Rubenerd

It’s been eleven years to the day since our first Grilled Cheese Sandwich Observation lesson, and almost three years since the last one. This cannot stand.

The above below photograph I took at % Arabica on my birthday this year in Kyoto does not depict a grilled cheese sandwich, and quite frankly it concerns me that you think it does.

Thank you.

Previous lessons

• Lesson #10 on 2016-09-08
• Lesson #09 on 2009-09-08
• Lesson #08 on 2009–04–05
• Lesson #07 on 2009–04–05
• Lesson #06 on 2009–03–27
• Lesson #05 on 2008–12–07
• Lesson #04 on 2008–11–14
• Lesson #03 on 2008–11–04
• Lesson #02 on 2008–08–21
• Lesson #01 on 2008–08–12

For some reason it’s easier for me to use or dispose of stuff during bouts of decluttering if I write about it first. Perhaps in my mind, by putting it on my blog, it’ll keep living on in some awkward, nerdy way.

I was doing a junk clean up this weekend, like a gentleman. Among a pile of stuff that’s remained untouched for years, I had completely forgot about a small box of memories from my 18th birthday that already seems far too long ago to be comfortable. And one of the items? A BlueQ bar of Mofo Soap!

Nothin’ keeps that Mofo clean like Mofo Soap. If you’re a bad-ass Mofo, and you know you are, there is no other soap. For full effect, get your entire bad-ass self covered in Mofo suds, check yo’ self in the full-size bath mirror, and rinse.

Obviously bought tongue in cheek, but it brought a smile to my face after more than a decade. As opposed to a smile somewhere else, which sounds anatomically dubious.

The bar of bergamot, lemon, and amber scented soap is pictured above next to my second Cussons Prize Medal Oatmeal soap for which I currently harbour an obsession, to give you a sense for what a big-ass mofo sized soap this is. And Saber, to represent the fact I’m still a weeb even after all this time. She’s a bad-ass.

My evening shower is going to be awesome.

Yves Smith’s Naked Capitalism remains one of the most important blogs I read. Last month’s article on why inequality is destroying democratic capitalism by Nobel economist Angus Deaton was particularly insightful:

I think that people getting rich is a good thing, especially when it brings prosperity to others. But the other kind of getting rich, “taking” rather than “making,” rent-seeking rather than creating, enriching the few at the expense of the many, taking the free out of free markets, is making a mockery of democracy. In that world, inequality and misery are intimate companions.

Jeremy Sear on Well May we Say #101, The Employer Lobby Strikes Back, featuring Cam Smith:

The entire justification the rich and wealthy have is that the poor are bad people who deserve it … because if the poor aren’t bad people who deserve their poverty, then why are they suffering so badly? It’s a huge incentive to think as badly as possible of the poor, and so they spend their lives taking in as many pieces of prejudice they can about the poor being undeserving and lazy and shit, and making poor decisions, and generally deserve every bad thing that happens to them. It’s also massively in the interest of their class and supporters for all the people who are out of work to be squabbling amongst themselves for the tiny amounts of work that are available.

We can’t discuss social security in Australia without someone mentioning dole bludgers or some other epithet. Even if half the people receiving government assistance didn’t deserve it in the eyes of these people, it’s still worth it to help those down on their luck. Frankly, I’m honoured my taxes go to helping people like this, it’s called living in a kind society.

It also helps entrepreneurs, because if things go belly up, they won’t starve. Safety nets and breaking up monopolies aren’t at the expense of the free market, they enable it, as Angus Deaton points out.

And while I’m posting snippets, Greg Jericho just posted another of his important economic articles for the Guardian Australia. We just reelected the same government who’s commitment to budget surplus sounds superficially responsible, but it’s absurd when you consider the weakness of the global economy right now, and that interest rates are below the rate of inflation:

This week the interest rate for Australian government 10-year bonds went below 1%. Show me a household that can take out a 10-year loan at a 0.96% rate, despite the fact that their level of debt has risen over the past six years from $257bn to $549bn, and I’ll start listening to you saying the government needs to budget like a household.

That’s enough of my soap box for this month. Or, is it?

