Rubenerd

Australian Opposition Leader Bill Shorten delivered his budget reply speech last night. I cried when he announced his plans for sweeping additions to Medicare for cancer screening and treatments. We were extraordinarily fortunate that my dad had a great job and insurance; it meant my sister and I had a mum for another decade. Everyone should have that opportunity.

I won’t lie, I was feeling excellent afterwards. The current government’s budget speech was a shrill diatribe against a party that hasn’t been in government for six years. Bill Shorten sounded like he had a plan, and his shadow cabinet looked more prepared than the government’s own bench.

But with a day to mull it over in my head, and thinking about my own industry, a few bits of reality set in. This is the same opposition party that sided with the government on the #aabill, and the arguably well-intentioned but disastrous social media reform law, both of which are costing Australian IT jobs and our international reputation.

As Simon Sharwood wrote for CRN, Mr Shorten was also scant on details:

Innovation wasn’t mentioned in the speech, and technology scored but a fleeting mention in remarks about “new investments in eliminating mobile blackspots; and a more reliable NBN for small business”. No detail was offered in either case.

To expect Bill to cover the aforementioned legislation may have been a stretch, but with the election looming it was Labor’s de facto campaign start. And dare we forget that while they started the NBN, it was that same Labor politician who wanted to instigate the Great Firewall of Australia.

There’s potentially a lot to be optimistic about in a few months, but I fear IT and digital rights won’t be among them.

I didn’t mean to invoke Betteride’s Law of Headlines here, the question mark here indicates I’m mulling my options, not that I’m saying it can’t be done.

I have a MacBook Pro semi-permanently connected to a gorgeous 4K LG UltraFine display as my primary home desktop. I barely used my Retina iMac, so I sold it and bought this display instead. Once you go 2× HiDPI/Retina, you can’t go back.

My other main desktop is a FreeBSD tower I originally built as a game machine, before realising I barely play games. I’ve found myself using it more and more since wiping Windows off it, and am mulling switching this LG display to it.

Problem is, it unsurprisingly uses a very particular type of USB-C 3.1 connector that carries DisplayPort Alt-Mode, so using a passive adaptor doesn’t work. The display also has a built-in USB-C dock, but that’s less important to get working.

According to a few Reddit posts, this UPD2018 board by Sunix lets you connect the display to your desktop by passing through the DisplayPort output of your graphics card, in my case an older Nvidia GTX 960. My NCASE M1 has one spare PCI slot, so this could work.

(I’m getting flashbacks to my friends using Voodoo cards connected to the VGA output of their 2D graphics cards in the late 1990s!)

The budget for this month is a little tight on account of Clara’s and my recent Japan trip, but I’ll grab one of these next month and report back how I go.

Sydney had an unseasonable amount of fog set in yesterday. Standing at Central station you could barely see anything beyond the platforms, it was spooky. San Franciscans would laugh at our bewilderment, but Karl just doesn’t visit that often here.

Clara and I had a close encounter with it from our flight from Tokyo. We were flying through clear sky, lined up with the runway, and we’d heard the landing gear deploy. Just as we we low enough to perceive individual buildings and cars, a blanket of what looked like thick cloud hugging the ground appeared. Next minute we were flying through it, and we couldn’t see anything.

Perhaps the pilots suddenly couldn’t either, and out of an abundance of caution decided to abort the landing. We heard a sudden and deafening roar from the engines, and the nose pitched up. There were a few audible gasps from the cabin, and some worried faces. The lead flight attendant came on the PA and announced in Japanese and English that we were trying another landing.

I’d assume Sydney Kingsford Smith would have ILS, but I still respected and admired the quick thinking of our pilots who decided they’d had insufficient time to prepare for this change in circumstances, and decided to re-attempt. That fog came from nowhere.

Aborted takeoffs landings are uncommon, but not unusual. I only fly a half dozen times a year, but it was my first experience with one. Update: Thank you to the many, many of you who pointed out that whoops!

The imitible @georgiecel tweeted this last week:

@phocks (Serious answer) I haven’t read a lot of blogs lately but I always enjoy reading posts by @gotjane @Rubenerd @paulienuh @hirokonishimura @hollypryce @aigoos @jemjabella - I may be biased here though :) Hopefully you find somthing to your taste.

Buried among the far better blog authors than yours truly is… yours truly! And best of all, her rates for bribary are very reasonable.

Today’s the last full day Clara and I are in Japan, so you won’t be subjegated to our Twitter and blog spam from here for much longer. Or if you’ve enjoyed it, thanks for your positive comments :).

Clara sent me the above photo from a newsstand down the road while I sit at Mos Cafe, a surprisingly beautiful space upstairs from a Mos Burger. It has plants, wood, plants made of wood, everything. The cafe, not the announcement.

Anyway, it feels oddly humbling to be here when this was announced; the last era name was unveiled back in 1989. Osaki Tomohiro wrote for the Japan Times:

In a much-awaited moment that heralded a new chapter in Japan’s history, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga announced Monday that the new Imperial era will be named Reiwa, taking one of the final steps toward initiating the nation’s first imperial succession in three decades.

Suga, who displayed a placard showing off the kanji characters for the new era, said the name was formulated based on a poem from “Manyoshu,” the oldest existing compilation of Japanese poetry. The first character represents “good fortune,” while the second can be translated as “peace” or “harmony.”

Naturally my first thought was to how this would be implemented technically. Most Australian newspapers struggle to understand what the Internet is, but the Japan Times had this covered:

In a nation where gengo has long been cherished as a way of identifying a year — as in “Heisei 31,” which corresponds to 2019 — in many official documents and computer systems, its change has had far-reaching practical implications, too. Local municipality officials, computer engineers and calendar manufacturers, for example, have spent months preparing for necessary changes.

