Rubenerd

Clara and I will be overseas again in a couple of weeks, so we decided to revisit our travel bank accounts. It’s critical to have a bank account without foreign ATM or transaction fees, while also having it separate from your primary account in case you’re skimmed or have your wallet nicked.

A few foreign banks in Australia now offer global accounts where you can hold multiple currencies. You can hedge forex with them, which is nice if you know a central bank rate cut is about to hit before you leave. But they’re the most useful for letting you spend in the local currency of the country you’re visiting. That way you save on fees, you can use a debit card in stores, and it’s easier to track expenses.

Or at least, I thought it would be. I signed up to a household-name bank earlier this week to get one of these global accounts, and while their desktop internet banking is passable, their mobile application is, without any peer or contest, the absolute worst one I’ve ever used. My local credit union-esque bank has but a tiny fraction of their holdings and profits, and theirs is so much better it isn’t even a contest.

Banks like to think they’re competing on features, interest rates, and brand awareness. But I wonder if they realise how much money they’re leaving on the table if they have horrible applications? I’d go as far as to say I’d sacrifice interest and perks to go to another bank with decent software. Maybe that shows I’m a fiscal sucker, but life’s too short to deal with bad stuff when so many other banks do a great job.

The latest Hugo static site generator version broke pagination for all my sites, including this one. This is how I previously filtered content so only posts would appear in pagination, as per the documentation:

{{ $paginator := .Paginate (where .Pages "Type" "post") }}
{{ range $paginator.Pages }}

This now returnes a single page with the word Posts shown, and nothing else. I changed to the generic pagination method below and it worked, so the issue was with the above lookup.

{{ range .Pagination.Pages }}

I saw this thread on the Hugo forums, which had example code by funkydan2 replacing .Pages with site.RegularPages. This worked.

{{ $pages := where site.RegularPages "Type" "post" }}
{{ $paginator := .Paginate $pages }}{{ range $paginator.Pages }}

I broke the lookup out into a separate line to make it nicer, but you can just do a replace with the original documented code and it works.

Niggling changes like this aside, Hugo is still the best static-site generator I’ve ever used. I do miss the Liquid template system of Jekyll, but Hugo generates more than six thousand posts in seconds, as opposed to more than fifteen minutes. I wonder how much wasted power I’ve saved on remote servers since making the switch.

I recently dreamed that I was waiting for a train near a large office building. The tower seemed to shrink as I walked passed it down the platform, which I realised was due to it being slender in proportion to its length. Dreams being what they are, the only other thing I could remember was that it looked awfully 1970s, down to its brown windows and tan exterior.

Fast forward to today, and I was reading the Cape Town article on Wikipedia, like a gentleman. And low and behold, check out the Cape Town Civic Centre, as taken by Vectorebus:

I feel as though it could have been a Starfleet building in one of the Kirk-era movies; maybe the Federation Academey of Sciences or something.

I haven’t hidden my distaste for what I dub regressive web design. Auto-playing and looping background videos, hamburger icons, newsletter prompts, chat bots; they’re the pop-up windows and <MARQUE> elements of the 2010s, with all the hard-fought lessons we learned from the late 1990s thrown out the proverbial airlock, gasping for air like me when I started going to the gym. There’s a mental image we all didn’t need.

And speaking of things we don’t need, the other of these regressive trends is fixed-positioned navigation and social media links, which I raised in March last year:

The good news is all of these elements use fixed positioning, so its easy enough to target them with a toolbar bookmarklet like Kill Sticky Headers. If you fixed position anything in your CSS, I’d wager you it’d be greatly improved if you didn’t.

This hit a nerve on Twitter at the time. People angry on Twitter, really?! Much of the pushback were either from trolls, or web designers who listed off workarounds without addressing the core problem, as all of us in IT are want to do. But a few, in good faith, wanted to know why some of us don’t like persistent elements on our screens.

It’s nothing groundbreaking: it messes with your effective viewport. You see less information because you’re viewing the site through a smaller window; which especially sucks on mobile. On the desktop, it breaks Page Up, Page Down, and Spacebar for scrolling, and adds needless visual clutter.

