gen Z, and find out.

My dad and grandfathers never treated me this way; not once, not ever. The more I see and hear about other dysfunctional families with abusive parents, I count myself lucky.