A few of the stories that have sped by my RSS reader over the last week or so:

Blogs To Express: Singapore’s last street barbers

They were once a common sight in the back alleys of Singapore, but are rapidly disappearing. This article originally appeared in a Straits Times article in 2012.

Alvin Alexander: Pursue the things that bring you joy

Quoting Edie Freedman, Creative Director at O’Reilly Media.

WorldLink: Q&A Hong Kong protests

Respectful and clear analysis from Deutsche Welle’s Southeast Asia correspondent Charlotte Chelsom-Pill. I’ve only spent a few days in Hong Kong, but I fell in love. I’m worried for the future of their city, but I hold out hope.

Channel NewsAsia: MPH’s two remaining bookstores in Singapore to close

Another piece of childhood slipping away. Getting older sucks, though its still preferable to the alternative.

Via Reddit: NetBSD on Raspberry Pi3

I adore the classic FVWM UI, kudos to sehnsuchtbsd. We really perfected simple, clean interfaces in the 1990s, from desktops to phones.

IT Pro: Majority of Chrome extension installs split across 13 apps

And of those, three are for blocking stuff.

We don’t use Slack internally anywhere for privacy reasons, but I’m known to share a channel with clients who already do, so we can collaborate on projects. Last week I went through and created a private channel, added all the contacts, before realising I’d wanted it to be public with everyone in my organisation.

I figured it’d be easy to flip a private channel to public. Alas, no:

Unfortunately, this is not yet possible - we believe private conversations should stay private, and generally encourage our customers to rename & archive private channels that have outlived their purpose.

I appreciate the sentiment, but for a brand new room that’s never been used, it should be a switch we can flick.

(It’s also worth noting that anything posted on chat software that doesn’t do client-side encryption must be considered public anyway).

Privacy is one of the big reasons for using iOS. Apple’s business model isn’t selling us to advertisers, and Tim Cook has said privacy is a fundamental human right. Even the big G’s most ardent fans couldn’t say the same, unless they were winking mischievously like a mischievous mischevant. I’m pretty sure that isn’t a word.

The corollary of this stance is Apple is held to a higher standard in the industry and popular press. Indiscretions that are largely passed off or ignored as routine in the Android or PC world, like faking security patches, bloatware from phone carriers, and installing rootkits, are met with howls of outrage and derision if or when Apple does it. As they should be; you can’t sell yourself as more principled and honourable if you stoop to the same tactics.

So when The Guardian broke this important story last month, my #picardfacepalm was in full effect:

Apple contractors regularly hear confidential medical information, drug deals, and recordings of couples having sex, as part of their job providing quality control, or “grading”, the company’s Siri voice assistant, the Guardian has learned.

Although Apple does not explicitly disclose it in its consumer-facing privacy documentation, a small proportion of Siri recordings are passed on to contractors working for the company around the world.

Apple have since suspended this programme, but it’s chilling. Why did a news story have to break about it for Apple to do this? Were the improved stats worth this potential hit to their reputation?

A large part of this comes down to motives. When Apple says they did this to improve a product instead of selling to advertisers, they’re one of the few companies I’d believe. Does this make me naïve? Probably. Either way, this doesn’t explain or excuse handing out to third party contractors; I can’t muster the words to describe how moronic a decision that was.

I don’t use Siri or any of these other voice assistants. I wish I could say it was only due to a principled stance on privacy, but it’s also that I haven’t ever felt the need for them. Between Apple’s excellent Shortcuts app and Agile Tortoise’s Drafts, I can initiate a workflow with a tap. But I also intuitively knew that anything that isn’t processed locally would be sent to a remote server, and I wasn’t comfortable with that. I hate when I’m right.

But Apple, please don’t pull this stunt again.

Clara and I used to obsessively follow the annual racing incantations of everyone’s favourite virtual idol Hatsune Miku, but we’ve been decidedly lax of late. I feel this is in part the result of Clara not blogging full time anymore; she would have already written an essay length post about each one by now.

I just saw 2019s version drop, and she’s the nicest one in a long time. Her pose and expression are super cute, and a bit more unique than the last few years which suffered a bit from Same Face. I love her colours especially; she looks even more like a Bavarian cake with cyan and fuchsia frosting than the original art by Annindoufu.

