Rubenerd

Offering immediate suggestions for frustrating problems was among the biggest boyfriend mistakes I used to make; a phrase I never thought I’d say given I was the latest of late bloomers! Sometimes people need to vent, as Clara did when Excel crashed and AutoSave rubbished the file. I could have advised that frequent saving would minimise that happening, but that’s not what someone losing an hour of work wants to hear. They want a hug, a cup of tea, and to share in shouting fuck Excel!

Well-meaning but oblivious advice of this nature is rampant online, and can usually be identified by that magical word just, or the phrase have you considered. The trackpad on your laptop broke? Just use an external USB one. Stuck at home? Have you considered not being depressed? Or my personal favourite from at least 2013: why?

Here are some other forms of what Asher Wolf called unhelpful advice. The first was my suggestion:

• “It can only get better from here!”
• “It could always be worse.”
• “Think of it as a growing experience.”
• “You’ll get better when you’re ready.”
• “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
• “Just apply for anything.”
• “Everything happens for a reason.”

I refer to these specifically as oblivious advice, because not only do they avoid factoring in anything about the person’s circumstance, they seek to outright ignore it. Even if well-meaning, they’re also logically flawed, and not what people under duress want to hear. Or maybe that’s just me!

Jason McCreary shared this code example back in 2018. He commented that the do nothing block was dead code, and you should start the if statement at the second block:

if (env('APP_ENV') == 'development') {
    // do nothing...
} else {
    if ($request->getScheme() != 'https') {
        // process request...
    }
}

My first instinct is to disagree. This is a form of inline documentation, and a reminder that something can be done there, both of which are useful if you’re working in a team. It’s also scaffolding that gives you space to add functionality later. But then again, your code would double in size if every conditional was treated this way.

I’d say it’s useful if the do nothing comment constituted something meaningful, like a task manager ticket number, a summary of the desired feature, a #TODO or other programming tag, or a link for more information. Otherwise it’s probably wasted space.

The Web Design Group wrote this about the structure of HTML 3.2 documents back in 1996:

Writing a structured document does not mean that you are writing in a straitjacket. It only means you have to lay out the document in advance. It also means the document becomes easier to read, maintain and extend. While this may not seem too important if you just want a homepage, when you have a whole site to maintain, well-structured documents make life a lot easier!

It’s interesting to read all these years later. We’ve come a long way with standards compliance in browsers, but document structure and maintainability haven’t kept pace. If anything the industry has gone backwards, with additional layers of brittle abstraction, and code so nested I could sell it to Horse Brand.

Try it out: view the HTML source of almost any website you go to in 2020. It may be standards compliant in the strictest sense, but would you call it well structured? Would you call it maintainable? Would you even call it understandable? Then extrapolate that to the CMS, and the web server, and the networks.

This is one of the more esoteric reviews I’ve done here over the years, but this cleaner has no business being this good.

Our studio apartment in Chatswood has cream carpet, and a kitchenette perilously close to it. I’m also among the clumsiest people I know, and I make it a habit of spilling coffee while juggling the heavy balcony door, laptop, and cables… as I just did this morning.

We decided upon moving into the aforementioned residential establishment to have a few strategically-placed bottles of carpet cleaner on emergency standby for the inevitable spills. Dr Beckmann’s Floor Carpet Stain Remover has easily been the best.

Among its most desirable attributes:

• The bottle is large but flat, rendering it easy to grip when one is panicking about the latest potential hit to their rental deposit.

• It comes pre-installed with a handy brushy-thing, which performs triple duty as a liquid frother, applicator, and scrubber. The centre is a giant blue sponge for holding the liquid, and the outer bristles help to penetrate the carpet fibres.

• We vacuum anyway, but strictly speaking it doesn’t require it. This is especially useful if you poured your morning coffee on the ground right before an hour-long client call.

I was not paid in anything other than clean carpet for this post.

