Rubenerd

Hi again from the Blue Mountains! It’s been such a wonderful week bush walking, reading, and chilling in coffee shops around Katoomba and Leuna.

But we also accidentally stumbled upon the Velvet Fog Record Bar, the best vintage Hi-Fi hardware and music store we’ve ever seen in Australia. I saw my first Pioneer draw-loading turntable in the flesh, figuratively speaking, drooled over a triple-head Sony tape deck that could be programmed to specifically detect the obscure type III tape formulation, and bought a rare Michael Franks LP. I even saw a beautiful Kenwood AM/FM tuner which I’d have snapped up in an instant if it weren’t for the fact my amplifier was already a receiver.

Which leads me to a question Mat from Techmoan asked six months ago:

It got me thinking that I don’t really see many people mentioning Kenwood on Hi-Fi forums nowdays … I thought I’ll ask … name the first five Hi-Fi companies that pop into your head … and I’ll be able to get a feeling as to whether or not people are thinking of Kenwood in this day and age

He’s already long tabulated and discussed the results of his survey, but I thought it’d still be a fun exercise anyway. So I paused the video and wrote down my first five:

1. Kenwood
2. Technics/Panasonic
3. Pioneer
4. Sony
5. Denon

I was surprised and bitterly disappointed in myself that Yamaha didn’t make my list, given my tape deck and receiver are both from one of the two tuning fork companies which I inherited from my dad. He mostly had Denon and Yamaha, along with a Technics turntable he brought back on a cruise to Fiji in the 1970s because it was still cheaper than buying domestic. He still has the beautiful shipping line sticker on its cardboard packing box.

These were Clara’s when I quizzed her, for completeness:

1. Onkyo
2. Kenwood
3. Sony
4. Pioneer
5. Yamaha

My aim is to eventually have one of the major manufacturers represented in Clara’s and my eventual Hi-Fi build. There’s something about the Kenwood aesthetic from the mid 1980s I love, but our LaserDisc/CD player is already one of theirs. Maybe I can cheat with a pointless graphic equaliser.

I realised I posted on Twitter about our annual leave, but not here where it’s far more important! Above is an unedited photo I took during one of Clara’s and my bush walks in the Blue Mountains National Park near Katoomba and Leura.

See you all next week.

I learned something about XML today, and macOS’s plists are a perfect way to illustrate it. Or more specifically, I corrected a misunderstanding I’ve had about XML for more than a decade.

macOS uses XML files to store key:value dictionaries in the form of property lists. This is a basic example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
    "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Word</key>
    <string>Bird</string>
    <key>Heard</key>
    <true/>
</dict>

These have always struck me as a bit strage, despite having written and parsed them for years. There’s nothing mapping the key and its value, in this case a string and a boolean true. These are entirely discrete values in a flat XML document like this, meaning it places the burden on the client to create that relationship while parsing.

RDF, and later HTML Microdata, solved this problem with triples that consist of a subject, predicate, and object. The above values would be implemented akin to this in RDF:

<dict>
    <string key="word">Bird</string>
    <true key="heard"/>
</dict>

If you wanted to keep the same syntax, another way would be to wrap the key and values in a new element, such as property. This would remove ambiguity as to what value belongs to what property, and renders the XML more robust against being parsed out of order:

<dict>
    <property>
        <key>Word</key>
        <string>Bird</string>
    </property>
    <property>
        <key>Heard</key>
        <true/>
    </property>
</dict>

Which leads me to my silly little revelation this morning as I sit here having a coffee.

I’ve always parsed XML sequentially for convenience, and assumed third party modules did too. But I’d always assumed that, strictly speaking, element order was insignificant in XML like SQL, another three-letter abbreviation. It was incumbent upon XML schema designers to include a sequential attribute if order was significant, such as an incrementing identifier, or a time stamp.

This has had a real effect on my own schemas. Requiring ordered attributes precludes the use of UUIDs, because they’re not sequential by design. I’ve also wrapped every key and value in their own elements, or used XML attributes to make the data more robust. If this ordering were the case, a plist key and string directly under the same dict element could theoretically be parsed in any order, thereby destroying the intrinsic relationship that comes from being ordered in a key:value sequence.

I’m relieved to admit I had this wrong. Section 2 of the W3C’s xml-infoset recommendation mentions this with regards to XML Information Items:

[children] An ordered list of child information items, in document order.

So while an XML relationship doesn’t strictly exist for a plist key and its value(s), parsing it in the presented order will return an ordered set.

Apple’s plists are valid XML and have been in use for decades, so my qualms are comically late and meaningless in practice. Yay! I’d still prefer a formal relationship between these attributes, but at least they make a bit more sense to me now.

This was a Twitter meme a few weeks ago, but I’ve just realised what three of mine are:

1. all politicians are corrupt,
2. all sides are as bad as each other,
3. and marzipan is disgusting.

