Rubenerd

I use passive CompactFlash to IDE adaptors for my vintage computer projects, with PCI-slot mounts so they can be easily swapped out when the machine is turned off. No need to pop the case off! Unfortunately it does limit the number of cards, especially when you throw in optical drives.

So I thought I’d research if SCSI to CompactFlash adaptors were a thing. I didn’t think they would be; CompactFlash to IDE is easy because they share the same protocol, but how would a SCSI CompactFlash be presented to a system?

One approach is to emulate removable SCSI disks of yore. Solid State Disks have a SCSIFlash box:

The SCSIFlash™ is an industrial OEM grade solid state drive which allows Compact Flash (CF) cards of up to 128GB (host dependant) to be attached to a regular SCSI bus. It will be seen as a SCSI Magneto Optic drive by the host computer. The SCSIFlash™ can emulate many SASI, SCSI-1, or SCSI-2 drives and can be programmed to suit the host systems requirement. Emulated Disk Sector sizes can be 256, 512, 768, 1024, 2048, 4096 bytes

That’s cool! We were firmly an Iomega household growing up, but my Japanese friends all used fancy magneto-optical systems and Minidiscs.

In the sidebar they list compatibility with these systems:

DEC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IOMEGA, Konica, Maxoptix, Olympus, Pioneer, Ricoh, SONY, SYQUEST, TEAC.

I didn’t think Iomega did Magneto-Optical. But in the general description for the device:

The IOMEGA SCSI ZIP emulator / SCSI Jaz emulator allows the CF Cards up to 64GB (SLC) and 256GB (MLC) to attach to the SCSI bus. It is seen as a IOMEGA SCSI ZIP/ Jaz Drive by the host computer.

So would you see multipe Jaz disks? Or does the protocol permit variable sizes?

This could work though, I already have drivers for DOS, and I’d assume classic FreeBSD and current NetBSD could work with it.

Rememember Yahoo? Japan still does; the original Yahoo logo is still everywhere over there as a telco. For the rest of us, its a search directory with a dwindling market share, and some questionable recent business decisions.

I went there on a lark this morning, and found this article by Sarah Carty:

If you’re a frequent flyer in economy class, you’ll know how important it is to check in online and pick your seat before you get to the airport. Otherwise, you’ll more than likely be left with the middle seat of a row, especially if you’re on your own and there are families and couples requesting seats beside each other.

But one woman has stirred a debate online, after she revealed that she refused to move from her aisle seat when a mother asked her to swap with her on a 14-hour flight.

I can emphatise. I booked an isle seat near a bulkhead on one of my monster work flights from Sydney to San Francisco. After we were all seated, a father came up and didn’t just ask, but demanded I move so he could sit next to his teenage son.

There are so many conflicting thoughts here. There are people who could use my marginally more desirable cattle class seat, for family, health, and legitimate other reasons. If I were a gentleman, I’d weigh up the pros and cons and offer my seat up, even if the person asking was a prick.

But then I remember it’s for a 20+ hour flight, and I specifically booked months in advance to secure a set that would make it less awful. I’m tall, which makes middle seats painful. And you don’t want to be an obstacle between my motion sickness and the bathroom, the location of which I also carefully planned for!

I appreciate not everyone has the luxury of booking in advance, and circumstances change. But just as they have their reasons, we have ours too. Does that make me a prick too? Maybe.

This post was originally written in March 2019, but didn’t leave the drafts folder. I’m publishing now before it becomes even more outdated.

American presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren called for big tech companies to be broken up. Even if it only ever amounts to a hypothetical, it’s a useful discussion to have given how much control these few companies have on the lives of so many people.

I can see the merits of the idea:

• Private monopolies are incompatible with free markets; their size prevents upstarts from effectively competing.

• These tech companies wield sufficient control to unilaterally dictate how the internet works. This should be of grave concern regardless of technical merit; and it surprises me these companies get such a free pass.

• Microsoft was found guilty of monopolistic practices that have been far eclipsed by these large tech companies. Being sued for a bundled browser and the AARD code sound quaint by comparison.

• These companies have done nothing to earn our trust.

But I can see some counterpoints:

• These companies benefit from the so-called network effect. People use large social networks because their friends are there. It’s unclear to me breaking up companies wouldn’t naturally end up causing the same scale companies to grow out again; like a modern Bell System.

• It could potentially give foreign companies an advantage. Those of us outside the US have been living with that reality already, but there’s a larger, undemocratic country that could easily eclipse it.

My key point over years has been the same: our economies are set up to incentivise parasitic and unethical behaviour. Until this peverse reward system is addressed, I fear any other actions are tantamount to perennial Titanic deck chair rearrangement.

I’ll be interested to see where this discussion goes.

