Rubenerd

Long-time Rubenerd reader Rebecca Hales – no relation to Halestrom other than sharing a fabulous name – asked where I’d got up to with the fitness post I’d promised back in June. Her question wasn’t entirely selfless, as she contributed material to it and was obviously getting antsy at seeing it posted on this esteemed publication. I may have performed a little embellishment in the description there, and by that I mean a lot.

(Not alot, that’s an entirely different beast. I feel between that and gotten we’re fighting a losing battle, but one can dream).

I wrote about Clara and I wanting this Arena gear back in April, as part of our push to get more exercise and be healthier:

Little did we know we could have been weeby at the latter as well. Introducing the Arena Manga One Piece! … Arena has a range of manga themed outfits, complete with darumas, seigaiha patterns, maneki cats, and a Great Wave off Kanagawa, among other Japanese motifs.

This is what the ladies outfit looks like, as worn by a model whom the photographer decided to catch sneezing. Gesundheit!

Rebecca commented within a longer email thread that she thought the design was cute, but that it came with a caveat:

I would be careful recommending that swimsuit for Clara because it’s uncomfortable. I like the open back but I’ve worn the same [style] and the shoulder straps are very thin and cut my shoulders quickly when diving :P

I haven’t had to contend with this as a gentleman, but I’ll take it under advisement. Now this has been pointed out, I can see the other people in the image above have more sane straps. Maybe they were causing her to sneeze, who knows?!

I’ve been overwhelmed and happy by the volume of lovely messages people have sent me about my hospital adventures last week. Other people have had far worse and scarier experiences than what I went through, but its good to know that I can be gone for a week and people notice my absence!

Four comments:

• Jim Kloss of the late Whole Wheat Radio fame indicated that snorting those electrolyte ice poles would be ill advised. While I do appear to be performing this act in the photo, I’m relieved to report I was ingesting them orally.

• Hales of Haelstrom joked that the nurses must have noticed my predilection obsession with a certain mobile game as the impetus for putting me on an IV. Good thing I’ve given that a break.

• A classy, anonymous gentleman who may have even figured out how to put on pants this morning said I was blatantly seeking attention, and that I’m no better than an Instagram Influencer.™ Good thing I was already in a ward for that sick burn, though I wonder how it must hurt holding them to dish out all the time.

• Rebecca commented that I’ll do anything to get out of following up on the fitness post I was supposed to have posted months ago. Touché!

One of Australia’s large supermarket chains was caught grossly underpaying their staff, to the tune of billions of dollars. This has deservedly drawn ire and criticism, leading the company to publish full page apologies in local newspapers and online.

This leads to some obvious questions:

• Why aren’t we surprised when this happens?

• Why are staff always underpaid in these scandals? Why is it almost never the other way?

• Why can a business underpay their staff and apologise, but a staff member would earn prison time for doing the reverse?

• Why does our economy incentivise bad-faith acting and superficial contrition when caught, as a profitable cost of doing business? Or put another way, why does the system tolerate this?

If these questions sound at all controversial or cynical, that’s an additional concern.

FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE is out now! Read the release notes and errata.

Vanilla Xfce on this release is nice!

clang/llvm, several archival tools, KDE, Gnome, OpenSSL, and plenty more userland tools and drivers have been updated. trim(8) and BearSSL have been added. And, perhaps weirdly, I’m most excited for the fact sh(1) now has pipefail which is awesome for someone who admittedly spends more time writing shell code than anything else thesedays.

Thanks to the release team, the Foundation, and everyone involved. And also a shoutout to John-Mark Gurney for making BitTorrent magnet links available. Let’s save the project some bandwidth and share the love.

I’ll be updating OrionVM’s FreeBSD 12.x template this week, otherwise you can use the standard freebsd-update mechanism in your existing VMs to jump to 12.1. Note that your disk will still show as FreeBSD 12.0, because that was the original template.

What does one do when bedridden, can’t eat, and are barely able to think? You substitute comfort food for nostalgia. In my case I was a rail nut as a kid, so I watched a bunch of classic locomotive documentaries on YouTube, like a gentleman.

Last week I learned that not only were steam turbine locomotives a thing, but that UP in the US ran them in revenue service. Union Pacific’s website describes the locos:

Union Pacific was the only railroad in the United States to own and operate gas turbine locomotives. The turbine, rather than an internal combustion diesel engine, drove an alternator/generator to supply electricity to electric motors mounted on the axles. Union Pacific’s gas turbine fleet totalled 55 locomotives.

The turbine fleet pulled freight trains between Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Ogden, Utah. Although tested on the Salt Lake City to Los Angeles run, their tremendous noise quickly made them unpopular in California. The locomotives were nicknamed “Big Blows” for their deafening jet engine exhaust noise. The huge locomotives, with their big appetite for fuel oil, eventually fell victim to the more efficient diesels, and in 1970 the turbines ran their last miles.

This below video on Union Pacific Turbines of the Wasatch was amazing for its VHS-era graphics as it was for the content and pacing. Modern engineering documentaries always have to have RACE AGAINST TIME with rapid-fire editing and metal music, but this was happy just to take you on a journey.

UP operated several generations of these turbines from the 1960s to early 70s on mainline freight services where they ran most efficiently. They were paired with auxiliary diesel-electrics for low speed and shunting, and ironically enough repurposed steam locomotive tenders for carrying their cheap bunker fuel. I love that they were painted in that classic yellow-and-red livery.