Today’s Music Monday is in celebration of a Cranberries LP Clara and I bought last week. Becuase that’s what we do now! The excitement of finding an album you recognise in a second-hand store, or a re-release in a music store, then then taking it home and playing it on your refurbished, overengineered 1980s turntable, it’s so much fun! Who’d have thunk it?

Dreams is one of most intensely-nostalgic songs from my childhood. Hearing this on the car radio, and walking around shops with my parents, are among the only memories I have of Australia before we moved to Singapore. It seemed to be everywhere. Clara asked me last week what the early 1990s sounded like, and I said this.

The composition and sublime backing instrumentation always fascinated me, as did Dolores’s beautiful, unique voice. The Cranberries had some great tracks, but this will always be my favourite.

Years later, and I use this alongside Roxy Music’s Avalon and a few Michael Franks tunes when I want to test a sound system. It only seems fitting to use it again on our new (for us) Hi-Fi.

Last week I asked why interesting new FOSS laptops are always cursed with 1080p panels, given Apple, Lenovo, and other manufacturers have been selling 2x Retina/HiDPI displays for more than a decade. @Infinitary and @mgmchannelbg on Twitter reminded me of System76, the vendor that ships Linux as standard on their equipment.

They have some decent kit, and the discrete GPU options on the Gazelle and Oryx lines blow Apple’s out of the water. But the specification pages for the Lemur Pro, Darter Pro, Gazelle, Oryx Pro, and Darter Pro all showed the 1080p curse.

I was ready to give up, but the Adder WS 15-inch comes with a 4K display, and weighs 2.5 Kg. This is higher resolution than even the 16-inch MacBook Pro, with more memory, ports, and better CPUs, for only 500g more. It’s also competitive with the Lenovo T-series and Carbon laptops with HiDPI displays. The only compromises I can see are its ugly Clevo case, and a meagre 62 Wh battery.

There’s still no compelling ultraportable alternative to the Retina-grade 13-inch MacBook Air, which ironically ships with a higher resolution screen than all those other laptops, and in a smaller chassis. But I’m relived it’s not entirely a lost cause!

I wonder if/when they’d ever officially support FreeBSD as a SKU?

The fact my American friends are even analysing Joe Biden’s transition team is a brief glimpse of sunlight through the 2020 pea souper.

Mr Orange’s dwindling supporters don’t realise the laughing stock he is to the rest of the world, how he’s left America’s international reputation in tatters, and has forced friends of America like me to coach everything we say about the country, lest we be ridiculed ourselves. Mr Orange’s America was the butt of jokes around the world pre-COVID, now people say it could be worse, we could be in his “shithole country”.

Nobody has done more in recent memory to embolden the free world’s enemies, from dividing and pissing off America’s allies, to providing cover for despots. Mr Orange is a hollow man and a liability, just as well all said he would be.

Whew! It’s almost as though I was letting off pent up steam after being that guy who defends the US. We digress; Alex Thomson wrote for Politico:

Two of the full-time staff hires also have ties to the tech industry, which could draw criticism from the left. Cynthia Hogan, a longtime aide to Biden who helped in his vice presidential search, is a former lobbyist for Apple. Jessica Hertz, who worked at the Obama Justice Department, was most recently a director and associate general counsel at Facebook.

At least Apple’s record on privacy generally favours consumers compared to most of the industry. By comparison, the latter appointment’s ties to a certain social network are scary.

Still, I suppose two steps forward, one step back, is still one step forward. If the world is fortunate enough to have America deliver Joe Biden victory, let’s hope it thoroughly holds him and his cabinet to account as they haven’t for his predecessor.

NOTE: The information provided here by the author (Ruben Schade) is strictly provided “as is” with no warranties expressed or implied. The author’s opinions are his own, and do not constitute financial advise. Perform your own due diligence, and seek the advice of a qualified tax professional.

I’ve been voluntarily depositing more into my superannuation via salary sacrifice for many years. The Australian Tax Office makes it clear that the concessional contribution cap threshold since the 2017–18 financial year is $25,000, plus whatever cap you’ve carried forward since 2013–14. Any contributions you ask your employer to salary sacrifice beyond this point are liable to tax above the standard 15%.