Both of us still think the 2011 version was the best on account of her looking more mature (below left), and I loved the glass shards in her skirt in 2013. Her Toky Taka 2017 version was pretty but not necessarily unique, and I wasn’t a fan of her weird shirt and colour scheme from last year. I feel this is a return to form; albeit in a completely different style!

Now that I look at her compared to those earlier versions, her design sure has come a long way. I’m still more a fan of the sleek, minimal look of these older ones, but I’m also glad GSR is giving artists a little more freedom now too.

The Loop linked to this worrying story in Digital Camera World about the future of Nikon, specifically their “71% decrease in earnings and an almost 15% drop in revenue”. This represents a decrease in unit sales “to less than one-sixth in comparison to fiscal 2012”.

At least part of this can be attributed to developing their new mirrorless cameras, which I’m unreasonably excited to try. I love my Olympus OM-D E-M10 II, but I’m hoping for my next camera to be full frame, and I have a soft spot for Nikon for introducing me to SLR photography in the mid 2000s. Or at least, a soft spot in the parts of the frame that I left out of focus by using a tight aperture.

(One of my two pancake lenses for the E-M10 recently kicked the bucket, which has me wondering which ecosystem to buy into. With what for money though, given my next major purchase might be a camcorder).

But it does concern me a little. On the consumer side they’re battling increasingly competent mobile phones that pass the Richard P. Gabriel test, and they’re many years behind Sony’s runaway success Alpha cameras. Canon also have their new mirrorless range, which I don’t know much about.

The irony also isn’t lost on me that I wrote an entire post about cameras without a single photo. One day I’ll make our Lychee install public, I promise!

Today we bid farewell to the Caffetini in Ultimo, across the street from our Sydney office. Among their coffee options, they also had the best chicken salt chips in the area, and was a nice place to chill. Their website still resolves.

I remember going there several years ago when Clara was having a job interview in a neighbouring building. This is mildly interesting, because when Clara had an interview near another cafe in Mascot, we ended up working in the same building.

I wonder if Clara can have an interview near a coffee shop in Singapore or Hong Kong next? Even with all the latter’s troubles, I still want to work from there for a while next.

A few people have asked me iRL and online what I use for a network-attached storage device, or if there’s any specifically I recommend. If you don’t want to read further, go for a FreeNAS Mini E, they’re excellent machines with the world’s best software for data integrity.

These are the features that make a good NAS:

• More storage than a typical external drive
• Shareable storage across devices
• Data redundancy, such that it can still operate in a degraded state
• Data integrity checks for irreplaceable media, to mitigate bit rot
• Higher performance than an external drive
• Ability to install software like PleX

You’ve got a few options:

• A set-and-forget box like a Synology or Drobo. I don’t have much personal experience with them, but we have clients at work who swear by them. If you don’t want to mess with server configuration, they’re still black boxes and expensive, but they’re easy.

• Cloud. Provided you can encrypt the data locally, you have a fat enough internet pipe – which rules out Australia – and you’re running a nice FreeBSD ZFS server on a good cloud that offers it as a Tier-1 template, it could work for some use cases.

• Adding extra storage to a desktop and running Mac CoreStorage, or an NTFS mirror, etc. Leaving aside almost nobody has desktops that can take drives anymore, even new file systems like APFS don’t offer proper data integrity checks #picardfacepalm. You also run the risk of data loss if your desktop OS gets hosed.

• A cheaper NAS box from a no-name or OEM. These are cheaper and usually have toggle switches to choose what RAID level you want. The only time I use them is if they offer a JBOD mode, so they expose all their drives individually to a target server so I can run ZFS on them. Otherwise, I don’t trust them.

• A small home server running ZFS on FreeNAS or straight FreeBSD, like an iXsystems FreeNAS Mini or an HP MicroServer. These do require a little more configuration but they’re the only solution that meets all my criteria. OpenZFS also runs well on Linux, but the extent to which ZFS is integrated into FreeBSD’s tooling make it much simpler, especially if you ever want to branch out and run software like PleX in a jail.

The final thing to keep in mind: don’t overthink it. If you have a portable external drive that you backup data from your laptop, you already do more than the vast majority of people. When you think you’re ready to step up, maybe there’s something here that’s useful.