The first cynically plays into the hands of those who would do us wrong. It normalises bad behavior by leading us to accept any bad faith act as inevitable, unavoidable, and intrinsic to the occupation. Mr Orange, Johnson, Bolsonaro, Morrison, Murdoch, and their ilk take this a step further by eroding trust in their supporters for the institutions themselves, allowing themselves to steamroll through anything they want while deflecting responsibility. It surprises me just how many people are willing to play this game for them.

Simple logic dictates there will always also be a side that is objectively better in any political race. The difference may not be as stark as we’d be comfortable with, and we should hold our politicians to a higher standard (see above). But anyone who says both sides are equally bad are simpletons who stifle any meaningful discussion.

As for marzipan, it’s one of the few times my mum was objectively incorrect. I want to try making my own, but perhaps substituting some of the sugar for honey or fake sweetener. I wonder how that would go?

The Good Mythical Morning gents recently asked if you’d have your vanilla or chocolate scoop on top in a two-scoop tower configuration.

Like Natalie Imbruglia, I’m torn. Vanilla is so obviously the greatest ice cream flavour it’s an insult to our collective intelligence having me point it out. With that established as fact, I’d be compelled to save the best till last by putting it below chocolate. But the concern would be that the chocolate would melt and mix into the vanilla, so chocolate is the only pure flavour you get.

It seems to me the only rational and reasonable answer here is to have vanilla in both positions, and eschew—gesundheit—chocolate entirely. Before you feel compelled to respond, you’re welcome. 🍦

Jim Kloss of the late Whole Wheat Radio, nochange BBS, Xchange file transfer application, and all around wonderful person tweeted this in response to my irrational computing post:

In the olden days I habitually ran defrags. Often several per day. Irrational because never got a noticeable performance gain. Embarrassing because I sat hypnotized and watched blocks being moved around for 3, 10, maybe 20+ minutes.

One of the first programs I ever bought with my own money was Diskeeper, to run on my DIY Windows 2000 tower. I could have used the built-in tool—which I later learned was based off Diskeeper—but its visualisations were even better. And like Jim, I was under the misguided notion that it made a huge difference in performance. Either way, SSDs saved us from so many things in our workstations and laptops, not least fragmentation!

He continues:

These days, my most irrational action is to constantly close things not being used. Even if I know I’ll open them 20 minutes later. Better to close and re-open than to eat up a massive 3K’s worth of 5GB memory!

Also this! I see people’s macOS docks and Windows taskbars and I blanch. Even if I weren’t concerned about memory usage, I feel like cognitively there’s more overhead having too many things open to track. Right now on my Mac I have Firefox, Emacs, the Terminal, KeePassXC, our company’s self-hosted chat client, and Outlook; that’s it. My FreeBSD tower is about the same. And even that lists already feels like too much.

It’s a bit tricker now because awful, Electron-based software bundles entire web browser frameworks into applications that just deal with text. In that case, closing a simple program can have a breathtaking effect on resource use.

I saw the title of this post whiz by as a quote on Twitter. I was about ready to say that they need not be mutually exclusive. Success could be defined by the value you place in yourself, those around you, and what you provide. In which case, is a phrase with three words.

Then I realised it was Albert Einstein. I defer to his expertise!

I took the above photo last weekend at The Rocks in Sydney, and desaturated it to add to the strangeness of the scene. Despite outward appearances of being related to this post, it’s in fact a non-sequitur.

I wrote this yesterday before the Bitcoin Twitter scam hit. This post is unrelated, as I have yet to possess a time machine. I also need to stress that Nicole Kidman and Waleed Aly have no association with this scam; I’m only including their image as an example to demonstrate how these scams can be identified.

I was reading someone’s site, like a gentleman, when I was abruptly redirected to one of the cheesiest, most brazen Australian-targeted scam pages I’ve seen in a long time.

Australia citizens are already raking in millions of Dollars [sic] from home using this “wealth loophole” - but is it legitimate?

Betteridge’s Law of Headlines even applies to scammers, who knew.

Last week [an Australian actor] appeared on The Project and announced a new “wealth loophole” which she says can transform anyone into a millionaire within 3-4 months. [The actor] urged everyone in Australia to jump on this amazing opportunity before the big banks shut it down for good. […] And sure enough, minutes after the interview was over, National Australia Bank called to stop [the actor’s] interview from being aired- it was already too late.

I’ve raised an unopened letter from Johnny Carson to my forehead. I’m closing my eyes to divine its contents… Bitcoin?

“What’s made me successful is jumping into new opportunies [sic] quickly- without any hesitation. And right now, my number one money-maker is a new cryptocurrency auto-trading program called Bitcoin Loophole. It’s the single biggest opportunity I’ve seen in my entire lifetime to build a small fortune fast. I urge everyone to check this out before the banks shut it down.”