This Alamy stock photo is captioned “group of people holding Australian flag”. It’s an all too common source of confusion, and understandable given our British Blue Ensign derivatives are so similar and dull. Here’s Australia’s ugly flag for those unfamiliar.

Canada and the United States changed theirs, can we get new ones please?

@romanzolotarev asked two great questions last week. The first was on which stack we use:

1. BSD, sh, vi 🐡😈
2. Linux, Bash, Vim 🐧
3. something else (reply)

I use 1 and 2 professionally, no prizes for guessing which I prefer. I stopped preinstalling Vim on BSD servers and use stock nvi and sh. My workstations have other combinations:

• Work laptop and personal Mac: macOS, ksh, Vim
• Work bhyve box: FreeBSD, ksh, nvi
• Personal laptop and tower: FreeBSD, ksh, Vim
• Personal tinkering VM and vintage boxes: NetBSD, ksh, nvi

And on keyboards, the options were:

1. built-in, stock keyboard
2. external, upgraded
3. I don’t use a keyboard

I’m on call most times, and like working from coffee shops, so I use 1. It’s difficult with the godawful Mac butterfly keyboards, so thesedays I blog with a tiny Panasonic Let’s Note. At desks I do 2 using:

• Work: KBtalKing with Cherry MX Browns
• Home: Leopold FC660 with Topres, the world’s greatest switches.

Clara and I were watching some randomised Good Mythical Morning episodes last Friday night, and noticed some Hetalia and Free! boys over the shoulder of this contributor and their owner.

Anime culture is a global, multi-billion dollar industry, but I still feel like it’s an in-thing when I see it in the real world.

Speaking of things I always, always forget for some reason, use this to put a new schema in your search path:

SET search_path TO schema;

From the PostgreSQL docs:

When objects are referenced in any other context without schema qualification (table modification, data modification, or query commands) the search path is traversed until a matching object is found. Therefore, in the default configuration, any unqualified access again can only refer to the public schema.

I guess I don’t need it often enough to commit to memory. Conversely, I still reference the non-existant DUAL table even though I haven’t touched an Oracle DB for almost a decade.

I’ve talked before about how fascinating eBay is for learning about vintage computer hardware. We have two friggen awesome oddities today.

The first is a 5.25-inch external Commodore SFD-1001 unit from 1984-85. If you hadn’t heard of it before, me too. I have a dark brown 1541 drive that matches the original Commodore 64, but I’d never heard of this one before. According to the ever-reliable C64 Wiki, it was five times faster than the 1541. Thanks to altamontfinds for the image:

Last year I wrote about the Epson SD800/SD700 unit that combines a 3.5-inch and 5.25-inch drive into one 5.25-inch bay. Turns out Teac also made one, the FD-505. Thanks to zacmis for the image:

You could put your Teac FD-505 into an empty Commodore SFD-1001, and feed the ribbons out to your vintage computer tower. That’d be amazing.

There’s a resurgent interest online about intermittent fasting, based on the increase in tweets, news articles, and videos being posted about it. Most extrapolate off a research paper published in 2016, titled Intermittent Fasting and Human Metabolis. It concluded:

It is well known that in humans, even a single fasting interval (e.g., overnight) can reduce basal concentrations of metabolic biomarkers associated with chronic disease such as insulin and glucose. For example, patients are required to fast for 8–12 hours before blood draws to achieve steady-state fasting levels for many metabolic substrates. Therefore the important clinical and scientific question is whether adoption of a regular intermittent fasting regimen is a feasible and sustainable population-based strategy for promoting metabolic health. In addition, research is needed to test whether these regimens can complement or replace energy restriction and if so, whether they support long-term weight management. Below, we briefly summarize the major conclusions that can be drawn based on the current evidence.

Click through and read all their findings, it’s well worth it.

I was told the story growing up that you needed to eat a huge breakfast, and then many times during the day. It always felt like a struggle, unless it was a treat when travelling. So I decided to skip breakfast beyond some water and a black coffee most days since early February, and felt no difference in energy. And without any other changes in my lifestyle, I’ve gone down a belt hole size.

Vague anecdotes based on a paper concluding more research needs to be done is almost, but not entirely, meaningless. But passing on out of interest.

I was upgrading packages on an older FreeBSD box with UFS2, like a gentleman, and the process aborted with this:

[103/168] Installing polkit-0.114_2...
===> Creating groups
Creating group 'polkitd' with gid '565'.
===> Creating users
Creating user 'polkitd' with uid '565'.
pw: user 'polkitd' disappeared during update
pkg: PRE-INSTALL script failed

I’ve only ever seen this once before, and was solved by regenerating the password database, as listed under Examples in the pwd_mkdb(1) manpage:

# /usr/sbin/pwd_mkdb -p /etc/master.passwd