Rubenerd

Have you noticed how there’s a drive to reduce the number of buttons on things? It’s presumably to reduce cost, and make interfaces more minimal, which we perceive as simpler. But it’s not.

One extreme is offloading functions to a partner app on a phone. We’re beyond smart bulbs now; you can get Wi-Fi coffee machines, shoe shiners, even routers… thank you, I’ll be here all week. Most, if not all, of the app’s functions could easily be added to the aforementioned appliances with buttons, dials, switches, levers, or any number of mechanical interfaces with which we’re all familiar and have had exhaustive usability and accessibility testing. The apps to control these appliances are often terribly designed, poorly maintained, difficult to use, and needlessy tie an appliance’s lifespan to a control interface that can be revoked at the whim of the app developer, or your phone being replaced. I’ve often thought claims of “planned obscelecence” were dubious at best, considering science and technology are consatntly evolving; but this coupling is an example I’m willing to concede.

Another is the merging of functions into a smaller set of controls. Some of these are mechanically elegant, like merging a fan speed dial with power. Not spinning at all is a valid opposite state to full blast, and also happens to be the off position. Others make less sense, or are far less intuitive. A kettle we have at work takes five short button presses and a long press to go from cold to hot water, some of which are on unmarked buttons. Choosing a preset and activating the kettle could be done with two presses, assuming each preset had a button rather than scrolling through a list each time.

Merging mechanical functions also doesn’t cleanly translate into buttons. Our Kambrook tower fan has a button to cycle through power modes, the last of which is off. Whereas a dial is easy to turn and click to off, this fan requires three button presses, with a pause each time, to turn it off each morning. I’ve considered pulling it from the power socket, or using a timer, or adding a switch along the power cord, but it shouldn’t have to come to that!

Physical controls come with their own limitations. They’re prone to breaking because they’re mechanical devices. They can’t ever hope to represent the breadth and depth of features a touch screen with near-infinte customisation and an API can achieve. But how many controls does my kettle really need?

I suppose I’d have a leg to stand on, but my 1980s Pioneer amplifier shamelessly has a slider instead of a dial, presumably to look more modern. A dial would make way more sense, but would look far less retro awesome. Hey, at least it doesn’t have a proprietary streaming service added that can will be disabled before the device itself stops working.

It sounds counter-intuitive, but I do almost all my image processing for this blog using my almost two-decade old Swiss Army Knife shell script library. Every image is scaled at multiple resolutions to save non-Retina readers bandwidth, and is sent through the excellent pngcrush and jpegoptim tools to losslessly reduce their size.

On the weekend I learned that ImageMagick’s append option can also be used to place images side by side, either horizontally or vertically. Note the operator changes from a minus to a plus:

$ magick convert \*.png -append vertical.png
$ magick convert \*.png +append horizontal.png

My mnemonic is to imagine the - is a dividing line, with images above and below.

Some of you may now be reasonably asking why I haven’t given a photographic example. That’s a great question. GraphicsMagick also has a similarly-named option, though I haven’t tested.

Clara’s and my new home FreeBSD server consistently outperforms my old HP Microserver for Samba and Netatalk file shares to our Macs and other *nix machines. The fact that the switching hardware, cables, and end points are identical shows just what a bottleneck that hardware was; I suspect it was a combination of poor cooling, not having AES-NI for drive encryption offloading, and some suboptimal ZFS settings that I’ve since corrected!

But now I’m interested in inking out more, especially when I use the InfiniBand kit at work and see how blistering fast transfers can get. Allan Jude and Michael Dexter suggested during one of the BSDCan streams last year that it was worth paying the extra for 10GbE, but dongles on the client side seem to be more expensive and much bigger.

I’ve been following Serve The Home’s 5GbE adaptor reviews. Here’s their most recent for a StarTech device with which they were underwhelmed, and a Sabrent unit which is a bit more robust. All of them use Aquantia/Marvel AQC111U chipset.

I already have an Intel 10GbE card for the aforementioned FreeBSD tower, so these dongles would be used for Clara’s and my Macs. I’d love to avoid installing kernel extensions to get one of these working. Sonnet earned my trust and respect with their Mac expansion cards in the late 1990s, but the website for their Solo5g says drivers need to be installed. Update: they use the same chipset as above.

Some Mac hardware ships with 10GbE; I’d love for an adaptor that uses the same chipset, if that were at all possible somehow. One can dream :).

There’s a truism in computer security that an undocumented backdoor for a small group of people is a front door for everyone. It will be found and exploited, regardless of how sinister or noble the intentions of the designers were. It’s one of the reasons people like me get so up in arms about legal requirements for backdoors; an attacker doesn’t care if a security hole was deliberate or accidental. And let’s be clear: there is no working around the fact these are security holes, legally mandated or otherwise.