At the time they were the most powerful prime movers in the world, but they suffered several drawbacks. Along with the ones listed on the UP site above, the turbines couldn’t be double headed, because in tunnels the leading turbine would starve the other of air and it would flame out. Their exhaust was also so fast and hot it could melt bitumen road surfaces they passed under! And the bunker fuel had to be pre-heated and was difficult to refuel; though using tenders instead of internal fuel tanks later helped.

By the early 1970s the economic advantage of bunker fuel over diesel had also burned up, so UP retired their last turbines to the scrapheap or museums. One day I’ll make it to Illinois to check one out.

In the meantime, I realised they have the units for Dovetail’s delightful Train Simulator. Here I am driving my recently purcahsed UP Turbine through my beloved Marias Pass map in Montana. These locos never went anywhere near this part of the US, but the steep grades and long distances suit it surprisingly well. If anything, I need to check I’m not breaking the speed limit as I power up the hills with such commanding force.

Where have I been this week? Hospital! But aside from some splitting headaches and a strictly controlled diet of dry toast and electrolyte juice that’s wearing thinner than some of my jokes, I’m doing well.

Earlier this week I came home and felt pangs in my stomach. Within an hour I was throwing up and dry retching continuously, and couldn’t even keep water down. I thought I could sleep it out, but Clara wasn’t having any of it and insisted I go to hospital.

I went to A&E at the Royal North Shore, got checked out by a nurse, was taken into a room with a bed and given a couple of IV drips, then bundled into another room and observed for the night. I was rocking a 38.8 degree fever and my chest was tight, but by the morning I was able to take small sips of water, and could gingerly eat a elecrolyte icy pole.

All this to say I went to hospital, they got my Australian Medicare details, and immediately treated me. No paperwork, no payment, they saw someone in need and helped me. Thank you :')

The Overnightscape Central is a fun weekly podcast hosted by the illustrious PQ Ribber. Hosts and listeners of The Overnightscape Underground participate in a topic each week, and you’re welcome to join.

01:34:43 – Rubenerd and Frank Edward Nora join PQ Ribber for a diverse and informative look at the Funny Animal genre!!

You can view this episode on the Underground, listen to it here, and subscribe with this feed in your podcast client.

I haven’t done a Pet Shop Boys edition of Music Monday for a while. This is one of my favourite songs from the Pet Shop Boys album Behaviour. I mean, it’s one of my favourite songs in general, and it’s one of my favourite songs from Behaviour.

When life is calmer, I have no doubt
No angry drama, a storm blows itself out

Ron Amaddeo reported on the new Google Pixel 4 phone for Ars Technica, emphasis added:

When the Pixel 4 ships this week, it will be releasing to consumers with a face-unlock security issue that will apparently stick around for some time. Unlike the iPhone’s FaceID (and Google’s earlier face-unlock system on Android 4.1), the Pixel 4’s face unlock doesn’t look for the user’s eyes, so the phone could be pointed at a sleeping or unconscious owner and unlocked without their consent. This weekend, Google said in a statement that a fix “will be delivered in a software update in the coming months.”

And then Samsung reported issues with the touch sensors on their phones, as Tim reported for Droid Life from Samsung’s statement:

This issue involved ultrasonic fingerprint sensors unlocking devices after recognizing 3-dimensional patterns appearing on certain silicone screen protecting cases as users’ fingerprints. … To prevent any further issues, we advise that Galaxy Note10/10+ and S10/S10+/S10 5G users who use such covers to remove the cover, delete all previous fingerprints and newly register their fingerprints.

This has lead banks to take reasonable precautions, as reported in Computing.co.uk:

“We’ve removed the app from the Play Store with customers with Samsung S10 devices,” Natwest said in a message sent to affected users. “This is due to reports that there are security concerns regarding these devices. We hope to have our app available again once the issue has been resolved.

These things happen, and demonstrate how difficult all this stuff is. But it doesn’t take much imagination to see how the pundits would have reacted if this were the iPhone X’s launch. #SiliconFaceGate? Okay clearly more imagination than I can muster late this evening!

Ivan Kwan summarised why most of Reddit is awful:

I’ve spent nearly a year on r/singapore (Singapore subreddit), and I feel like it’s just not worth my attention anymore. The conversations there make it seem like it’s filled with edgy teenagers, trolls, and people trying too hard to be intellectual.

Twitter is arguably worse, but at least I’ve culled my following lists over the years, and instablock predictable trolls. But I am subscribed to r/sysadmin and a few others on Reddit, and both these said more than I could have regarding soliciting help online. CuddlePirate420:

… not as bad or as condescending as StackOverflow’s philosophy which questions your very reason for even existing. “You want to know how to do X? Why on earth would you want to do X? Knowing nothing about you or your needs, I guarantee what you need is Y.”

Empathy is hard. Dr_Midnight in response:

Experience has taught me that this mindset is extremely pervasive among programmers, and that it is not solely present on StackOverflow. Programming-language related IRC channels on freenode are among some of the most toxic places on that entire network when it comes to the sheer level of condescension and echo-chamber-like behavior.

My favourites were from Linux people saying using $distro would solve my FreeBSD problem, or that the solution to DOS or NetBSD on my vintage 486 or Pentium 1 tower was… to not use them. I counted sixteen references to actually on a thread before I turned off comments in 2012, with a subset naturally calling me an idiot contrarian. Because naturally if you use something others don’t, you’re just doing it for the sake of it. Or soju, or whiskey, or whatever.

I’m on board with Merlin Mann’s why am I not a potted fern? response. At some point it’s the only rational thing to do.