Rubenerd

Not Merry Xmas to the year, it can hurry up and get in /var/tmp where our life cronjob will promptly clear it away. But Merry Xmas and Happy Holidays to you, your family, friends, and everyone else.

I can say that your emails and tweets have been among the highlights of this year, and relegated that 2020 ennui to the aforementioned temporary folder. For those of you also isolated from family, or doing it tough this year, I hope that my silly, long-winded ramblings here were helpful in some small way too.

It’s hard to see in this shaky, high ISO camera-phone image I took last night on a while, but this is Clara’s and my little tree. A studio apartment doesn’t give one much space for sprawling decorations, but we’ve been carrying this one since we moved in together. The heart in a circle and the blue bauble with the star and moon came from my late mum’s collection; the white snowball I bought with pocket money when I was 8; and that green bird came with my dad when he emigrated from post-war Germany with his family to Australia in the 1950s. The summertime Xmas koala was a recent Clara addition!

Xmas came early this year! My favourite illumos distribution Tribblix hit milestone m24 last Saturday, and the images are available for download.

From the about page:

Tribblix is an operating system distribution derived from OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, and illumos, with a retro style and modern components. The base kernel and commands are from illumos, with a few components currently repackaged from OpenIndiana (mostly X11, some other oddments); pretty much everything else has been rebuilt from scratch.

SunOS was my first commercial UNIX, and part of the reason I love using FreeBSD now is owing to its tooling and design that have been influenced from the Solaris world. I have yet to use Tribblix in production anywhere, but I keep it around in a VM for tinkering. It’s excellent.

Thanks to Michael Dexter for recommending it at AsiaBSDCon 2018 :).

I didn’t realise what a chord I’d struck with my post yesterday about blogging platforms advertising themselves as getting you more business from audience. Almost makes me wish I’d spent more than five minutes smashing it out in response to seeing a single line of text on a hero image cough.

@hikupro retweeted a few quotes which I appreciate! Lukas V also chimed in with one of the best emails I’ve had in a while:

The appeal of reading blogs for me comes from people’s passions being displayed on screen. I don’t care much for photography, but seeing a chrisjones.io post in my RSS feeds puts a smile on my face. I always know I can find some interesting reading material from ohhelloana.blog’s monthly bookmark posts. And, of course, seeing the rubenerd.com appear in the reader sidebar is a clear sign of some fun topics to come! Sadly, the only way to reliably find these kinds of websites are from blogrolls, obscure communities like those around the Gopher protocol, and whitelisted search engines like https://searchmysite.net.

It’s true… except for the fun topics from that Rubenerd.com guy, he’s a bit dodgy. I’ve touched on one of the supposed golden rules of blogging that you were never supposed to deviate from a single topic, which even back in the blogosphere days I thought was bunk. Merlin Mann has said he loves reading and watching people passionate about things he doesn’t know about because its infectious; I like it too because I learn new things about fields I otherwise wouldn’t have explored or entertained.

I also quickly touched on the declining quality of so many blogs, which he identified with an especially pernicious example:

I saw your post about audiences, blogs, and businesses and it struck a chord with something I’ve noticed as I’ve been increasingly interested in personal blogging: spammy meta-blog blogs*. You know the ones I’ve talked about. The ones with headlines like:

• “10 ways to increase your SEO”
• “how to go from one visitor a week to over 5000”
• “our hottest 6 tips for blogging about XYZ!!”

Glancing at Reddit’s “r/blogging” shows just how big of a problem this is. Every post is about visitor numbers and revenue. These kinds of topics make it near impossible to find new blogs written based on people’s interests instead of their wallets.

Rebecca Hales also chimed in:

ARE YOU EXERCISING?

It is so obvious when a blog is written because somebody is interested in something, and not just because they are paid to write it.

The former is definitely happening, but it’s taken the form of late-night walks where I can avoid people, not in the pool. Though it might be good as it gets warmer. The pool, not people churning out PR for a blog.

I’ve recommended people check out the Ghost blog platform for a couple of years now. I statically generate my site with Hugo, but I appreciate that not everyone wants to live in their text editor and Git. Frankly, there are times where I long for a simple to use, server-based blogging platform myself too! Ghost is easier to set up and run than WordPress, even though it runs on Node.

But I was disappointed, though not surprised, to see this hero image on their landing page this morning:

Turn your audience into a business.

I see why they pitch this. Ghost also comes in a paid, hosted version like WordPress.com, and they need to emphasise the fact it’s a potential revenue centre, not a sunk cost. It’s those paying customers that subsidise their free, open source version of the software that I host for people, and we should want them to be successful. Still, it makes me sad seeing it as their primary pitch.