I was reminded of this again last week when Lawrence Abrams reported on Dutch security firm EYE discovering a back door in ZyXEL routers. An administrative account was included with hardcoded credentials to install firmware updates via FTP. The company since submitted a patch, and the fact the boxes are getting automatic updates is encouraging. Here comes the proverbial but: it’s a stark and worrying reminder that these bad security practices still exist, and we all know it’s everywhere.

My two favourite quotes from university were that IT is about people not machines, and that security is Swiss cheese; you’re fine provided the holes don’t line up. A company I worked for briefly after high school used routers from a few different manufacturers in the hopes that deliberate or accidental back doors and security holes wouldn’t compromise their networks; a practice I since learned is widespread. Like cheese.

I’ve decided to spend time this year learning more about the etymology and history of phrases and names I assume or take for granted. I’m most interested in technology, engineering, and science, but I love when we get an overlap between those and art!

I overheard the phrase Prussian blue in a documentary and decided to check it out. Wikipedia described the dye’s discovery:

Prussian blue was probably synthesised for the first time by the paint maker Diesbach in Berlin around 1706. [..] The pigment is believed to have been accidentally created when Diesbach used potash tainted with blood to create some red cochineal dye. The original dye required potash, ferric sulphate, and dried cochineal. Instead, the blood, potash, and iron sulphate reacted to create a compound known as iron ferrocyanide, which, unlike the desired red pigment, has a very distinct blue hue.

And the name?

It was named Preußisch blau and Berlinisch Blau in 1709 by its first trader.

The Great Wave off Kanagawa is probably the most famous early artwork that made use of Prussian blue, though as the name eludes, it was sourced from Europe. It’s been used to the point of being a cliché, but it’s still one of my favourite artworks.

It’s also on the World Health Organisation’s List of Essential Medicines for its use as a heavy metal poisoning antidote.

A dozen cases are being reported in New South Wales again over the last few weeks, so Clara and I being safe and not going anywhere if we can help it. We were probably going to spend the first day of 2021 yesterday watching Hololive characters anyway given the timezone difference was fortuitous, but shaddup.

Ame did nine hours, which we ran for most of the day. Everyone’s favourite shark Gura chimed in halfway through with her own stream too. They motivated us for the first time in a while to think what our resolutions and goals for the year were.

But our favourite was Ina, who went into Minecraft and set off some little fireworks behind her torii gate. She had a few misfires, but it was beautiful!

Happy New Year to you and your folks.

I used to do annual Worldles as a fun way to visualise what I’d talked about the previous twelve months; that being the typical duration of a year. Here they were for 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012.

Alas, while the Wordle.net blog is still around, the original site is not. But the Wordart.com site still lets you import text and generate some silly fun, and it ended up with something far more detailed:

FreeBSD didn’t come as a surprise, nor did my renewed interest and advocacy for RSS. I talked about music more than I expected, and I’m pleased to see that virus didn’t get more of a mention. Lots of new stuff too, it seems.

This has been a hard year, and today from a personal perspective has been the cherry on top I fully expected (inb4 confirmation bias). But I’m going to let it get away with sending us off like this, so I’m writing an (incomplete!) list of things I was thankful for this year, written to the sounds of Mori Calliope telling the year what it can do, and reminding us it won’t bring us down.

Clara, and health

♡

Dad didn’t lose his life or home in the Australian bushfires

This was only in January, I already can’t believe it. Helping him pack some essentials and evacuating on advice of the Rural Fire Service was… I can’t summon the words right now. But he and his home survived, and hopefully we’ll have a postponed Xmas again soon!

Reconnecting with friends

Dealing with anxiety over the last few years led me to distance from people I care about. I reconnected with so many of them again this year, from high school to now, and they’re all awesome… and understanding. Thanks everyone.

Becoming more involved with FreeBSD and NetBSD

I spoke at the FreeBSD miniconf at Linux.conf.au 2020 in January, met some more members of the Australian BSD community, and I was mentioned on the BSD Now podcast! I still have impostor syndrome something fierce, but people have helped coax me out of my /bin/sh.

Hololive EN

People acting anime characters in realtime while playing games like Minecraft sounds niche but not groundbreaking. But their English-speaking generation launched this year have brought us so much joy. Clara and I will always be Investimigators, but Gura and Ina have become de facto councillors given the heavy questions they answer with care and good humour. I only half joke that they’ve probably saved lives during these depressing times.

Minecraft

I blame Hololive-EN for getting me into this time sink game that I’d so successfully avoided for a decade. WOW it’s fun. You could do worse than spending your evenings building out villages and exploring with your girlfriend if you can’t travel or go outside.

