Rubenerd

Most people know Isetan for being a department store, but they also usually have amazing Japanese supermarkets in the basement. My parents and I often bought groceries at their Shaw House branch when we lived in Singapore. Clara and I went to their Jurong East outlet today on our way to Kinokuniya, and by chance discovered a few things.

Despite it nominally being a Japanese supermarket, they stocked a ton of Singaporean sourced food and local flavours behind this delightful poster. Singaporean/Malay and Japanese food are easily my two favourite cuisines, and I was looking at one isle, then the other, and forming weird concoctions in my head. Sambal udon? Kaya Pocky? Oh wait, the latter exists now! That’s for another post.

The next foodstuff would be decidedly pedestrian for my North American and Southeast Asian readers, but I was stoked to find Ruffles! I ate far too many of these deep-fried potatoes as a kid, especially their sour cream and onion flavour. Australia’s Smiths crisps are fine, but their Ruffles-equivalent is far less robust. Probably because it doesn’t have some nasty chemical in it. I showed a modicum of self-restraint and bought some bananas instead, but the urge was there.

Which leads us to something we saw and almost couldn’t contain our joy. Clara and I first saw Chichiyasu brand milk coffee in a vending machine on our Airbnb street in Osaka, and since then we’ve discovered they make tea, yoghurt drink, chocolate milk, and a whole range of goodies. We love the character, and hope to go to their gift shop in Hiroshima one day. In the meantime, there was our favourite cute boy right there in a fridge in western Singapore… shiok!

This blog largely turned into a series of Singapore coffee shop views faster than I expected. And I approve of it.

Today I worked remote from a Toast Box in Novena before heading into town. I’ve largely cut sugar out of my diet, but it was a surreal delight to sit there having a traditional kopi-o and kaya toast while on a video conference with my colleagues in Sydney and San Francisco.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Coffee Bean for my own nostalgic reasons. But Toast Box, Ya Kun Kaya Toast, Old Chang Kee, and Mr Bean warm my heart. I was only ever a temporary guest Singaporean, but I identify more with this fare than even Vegemite. I guess they call them your formative years for a reason!

This was also my first proper week working remote in a decade. Eastern Australia is only two hours ahead of Singapore, so it was too onerous to wake up a bit earlier. Except for today, waking up was a struggle. I suppose as long as one takes more care to sleep early, it could work longer term.

The images for this post are supplied by the excellent Camera Size that let’s you perform scale comparisons for—wait for it—cameras.

I loved my Olympus O-MD E-M10 MarkII. It was the most fun I’ve ever had with a compact camera, right down to not being able to say the name fast. They say the best camera is the one you have on you, and I simply never carried my Nikon DSLR because it was too bulky. By contrast, #BaDumTish, this camera was always on me, and as a bonus it mostly had improved specs.

Careful readers would have noted my past tense above, because in the space of two months the whole system fell apart. My two prime lenses karked it, the rear LCD stopped turning on entirely, its SD card reader routinely unmounts halfway through transferring images, and the electronic viewfinder no longer activates when it sees my face, which I take personally. Someone more creative than me could shoot photos blind with this, but I want to see what I’m doing.

It’s strange; I thought I treated this camera well. Maybe I forgot I was in a dust storm, or within EMP striking distance from a rouge Canon employee. I could get it repaired, but now I have reservations about long term reliability, and I figure I may as well take the opportunity to put the money towards an upgrade.

I would love to go full frame, just as I’d like to own an apartment in Australia and Singapore, and perhaps travel to the moon. I’ve been researching the Pentax K1 Mk-II for a while; I even reserved a rental at Ted’s to give it a try, but they’re a special order and booked out for months. I can see why; they’re almost half the price of similarly spec’d Nikons and Canon full frames, and the latest Sony mirrorless kit.

The other, vastly more realistic option is to acknowledge I’ll only ever carry small cameras, so to go the entire other direction and see what the best fixed-prime compact is with a larger sensor, given I basically had my main prime welded to the Olympus anyway.

The good news is we’re spoiled for choice in this area. Clara and I instantly liked the Fujifilm XF10 in store, with one of Fujinon’s gorgeous fixed 28mm ƒ/2.8 equivalent lenses. It’s pictured—HA!—with the full frame Pentax above. But reviews are fair at best, not least because it’s missing a hot shoe and has middling image quality.

The other Fujifilm is the X100F, the fourth in the now-legendary X100 series which everyone loves. I enjoyed testing the manual dials in store, just as I did with my Olympus. But I’m not sure if it’s just Clara and I, but we find Fujifilm’s rear buttons, menus, and modes utterly confounding. Her X-T10 delivers amazing photos, but it’s a routine source of frustration for us. Don’t email me.