Blogging shouldn’t only be about business, it should be about creativity. Or anything you want it to be. The web for the last decade has been so conditioned to think social media is the place for people to write ideas, and blogs have become another channel to crank out PR or poorly-written tutorials to wrap with hundreds of low-value ads. I don’t begrudge people needing to make money and, you know, eat. But the framing of blogging in the industry, and even blogging software itself, has shifted away from people who write their ideas and thoughts and into a business tool, and we’re all the poorer for it.

Which is my second issue: summarising your readers as an audience. This is subtler, and I’m willing to admit I’m bringing my own biases into what that means. Audience to me is only a step above saying people who read your blog are customers. The phrase blogosphere became a source of ridicule over the years, but it describes something we’ve lost: a community. Audiences are passive consumers. I’d like to think that with tools like RSS and blogging platforms, we’re more like federated writers. (I don’t like that phrase either, I’m trying to think of something better).

Back in 2005 I remember Doc Searls hosting a panel for BloggerCon entitled Making Money which has stuck with me ever since. His central argument was that we didn’t buy our phones to make money, we bought them as a tool to help us. The analogy doesn’t entirely hold in 2020 given how many people literally run their businesses and computing off their smartphones, but it’s still an interesting way to frame it. A good blog is a sales tool by virtue of it having great content.

(There’s a wider discussion about how low-quality sites and bad actors are incentivised over honest people, but how that pertains to blogging specifically is a topic for another post!)

I sure spend a disproportionately large amount of my time looking at dust collectors for someone claiming to abstain from their procurement in the interests of saving money and shelf space. It’s not that our shelves are sagging under the weight of these slabs of gold-pressed latinum cleverly disguised as anime characters, so much as their physical dimensions not being wide or deep enough to contain additional ones without stacking.

The first two off the shelf—hah!—are Alter’s re-releases of Purple and Black Heart from the inexplicably fabulous Hyperdimension Neptunia series. Alter are Clara’s and my favourite fig company by far; and Neptunia’s premise is so wonderfully absurd. I wonder if the likes of Netgear realise they are anthropomorphic versions of their hardware set in a surreal universe with Random Access Memory and all their friends. Look at me go with all these adverbs we’re not supposed to be using anymore!

Regardless of whether you know or are interested in the series, I can’t get over the obsessive detail in figs like this. The level of material science manufactures would have had to go through to produce these, and have them literally stand the test of time is something else, especially with all those top-heavy parts. The west doesn’t do anything close.

(Funny story, I was at a SMASH! or similar convention one year—remember conventions?—and I was waiting in line for something with someone cosplaying as Purple Heart. I was in one of my Gundam uniforms. I remember looking at each other and laughing; she worked at an auditing firm, and I was in IT. “Is this what grown-ups do on their days off?”)

But the one I’m most excited for is Inuyama Aoi from Yuru Camp. That series should have been released this year to help us all cope; it was chill, fun, and the characters and sets were all wonderful. It’s easily one of our favourite anime series of all time. And she has Japanese curry and a removable hat!

Anyone have some spare shelves?

I spent so long on the title for this before giving up and removing doubt with extra commas. Was it a viral video about fake food, or the fakeness was viral, or the viral fake food had a video? I suppose all of them apply.

Ann Reardon of How to Cook That is Clara’s and my favourite food scientist on YouTube, and she posts from Australia! She has made some spectacular things, including a chibi anime cake for Final Fantasy, and my current favourite 3D optical illusion. She’s also known for her well-researched, thorough, and fair debunking videos where she takes some of the most atrocious “five minute hacks” and the like that we’ve all seen recommended to us at some point, and schools us on why they’re either vague, misleading, or outright lies.

One of the most important antidotes we have to bad information is good information, and I appreciate all the effort people like Ann put into this. Someone with her skills could easily make more money doing, as we would say here, dodgy shit. Which gets us to the core issue: readers here would know I’m always interested in understanding and deconstructing the motivation to behave like this. Ann breaks it down towards the end of this Blossom debunking video:

This sort of stuff is getting promoted by [YouTube’s] algorithm. I think unless the algorithm itself changes; unless the platforms Facebook and YouTube take responsibility for what they’re promoting, there’s just going to be more of this… because it works. It would have made them so much money because they’ve got so many views. So that tells other companies *we should try and deceive and do fake stuff because that’s going to get us views.