OpenZFS 2.0

I use and advocate for ZFS everywhere I can, professionally and personally. Merging the disparate branches of open source ZFS into one tree was a huge technical and community achievement, and most importantly signalled the stability, long-term support, and viability of the world’s most trustworthy file system and volume manager now that Oracle holds the other keys. I run it today, and can’t wait for it to be in FreeBSD BASE next year.

Emacs

I like Vim and have used it for years, but this whole time I didn’t realise that Emacs interfaces to my brain better: read into that as much as you want. Finding all these great tools that can run it has been too much fun.

This blog

I added 490 posts this year, and reached 7,200. Writing each one was a cathartic exercise to write, and even got mentioned on some high-profile news sites, aggregators, and mailing lists. I’ve had so many great emails, comments, and feedback. You’ve even taken time to read my site or RSS feed, and the post I’m writing now. Thank you.

Happy New Year. Ganbatte kudasai! Let’s do our best to make 2021 better.

Those of you familiar with my ramblings know I have a penchant for vintage computer hardware, especially if I can somehow shoehorn it into a contemporary system. There’s something so fun, and almost magical, about having lights blink from a piece of hardware long past its use-by date. It’s like I’m literally keeping a part of computing history alive.

I also have a specific interest in Iomega hardware from the 1990s and early 2000s, having grown up using their kit and been interested in their advertising and designs. They were doing coloured peripherals right alongside SGI, and years before Apple introduced the iMac. They weren’t the most reliable drives by any stretch, but I adored my Zip drive for backups, ferrying school work, and stretching my paltry hard drive. I understood why writable optical media made more sense economically and for compatibility by the end of the decade, but super-floppies were way more convenient.

Clara and I were at Vinnies looking for some second-hand RCA cables and records for our Hi-Fi system, when I chanced upon an external Iomega CD-RW Plus Drive, model 32888. I’d had my eye out for one of their external purple “Zip” branded units, and a silver USB 32971 floppy drive with card reader, but I’d never seen this chunky boy before. And I couldn’t refuse for $20!

The drive and cables were in immaculate condition, almost as though it was never used. CNET lists it as being compatible with any 75 MHz machine running classic MacOS or Windows 98! It has a CD-RW and DVD-ROM optical drive (52x24x52x/16x), a USB port, and a card reader for SD/MMC, CompactFlash, SmartMedia (!) and M8 Memory Stick.

Unlike other drives which multiplex across one cable or use an internal hub, this drive has two discrete USB 2.0 cables for each of the devices. This meant I could plug it into my new FreeBSD tower, and it just worked! Here’s dmesg(8) for the CD:

ugen0.6: <vendor 0x059b IOMEGA CDDVD522416EC3-C> at usbus0
umass3 on uhub0
umass3: <vendor 0x059b IOMEGA CDDVD522416EC3-C, class 0/0, rev 2.00/1.03, addr 6> on usbus0
umass3:  SCSI over Bulk-Only; quirks = 0x0100
umass3:12:3: Attached to scbus12
cd2 at umass-sim3 bus 3 scbus12 target 0 lun 0
cd2: <IOMEGA CDDVD522416EC3-C 0P5B> Removable CD-ROM SCSI device
cd2: 40.000MB/s transfers
cd2: Attempt to query device size failed: NOT READY, Medium not present - tray closed
cd2: quirks=0x10<10_BYTE_ONLY>

And for the card reader, with each slot being mapped to its own device:

ugen0.5: <IOI MediaBay 7 in 4> at usbus0
umass2 on uhub0
umass2: <IOI MediaBay 7 in 4, class 0/0, rev 1.10/1.00, addr 5> on usbus0
umass2:  SCSI over Bulk-Only; quirks = 0xc000
umass2:11:2: Attached to scbus11
da2 at umass-sim2 bus 2 scbus11 target 0 lun 0
da2: <IOI MediaBay 7 in 4 1.00> Removable Direct Access SCSI device
da2: Serial Number 9202261
da2: 1.000MB/s transfers
da2: Attempt to query device size failed: NOT READY, Medium not present
da2: quirks=0x2<NO_6_BYTE>
da3 at umass-sim2 bus 2 scbus11 target 0 lun 1
da3: <IOI MediaBay 7 in 4 1.01> Removable Direct Access SCSI device
da3: Serial Number 9202261
da3: 1.000MB/s transfers
da3: Attempt to query device size failed: NOT READY, Medium not present
da3: quirks=0x2<NO_6_BYTE>
da4 at umass-sim2 bus 2 scbus11 target 0 lun 2
da4: <IOI MediaBay 7 in 4 1.02> Removable Direct Access SCSI device
da4: Serial Number 9202261
da4: 1.000MB/s transfers
da4: Attempt to query device size failed: NOT READY, Medium not present
da4: quirks=0x2<NO_6_BYTE>
da5 at umass-sim2 bus 2 scbus11 target 0 lun 3
da5: <IOI MediaBay 7 in 4 1.03> Removable Direct Access SCSI device
da5: Serial Number 9202261
da5: 1.000MB/s transfers
da5: Attempt to query device size failed: NOT READY, Medium not present
da5: quirks=0x2<NO_6_BYTE>

