Stepping, email footers… someone could have made that funny.
I’ve mentioned Merlin Mann’s bulk email trick a few times before, but there’s someone born every minute who hasn’t seen The Flintstones. Keep a smart folder or saved search in your email client that matches on the word unsubscribe, and it makes it a snap to perform regular purges.
Either I’ve become very good at this and fewer of those emails now arrive in my inbox, or marketers are cottoning onto the fact we’re doing this. I’m seeing more footers going to great lengths to reference anything but the specific word unsubscribe. Here are a few examples just from today:
Change communication preferences
Update your email preferences
Update your preference here
Update your subscription preferences
In fact, is a phrase with two words. The trend now seems to be some babble proceeded by prefererences. Maybe some regex is required.
Speaking of things I tweeted recently, this image is one the most incredible things I’ve ever seen, couresy of the National Science Foundation in the US. The surface of the sun looks like golden animal skin.
The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope has produced the highest resolution image of the sun’s surface ever taken. In this picture, taken at 789 nanometers (nm), we can see features as small as 30km (18 miles) in size for the first time ever. The image shows a pattern of turbulent, “boiling” gas that covers the entire sun. The cell-like structures – each about the size of Texas – are the signature of violent motions that transport heat from the inside of the sun to its surface. Hot solar material (plasma) rises in the bright centers of “cells,” cools off and then sinks below the surface in dark lanes in a process known as convection. In these dark lanes we can also see the tiny, bright markers of magnetic fields. Never before seen to this clarity, these bright specks are thought to channel energy up into the outer layers of the solar atmosphere called the corona. These bright spots may be at the core of why the solar corona is more than a million degrees. Credit: NSO/AURA/NSF
There’s so much going wrong with the world right now, but I still feel honoured and privileged to be living during this time. We’ve seen the sun this close, and only a few years ago saw the heart on Pluto that our ancestors didn’t even know existed. Science is beautiful.
When asked about the prospect of an independent Scotland joining the EU, [Former European Council president Donald Tusk] said he had to “respect the internal debate in the United Kingdom” and it was not his role to intervene.
But when pressed on the level of support in the EU towards an independent Scotland joining the union, he said: “Emotionally I have no doubt that everyone will be enthusiastic here in Brussels, and more generally in Europe.
Scotland voted in favour of the UK staying in the EU by 62% to 38% in 2016.
I maintain that the people who voted for Brexit are not aware of the Pandora’s Box they’ve opened, or they wouldn’t have done so. Breaking off from one union may lead to the dissolution of their own. It’s like watching a Pythonesque fish dance in slow motion, only the hapless chap they’re slapping is themselves.
I tweeted about this earlier today, but this is huge news. If you have a spare moment, please download and run the latest release candidate for NetBSD 9.0 for an architecture you can test on.
NetBSD 9.0 looks to be a stellar release, particularly for storage for which I harbour the most interest. ZFS pools can’t yet be booted from, but will be finally included for data use which I’m super keen to test. They’ve also reworked the SATA stack in the same vain to better handle reported drive errors.
There are tons of other features and changes; check the formal release notes for more details and grab an ISO or disk image.
I’m mostly a FreeBSD person now, but NetBSD was my first, and I still maintain a few computers and a template for it on OrionVM. I was also lucky enough to meet several of the maintainers at AsiaBSDCon who also explained to me how devpubd(8) worked for my platform integration scripts. And pkgsrc is the best cross-platform package manager, as far as I’m concerned.
I’ve always adored this opening verse to “Follow That Man” from Boz Scaggs’ 1994 album Some Change:
You take one part Buddha
And two parts cat
Run them through your computer
And that’s where he’s at
Some say he’s ruthless
And some say he’s a saint
They tell you he’s innocent
I tell you he ain’t
One could equate this to how certain actors portray themselves in Silicon Valley in 2020, and how people like me characterise them and their influence. Though according to a 1994 interview on NPR, the words just fit well:
Boz: They just sort of tumble out. I think a lot of songwriters play on that. Sometimes when you’re stuck for a word, or you’re stuck for an idea, you just sing along with the music. The music will tell you what the song is about.
Scott Simon: “You take one part Buddha and two parts cat, run them through your computer and that’s where he’s at.”
Boz: A friend of my who writes had me early, early in the process, about the legality of rhyming Buddha and computer and I said it’ll go over in New York.
We’ve got another palindromic date, if one were to write it without dashes. It even works across multiple formats:
The correct ISO 8601 convention as YYYY-MM-DD
The logically ordered but still incorrect DD-MM-YYYY
The illogically ordered and entirely incorrect MM-DD-YYYY
People who don’t use the ISO format are as bad as those who don’t use leading zeros on their dates and times. You know who you are.