But these concerns pale in comparison to what the real problem is with this stuff, as Amy Carney tweeted last Sunday:

Please, please, PLEASE, stop designing sticky headers & footers #WebDev. Your trick leaves us, who need to increase text size or zoom in, with only a few lines to read at a time. It’s just as annoying as ads that monopolize the screen. -Sincerely, the visually impaired. #a11y

Now, just as fast food instantly becomes gourmet upon shoving caviar and gold leaf on it, you can carefully code fixed-position navigation to behave better, be less annoying, and more accessible. But the best approach is to remove them.

Scott Ludlam:

what happens when you treat housing as a tax-sheltering asset class to be bid up by investors. housing is unaffordable by design, not by accident. when the business press cheers a ‘strong’ housing market, thats the sound of poverty being locked in.

Everyone knew Iomega’s colourful Zip, Jaz, and Ditto drives in the 1990s, but fewer were aware that Iomega allowed third parties to manufacturer their media under licence. My dad bought me FujiFilm Zip disks in primary school because they were a bit cheaper in packs of ten, and I saw a few co-branded laptop drives back in the day.

Today I learned Sony rebranded the Ditto tape drive as the StorStation, not to be confused with their more recent tape devices. It had the same enclosure as the maroon Ditto but was coloured beige instead:

Thanks to dig_in_and_dig_on eBay for listing this rare find. I’d buy it for my vintage peripheral collection, but it’s already ludicrously overstocked as it is; especially for someone pretending to get rid of stuff.

It’s Music Monday once again. I don’t know much about this band or song, all I know is a colleague has played it bunch of times, and I misheard the lyric as “jitters”. I thought he was saying I drank too much coffee.

I do this every year or so because it’s a fun mental exercise. This isn’t a list of features I expect them to include, it’s features I’d love to see.

• Better batteries. iPhones used to have excellent battery life relative to other phones; at best they’re mediocre now.

• Grippable edges, ideally using the same design language as the gorgeous, flatter iPad Pro. I don’t think anyone prefers the slippery, rounded edges introduced in the iPhone 6 and carried on since.

• Maintaining an LCD version like the XR and 8, because OLEDs still have accessibility problems.

• A small, iPhone SE replacement. My iPhone 5s is still my second favourite phone of all time behind my Palms.

• Better low-light camera performance.

And if I were really wishing hard:

• Bright colours again, like the iMac DV of yore. Apple has been letting some of their old-school whimsy peek through again of late, I think this would be delightful.

• A way to sync or at least backup with Linux, which people like me could then port to FreeBSD. I dislike Android, but I empathise with BSD people using them for that reason.

I tend to form odd attachments to my electronic devices, so I hold on to them for a long time. I love how simple the screen on my iPhone 8 is; no notch protrusions, it’s bright, and runs all the software I need. An iPhone SE replacement aside, I think I’ll be using this a while longer anyway.

I put xkcd in the same bucket as Rick and Morty; I get the jokes, but they’re not my cup of tea. This is tantamount to heresy online, but surely even xkcd must have had a comic about forcing your preferences on others.

And that’s part of the problem. Through no fault of Randall Munroe, xkcd has become gospel among certain vocal members of the infocomm community. You can’t have a serious discussion without a URL to one of the comics being dropped like a thought-terminating cliché. It’s tedious, predictable, and does little to progress discussions.

We need a new standard? Yeah, but xkcd humourosly said it’s not possible!

So you’d think with xkcd’s theme of password reuse, credential strength, and cryptographic hashing of late, I’d think it was deliciously ironic that its poorly-hashed forum password list was leaked, as plenty of well-known online publications gleefully reported.

No, I don’t think that. My views on the comic aside, this breach will affect real people. Plenty of people reuse their passwords, as Randall himself has said. And those passwords will soon be known, given they were were stored with the now broken MD5 hash. I’m sure plenty of them are in rainbow tables already.

Security is also hard. If it weren’t outdated forum software, it would have been a zero-day in userland, or a subtle kernel bug that can only be triggered under certain circumstances, or a misconfigured firewall, or a leaky sandbox/virtualisation guest. Heck, even your CPU could be leaking data.

The best thing we can do from these events is learn from them, and try and improve how we do things. There are secure ways to handle passwords, but in isolation and practice it’s increasingly clear they’re insufficient for authentication.

My coffee shop posts have been unexpectedly popular, so have this photo from the Everyday Canteen in Artarmon. It’s a leisurely stroll away from Chatswood in Sydney’s north, and has amazing breakfast and coffee.

I’m really liking Artarmon the more I wander around here. The Japanese supermarkets down by the station have a great selection of stuff, and the whole suburb is leafy and nice.