I don’t think the card reader will be compatible with any of the current SD cards I use, and even if it were, it’d be too slow to copy over all the raw images in a reasonable time. I’m also not sure if I’ll ever be burning CDs again. But that’s not the point :).

Clara and I have been living in studio apartments since we moved in together in the late 2010s. They offer several distinct advantages from regular apartments or houses if you can make your life work around them, though we’ve discovered a few issues that are now making us reevaluate too. Buckle in for what I’m sure aren’t all that many surprising observations!

The joys

The biggest, and most obvious advantage, is cost. Studio apartments are cheaper, and let you live in buildings and areas you either couldn’t easily afford otherwise, or where you’d have to sacrifice on other things. Clara and I lived in North Sydney, meaning we could walk to work across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. We now live in Chatswood, a suburb a bit further north but no less convenient. I feel right at home here having grown up in Singapore; the shops, food, languages, and ethnic diversity are all wonderful and familiar.

We’ve used all that saved money to invest, build a nest egg, and finance way more international holidays—remember those?—than we otherwise could have, without putting anything on credit [that we’re not immediately paying back so we’re just using them to earn points]. Clara and I are cautious, and travel is our favourite thing in the world, so it made sense to prioritise these.

Another tangible way studios save you money is forcing you to downscale and being careful when buying new things. Where would you put it? There’s also something oddly fun about working within space constraints for certain hobbies, like finding a Laserdisc player that could also double as a CD, VCD, and DVD player; or figuring out a way to shoehorn and virtualise an entire homelab into a single FreeBSD server tower.

(Whether you would classify vintage Hi-Fi gear or easily-replaceable servers as junk you don’t need is another question! That’s the thing about hobbies).

Studio apartments are also easier to keep clean, and you’re more motivated to do so. You can make light work of vacuuming without navigating the around doors and walls and tripping on the cable. You can’t let dishes accumulate in the kitchen because you’ll be sleeping in the same room. There’s no out of sight, out of mind in a studio; it’s either messy or clean.

They also feel larger without those subdividing walls, which I wasn’t expecting. Most one bedroom apartments I’ve visited feel cramped and less airy compared to our single larger room, even if they have a greater overall floor area. It means you have a bigger loungeroom during the day, and a bedroom at night.

The nots

The biggest, and most obvious, is space. We’re in a larger studio now than we were in North Sydney, but I do miss having my own little space for computer stuff. Forget about them if you have housemates, a larger family, or a partner you’re not thrilled to be spending your life with. Also forget them if you have expansive hobbies like anime figure collecting; we had to be much pickier about which characters we bring in now!

The other quibbles could be classified under sound and light. Clara and I often work overtime or are on-call in the evenings; the light from our displays and the furious sound of typing makes it nigh impossible for the other person to sleep. I love getting up early and Clara likes staying up late, so I have to tiptoe around the kitchen like a mouse each morning while boiling water and making coffee.

I get cabin fever at the best of times, but being stuck in a single room for months during Covid times was the ultimate test. I was extraordinarily lucky that we bought some balcony furniture and largely had nice weather, so I could set up a laptop workstation and take meetings without disturbing Clara while she worked inside. Still, there were times I’d be sitting out there, feeling claustrophobic and anxious, wondering why we’d subjected ourselves to this living arrangement!

I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve had people over, but this can also be difficult. We have one couch, and a tiny coffee table which doubles as our dining table. We’d get bean bags or extra cushions, but where would we put those?! It’s not the best arrangement for entertaining; though if you’re introverted like us it works as a convenient excuse (cough).

And finally, storage; or lack thereof. Our entire walk in laundry is full of plastic tubs from our last move, and we have the box for the TV sitting against the wall because there’s nowhere else big enough to put it. We’ll jettison this stuff when we eventually buy a place, but renters need to be able to pack everything at the drop of a landlord’s hat.

Conclusion

Clara and I still think the pros outweigh the cons, though this year has definitely skewed it more towards the latter for the first time. But then we think about going back to Japan at some point again in the future, and we think it’s worth it.

YMMV, as they say.