Rubenerd

Last week I was trying to find the Adwaita GTK theme for my FreeBSD tower. I used to love tinkering with themes, but thesedays I just want one that looks decent across multiple toolkits, and Adwaita fits the bill.

(Curiously, Xfce’s Appearance pane used to list it as an option, but not as of FreeBSD 12.x. I used to like Bluebird back in the day, but I find Greybird a bit dreary and low contrast).

Finding it in the ports system proved trickier than I expected. If you search for Adwaita you get the iconset and Qt theme, but not the GTK2/3 themes. Fortunately Oliverd@ had this suggestion on his Xfce FAQ:

How can unified themes be used with GTK3 and GTK2?

Install x11-themes/gnome-themes-standard, and change the value of /Net/ThemeName property

This is now gnome-themes-extra instead. Install that, and Adwaita appears as a GTK theme option.

The 29th of February is always a delightful date, even if it does throw my budgets off by a day. These are the posts that have appeared on Leap Days, in descending order of datage. Datage?

• 2020: Rubenerd Show 404: The 29th griddle episode (yesterday)
• 2016: Rubenerd Show 326: The 29th of February episode
• 2012: none!
• 2008: Is embedded spam getting worse?
• 2004: none!

I well and truly messed up what was a nice cadence of off/on again posts by uploading a show yesterday. I should have waited until 2024.

The only thing I remember from Leap Day 2012 was getting my Wikipedia username officially changed to RubenSchade, because I wanted to be more transparent with my edits.

I have a text file to track sites that broke with NoScript and cookie blocking, and what additional whitelisted domains are reqired.

Fastmail
fastmail.fm
fastmailusercontent.com

Fastmail hasn’t been on .fm since at least 2017 I think, which dates this file to around that time.

Microsoft’s web services still take the cake for most number of third-party domains that are required to log into their services. I think I even need more than when I first checked.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

44:51 – The second Rubenerd Show to be released on the 29th of February, HTTP 404 status codes, a new griddle, SARS, Phua Chu Kang, bushfire update, why you shouldn’t need a reason not to be a dick, and a nostalgic snack review from Singapore. Recorded early Febuary 2020.

Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released February 2020 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts; this one notwithstanding.

Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.

Did you know you could do this? It was news to me!

-- Usually written as: 
SELECT * FROM tablesalt WHERE greekcolumn IS NOT NULL;   
    
-- But you can also:
SELECT * FROM tablesalt WHERE greekcolumn NOTNULL;

Thanks to Kaarel Moppell for his excellent page of tips.

Later Laserdiscs included digital Dolby and DTX surround in their audio streams, but they were still physically encoded on disc as an analogue waveform. To play these on an amplifier that only accepts a digital bitstream, you need a radio frequency demodulator box.

The Kenwood DEM-9991D was the one I was looking to get, and I found its service manual online. And page 5 included a full circuit diagram.

I love how much care went into documentation and engineering for Japanese Hi-Fi gear during this time.

I discussed last month the virtual envelope system of budgeting, and that You Need a Budget (YNAB) was the best software for implementing it. Unfortunately for our use case, this was long replaced by a subscription web service, and YNAB4 became abandonware.

There are so many other competing tools you can use, but deep down I didn’t want to be locked into another vendor’s design decisions and file formats again. So I finished the post by setting a target for myself:

My end goal is to replace this [third-party updated YNAB] entirely with a reworked spreadsheet I’ve half-moved over to for a while…

Over the last month we finally did it, and this week I reached a milestone where I budgeted in the spreadsheet instead of YNAB for everything, for the first time in half a decade. Hitting ⌘Q after confirming all our data had been successfully exported felt like the end of an era.

The spreadsheets consist of a relatively simple AutoFilter’d chequebook sheet with each expense classified by account and envelope, and a budget sheet with a series of SUMIFS() to allocate and track spending in each envelope per month. We’ve also added features we’d always wanted, such as basic burn-down charts for each envelope using data bars, and basic multi-currency support.

Saying it’s functionally-equivalent to YNAB would be more of a stretch than the lyrca I see some people wear at the gym, but for our needs it’s perfect.

(The earliest versions used SUMPRODUCT(), but I was able to refactor them out for noticably better performance. I am by no means a spreadsheet expert, but I’d say its flexibility and elegant syntax is easily outweighed by its sluggishness; at least under the limited circumstances I’ve used it).

Thanks to Jesse and the YNAB team for introducing us to this system, and instilling in us the discipline to carefully plan for and track everything: it’s absurd what a difference it’s made. As I wrote in that first post:

Tracking each cent might seem tedious, but I reconcile my accounts each weekend over coffee and derive a tremendous amount of relief knowing that I have an exact picture of my finances. It also makes tax time, investing, and budgeting for large expenses ludicrously easy and stress free. It’s not that I have time for it, as much as I don’t have time not to do it.

I’ve always thought of myself an ameateur vexillologist; not least because the name sounds cool. So I was thrilled when I saw this tricolour on someone’s bio earlier today that I didn’t recognise!

A reverse image search determined this is the state flag of the Canary Islands, in use since 1960 and officially in 1982. The institutional flag below includes the territory’s coat of arms. Or two dog coats here.

And speaking of canaries, it got me thinking what flags have birds on them. Off the top of my head I think of Albania, American Samoa, the ACT, Christmas Island, Equador, Papua New Guinea, San Francisco, South Australia, Western Australia, and the state flag of Germany. But there’s way more than I expected.

Australia’s most famous and widely-travelled steam locomotive is the green, streamlined, cat-whiskered 3801 from New South Wales. She’s the only locomotive to have travelled to every mainland state and territory, and even got a mention from the state premier about the importance of restoring her again after years of boiler problems. I hope they’re able to.

But the 3801 still plays runner up to my favourite, the Victorian Railways R-761. There’s something about her styling and clean lines that even as a kid I thought looked futuristic and cool. For someone growing up with Thomas, her distinctive red smoke deflectors almost looked like ears. And the detail of the SCOA-P wheels are like nothing I’d seen before.

Both even steamed alongside the 4472 Flying Scotsman during Australia’s Bicentennial celebrations in 1988. I was alive at the time, but I wouldn’t have remembered or known what was going on even if I’d seen it, gah!

Anyway today I noticed you can get an HO-Scale locomotive from Eureka Models for AU $759.00, complete with sounds! She looks amazing:

A decade ago I would have looked at that price and said hell no! But now I can appreciate why; these would take so much care and attention to make, and they wouldn’t exactly be recouping money with economies of scale. Economies of HO scale! AHAHA! Haha! Hah.

They’re out of stock right now, and I doubt I’d ever be buying one at that price point. But she’s going on the wishlist on the absolute off chance that someone is generous :).

Mistress Snow, PhD asked this on Twitter:

Academics: what has been the worst physical symptom of job-related stress for you? I’m thinking everything from overwork to bullying to shitty working conditions.

I’m not an academic, and fortunately haven’t had to deal with university for a while now. But at my last year of uni and in some of my first jobs I’d get stressed enough to throw up, regardless of whether I’d eaten anything or not. On one particular evening I threw up so much I burned the inside of my throat and got purple bruises on my abdomen.

All the physical symptoms of this were obviously terrible, but it was the deep, deep shame that felt worse. I didn’t want to admit to anyone I was dealing with that; I thought it was a sign of immaturity and weakness. This has been another of the gifts Clara has given me since we’ve been together; her encouragement and support have got me through this stuff.

I take pains to point this out now, and encourage you to read that above Twitter thread, if you’re going through the same thing or worse. It would have helped me tremendously back then knowing I wasn’t alone with that.