So imagine my surprise when I was hit with a tax bill last year for excess contributions that didn’t add up to that! Clara and I slavishly bookkeep all our accounts, income, and expenses down to the cent, and I couldn’t get the numbers the ATO were claiming. I reluctantly paid the bill, assuming ignorance on my part.

This year I received another notice titled:

Act now - You have to pay tax on your Superannuation Excess Contributions

Uh oh, again!? But when I opened the attached PDF:

Your excess concessional (before tax) contributions previously included in your assessable income in the 2018-19 financial year have now reduced to nil as we have received updated information. Your income tax return has been amended to reflect this.

And a third letter was sent:

Interest on overpayment for Income Tax for the period from 01 Jul 18 to 30 Jun 19

I’m not sure if these sort of miscalculations are routine, or whether the tape head connected to the COBOL parser jumped when reading my files in 2018–19. If you were bitten by this too, it might be worth seeking advice.

Colleagues and I were discussing the next batch of interesting free/open source laptops a couple of weeks ago. The need for open hardware is becoming all the more important from a security perspective, and for the right to repair that ensures less of our junk ends up in recycling centres or landfills in the first place.

Here are some of the contenders being sold in 2020:

• Pinebook Pro
• Librem 14
• KDE Slimbook 14
• KDE Slimbook 15.6

I knew before even opening their specification pages that they’d be saddled with crappy, long-outdated displays. But maybe, just maybe, I thought someone might finally be taking graphics seriously. Alas it was not to be; each stretched a 1080p resolution across their displays that Apple beat with their MacBook Pros 12 years ago.

Why is this always the case? This isn’t a minor quibble; aside from the lost decade in which competing hardware long outclassed them, the KDE Slimbook is specifically advertised for painters, video editors, and 3D creators. I’m not sure how that can be seen as truthful.

These are the only reasons I can think of:

• Cost. It makes sense for the Pinebook Pro, but not other machines which are being sold as premium devices.

• The audience for FOSS laptops don’t care about display quality. That might be fine, but these machines will need to do better if they want to be taken seriously outside enthusiast circles. Ambivilence breeds complacency, and that’s how the competition get further ahead.

• Manufacturers don’t think people care. Some of us do! Once you go 2:1 Retina/HiDPI for huge terminal windows and photo editing, going back is like trading your VGA card for a Hercules. Did I show my early thirties age there?

• FOSS drivers aren’t up to scratch to power such displays. I hope not, but I suspect it’s true. NVIDIA’s binary blob drivers are excellent on my FreeBSD tower, but I can see why a company advertising itself as a FOSS manufacturer would be reluctant to ship with them.

I’d love to be proven wrong. Let me know if any of you find an open laptop with a good display, or I forsee more second-hand ThinkPads and Panasonics for my daily carries and personal projects.

I had an overdue realisation last night:

• I use Macs for work, for specific business software
• DOS, and various 1990s versions of Windows are for nostalgic fun
• (GNU/)Linux is for simulation/world building games
• FreeBSD is for everything else, and then some

All of this is such a shift from before. Macs used to be seen as creative tools, not something you’d use for business. DOS and 1990s Windows were endlessly frustrating, not sources of fun. Linux couldn’t have been broadly used for games.

I can still remember in the early 2000s bringing my iBook G3 into a corporate office for school work experience, and all the ensuing discussion about what it was, and whether it could be supported by their corporate LAN. They were even more confused when I booted it into NetBSD. How things change.

Though I do wonder sometimes, with just a slight tweak to history, how things might have been different. In another dimension somewhere, I’m using the latest BeOS-powered PowerPC laptop, and a shiny new Palm smartphone. Both of these represented the pinnacle of UI design in the 1990s, and still in the 2020s have yet to be surpassed. People call me an Apple fanboy, but I’d drop all of it in a second for that gear.