Rubenerd

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

20:56 – I intended this episode to be about something completely different, but now that every state in Australia is on fire, and my dad has evacuated his house, suddenly my other interests and topics seem less pressing. Thanks, and please consider donating to the NSW RFS.

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

Released December 2019 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.

My dad “retired” to a home up the New South Wales coast in Australia, just north of Newcastle. I say that in quotes, because if anything he’s been doing more work and projects since leaving his last full time job than before.

It’s a beautiful spot. You drive off the freeway onto a narrow, tree-flanked road that leads to a secluded, peaceful village of bungalows. Across the street sits a sheltered harbour and, behind that, the Pacific Ocean. I think its what foreigners think all of Australia is like, based on the images we portray in our tourism advertisements.

But that beauty was an obvious liability this year. I haven’t wanted to be melodramatic about it here or on Twitter, but we’ve been terrified he’d lose it to the fires, and possibly his life in the process. The Rural Fire Service Fires Near Me app has helped tremendously with tracking where the dangers are, and alerting us when there’s activity. We then share this info in our family LINE group, and get feedback on where everyone is. For all the crap IT has done to the world lately, this is easily a success story.

Earlier in the week I’d gone up to visit and possibly help if stuff hit the fan. His area had avoided the fires, but around midday we learned of three new grass fires that had started, and all within striking distance of the highway we use to leave. They were only advisories, but we didn’t take the chance.

We packed up the car, and drove back to Sydney under an increasingly orange sky. The primary A1 freeway was fortunately still open, but moved glacially slow. We saw a couple of the grass fires along the highway, the last of which had been successfully put out by a team of weary looking fieries that still waved back and smiled when I gave them a thumbs up as we drove by.

This was a trivial bushfire experience, especially when I was scrolling through Twitter at all the photos of burning buildings by people who were really doing it tough during the disaster. But it was enough to still be terrifying.

In the new year I’m going to help scan the last buckets and albums of family photos. It’s likely going to take weeks, but having a few hard drives in a backpack and an encrypted cloud backup elsewhere helped hugely with peace of mind. As my dad said, everything else in the house could be replaced, but memories can’t be.

Today’s Music Monday I found via the Technology Connection channel. It’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. D-D-D-DiscoVision!

We had a LaserDisc player in Singapore, but admittedly they were bigger there and Japan than the rest of the world. Bigger in terms of popularity, and the physical size of the disks. Glaven.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

01:06:42 – It’s the four hundredth episode of my sporadic podcast! In lieu of formal celebrations, I discuss the surreal circumstances within which we find ourselves, along with various other ruminations about the holidays, significant figures, keyboard memories, ranting about fires, LPs, and more. Thank you so much for listening to my silly audible emissions, here’s to the next 400. ♡

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

Released December 2019 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.

The Verge—with apologies to my French readers—has a tech flop retrospective for the last decade. Adi Robertson’s point #9 should have been the first one:

Privacy. Back in 2010, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg caused a minor uproar by suggesting that privacy was passé, but insisted he’d been misconstrued. And yes, the US government had implemented a sweeping wiretapping program in the wake of 911 — but its legal violations were supposedly in the past. The following decade, unfortunately, didn’t bear these reassurances out. We soon learned the NSA was conscripting phone and internet companies to spy on the entire country. Our lives were monitored through smartphones, home surveillance equipment, online DNA databases, and everyone from credit card companies to the DMV selling records of our behavior. People still care about privacy — but it’s harder than ever to come by.

I was preparing my personal HP MicroServer for a fresh install of FreeBSD, like all good sysadmins do on days off. This entailed creating a bootable FreeBSD USB key installer. I had a spare 32 GiB USB 2.0 SanDisk Extreme which I figured would do the job, but for some reason I couldn’t only copy 64 MiB [sic] of data to it before writes to it fell off a cliff.

Here it is accepting a disk image copy on my FreeBSD tower. I hit CTRL+C after more than half an hour with no progress:

# dcfldd if=memstick.img of=/dev/da1 bs=2048
32768 blocks (64Mb) written.^C
32769+0 records in
32768+0 records out

Writing plain zeroes had the same effect:

# dcfldd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk6
2048 blocks (64Mb) written.^C
2049+0 records in
2048+0 records out

Sure enough, FreeBSD dmesg(8) was only showing a 64 MiB key, the same size as my first ever USB 1.1 key back in the early 2000s:

ugen0.3: <SanDisk Corporation Firebird6Up9> at usbus0
umass2 on uhub5
umass2: <String 2> on usbus0
umass2:  SCSI over Bulk-Only; quirks = 0xc100
umass2:9:2: Attached to scbus9
da3 at umass-sim2 bus 2 scbus9 target 0 lun 0
da3: <SanDisk Firebird 1.05> Removable Direct Access SCSI-2 device
da3: Serial Number 0123456789ABCDEF
da3: 40.000MB/s transfers
da3: 64MB (131072 512 byte sectors)
da3: quirks=0x2<NO_6_BYTE>

On the off chance it was a FreeBSD issue, I plugged it into my Mac laptop. Same effect:

I’ve had keys formatted with exotic file systems, or GPT when a machine expects MBR, and whole drive encryption, and every combination of the above. But to be told the key itself only has a 64 MiB total capacity, as opposed to just its first file system, was surprising.

