Rubenerd

I sit on the balcony most days to do work. It makes the most sense when living in a studio apartment; balancing the need for boundaries, and not wanting to interfere in Clara’s own video conferences and meetings. It also gives back a bit of the vitamin D I miss from not commuting, and the fresh air helps.

It’s also helped in some unexpected ways. I didn’t realise how much I depend on being able to look elsewhere from a computer screen for inspiration and what I call microbreaks. They’re those moments in time between reading each email, or while on an audio call, or when you’ve paused writing to think of the right word or phrase. They can last anywhere from a few seconds, to a minute or two. They’re also generally unplanned, but are welcome each time.

Having a balcony is great for these microbreaks. Even six floors up, a dad and his kid caught my eye and waved up at me as they walked out of reception. That wouldn’t have happened if I were staring blankly at my computer screen.

I’ve also been told they’re useful for staving off myopia by giving your eyes some exercise.

I saw a bash discussion on the FreeBSD forums a few months ago:

It just perplexes me, because [the GPL is] one of the first things I’ve learned about in FreeBSD (probably before I ever installed and used it), and I always come across why it’s not in base.

I don’t think anyone is stupid for not knowing that; I don’t understand how someone can go so long, without knowing it. It’s like someone smart, who didn’t do their homework/research for a long time. Newcomers, however, shouldn’t be expected to know it. I’m going to leave it at that.

I can empathise, to an extent. FreeBSD’s simple, transparent licencing is one of its broad appeals, and is generally one of the first points raised in BSD versus [GNU/]Linux discussions. FreeBSD’s removal of GCC made headlines for months, as just one example. Requests for GPL-encumbered software in base must also grate after reading so many of them.

But it still shouldn’t come as a surprise that some FreeBSD users aren’t familiar with its licencing. FreeBSD is widely recommended for reasons beyond this, from its documentation, community, ease with which its kernel and world can be rebuilt and reproduced, mature tooling, jail and dtrace infrastructure, thorough ZFS integration, networking performance, stability, reasonable init system, BSD *nix heritage, mascot, and more.

FreeBSD and the Foundation, like the other BSD projects, don’t have massive marketing or PR departments like Linux does to keep it at the forefront of people’s minds. I’d guess most BSD users come from recommendations, either word-of-mouth or reading. Licencing is but one of the advantageous angles, which could be easily misunderstood or overlooked coming from GNU/Linux; even from people who’ve used it for a while. I know, I seem to have the conversations weekly.

Which leads us back to the gentleman’s first observation:

It just perplexes me [..] I always come across why [the GPL is] not in base.

We can blame users to RTFM to an extent, but this recurring misunderstanding should also be telling us something in neon lights. The Free Software Foundation’s advocacy sets so much of the tone in the free/open source software community, and those of us on the BSD/ISC/MIT side are demonstrably not providing effective counterpoints. In the paraphrased words of John Siracusa, being technically accurate is necessary, but not sufficient.

Maybe the FreeBSD homepage needs to communicate the licence advantages better, as well as the relationship with the GPL in ports and base. Explain why GPL free software is good, but that unencumbered software is better and necessary, especially for projects like FreeBSD.

I don’t have anything specific to mark this momentous occasion, so I thought I’d take this moment of serendipity to look through my phone photos from today:

Anyone have an idea what this is? This isn’t a trivia question, I am genuinely at a loss. A photo taken at a table after I thought the laggy iOS 13 camera app had been dismissed? A representation of Venetian cloud formations?

The coffee hadn’t taken effect when I tried doing this:

$ cd ./script.sh
==> oksh: cd: bad substitution

Ladies and gentleman, it’s Bad Substitution with their new hit, “Out of Bounds”. It’s Savage Garden with a bit of Lewburger.

I’m at the point in my life where I hear songs when I hear error messages, then wonder in which dream I first heard it. Is that concerning?

Pretty well, appreciate you asking! How are you?

I’ve been off Twitter for about a week now. I’ve have an account on it for longer than most, and have made long-lasting friendships with people on it. I’ve even started reconnecting with people from years past which I treasure. I call this Good Twitter, and want to see it preserved somehow.

On the other side, Twitter is wire service. I could tell that seeing the minute-by-minute analysis of every despot and policy left me with a contradictory mix of dread and the urge to consume more, especially first thing in the morning where my emotional state and attitude for the whole day is so often informed. Is this what smoking feels like?

My old man quipped that things aren’t any worse now than before, it’s just social media percolates on issues and bubbles them to the surface more than curated news media ever did. There’s probably some truth to that, though I think it’s as ripe for abuse; albeit in a different form.

I’ll probably be back for my fix in the next week or so, but I’m already thinking what filters I’ll add this time around. I want to be informed, but being anxious and angry also isn’t helpful. The fact my first instinct was to say fix above suggests this is still an unhealthy relationship. No wonder I retreat to work projects, this blog, and remote Minecraft islands.

Clara and I have been playing this newfangled game called Minecraft. Just like Superliminal which I have a draft post about, we jumped in after watching the Hololive EN crew play it, and see all the cool stuff they’d build together.

(As an aside, I'm finally seeing the appeal of video game streamers. They do wonders to reduce the barrier to entry for games by giving you an introduction, and seeing them play in real time is better than any review. I'm also self-aware enough to realise that I'm saying this on a review, whoops).

In one of the biggest collective cases of I told you so, Minecraft is just as fascinating, addictive, and fun as everyone has said for the last decade. It marries the aesthetic of Commander Keen and the creative freedom and resource management of SimCity—my two favourite games of all time—into an open-world simulation you can explore. It’s terrifyingly well-suited to my tastes.