I also discovered the Dashboard.app still exists, which I used to highlight the fact I took a screenshot at 20:02, which is also a palindrome. That’s also the correct way to write digital time, none of this ambiguous and verbose AM/PM nonsense!
I’ve told the story a few times, but I remember an Australian primary school teacher showing us a mnemonic for remembering AM and PM: AM is for After Midnight and PM is Past Midday. I scratched my head the whole walk home, wondering why it wasn’t After Midday and Past Midnight in that same system. And isn’t the evening technically still after midnight on that day?
AM/PM need to be relegated to the litter basket of history, along with the various incompatible Imperial systems, non-ISO dates, and coriander.
If you’ve listed to my ramble on some of my recent shows or commentary on the Overnightscape Central, you would have noticed I’m more than a bit obsessed with the LaserDisc video system again. I blame these two factors that occured just in the last month:
I was the last person in the world to discover the Technology Connections YouTube channel, and his series on LaserDiscs and RCA’s CED VideoDisc have been detailed and fascinating. I’ve watched them all at least a few times by now.
Helping my dad evacuate his house during a bushfire alert lead us taking stock of all his possessions. It was scary, but out of it I may have been given the family Kenwood LaserDisc player. Forgive the awkward camera angle below, these massive discs are hard to balance on one hand with a camera in the other!
For those of you who haven’t seen these gorgeous, LP-sized CDs, the LaserDisc was the world’s first consumer laser optical disc format. Yes, they pre-date CDs! And unlike those small CDs, VCDs, and DVDs that held their data digitally, the pits and lands on a LaserDisc were converted back into analogue waves, just like the ill-fated RCA CED VideoDisc and VHD. This makes sense given what must have been severe limitations in hardware at the time to digitally decode video in real time.
The LaserDisc video format first appeared in the US as the MCA DiscoVision system, but was sold to Pioneer in Japan when it couldn’t compete with the burgeoning home tape systems in the West. LaserDiscs were popular in Singapore because of their image quality, and the fact tapes were prone to rotting and going mouldy in the tropical climate. I remember as a kid popping out an old Paddington Bear VHS tape and looking at horror at the fuzz that had accumulated behind the viewing windows after not being played for a while.
We had a small LaserDisc collection when I was growing up, but we also rented them and ended up picking up more from those rental stores when the format was on its way out. In fact the only inaccurate comment in the Technology Connections LaserDisc series was attributing the format’s niche status to the lack of a rental market. This may have been true in the West, but it definitely wasn’t in Singapore and Malaysia. Maybe people in South-East Asia handled their scratch-attracting rental media better than Westerners that needed to have their signals hidden in tape cartridges.
LaserDiscs were also marvels of engineering, especially for the time. They knocked the pants off tape formats for video quality, had chapter support, could hold a single frame of video without distortion, didn’t need rewinding, could be fast-forwarded and seeked quickly and accurately, and provided you didn’t get one that had laser rot, could last indefinitely. It would take two decades before DVDs provided similar features to the mass market, albeit in a smaller package.
That larger size also came with another benefit: the cover art could contain way more detail, just like a vinyl LP. Check out these covers from the Evangelion anime; they’re gorgeous!
Of course now I’m going down the rabbit hole of figuring out how to integrate this player into Clara’s and my home video system. Even though later LaserDisc players included digitally-encoded AC-3/Dolby Digital or DTS, the raw signal coming off the player is still an analogue wave that needs to be demodulated back to binary. I had no idea! Some receivers and amplifiers from the 1990s include this to simplify LaserDisc playback, but it’s unlikely I’ll be able to find one now unless I’m lucky on eBay. So the alternative is a dedicated AC-3 demodulator.
Update 2020-03: Version 6.4.2.1 has fixed the blurry text and performance issues below. Text is still pixel-doubled rather than using the Mac’s native Retina screen resolution, but it’s otherwise significantly improved. Special thanks to Christian Lohmaier for tracking this and finding the issue with Xcode that caused this.
LibreOffice is solid software, and the Document Foundation have done a great job maintaing and fostering its development. I’ve been using it since its StarOffice days, then later OOo. I’ve so internalised how it works that Microsoft Office feels clunky and unintuitive by comparison; a comment that garners a mix of disbelief and bemusement on the part of Office people. It’s their loss; the Sidebar UI alone is worth trying given how much more elegant it is compared to the Office Ribbon. I use it on my FreeBSD machines now, thanks to the efforts of the office@ ports team.
I mention all this to provide context for what’s about to come. LibreOffice on the Mac is unfit for purpose [ed: see update above] as much as it pains me to say. It has been since at least 2017, and it’s been getting worse.
Credit where credit’s due, the software was properly ported to use native Quartz as opposed to spawning an Xorg session. It uses native Mac Open and Save dialog boxes. It integrates well with system printers. All of this would have taken a lot of work which, given the install base of macOS and the smugness of many of its users against free/open source GUI applications, was much appreciated.
