Rubenerd

I’m restoring the first computer I built when I was in primary school, and have been trying to locate the exact OEM version of Windows 95 I licenced along with the parts from Make Fine Computer in Funan Centre. I call out the name of the shop as a nostalgic homage, as they’ve long since closed down. ♡

Winworld and the Internet Archive have been tremendous resources for finding these images, but one version I downloaded came extracted to an MDF. It’s an Alcohol 120% disk image that can’t be burned to a CD on my Mac or BSD boxes, so I wanted to convert it an ISO.

It’s easy enough with the surprisingly-named mdf2iso:

$ mdf2iso Win95_OSR25.mdf
    
==> mdf2iso v0.3.1 by Salvatore Santagati
==> Licensed under GPL v2 or later
==> Win95_OSR25.mdf is already ISO9660.

Sure enough, just appending the .iso extension worked.

Lesson learned: try mounting MDFs as if they’re ISOs first. If it isn’t, use Salvatore Santagati’s excellent utility. If only those awful bin and cue files were as easy.

It’s on FreeBSD ports, pkgsrc, and Homebrew.

Via Twitter, regarding my earlier post about ksh and csh in the BSDs:

@Rubenerd About your latest article on #NetBSD csh; tcsh (and csh) in #FreeBSD is quite a bit different: It’s really both tcsh (ie. same exact binary), it’s got a lot of fixes, coming from the canonical upstream github.com/tcsh-org/tcsh as indicated by psrc/contrib/tcsh/README.md

Readers of my blog from way back know how much this series meant to me a decade ago, and he’s drawn them so well! Given the current scary climate out there, I might need to marathon the series again now.

This was originally written on May Day, but for some reason I didn’t end up posting it. It’s been a month, and already so much has changed.

I’ve definitely felt a shift in my mood since I’ve been forcing myself to get more exercise again. I hadn’t realised how much walking and other activity a day takes, especially when compared to working from home metres away from your kitchen and bed.

Late in the evening feels like one of the better times. It’s easy to socially distance when you’re the only one around.

It’s another of my blog posts where I ask you to read something and take a guess. Here’s a review of a drive enclosure from a well-known storage review site. Can you see anything missing?

The Netstor Mini Dual NA460C is a desktop direct attached storage device in a tiny compact form factor. The NA460C has a built-in hardware RAID processor and support four RAID modes including RAID1, RAID0, SPAN, and JBOD. The device provides a physical option for selecting the desired RAID mode on the back of the device, giving users the option for data protection through RAID1 or maximum storage through SPAN (16TB according to Netstor using two 8TB HDDs). The NA460C also uses USB-C interface.

That’s right, there aren’t spaces between the drive capacity and units. It should be 8 TB, or 8 TiB if they’re really referring to tebibytes. I made that mistake many times, and I’ll likely make it again.

Jokes aside, is a phrase with two words. There’s no mention anywhere in the review, including the opening description, about how loud the unit is. It seems like an odd omission, yet it’s the norm on most review sites.

I understand that data centre hardware will be noisy: it’s specifically optimised for a dust-free, temperature-controlled environment with engineers who (PARDON!?) wear ear plugs. But it’s reasonable to assume a mini NAS could just as easily end up sitting in an open-plan office or home as it would be in a sound-proof comms room or basement. Worse, the problem is compounded by proprietary connectors, interfaces, and controllers that hamper easily replacing fans with handsome, quiet Noctua units upon discovering you’ve bought an industrial-strength gas turbine for your desk.

Please include sound information, at idle and under load, when writing NAS reviews. It doesn’t need to be detailed decibel descriptions or other forms of delightful alliteration, just whether it’s LOUD or not. Our wallets, and our ears, will thank you :).

$ openssl s_client -servername $URL -connect $URL:443 | openssl x509 -text

Reading the news coming out of the US about the protests fills me with dismay, not only for the senseless death and repression, but for how helpless I feel to assist.

It’s tempting to think we’re isolated from this sort of thing over here, but our society’s treatment of our Aboriginal Australian sisters and brothers is equally reprehensible. As too is Singapore and Malaysia’s attitudes to their foreign workers, many of whom risk and lose their lives to send remittances home to their families.

Earlier this year Australia was on fire for months due to climate change people are too stubborn to accept, stingy to address, or lazy to act upon. The COVID situation demands respect and directions from medical staff, social distancing, and responsible testing, which some have openly defied. The deplorable actions being protested about by those American patriots are borne of the same selfishness, willful ignorance, and small-minded callousness that even the word racist can’t fully encompass.

The message we should take from 2020: treat everyone like human beings with needs, hopes, and potential. If you disagree, you’re part of the problem. Few things are as black and white.

This video by うえP (UEP) shows an US Army aviation fuel transport train that runs in from the Tsurumi Oil Storage Facility (Azumi Station on the Tsurumi Line) to the US Army Yokota Air Base (Haijima Station on the Ome Line).

Normally I don’t get video recommendations because I only access YouTube via a proxy, but it was immediately under the live video feed I may or may not be watching continuously.

I’m tenuously counting this as a Music Monday, because the opening background tune is lovely.

I had some late night work to do this evening. Witnessing such a momentus occasion as I typed away back here on Earth was worth it :).

Screenshots from the NASA feed via @LanceUlanoff.

Anna Stansbury and Lawrence H. Summers wrote a paper for the American National Bureau of Economic Research this month, titled: The Declining Worker Power Hypothesis: An Explanation for the Recent Evolution of the American Economy. You can buy a PDF version for $5.

Rising profitability and market valuations of US businesses, sluggish wage growth and a declining labor share of income, and reduced unemployment and inflation, have defined the macroeconomic environment of the last generation. This paper offers a unified explanation for these phenomena based on reduced worker power. Using individual, industry, and state-level data, we demonstrate that measures of reduced worker power are associated with lower wage levels, higher profit shares, and reductions in measures of the NAIRU.

As an aside, I had to check what NAIRU was. According to Investopedia:

The non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) is the specific level of unemployment that is evident in an economy that does not cause inflation to increase. In other words, if unemployment is at the NAIRU level, inflation is constant. NAIRU often represents the equilibrium between the state of the economy and the labor market.

Tyler Cowen from Marginal Revolution quoted Larry Summers and Anna Stansbury’s responses to the paper, where they draw a connection between wealth inequality and falling interest rates. Emphasis added.

If corporate profits are so high, how is this consistent with the persistently low demand postulated by Summers’ “secular stagnation” hypothesis?

Secular stagnation as we think of it is the product of a rising gap between the desire to save and the desire to invest (which, in an IS-LM type framework, would push down the neutral real interest rate).

Falling worker power redistributes income from lower and middle-income people to the rich. The rich have a higher propensity to save. Thus, falling worker power increases the desire to save relative to the desire to invest. Rising inequality has been posited by several authors as a contributor to the declining neutral real interest rate (see e.g. Smith and Rachel 2015). Under this view, secular stagnation is exemplified by low private return to capital investment – but, in a noncompetitive world, this may or may not be the same thing as an abnormally low profit rate or capital share.

This is also why stimulus spending is most effective being targeted at people at lower income levels. It’s not just the most ethical thing to do, it will have the most immediate economic impact.