You mine to find resources and uncover the beautiful, procedurally-generate caverns with flowing water and lava. You build your own houses, tunnels, bridges, boats, and powered railways. You craft clothes and glass, smelt and polish materials, and trade with villagers. You even encounter creatures, some of whom are even happy to see you. And the sunsets are quite pretty.

I imagine that in an alternative universe where Maxis wasn’t bought by EA, the company came out with Cities Skylines and Minecraft. It imbues the same open-ended spirit of those games: it’s a gigantic, multi-levelled puzzle without a pre-defined ending or path you have to follow. This is what computing was supposed to be!

Clara and I have already learned a lot in this last week. We were separated while running away from monsters and had to make our own makeshift shelters in disparate places, wondering if we’d ever see each other again. Now I’m in the process of building an MTR tunnel between the two with the F3 coordinates and a compass, and she’s floating away to explore and fill in more of our maps.

This shows how green I was, but I didn’t even realise the original Minecraft ran on Java, and the FreeBSD Foundation—for which I’m a proud regular donor—published an excellent getting stared guide. Thanks to Jonathan Price and the committers for maintaining the minecraft-server port, it was unreasonably easy.

There’s also always someone who comments on posts like this saying that I’ve offended their delicate sensibilities having only just discovered something everyone has known about for years. Let’s just cut that feedback loop at the source and pretend you already sent it: that way you retain your smug satisfaction and I don’t have to read it. Better yet, spend the effort paying Minecraft!

The iPhone 12 is the first model in the phone’s history not to ship with an LCD option. This small detail has been lost in the regular fray of frantic iPhone 12 coverage, but it’s a big deal for those of us photosensitive to OLED screens.

If you haven’t seen my earlier posts about this, OLED screens flicker uncomfortably for some of us, especially in low light and when being moved. This is amplified when holding a phone that literally moves in your field of vision as a function of its regular operation. The visual sensation can cause headaches even after a short time; I get them because I find focusing difficult, which irritates my eyes and mimics the unsettling colour shimmer I get at the onset of a migraine.

The iPhone X, XS, and 11 shipped with LCDs on their low-end models, which I attributed to Apple acknowledging this health issue for a subset of their customers. It also helped them differentiate the product line by selling the OLED’s bolder colours and better contrast as premium features to people with normal peepers.

The iPhone 11 is still being sold, but the 12 signals the end of the line for LCDs in their mainstream phones. I can see why we’re unimportant in a business sense, but it still makes me a bit sad.

It seems Apple’s answer for us now is the iPhone SE, the current model of which still ships with an LCD. This works for me, as it’s the same size as my current iPhone 8, and weighs less than the house bricks of the larger models. It’s also cheaper by Apple standards, and still has Touch ID which I prefer because it can be unlocked as I take it out of my pocket. But I can see—hah!—how mobile enthusiasts who want the latest camera optics and goodies would be disappointed that they’re locked out now.

I’m also keeping an eye—hah!—out for Android product lines that still feature LCDs as escape plan, should Apple abandon LCDs entirely. Android has always been a basketcase, but at least it has multiple vendors going for it. I’ve always been partial to mobile Sony hardware going back to the Clié; is there a modern LCD Xperia? Or I wonder if there’s a nice Blackberry-style one?

I’ve been giving Electron a lot of justifiable flack recently, but that’s not to say native desktop software can’t also feel like you’re trudging through molasses.

The one that continues to amaze me is Outlook for Mac, which for $REASONS I still have to use in a specific capacity. Typing a new email is usually tolerable, but sometimes it can take upwards of half a second or more for each character to appear. I feel as though I need mosh for email, which is just silly.

Insert obligatory comment about how modern software is expected to do more, but I can’t help remembering how much smoother Eudora, Apple Mail, and Mozilla Mail/Thunderbird felt with orders of magnitude less memory and CPU time than what Outlook has here. My Thunderbird install with two decades of mailing list messages and personal email still manages to index and run just fine with no noticeable performance impact when editing mail. Even Microsoft’s own Entourage back in the day felt more performant.

And that’s the rub. In the days of scarce system resources, developers seemed to grok that any real-time actions engaged by an operator needed to be fast; or at least, appear fast. We perceive graphical performance issues above all else, which is another reason why the compromises Electron apps introduce are such a monumental step backwards. If it takes indexing mail longer—I’m just hypothesising that’s what causes Outlook to crawl—that’s more tolerable if the UI itself is responsive.

The dream would be to go back to (Re-)(Al)Pine for mail, which just leaves the open question about shared Exchange calendars. Are there third party GUI clients that can handle these well, ideally for macOS and/or *nix desktops? I’d pay good money for them not to have to see Outlook again.

I’d had inkings of this already, but it took someone else writing it so plainly and beautifully:

My conspiracy theory is that time travel IS real and someone keeps trying to fix 2020 by changing something. But every time they do, they unwittingly make it worse.

From InfoSec’s very own Alyssa Miller, via my sister. I’ve taken a Twitter break but this was too good not to share.

That’s a long traffic light below. And as usual, it overflows slightly into another square. Are we supposed to click that one as well? What about the pedestrian light? Nobody knows.

Also, does anyone get the distinct impression we’re training algorithms for self-driving cars? Why else would these verification tools this obsessed with traffic lights? I expect we’ll be asked to check signs next.

One small bit of fun I’ve been having is also intentionally selecting squares that don’t contain the item in question. I’ve been surprised how often it still lets me through. Take that outlier!