Ann doesn’t have a computer science or information system background, and yet she still easily observed the trend. We’ve reached the point where these platforms can’t feign ignorance anymore; people will continue to upload lies as long as recommendation engines make it financially lucrative to do so. We all know it.

As to whether these fake food videos are harmful, Ann also had a point I didn’t consider. In my younger and more cynical years—some of which coincide with the first few years of this blog, gulp!—I would have scoffed at the idea because it assumes people aren’t applying critical thinking. I still think this is true to an extent; we need to educate people about how to think. But here’s another angle to consider:

I had so many comments in that previous video of kids who’d spent their pocket money buying ingredients to cook one of the “So Yummy” recipes and then failing again and again, and they thought that they couldn’t cook and they’d stopped baking.

This is tragic. Extrapolate this out further, and how many other people are being lied into thinking they’re not capable of something? Paint this issue however you want, but motivation and a sense of agency are powerful forces, especially to impressionable children.

From Respectful Memes:

Jeremy Ray pulled no punches in his retrospective on Australia’s National Broadband Network for The Shot earlier this month:

In 2013, Australia reached a fork in the road. One side, Kevin Rudd’s governing ALP, had a truly world-class proposal for the future of the country’s internet. The other, Tony Abbott’s LNP Coalition, did not. And our mainstream media fucked it up colossally. Not just Murdoch, all of it.

[..] Communications technology was a less sensational issue buried amongst all the borders and the boats. The NBN was a chance for politicians to do their businessman impersonations, using focus-grouped phrases like “Multi-Technology Mix” while hoping journalists wouldn’t ask why they were allergic to fibre – moral or otherwise. And the caper worked. The fourth estate slept on Australia’s future and we hurtled to our copper fate.

He also discussed the ABC’s dispicable treatment of Nick Ross, who had the audacity to write qualified articles and correct predictions about the Coalition’s more expensive, sub-par NBN alternative.

It seemed everyone in the industry was warning about how bad it was at the time, yet the general press ignored us. The Coalition’s lines went unchallenged, and the voting public took it as fact that Labor’s plan would have been worse. We’re now living with the consequences.

It reminds me of my dad talking about how grumpy he’d get reading about his industry in the media, and how many details they routinely got wrong. His lightbulb moment was realising that if they could get his industry wrong, do they ever get anything right? I don’t think it’s as bleak as that, though this NBN coverage—or lack thereof—has been illustrative in how the press handles technical issues their financial backers want buried. If I’ve seen it play out in my own niche, where else is it happening?

About all I took exception with in the original article was Jeremy’s chariterisation:

Rare is the meaningful difference between Australia’s two major political parties

They really are more meaningfully different than people think, though the same media that buried the NBN would have us believe they’re the same. As the case with the NBN, we can’t let them get away with that.

From Ecce Homo, 1888:

My time has not yet come either; some are born posthumously.

OpenZFS 2 is a huge achievement, and makes me bullish about the long term prospects for the world’s most trustworthy and nicest to use storage system. You can even use try it today on FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE, though I recommend tracking -CURRENT for these sorts of features.

The rule of thumb for packages with drivers or kernel extensions is to see when they were built. IIRC at the time of writing the current openzfs and openzfs-kmod packages were built for 12.1-RELEASE, so you won’t be able to boot with them with 12.2. But they’re easy to install from ports.

First make sure you have base source for your release:

# svnlite checkout https://svn.FreeBSD.org/base/releng/12.2 /usr/src 

Then download the latest ports tree, either with portsnap or subversion:

# svnlite checkout https://svn.FreeBSD.org/ports/head /usr/ports

You can build the ports with the usual make install clean, but I still use portmaster(8) after all these years:

# portmaster sysutils/openzfs
# portmaster sysutils/openzfs-kmod

Now enable, assuming this has been set to YES:

# sed -i '.backup' 's/zfs_enable/openzfs_enable/' '/boot/loader.conf'

Then update your path to use the new userland tools in /usr/local/sbin, and reboot. You may need to reimport your pools created with these tools each reboot, or use this rc.d script that PMc raised in the FreeBSD forums. That caught me out the first time.

The only other caveats are to be careful when trying new features if you intend to share pools with other -RELEASE machines. ZFS does a good job with backwards compatibility, but older versions won’t recognise an encrypted OpenZFS pool, for example. 12.2-R also doesn’t support encrypted zroot boot volumes. By reading this post you acknowledge this responsibility!

Refer to the OpenZFS website and FreeBSD Handbook for more information about the process, and for the canonical documentation.