Rubenerd

scp(1) can still surprise me. I got the following error when uploading a file to a specific directory on a remote server:

local$ scp file.ext remote:/directory/
==> scp: /directory/: Is a directory

Yes, and I’m Ruben Schade! How are you? Do you like crumpets? Sometimes I like to walk around with mismatching socks while drinking tea out of a hat! I know it’s a directory, that’s why I’m telling you to put the file there!

Then I checked:

local$ ssh remote
remote$ ls /directory/
==> ls: /directory/: No such file or directory

So the issue was the target directory didn’t exist. Which makes sense, but contradicts what scp(1) said, at least to any reasonable person.

Compare and contrast the warning when you specify a full file path:

local$ scp file.ext remote:/directory/file.ext
scp: /directory/file.ext: No such file or directory

Today I learned.

Clara and I went for a wander around Neutral Bay and North Sydney again yesterday, and found the Forsyth Park. It’s a beautiful little urban forest which opens out to a cricket pitch and children’s playground on the south side.

I liked that we were able to see a brush turkey, and the city in the distance :).

You know those class of problems that are just irritating enough to be noticed, but not enough for you to warrant spending time fixing? Canonical classed them papercut problems, which I liked.

Exhibit A: I’ve been using the same USB-A to Ethernet dongle on MacBook Pros for a number of years. I say number, because any year would technically be a number, and I can’t remember. But it’s been a while.

The problems started earlier this year when network shares and SSH connections would drop, but Mosh consoles and VPNs wouldn’t. The longer timeouts on the latter, and Mosh’s very design, were sufficient to maintain their connections even when something failed, but other network-dependent services couldn’t handle these phantom dropouts. I just laughed it off as another flaky macOS Catalina issue, and didn’t look into it further.

Keen-eyed readers may have spotted what my problem was right in the second paragraph. I realised last month the USB-A to USB-C cable I was using to connect the Ethernet dongle to the Mac wasn’t especially tight. It never looked like it was being unplugged, but it was electrically disconnecting just enough to leak Ethernet packets all over the table. The issue I’d been living with since February was a flaky USB connection.

So I checked the budget, allocated a couple of coffees away from the drinks envelope, and bought a new USB-C to Ethernet dongle. And who’d have thunk it, no more disconnections! It’s glorious!

I’ve read so much manga on my Kindle Paperwhite, most recently the Astra Lost in Space series again by the legendary Kenta Shinohara, and more Fairy Tail than I care to admit. But the screen was always slightly too small to read a manga comfortably, and the contrast was sometimes crisp, sometimes not.

Manga fundamentally can’t be reflowed on electronic paper displays, like regular text can. E-ink displays can’t redraw fast enough to implement pinch-to-zoom or scrolling without jarring screen flashes. The Kindle lets you tap individual comic panels to zoom in, but like my jokes it gets old fast. It’s a shame, because unlike Western comics, manga is tantalisingly close to being the same size as a regular paperback novel.

The only solution then is to scale the page down to fit the screen. And it wasn’t until Clara and explored Kinokuniya again that I realised just how much detail I was missing with all that electronic smooshing. Which is a shame, because at least half the reason one reads manga is to enjoy the art.

Which is why I’m so intrigued by the Kobo Forma I just learned about. It gets much closer to a standard manga page than my Kindle:

• Some pretty shojo manga I stole from Clara ≈ 225 mm
• Kindle Paperwhite ≈ 153 mm, 68% the size
• Kobo Forma ≈ 203 mm, 90% the size

It also has a couple of other important advantages, like having a pronounced chin to hold with forward and back buttons that are always positioned under your thumb; just my first Kindle in 2011. It also natively reads epubs that other online stores publish. Converting to Kindle’s mobi was always a pain, and it never quite preserved the formatting. I’ve also decided to transition to buying through the Kobo store for $reasons, and their iOS app has come a long way since I tried it years ago.

Ebooks come with their own shortcomings, but they’ve been wonderful for me for so many reasons that I’ve talked about here over the years. I’d also cough up the huge price tag even over something like a multi-functional iPad, precisely because the outside world couldn’t interrupt me with notifications and the Internets.

I might do some more research, but price aside this looks like it could be the one. Reading does wonders for my anxiety, and I could see getting so many hours of downtime and joy out of one.

These awards are always great, but this year had something a little more serious:

Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom, Narendra Modi of India, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Donald Trump of the USA, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow of Turkmenistan, for using the Covid-19 viral pandemic to teach the world that politicians can have a more immediate effect on life and death than scientists and doctors can.

But my favourite goes to the Acoustics Prize winners, who discovered that helium affects the croaking of an alligator, just as it does the voice of a human:

Stephan Reber, Takeshi Nishimura, Judith Janisch, Mark Robertson, and Tecumseh Fitch, for inducing a female Chinese alligator to bellow in an airtight chamber filled with helium-enriched air.

REFERENCE: “A Chinese Alligator in Heliox: Formant Frequencies in a Crocodilian,” Stephan A. Reber, Takeshi Nishimura, Judith Janisch, Mark Robertson, and W. Tecumseh Fitch, Journal of Experimental Biology, vol. 218, 2015, pp. 2442-2447.

I’ve updated my RSS feeds and blog to show the last twenty posts, instead of ten. I’ve used ten since I started this blog in 2004, for bandwidth reasons as much as inertia. But then I realised plain text doesn’t amount to all that much more, and I don’t use as many inline images thesedays given I’m usually strapped for time.