But performance is where it falls apart. These are but a few of the most frustrating examples:
Scrolling speed is slow, jittery, unpredictable, and easy to overshoot. Lotus 1-2-3 running on my vintage 200MHz Pentium tower next to me scrolls a thousand line spreadsheet more accurately and smoothly, and stops when I lift my finger off the cursor keys. The worst is when it buffers your input, leading you to watch in vain as your document or spreadsheet cells fly away long after you stopped scrolling.
Typing responsiveness is poor. Characters that appear immediately when I type them in other applications have a noticeable lag, especially in Writer where you’re more likely to do long form text input. It’s even worse than typing in an Electron “desktop” application.
Placing, moving, resizing, and connecting shapes in Draw is an exercise in futility. The movements lack any precision, leading to vague placement, dropping things where you don’t intend to, and clicking through things you didn’t expect. Once you throw in line connections, layers, and fatigue, you want to start flipping tables.
Opening top or Activity Monitor immediately shows the issue. Any scrolling or movement results in an entire core being pegged, where it’ll happily stay until you stop moving around the document you’re in.
Eagle-eyed readers may have just noticed what my problem is. The screenshot is from a Retina Mac, Apple’s term for Hi-DPI displays. Run even the most recent LibreOffice on a non-Retina Mac, or use a Retina MacBook in clamshell mode with a non-Retina screen, and the performance problems go away. For whatever reason, LibreOffice and Retina Macs simply don’t work.
Which leads us to the suggested solutions. Forums say to reset your user profile, which has never worked. Others say you should offload to the discrete GPU, which your laptop might not have, or you don’t want to given the huge power penalty this will incur.
The only tolerable workaround is to launch LibreOffice using Low Resolution Mode:
Click on LibreOffice.app in /Applications
Hit CMD+I to launch Get Info…
Check Low Resolution Mode
But even then, this has got worse. Whereas before text would just double in pixel size, now text and lines appear blurry and ill-defined, like you’re looking at a document through watery eyes. This was introduced after LibreOffice 6.2.x, which I’ve since reverted to. Version 6.4 released yesterday was billed as a performance-focused upgrade, but it made no discernable difference to either Mac performance or font rendering.
I’m not a C++ developer, but I’m willing to help financially to solve this problem. Because until this is resolved, I can’t recommend LibreOffice for Mac users.
I got a couple of fun emails this morning. Here’s one perporting to be from a Garth Evans in 12px Verdana:
Hello, This is a brief but sharp-toned letter about how the reader can use your material. If you want to.
And that’s it. It’s a shame, I was looking forward to being sharply-toned.
Here’s a style of message from Amy that I get on a weekly basis, staying on the theme of using material. I replaced the tech with $BLAH, given the surrounding language changes so little with each of these:
Hi Ruben, I noticed you’ve shared $BLAH, as you might be aware, $BLAH announced at $TIME that it would be shutting down. We’ve put together a guide to the best alternatives. Here’s the link. Perhaps you could update your page to include a link to our guide so that anyone still interested in $BLAH has an alternative.
As an aside, is a phrase with three words. It also says a lot when we’re used to things just shutting down. I used to self-host because I love tinerking with FreeBSD and NetBSD servers; now I do it as an act of self-preservation.
Here’s one from Adrian that’s definitely formatted properly so as to be taken seriously:
We noticed that you run a nice blog at rubenerd.com .Apps4Rent would like to sponsor a post on your blog. We are willing to pay a onetime fee to insert a Marketing message in one of your existing posts. An example message is: “Two useful technologies for working from anywhere – Cloud Desktop and Cloud SharePoint.”, with two dofollow links going to our websites.
Here’s one where they spelled my name correctly:
Dear Email User, Your email address has been selected as one of our lucky winners, see attcachment for details.
Gesundheit! And finally, someone claiming to be called Olga who’s after men over forty—sorry Olga—had this delightful footer:
This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.
But then I remembered my New Year’s resolution to use more from FreeBSD base, rather than automatically reaching for ports. There’s a more than capable svnlite client, which makes sense given you might need one to pull the ports tree before you can download subversion.
Peter’s comment in revision 251886 back in 2013 advises it should work with this relatively small repository:
To be absolutely clear, this is not intended for any use other than checking out freebsd source and committing, like we once did with cvs. It should be usable for small scale local repositories that don’t need the python/perl plugin architecture.
But would it work with Ansible? I symlinked the FreeBSD svnlite(1) client to svn in /opt, which is where I stash my own binaries and scripts:
- name: Symlink svnlite to svn
file:
src: /usr/bin/svnlite
dest: /opt/bin/svn
state: link
- name: Pull WordPress
...
I ran the playbook again, and it worked!
The next step would be to see if Ansible can be supplied a subversion path, rather than using a symlink.