Update

The plot thickens. After zero-ing out the first 64 MiB of this key, I plugged it into a USB-C port with an adaptor, and it came up as a 32 GiB key as expected, with a Mac partition table:

/dev/disk4 (external, physical):
#:                    TYPE NAME SIZE      IDENTIFIER
0:  Apple_partition_scheme      *32.0 GB  disk4
1:     Apple_partition_map       4.1 KB   disk4s1
2:               Apple_HFS       2.4 MB   disk4s2

But disk4s2 couldn’t be mounted; presumably because I zero’d its MBR! Or was this key GPT, who knows? So I used diskutil(8) to create a new root MBR FAT32 partition:

# sudo diskutil eraseDisk FAT32 "BLANK" /dev/disk4   
Started erase on disk4
Unmounting disk
Creating the partition map
Waiting for partitions to activate
Formatting disk4s2 as MS-DOS (FAT32) with name BLANK
512 bytes per physical sector
/dev/rdisk4s2: 62087520 sectors in 1940235 FAT32 clusters (16384 bytes/cluster)
bps=512 spc=32 res=32 nft=2 mid=0xf8 spt=32 hds=255 hid=411648 drv=0x80 
bsec=62117888 bspf=15159 rdcl=2 infs=1 bkbs=6
Mounting disk
Finished erase on disk4

The Finder now showed it as a 32 GiB key. But then I plugged it into my FreeBSD tower again, and dmesg(8) showed the key timing out when attempting to connect:

usbd_setup_device_desc: getting device descriptor at addr 5 failed, USB_ERR_TIMEOUT
usbd_setup_device_desc: getting device descriptor at addr 5 failed, USB_ERR_TIMEOUT
usbd_setup_device_desc: getting device descriptor at addr 5 failed, USB_ERR_TIMEOUT
usbd_setup_device_desc: getting device descriptor at addr 5 failed, USB_ERR_TIMEOUT
usbd_setup_device_desc: getting device descriptor at addr 5 failed, USB_ERR_TIMEOUT
ugen0.5: <Unknown > at usbus0 (disconnected)
uhub_reattach_port: could not allocate new device

And when I plugged it back into my Mac, I immediately got the dreaded This disk is not initialised error, despite it formatting and mounting correctly before being ejected.

I’ve seen this error in the past with some USB 3.0 hardware, and the suggested solution from IRC or forums (I forget) is to add this to your /boot/loader.conf. But it didn’t help in this case, either because the key was USB 2.0, or there’s a hardware problem.

hw.usb.xhci.xhci_port_route=-1

My gut feeling now is the key hardware itself is fried. I’ll keep it around for some experiments.

Merry Christmas eve! Clara and I were watching videos this evening, and somehow we ran into a streak of comparitive videos.

Here the Good Mythical Morning guys comparing microwaved and oven-cooked food. Their reactions mirror mine; microwaved potatoes are fluffy and beautiful, but most dishes taste better finished or cooked entirely in the oven.

Here Cody from Cody’s Lab compares the ductility, malleability, and brittleness of various metals while supercooled with liquid nitrogen. He retried aluminium in another video and found it performed much better than the thin solder he had before, but copper performed the best.

And finally, George Neville-Neil explains his pragmatic reasons for preferring BSD licences over the GPL and other copyleft licences on this episode of The Lunduke Hour. I’ve mentioned this video a few times here, but I realised I never shared it. It was interesting and a lot of fun.

eBay can be set up to send you a PIN confirmation email each time you log into a new device it doesn’t recognise. It’s not foolproof, and arguably we have far better systems for multi-factor auth, but it’s a start.

This is what eBay sends:

Subject: Here’s the eBay PIN you requested

Confirm your identity: Here’s your PIN

Here’s the eBay PIN you requested

Hi rubenerd,

Here is the PIN you’ll need to finish confirming your identity on eBay. It’s just one more step, and then you’ll be on your way.

Your PIN is: HERES-YOUR-PIN [ed: okay, I made that up]

My favourite was them saying it’s just one more step, as if reassuring me after saying I’d be getting a PIN four times. Then another time. But are they sure I’m getting a PIN?

Tohsaka Rin and Saber are a delightfully-festive mobile home screen; something we all need down here. I’d been tossing up between using this from Unlimited Blade Works, or one of the ones from the original Fate/Stay Night. Or even something from Fate/Grand Order, but Clara and I have already done that for a few years now.

I love that this has become such an enduring franchise. Few things survive from my childhood, but it’s still fun seeing their beaming faces after all these years. My only regret is not snapping this at 22:22 on the 22nd.

A decade ago I reviewed an article about reducing stress by the Dumb Little Man. I thought it’d be fun to see how much of it still holds.

1. Turn off the TV: I’d apply this to Twitter now too.

2. Go for a walk: Still holds.

3. Call up a friend: I’m an introvert, but I still don’t do this often enough.

4. Take advantage of free events: Ditto.

5. Hang out at your favorite bookstore: These mythical places have almost ceased to exist, but I do this at coffee shops with a Kindle or my RSS reader.

6. De-clutter your home: I didn’t think much of this at the time, but this is absolutely gigantically huge. There is something supremely satisfying and calming about going through junk and throwing it away. If you’re asking yourself if you need something, you’ve already answered it.

7. Treat yourself to a hot bubble bath by candlelight: Not my cup of tea personally. That’s the next one.

8. Brew a special cup of tea or coffee and sit down in your favorite chair: Many times this.

9. Bake your favorite cookies or your favorite cake: Not when you’re giving up sugar. But homemade food is great.

10. Update your photo album: I’m back to just hierarchies of photos in folders with thumbnail images, but this is still a great exercise. One day I’ll have an Apple Aperture replacement.