Rubenerd

From his 1996 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, emphasis added:

The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

The US suffers from the worst case of this, whether it be mask protests, 5G paranioa, lies about vaccines, or the moon not being made of cheese, but they’re by no means unique. See my other post today on intentions.

Today I learned of the MIT-licenced fdupes by Adrian Lopez that performs hashed and byte-for-byte file comparisons and presents lists of duplicated files. It works well, and you should use it. A big shoutout to ehaupt@ for maintaining the FreeBSD port, and ef at Bonn University for maintaining on pkgsrc.

On my Mac I use the excellent open source dupeGuru GUI application, but I had a need to find duplicates across terabytes of data on one of my FreeBSD microservers over the weekend. I wanted a tool that I could easily run in a detached screen session, and fdupes fit the bill like a buff platypus. What?

I took a ZFS snapshot of my dataset in case things went pear-shaped and I needed to roll back, then set it to auto-delete duplicates in a my target directory. Substitute your pool, dataset, and directory as required:

# zfs snapshot pool/tank@backup
$ echo "THIS WILL DELETE DATA"
$ fdupes -r -d -N $directory

If you just want it to identify duplicates:

$ fdupes -r $directory > dupes.log

Or if you want it to prompt you as it finds them:

$ fdupes -r -d $directory

Someone will probably tell me that ZFS has deduping, but it’s not applicable in this case. This was just a quick and dirty job to clean up some recursively rsync’d mess that I did while half-asleep; and I just use lz4 compression for all my pools now anyway.

I could have cleaned it myself, but why not let The Machine™ do it?

Melissa Davey quoted the Premier of Victoria at his press conference yesterday:

He added that some people were feeling shame around their symptoms and positive diagnosis, causing them to delay telling close contacts for fear of being judged. “I had a bit of feedback from people that there might be some reticence to come forward” he said.

“There might be a sense that you would be looked upon badly, that you would be somehow judged, that you would be not necessarily seen as doing the right thing – nothing could be further from the truth. If you have symptoms, coming forward and getting tested, it will be something we’ll be grateful for and it’s you making a powerful contribution and doing the right thing.”

♡

I get more hits to my site and RSS feed in a typical month now than I used to get in a given year. For a fifteen year old blog that started life as a Perl CGI script in high school, it’s been wild to see. Whether you’re coming here from Hacker News, Reddit, Twitter, Discord, newsgroups, or the BSD Now podcast, hi! Sometimes I talk about tech here.

This marked increase in traffic corresponds with more feedback email, a not altogether insignificant number of which are negative. I’ll address some recurring themes here, because they’re Jason Bourne of the same misunderstanding of the kind of site people have come across.

Once you filter out the obvious trolls saying BSD is dead, Apple computers are for posers who value form over function, and that we’re all sheep for wearing a mask, most of the remainder concern the tone of my posts, and what they consider the ancillary topics I cover. They claim that my writing is too jovial, my site mascot drawn by Clara is inappropriate, and inclusion of posts about cooking garlic are a waste of time and somehow detract from my serious technical and political posts.

(One gentleman spent an inordinate amount of time criticising Rubi’s skirt in such lurid detail I felt but the tiniest twinge of what women must feel as creepy men ogle them walking past).

I appreciate—most of—the feedback, but respectfully disagree. There may not be many of us doing this anymore, but this is specifically a personal blog. This site has always been a labour of love for me since I started it in high school in 2004, and will necessarily be about stuff that’s on my mind and that I’m interested in. There are drier technical blogs by people I respect out there, but that’s not my style.

I’m also unsure how one can quantify detraction in this context. I remember having a similar debate with a WikiProject Albums contributor, who claimed compilation album articles similarly detracted from the quality of Wikipedia. In a finite space like a newspaper or book that might make sense, but in an electronic medium it seems to me the easiest solution is to ignore things in which you have no interest. Your also free to find an anime mascot drawn by my girlfriend offensive, just as I’m free to include her to make the world a slightly nicer place.

Which dovetails to the third comment which I take more seriously. I haven’t received permission to quote their email, but in summary they said my serious posts about COVID, social security, and attitudes in open source software communities are valuable, but sporadic. The implication is it’s incumbent upon me to only discuss important topics, and that by including what amounts to sidebars I’m trivialising them.

This one, selfishly, comes down to self-preservation. I need to write about the intricacies of BSD text editors and fun engineering or cooking videos to afford me sufficient mental fortitude to discuss serious topics. Sometimes we all need a break, and this is how I do it.

As I wrote on my first post fifteen years ago:

… it’s a blog site with random stuff on it that I think is groovy, weird etc … maybe one percent of it, or maybe two, might be useful to someone, especially with respect to some of the tech problems I’ve had and solved over the years. So here it is.

Thanks for reading.

Josh teaching us how to Cook Salmon Good in the Mythical Kitchen:

Craig Leres on the FreeBSD ports team has deprecated nvi-devel in lieu of nvi2, with the former expiring this time in October. From the pkg-descr:

vi is an implementation of the ex/vi text editor. The original vi was written by William Joy. Later Mark Horton added a number of enhancements. nvi was written by Keith Bostic and was distributed as part of the Fourth Berkeley Software Distribution (4BSD) by the University of California, Berkeley. This version is based on a fork of nvi by Sven Verdoolaege.

Nie Alarie added nvi 2.1.3 to pkgsrc in June.

nvi is a distinct branch of vi, not to be confused with Vim or its offshoots. You can install Vim from ports—and I do—but nvi is the default editor family in the BSDs, so its useful to be sufficiently proficient in it. You may find learning nvi helps you be a better Vim user, too.

