Rubenerd

I love when artists, designers, developers, whoever, can take two seeminly unrelated things and make something unexpectedly beautiful with them. Case in point, Suzushiro’s theme is Japanese maids with skateboards. They’re all fantastic; check them out on Pixiv and Twitter.

But this one made me smile after a long evening. Everything about it is perfect! I don’t care if I use their LINE stickers or not, I’ve just bought both sets as a sign of appreciation and to support awesome art.

There have been two—what I would charitably refer to as—faux pas raging on Twitter the last few days. Both by popular authors, and both generating significant backlash, as the collective hive of Twitter is want to do. The first was by Australian author John Marsden, who prescribed the following for school bullying victims in an interview about his latest book:

He said he sympathised with children having a hard time, but would advise them to “look at your own likeable and unlikeable behaviours and try to reduce the list of unlikeable behaviours and unlikeable values and unlikeable attitudes and over time that will probably have a significant effect”.

And then yesterday, American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted this in response to the latest American shooting:

In the past 48hrs, the USA horrifically lost 34 people to mass shootings.

On average, across any 48hrs, we also lose…

500 to Medical errors
300 to the Flu
250 to Suicide
200 to Car Accidents
40 to Homicide via Handgun

Often our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data.

Both these points are true if viewed objectively. If you change yourself to be less unique and therefore reduce your target for bullying, you won’t be bullied as much. Gun deaths are vastly over-reported, especially in relation to cancer and heart disease. I could speak to both of these, directly or in my nuclear family, before I turned 18. I’ll bet you could do at least one too.

But we’re humans, not robots. These gentleman may have had the best of intentions, but it doesn’t change the fact these messages come across as insensitive, poorly timed, and/or victim blaming. If your aim is to win hearts as well as minds, this is counterproductive.

It reminds me of the time I was in a lift that plummeted three floors, and people on Twitter told me not to worry, because safety lifts made my experience impossible. Being condescending isn’t the best thing to immediately throw at someone who’s rattled and scared.

To remind us of better times for Kyoani and the world, have the greatest ending song of all time from their 2006 adaptation of Suzumiya Haruhi.

I was watching this legendary series when I was living in Malaysia, and my future girlfriend was dancing it’s ending theme song back down in Sydney. Years later, and I was cosplaying Kyon (far left), and Clara was Yuki (second from the left).

If this isn’t the best ending song of ALL TIME, I don’t want to be right!

Related links

• Love for Kyoto Animation
• Music Monday post archive
• Ten years of Haruhi

An earlier version of this post was published by accident that didn’t have the link to the article

From RetailInAsia:

The new Funan embodies a new paradigm for living, playing and working in Singapore’s city centre. The integrated redevelopment addresses the new generation of tech-savvy consumers who are in search of collaboration, experiences and recreation under one roof where they can engage, build community and express themselves.

If it won’t let me synergise those paradigms, I’m not interested. They really do use an entirely different language to us.

Jokes aside, I understand why internet shopping killed a tech mecca like Funan Centre. But it was still painful to read the news it had been knocked down; I spent most of my childhood between there and Sim Lim Square. I build my first computer from Make Fine in one of their stores, and spent many happy hours wandering around Edpol Systems, South Asia Computer, and the large Challenger anchor store upstairs

I should upload all the photos I took of it over the years somewhere.

A common question I’m asked is why do you overuse passive voice? The second is in the title. Blogging fills two purposes for me:

• It’s an idea dump. I understand and think through concepts and problems easier if I have to explain them, and text is the easiest way I can.

• It’s a cathartic hobby. I enjoy sitting at cafés and writing; either this, technical documentation, or fiction that may (not) ever see the light.

So it’s not a question of finding time, it’s how I’d function if I didn’t.

(I mostly write posts within minutes, so it’s also not especially time consuming. I may also cheat and write a series of posts which are published over a week if I know I’ll be especially busy at work. But you didn’t read any of that).

I got a frantic phone call from someone in the family today, claiming their telco was on the other phone warning about a remote attack. He’d got them to run a netstat to confirm multiple people were trying to hack them, but that installing TeamViewer and some other software would be able to fix it.

