Rubenerd

Two of the best tools for testing your HTTPS/TLS connection settings are the Qualys SSL Server Test, and the Mozilla Observatory I only learned of yesterday.

They both test somewhat different metrics, so Rubenerd got an A+ from Qualys, but only a B+ from Mozilla. The great thing is they each offer suggestions, so I was able to get to an A+ with just a few changes.

My only caveat was this listed failure on the Mozilla Observatory:

Blocks inline styles by not allowing ‘unsafe-inline’ inside style-src

I can see how removing inline styles would offer security benefits, but we’ve had it drummed into us for years that HTML width and height attributes are depracated in favour of CSS. It’s infeasible for most sites to store sizes for every single image in a remote CSS file.

I got a new adjustable standing desk for work, the Ergolux Corner Height Adjustable Sit Stand Desk Riser. It also comes in black, but white matched our existing desks.

It’s pretty good. The standing desk I had at the San Francisco office was fully motorised, but the manual height adjustment of this is smooth and relatively easy, and it locks safely into place. Just as importantly, the arms scissor along the sides, maintaining a consistent table depth. Here’s a delightful animation illustrating its operation:

The only downside is the precariousness of cable management. The desk comes with a sleeve for running cables through, but no detail for where it should go. Make a note of how the desk sits when its retracted and standing, so you don’t accidentally pinch any cables when the table moves. You’re not going to damage a thick power cord, but smaller USB cables could get crimped.

I’m not convinced we know enough about the long term health effects of either sitting; it seems being motionless in any position is bad. I just like working standing sometimes, but with the option to sit if I need to.

Yesterday I was where every self-respecting person would be having just moved: buried under Ethernet cables, Wi-Fi routers, and inexplicably-vague manuals. The good news is I finally bit the bullet and installed OpenWRT a try on our router; I’m already kicking myself it too me this long.

I decided to give a new hotspot a quick test, but macOS would have none of it:

This is a fantastic feature. If a malicious actor is man-in-the-middling, or otherwise futzing around with networking gear, this should give any client pause. There wouldn’t be any practical reason a target network would downgrade its security. I don’t use Wi-Fi on my FreeBSD boxes, but now I’m intrigued to try the same experiment on those.

I would have posted about a Wi-Fi network called Tohsaka on Tumblr, but they would have just flagged the post as adult material, as they did with this cute one by @Keyyui:

Robyn D shared this article by Charlotte Riley in the New Statesman:

[I]f you are a woman, you find yourself constantly dodging. Side-stepping men who are walking in your direction; being wiped out by a wheely suitcase dragged by a be-suited man; moving to the side to let faster men move past you; or just pausing to let men bustle in front of you onto the train, or into the lift, or onto the escalator, and on with their busy lives, to their important jobs.

This sounds thoroughly aggravating and easily believable, because also it happens to me. Constantly. I think it’s a power play: women, and perhaps meeker or more effeminate gentleman such as myself, are perceived as submissive or less important, so we’re ripe for trampling on.

Clara and I started laughing and pointing it out to each other when it happens while we’re walking together. There is the occasional woman who demands we clear the way for her large bags of designer fashion, but it’s generally guys.

One thing I have going for me that perhaps fewer women have is my height. I can peer ahead and spot snowplowers before they reach me so I can preemptively avoid. But why should it always be us, rather than both parties acknowledging each other and having simple courtesy?

Charlotte reminds us of the best coping mechanism:

But in my opinion, the best way to play the game is cheerfully. Smile! Make eye contact! But never, ever give way.

As my mum used to say, nasty people can’t stand kindness, because they don’t know how to handle it.

Wanted to keep up to date with Rubenerd from a third-party site? FeedReader has you covered! Emphasis added:

Never miss Rubenerd.com updates: Start reading the news feed of Rubenerd right away! This site’s feed is stale or rarely updated (or it might be broken for a reason) …

Wait, what?

… but you may check related news or Rubenerd.com popular pages instead. It is generally safe for browsing, so you may click any item to proceed to the site.

Generally safe may be the greatest words of praise even given to this blog. But how did I arrive at such a glowing endorsement?

Child safety: Excellent
Trust: Good
Privacy: Good

I pride myself on trust and privacy, but child safety must have come from all the tamper-proof door latches and pubkeys.