I taught myself nvi while I was at uni in 2010, which I’ve just realised is a decade ago. Aiyo.

This Music Monday will be different from what I normally share here, but I like being (un)predictable like that. Today I’m reviewing the Kos Porta Pro X headphones which recently arrived. They have no business being this good, especially for the price.

The AKG K55x series are my favourite headphones of all time. They sound so crystal clear I was hearing instrumentation in my favourite songs I never knew existed. Their giant 50mm drivers are surrounded by pillowly-soft cups which make them a pleasure to wear, and naturally block out outside noise. But they’re expensive, too big to carry around, and as I unfortunately learned during our last house move, they’re far more fragile than I appreciated.

My audiophile colleague knew I was in the market for a new pair of affordable headphones that included an inline mic for our working-from-home world, and recommended the Kos Porta Pro X. I ordered mine a few months ago, and they finally arrived along with my other old Walkman gear I’ll talk about soon.

They look like something from the 1980s because they are; albeit updated to be more durable according to Koss. This is a huge tick in my book given my penchant for nostalgia. The entire assembly folds in on itself and clips together with a small hook, which can be put into the protective bag it ships with.

Given their size, weight, and price, the sound is wonderful. Brass in jazz sounds especially bright and cheerful, and vocals are clear. They’re too bass heavy for my tastes, but curiously it doesn’t rob the headphones of any discernible clarity. I adjusted the equaliser in iTunes to reduce lower frequencies and keep the rest static to get the sound profile I like.

Bass aside, they sound far better than any headphones I’ve tried off the shelf in stores, including ones that are double the price.

Ergonomically they look like they’d be as uncomfortable as those awful headphones you get on aeroplanes—remember travel?—but they feel surprisingly comfortable. The size can be adjusted by sliding the top piece in and out. In addition to the ear cups, they also include adjustable secondary “comfortZone” pads which cushion your head above your ears. Now that I’ve used headphones that have this, it feels weird not having them on others.

The 3.5 mm headphone jack strain relief is a proper metal coil which is a nice premium touch, and the cable splits in a fixed position a quarter of the way down with a sturdy Y thingy, to employ technical nomenclature. The model I got included the inline mic, which I’ve been told by colleagues works as good as the wired Apple earpods I was using for conference calls.

I ordered mine from Drop (ne. Massdrop) which are priced lower and come with the inline mic as standard. I love these things!

Even as an angmoh I was concerned. The unwashed rice was the cardinal sin for me though… wah lao eh!

I learned to cook rice from a local friend’s mum when we were growing up in Singapore. And yes, I did the metal spoon on the pan thing too; fortunately she were gracious enough about it to forgive me. Thank you auntie :).

Black Apollo had a great mental exercise on Twitter which sounds like a great opportunity to over-analyse something.

The Blue Pill

I could say with confidence the Blue Pill would be easier. Age 45 is still super young, with so much life ahead to enjoy the money and put it to good use. I’ll be that age in a decade and a half, and I’m sure that time would have flown otherwise. But it comes with two huge caveats.

The biggest would be the responsibility such wealth would bestow. I used to joke that I’d infinitely prefer being rich to famous, but that being rich would come with its own problems. There are so many deserving people and causes in the world, and I’d worry I’d live my life guilt-ridden with the opportunity costs associated with helping one over another. Not to mention worrying about maintaining that wealth in investments and savings, or conversely worrying whether the wealth managers I’ve hired aren’t doing something sneaky. Maybe that’s why so many of the ultra wealthy are detached sociopaths.

Then there’s the issue of that lost time, and who may have moved on, or how the world may have changed in that intervening time. Would I change the course of history and not meet Clara? There’s also small but vocally-dystopian voice in my head saying that 2020 is just the beginning, so to enjoy what little of the good times we have left. Or it could be one of those “careful what you wish for” life lessons where you arrive with your $20 million, only to learn that hyperinflation or COVID-fuelled world wars for resources and medicine has rendered it worthless. Wow that went dark quick!

The Red Pill

So let’s check the Red Pill. The primary advantage here is all your experience and knowledge, albeit at ten, would have come from you. While we’re dealing in the land of hypotheticals, I never found casting a spell to gain a skill that appealing; I feel no pride or joy from work that I feel I didn’t earn. But again, two things to consider.

The biggest logical downside for Red is you’d have future knowledge, which would be great for stock picks, but would introduce all sorts of time-travelling paradoxes. While I admired and respected physics in high school and later in life, I was a chemistry guy. I live in observable physical reality, and I’m not sure I’d have the mental capacity to deal with changes I’d be making to the world, inadvertently or deliberately, to say nothing about the responsibility I’d feel to save people and inevitably falling short. The Early Edition TV show from the early 2000s explored this better than anything I’ve seen.

But personally, is a phrase with two words. How would I cope with adults treating me like a ten year old, despite being in my thirties inside? Would I be taken seriously? Would my prognostications be seen as a sign of an unsound mind? My and my sister’s childhoods were also, in parts, relatively awful as well given ongoing family health issues, and school was awful. My life today is objectively better.

Perhaps both outcomes are the same. The Red Pill could leave you wealthy but broken, leading to a 45 year old with $50 million in the bank that ends up being worthless. Was this the real life lesson here?

I’m sitting at one of my new favourite cafes in the world, the Cassiopea in Katoomba. Like all the best finds, Clara and I stumbled upon it on our first day wandering around the Blue Mountains, and I’ve kept coming back since. Their roasted beans and coffee are so good, the staff are super friendly, and they’re open from 06:00 for us early-risers.

This is not to be confused with the Cassiopeia PDA which my mum used in the 1990s. Computer hardware used to be so much more interesting.