The other option I’m intrigued by again is the Ricoh GR. I looked at one briefly before getting the Olympus, and since then they’ve come out with an even tinier GR III model. It has all the controls I care about, a 28mm equivalent ƒ/2.8 lens, image stabilisation, and still retains an APS-C sized sensor which is mindblowing to me. It doesn’t have a flash, which I never use. It also lacks a viewfinder, but perhaps ashamedly I’d mostly stopped using the one on my Olympus.

There are no right or wrong answers here, but I think I’ll be saving for the Ricoh. A certain famous camera reviewer says he doesn’t see the point of it, which probably works in its favour too.

This Bloomberg report has been making the rounds, as it should:

The Alphabet Inc unit was the only member of the World Wide Web Consortium to vote against the measure to expand the power of the organisation’s Internet privacy group, according to a tally of the results viewed by Bloomberg News. Twenty four organisations voted for the idea in a recent poll.

The article also repeats some interesting language I’ve been seeing in a lot of such reports, emphasis added:

The debate hasn’t been confined to the W3C. The Safari and Firefox browsers now block third-party tracking cookies - little bits of code that let advertisers follow users around the web with targeted ads. But Google decided not to do this, opting instead to give Chrome browser users more control over which cookies can track them.

This logic is how we end up with Orwellian names like AdChoices.

The cliché Singlish accent pronounces three as tree, though as a stupid angmoh at best I can only offer an approximation. Wah, so good is it. 🇸🇬

Today’s pointless Singapore nostalgia post comes from the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in the Junction 8 shopping centre in Bishan. If this sounds familiar, I’ve written from here back in 2008, and mentioned it yesterday. I’m certain I did another post in the intervening years, complete with a silly laptop coffee photo like below, but I can’t find it right now.

This was my local café on the way to my first full time job out of high school, and sometimes I’d come for lunch. It was also where my friend Felix and I studied for our final high school exams when the AIS moved to Lorong Chuan. It seems like so long ago now; perhaps because increasingly it is. Is this what getting old feels like?

Anyway, this is my office for working remote today. I’m glad among the churn of food and retail here, this branch still exists after all this time :). Shiok.

My Singapore nostalgia is likely to become insufferable over the coming days, for which I acknowledge but shamelessly do not apologise for. Maybe I should preface such posts with SG19, as the government here is want to do with anniversaries and such.

Yesterday Clara and I wandered over to Junction 8 in Bishan, five stops along the North-South MRT line from Orchard. Between high school and university I worked briefly in the area as a Perl developer, because that’s what we did in the mid 2000s! The company’s offices were in the Union Industrial Building, a few blocks down the street.

I figured it must have been refurbished, because all I could find online of the original building was an outdated listing on EdgeProp, and an entry on PropertyGuru under an interim name, the Claris Centre. Fortunately, the latter had the photo above.

Needless to say, is a superfluous phrase. The area around the building was almost unrecognisable; all the low-rise light industrial buildings and offices had made way for tall glass buildings, including the Union Industrial Building. There’s even a new Circle Line station literally across the street.

I took photos of the entire building from the front, but somehow the setting sun between these two new structures seemed more apt.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

54:03 – Returning to the birthplace and spiritual home of the Rubenerd Show in Singapore, and where I first heard The Overnightscape. Wandering around Marina Square with Clara making random observations about life here compared to the 1990s and 2000s, with sounds of the Singapore F1 Grand Prix in the background. Then jumping on the MRT back to Novena, and walking in the late evening. It’s a remote-working holiday, but I’ll take it!

Recorded in Marina Bay, Singapore. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released September 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.

Simon Sharwood reported for IT News:

The cable’s operator told iTnews that the Perth-to-Singapore portion of the SEA-ME-WE 3 cable is out, that no estimated time of repair has yet been determined and that the problem struck between repeaters 345 and 346.

For all the breathtaking technological progress we’ve made over the decades, its still just logic gates connected to cables; albeit very tiny and very long ones respectfully. Long logic gates and tiny cables would be useful in far fewer circumstances.

Andy LoPresto reposted this 2013 gem from Pinboard’s blog:

There is no difference, from the attacker’s point of view, between gross and tiny errors. Both of them are equally exploitable. In at least three [of the Matasano Crypto Challenges], the mere fact of getting distinguishable error messages was enough to recover the entire message.

This lesson is very hard to internalize. In the real world, if you build a bookshelf and forget to tighten one of the screws all the way, it does not burn down your house.

In our continuing series of things you already know unless you don’t, say you want to process a string in awk using a delimiter other than a space, or as awk referres to as a field seperator:

$ echo "Bird'is'the'Word" | awk '{ print $1 }'
==> "Bird'is'the'Word"

You use the -F argument to split on a different character. I used a single quote here to remind us to escape characters if needed, or wrap in quotes:

$ echo "Bird'is'the'Word" | awk -F\' '{ print $1 }'
==> Bird

This works in the One True Awk™ found on BSDs, macOS and illumos; and gawk from GNU.