Gesundheit. I found an entirely different image while searching for an accompanying Simpsons screenshot on my Sydney cold snap post:

The caption reads like an Amazon item title:

Simpson Strong Tie Set Simpson Strong Tie Set Xp Data Sheet Simpson Strong Tie Set Xp Msds

The site was one of those fake blogs that harvest RSS feeds and repost the items as their own. I added a line to each item in my feed a few years ago telling people where posts originally came from. It didn’t stop the blatant reposting, but I got some free advertising.

I did a reverse image search and found Simpson Strong-Tie, which does look legitimate.

Sydney endured its hottest January on record last month. Other parts of Australia would understandably feel no sympathy, given they had it far worse. Adelaide, my favourite Australian city and the place I studied for a couple of years, hit 50 degrees. For my American friends, that’s 122 Fahrenheit.

I’ll concede one point in the SI versus Imperial debate: 122 sounds far more impressive. Not as much as setting your railways on fire to prevent damage during one of your worst blizzards of all time, but still.

Early February continued this trend, leading many of us to quote Homer Simpson in his darkest hour with “Marge, can you set the oven the cold?” It didn’t help that our office had a non-mechanical air conditioning issue around the same time, because of course it would!

And then this week happened. We cross live to the Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon team reporting from Chatswood:

I’m reducing the amount of politics I blog about here, in part because it doesn’t bring me any joy talking about the latest scandal, or how I think a policy or politician is heading us in the wrong direction. It also ignores the fact that, for the most part, the world is a better place than it’s ever been.

But when… </rant>

Update: No, you know what? Nuts to a journalist who wants to summarise my entire generation as being ignorant. I don’t want to soil my personal space with his screed, and I don’t want to waste your time reading it. A special shout out and thanks thanks to long-time reader Hales for this insight.

I've redacted the entire rest of this post. It’s likely already archived in a few places if you really want to look, but I wouldn’t bother.

Dave Lee had an interesting take on why Apple is rumoured to be releasing a 16-inch laptop: they’re in the United States and still inexplicably use imperial measurements like the inch and furlong. But the other reason: they’ve painted themselves into a thermal corner with the current MacBook Pro hardware design.

There’s precedent for this idea. Apple came out and said as much about their Mac Pro, and for similar reasons Dave discusses. Apple’s current laptops were designed with a strict thermal ceiling that looked reasonable with Intel and AMDs road maps a few years ago, like the Mac Pro and its dual GPUs. But the latest high-end crop will use far more power.

I’ll almost certainly be wrong about this, but I don’t think beefing up a laptop to let it dissipate more heat sounds like Apple. They’d rather sacrifice performance to achieve the best battery life, weight, and thinness. Whether you and I think that’s a good idea is another story.

I can’t remember where I read the factoid that Apple sells more laptops used as desktop replacements than iMacs and Mac Pros combined. By which I mean laptops that spent their lives plugged into to a desk and external display. From that vantage point, a beefy MacBook Pro with awesome performance would be a boon.

I’d give up a performance boost for a usable keyboard, mind. I’ve been using this 13" work MacBook Pro for a few months and I’m seriously contemplating carrying an external keyboard around to overcome the dull throbbing in my knuckles and finger joints. The butterfly key mechanism isn’t as much a bad keyboard as it is user hostile. Even my GPD Pocket feels better.

Anime fig collecting is a time-consuming hobby that sucks up your wallet, all your available free space, and is absolutely worth it. So much of our lives sit in digital realms, its nice to have physical anchors in the real world, even in this case it’s a cute character from a series or game we love.

(Admittedly Clara and I have had to pare back our collections since we started living in studio apartments and reducing our amount of stuff, but we still keep an eye open for fun new ones).

Good Smile Company is one of the better known manufacturers, perhaps most famous for their line of Nendoroids and Good Smile Racing merchandise. Now the evil geniuses are capitalising on the public perception that figs are getting too expensive with a new fig line:

POP UP PARADE is a new series of figures that are easy to collect with affordable prices and releases planned just four months after preorders begin! Each figure stands around 17-18cm in height and the series features a vast selection of characters from popular anime and game series, with many more to be added soon!

Their first one is virtual idol Hatsune Miku, understandable given how iconic she’s become over the years. Both this series, and this new fig, present severe challenges to our decluttering and limited living space.