I’ll say this much: it’s a political reprieve from endless Brexit sillyness.

Today’s pointless nostalgia trip comes from the open air garden atop Namba Parks in Osaka that I fell in love with back in 2017. I found the same table I sat at and blogged from back then, and got the same Boss Coffee can. There were two differences this time:

• We came in the heat of summer two years ago, and this time we’re coming off Northern Hemisphere winter. We’re increasingly freezing our hands numb sitting out here in this pointless exercise, so will be retreating indoors soon.

• This lack of heat lead me to buy a hot Boss Coffee can this time. Two years ago, I was relieved to have an icy one.

• Clara is here too, reading her pretty bishounen manga. In the nerdiest way I can express, her compatibility and patience with my bizarre interests is almost scary. I’m a lucky guy.

That about does my nostalgia posts from Osaka. I’m going to keep hacking on wpa_supplicant on this Panasonic laptop for a bit then head off; I discovered the key_mgmt option that lets me connect to open Wi-Fi hotspots without passwords, and the detectportal.firefox.com URL that lets me auth. And all from a laptop that has a keyboard that’s a pleasure to type on.

In July 2017 I gleefully wrote from a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in Osaka. I used to go to their branches all the time after school and on weekends in Singapore, so to see that familiar circular logo tinged with a delightful schade [sic] of purple this time was a real treat.

Little did I realise that Osaka in general would have the same effect on me, and this particular Starbucks in Namba Parks. I place coffee shops and cafes in two distinct categories: you want the world’s best coffee, go to a coffee shop. You want to chill somewhere and hack on some code or prose, go to a cafe. And this one complex has the world’s best Starbucks downstairs, and the best park bench view upstairs.

I love going to Tokyo for AsiaBSDCon and to explore, but there’s something special about the Kansai region of Japan. Kyoto is now my favourite city in the world, and I have a soft spot for Osaka. It’s not just because I think it’s nicer than Tokyo, but it was Clara’s and my first destination to Japan, so it will always hold a special place.

It also holds significance for what I’m typing on. This time around I’m blogging on my Japanese Panasonic CF-RZ6 that I’ve put FreeBSD on. I don’t want to discuss a certain fruit company here, but I’d forgot what a joy it is to type on a nice laptop keyboard again. The keys themselves are tiny on account of this laptop being smaller than some iPads, but they’re a perfect fit for my spindly fingers. And they feel so responsive with a solid amount of key travel. Dare I say it’s the best mobile keyboard I’ve ever used.

Anyway, Clara is patiently sitting next to me reading, so it may be time to head off. I’m just so happy to be back here, even if its only a day trip from Kyoto.

If you want a great introduction to Japan, consider flying to Kansai Airport and exploring Osaka first. It has so much of what Tokyo has, but at a more accessible scale. And I love hearing the Kansai dialect everywhere :).

bhyvecon and AsiaBSDCon 2019 are over, and once again there’s so much to discuss I have enough to easily fill a few dozen blog posts. So instead I’m going to be throughly unproductive and talk about our trip to The Guest in Ikebukuro.

This month the café was themed around Urusei Yatsura, the smash-hit science fiction comedy and cult classic of the 1980s. I never read the manga, but the anime was one of my earliest experiences with Japanese pop culture and mythology. It’s also an incredible time capsule into the decade, with the now-retro theme music and art style. Those cityscapes alone are amazing.

It was also the breakout series for Rumiko Takahashi, who ended up writing other touchstones including Ranma 1/2, Inuyasha, and Rinne. Her writing style and ability to weave Japanese history into modern popular culture has been imitated but never surpassed.

Clara and I already spent far too much in the gift shop, so we just got drinks. There was a one in ten shot of getting Lum on my coffee, and I did!

Being a fan of the series aside, I’m just happy that these classic shows are getting respect and attention they deserve, in spite of so much contemporary competition. There’s no question Urusei Yatsura was a trailblazer.

I’m overwhelmed with all the stuff I’ve learned, and the great conversations that have come out of AsiaBSDCon and bhyvecon. I think both were even better than last year. These each deserve their own proper posts!

In the meantime, I was heading to the event today and took a wrong turn at Albuquerque. I kind of enjoy when I made a navigational mistake when travelling; it’s a great way to discover things I’m not in a rush.

In this case I mistook the colour codes for the Namboku and Chiyoda lines, and ended up in Ishigaya station. It’s one of my new favourites in Tokyo because its such a perfect microcosm of why I love this system.

First, there’s always something unexpected. Excavators for the station discovered architectural ruins, so they built the walls around it and made a miniature museum!

Then there are always the rows of perfectly manicured plants in neat rows of pots. I’ve since wondered how they get enough light. Are they plastic? Surely not, they look so realistic.

And the pragmatic, yet bizarre design decisions. This travellator tilts upwards into a shallow escalator for a few metres midway, then flattens out again. Make sure you’re watching where you’re going, or you’re in for a shock!

And finally, the feeling of being in a warren from a time since passed. It’s not perfect, or even logical. The metro was built, expanded, and improved over successive decades into a twisted series of tunnels, passages, and platforms. And pipes, did I mention pipes?

It’s intimidating when you first come to Japan, helped in no small part by the disparate operators and the split between metro lines, suburban lines that branch off the subway, and the JR. But once you grok them it’s another world I’m overjoyed to experience.

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01:10:35 – Join Clara and I on our second day back in Japan! Today wandering around the lights and sounds of Ikebukuro, including pretty anime boys, a Family Mart snack convenience store snack tour, then taking a couple of Tokyo Metro trains back to Kudanshita, complete with those legendary Departing Melodies.

Recorded in Tokyo, Japan. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released March 2019 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts; this one notwithstanding.

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