The Project co-host […] was left in disbelief as […] pulled out her phone and showed viewers how much money she’s making through this new money-making program that now has everyone in Australia whispering.

In disbelief, no less! Here are some examples of the graphics:

You and I could immediately tell the page was fake. Here were some of my highlights:

• The URL doesn’t match ABC News, and none of the internal links go anywhere that makes sense.

• The unrealistic tone for a non-commercial news article or opinion piece, and the inclusion of an infomercial-style “as seen on” banner with outdated corporate logos.

• The universally-glowing feedback of the fake social media posts. Even a page announcing that wearing pants could reduce the spread of COVID would have trolls announcing they were going to march in their underwear in protest.

• The incorrect use of an ABC watermark on a Channel 10 screenshot on the page, and other poorly-photoshopped graphics and photos.

• The use of a cheque image from the UK, with references to “_UK” mixed in with “_AU” in the asset filenames. This whole site is designed to be genericised for victims in different locales, and in this case they slipped up.

I also noticed in the EXIF data that the images were made in “Adobe Photoshop CS6 Macintosh”, presumably because this was the last release that could easily be pirated before Adobe’s move to cloud subscriptions.

Unfortunately, this is all what scammers routinely argue: the page was deliberately and intentionally made unbelievable, placing the burden on the reader to not be scammed. There are even those in certain IT circles who sympathise with this position, as if moving everything in society online and not giving people sufficient training is somehow the fault of non-technical people.

Which leads us to the dark side of this junk. Halfway down the page we get this:

We’re seeing hard economic times, and this is the solution people have been waiting for.

Scammers taking advantage of people is bad enough, but exploiting insecurity and desperation is the lowest of the low. Vulnerable people’s defences have already been compromised by stress, so a line like this may just be enough for a well-meaning but uninformed person in a moment of weakness to part with what precious money they have left.

I’ve reported the site to their hosting company and domain registrar, but I’m sure the hydra will just sprout elsewhere. Education will be the only enduring way we can stomp this stuff out.

Clara and I made Pasquale Sciarappa’s One Pan Pasta with Chicken, though we used mock chicken.

It was beautiful! You have a new subscriber signore :). 🇮🇹

I’ve had a resurgent interest in vintage music formats of late, from cassette tape formulations and Walkmans to MiniDiscs and re-imagined 1980s headphones. It has the advantage of generally being cheaper than new gear during these fiscally tough times, and is infinitely more fascinating.

On the weekend I finally fulfilled another dream: to own my own fully-serviced linear tracking turntable. And here it is:

Okay that’s just a graphic from the user manual, it’s not in my hands yet. Not that it would matter, it’d be hard for me to take a picture of one while having it in my hands. Eventually when it arrives I’ll take a picture while sitting on a cabinet or table surface. The turntable I mean, there’d be no point me sitting on those. Which one am I?

The Technics SL-J300R arguably represents the pinnacle of Technics turntable technology and design before vinyl finally succumbed to the CD in the early 1990s. The current vinyl resurgence is fun to see, though most modern tables barely have any of the features of this one:

• Linear tracking, meaning the tonearm doesn’t pivot. The theory goes that it’s gentler to records, and picks up more audio detail, because it mirrors how the initial vinyl was first cut. I question the latter on a consumer-grade device, but I’m more interested in the former anyway, given I’ve inherited some albums from my late mum. ♡

• Quartz locked, to maintain optimal platter speed. It uses a reference frequency generated by a quartz oscillator to make fine adjustments to the motor speed.

• Track selection, using an optical pickup. Yes! The surface of the record is scanned for track gaps, and buttons on the front panel are populated allowing you to choose which tracks to play, and in what order. Even in the MP3 era I mostly collected albums over songs—a topic for another post— but being able to easily skip one song I don’t like will be great.

• Size detection, using the same optical pickup to locate the record edge. It also assumes the speed based on the size, though this can be overridden.

• Automatic operation. My hands shake, so having this lower the tonearm will be helpful.

• Friendly to studio apartments. It’s the depth of a record cover, barely wider, and the linear tracking means the lid has a thinner profile to fit on smaller shelves while still being able to open the lid. The cable connections are also recessed into the back which further reduces its profile.

• Late 1980s design aesthetic. The black lines, keys, and sharp angles will fit perfectly with my Yamaha cassette deck, Kenwood LaserDisc/CD player, and Yamaha receiver with the required pre-amp.

I’ve had this and a few other Sony, Technics, and Pioneer tables budgeted for and on eBay saved search lists since 2018, and Techmoan’s review only strengthened my resolve. Despite eBay’s best efforts at emailing me junk and spamming search results, I was overjoyed to finally snap one up minutes after it went live over the weekend. It’s overengineered, completely pointless, and I can’t wait to play with it.