The blood rushed to my head, and in a moment that perhaps either scared or surprised my coworkers, I shouted to immediately hang up on the “provider” and turn off the router.

We were very lucky that they’d given it some thought and thought the software install step was a red flag before proceeding. Or it could have ended much worse.

This person spent their lives working on highly technical systems and only just semi-retired. The fact even someone like that can come that close to being scammed is nothing short of terrifying.

My industry has failed in its duty of care and is responsible for this. We told people they could use their computers for online banking, secure communication, the works. And it can all be undone with the privacy equivilent of an analogue loophole. How do we fix this?

I stopped using the NoScript Firefox plugin a couple of years ago, for the reason people on social media threw at me for thirteen years: it broke too many websites. The approach for using it goes like this:

1. Go to a new website
2. See a badly designed fallback with missing content
3. Scroll NoScript’s giant list of third-party sites
4. Try the top level domain, and maybe other sane ones
5. Refresh
6. If still doesn’t work, repeat 4-5.

I got it down to a science, but eventually the modern web wore me down.

Or so I thought. Because the difference between NoScript and just using uBlock Origin feels the same as going from uBlock Origin to no filtering at all. Your first impression is how much slower websites are while you wait for content to load you either didn’t need, want, or ask for. I wouldn’t say I can do the white-list dance in less time than it takes for an untouched page takes to load, but I get awfully close.

So I reinstalled it on a fresh new Firefox profile. Aside from the obvious junk this blocks, I’ve also been alerted to three XSS requests, all by large companies that should know better, one of which starts with M and ends in icrosoft. I’m looking at you, Volume Licence Service Centre.

I concede NoScript involves a active role in web management than a set-and-forget tool like uBlock Origin or PrivacyBadger doesn’t. It’s not difficult, but it requires a lot of time, especially when you first start training it on sites you frequent. But if you’re like me and feeling increasingly fed up with what the web is turning into, the worst you could do is try it and uninstall if it’s not your cup of tea.

Last month I got some suspiciously kind feedback from @ininitary:

Line-based printers like typical inkjets usually do not support PostScript® or PCL. They often can print plain ASCII text files. print/ghostscript9-base supports the PDLs used by some of these printers. However, printing an entire graphic-based page on these printers is often very slow due to the large amount of data to be transferred and printed.

That’s clearly the wrong quote, though TIL. Let’s try that again:

yeah and now i’m shocked and wondering how could that be that this is how i had to realise my all time favourite blogger is on the twitters

I can’t take two things: corriander, because I’m allergic; and compliments. But I appreciate the sentiment!

Speaking of VyOS, last week I learned—relearned?—how to configue a simple port forward from an interface with an internet routable address, to an internal network on another interface:

$ configure
# set nat destination rule 100 description "Would prefer pfSense!"
# set nat destination rule 100 inbound-interface eth0
# set nat destination rule 100 protocol tcp
# set nat destination rule 100 translation address $TARGET_SERVER
# set nat destination rule 100 translation port $TARGET_PORT

You’ll want to change the rule number to get the order right.

It’s Music Monday time! Each and every Monday without fail, except when I fail to, I post a piece of music such that our Monday may be filled with perhaps a little more joy than its unenviable position at the start of the work week would normally afford it.

Window Washer’s Dream was my favourite song from SimCity 3000, which seems fitting to share given I just posted about the game yesterday. I loved as a kid hearing the layers of sound and instrumentation slowly build up.

It was surreal hearing it again tonight. It immediately sent me back to those optimistic, fun primary school evenings when I’d finished my homework and helped pack up the dinner dishes. I had this tradition where I’d camp out in my room with the lights out and the windows open when the evening Singapore air wasn’t quite as humid, listening to this music and building out stuff. Those were tough times, trying to figure out whether I’d build a microwave power plant, or save a bit longer for fusion.

I’ve still got all those old cities in my backup folders since I archived all my decaying Zip disks. I might need to dig them up and screenshot them here!