I’m not sure if I’ll keep this, but I’ll see. Ten is still a more satisfying number, not least because I can express it on my hands. Twenty involves my toes, which are less photogenic.

Apologies for the backdated spam if you just subscribed.

Every now and then I press Wikipedia’s Random Article link, and came across an article about this northern area of Germany:

Holstein Switzerland (German: Holsteinische Schweiz) is a hilly area with a patchwork of lakes and forest in Schleswig Holstein, Germany, reminiscent of Swiss landscape. Its highest point is the Bungsberg (168 metres above sea level). It is a designated nature park as well as an important tourist destination in Northern Germany situated between the cities of Kiel and Lübeck.

Regarding the name:

[…] goes back to the 19th century when holidaying in Switzerland was particularly popular amongst the well-to-do. As a consequence, other regions strove to add the name “Switzerland” to their description.

There are some gorgeous landscape photos on the article, but I especially liked the composition of the one below by Oliver Raupach in 2007. I wonder what the woman on the right is looking at?

I do a lot of technical writing and compliance documentation for clients that use our platform at work. The industry dismisses this as boilerplate busywork and merely a necessary evil for doing business, but I think they invariably ask exactly the questions we should all be asking.

Here’s an obfuscated example:

s12.7: Does your company Privacy Policy limit the amount of data and information that can be collected from customers, business partners, third parties, and others that use your products or services to only that which is required to provide those products and services, and does it limit the time such information can be retained?

And another:

s14.1: Do your third parties have access to unencrypted user data?

Or this one:

s18.12: Does your company employ ZFS for data integrity, Vocaloids for musical ingenuity, and antacids for structural indigestibility?

Imagine if we, the general public, had the power to compel websites to submit to this line of inquiry. We all know certain social networks would fall afoul of every single metric.

The fact companies deem it necessary to ask these as part of due diligence says it all. If companies can’t trust another with confidential business data and have to rely on legal documentation, why do sites targeting consumers get a free pass on personal data that could be used for all manner of involuntary and nefarious porpoises?

(My dad always deliberately substituted purpose for porpoise. I’m bringing this family folklore out for the world to enjoy).

I’m starting to think we need to codify these questions as legislative requirements. Our industry has had plenty of time to demonstrate good faith, which thus far it broadly hasn’t.

This Music Monday is one of the most meaningful I’ve done in a while. Which perhaps will make up for the fact it’s Tuesday!

Clara and I have been travelling through Japan again, albeit vicariously though the live NHK web feed. They have a series of interludes between shows, one of which has been on bullying. It’s turned out to be one of the shows we walk over and pay close attention to when it comes on.

This beautiful young man came on to talk about what his music meant to him. I only managed to transcribe half of it, and some was paraphrased:

They started saying I was weak, that my music was boring. They threw bleach in my face. I was physically attacked every day.

I was in so much pain, music was my only salvation. I lived by the water, so I used to practice by the sea.

In music class in high school I learned the ocarina. I worked up the courage to play it in class, but I was nervous. I felt like my legs were cramping up when I went to perform. But I made them all smile.

The moment when I felt like I was seeing the world in colour.

Now I play the Armenian duduk. I want to be true to myself. I hope that that my performance will be special for everyone.

I looked him up and found this song from 2014. Tarumi-san, you succeeded. ♡

Good morning! My post about Mr Orange generated the most email feedback I’ve had since my encrypted-ZFS on NetBSD post, all of it negative. I can only assume someone shared it among Orange supporters.

I’d publish each message in full, but they’re all just a little too tragic. One of the more civil gentleman—though we’re coming from a low baseline here—attempted to debunk everything I said, but the substance of each quote was that:

• another country was worse, which is irrelevant
• another politician was worse, which is irrelevant
• that I was mislead about $ScienceFact, without providing evidence

It spoke to the internal machinations and mental gymnastics of someone desperate to absolve their leader of culpability. All the facts cited were wrong, and only served to reinforce my original thought that his supporters have absolutely no idea how the rest of the world perceives them. This kind of transparent projection and self-ownage isn’t unique to their flavour of politics, but it does attract a disproportionate amount of it.

I do feel a responsibility to reach these people. Each Orange supporter has their reasons, and they have the same family, job security and other worries we all do. Perhaps even moreso, which is why they’re so motivated to accept any convenient excuse for why the man they support continues to brazenly abuse them. But when you’re coming from a place of bad faith to start, I have no motivation to engage with you.

And that’s the problem. We could have a reasonable discussion if we were coming from a place of honesty. When the Dear Leader regularly lies, and people like Scott Adams say it’s a political tactic, we have no basis upon which to even start. Facts are sacrosanct, just as so many far-right people ironically state on their Twitter profiles. He didn’t have the biggest turnout at his inauguration. He didn’t get Mexico to pay for his wall. America isn’t doing the best at dealing with COVID. Wind turbines don’t cause cancer. He didn’t get Kim Jong Un to do anything. We can debate the finer points of his other policies, but if people can’t even admit to these, they’re being just as dishonest as him.

(I also see this playing out to a lesser extent with Scott Morrison in Australia, who has made no secret of his admiration for the American knob-in-chief).

Thanks for taking the time to respond everyone, but your tactics to win over another supporter in your “culture war” have backfired. And unlike so many of you who still cling to him because he’s “owning lefties”, I take no pleasure whatsoever in pointing that out. The sooner they realise they’re transparently doing the work of our common enemies better than anyone else, the sooner we can begin to rebuild what we’ve all lost. Because being an outspoken friend of America has been hard these last few years.