Rubenerd

This post was written while stuck in a train tunnel between Sydney International Airport and Wolli Creek stations on Saturday. I had Arthur’s Theme in my head the whole time.

Kottke.org fills me with optimism for this medium. Aside from having as inscrutable a name as my own, he also still writes in his own personal space after all these years, long after others gave up and moved to the current social network hotness.

I had assumed those abandoned blogs were a failure of decentralisation; blogs could be written by anyone, anywhere as opposed to being in a silo like Facebook or Medium. But guest writer Tim Carmody makes a point at the end of this post I hadn’t considered:

… what was it that we wanted from the blogosphere in the first place? Was it a career? Was it just a place to write and be read by somebody, anybody? Was it a community? Maybe it began as one thing and turned into another. That’s OK! But I don’t think we can treat the blogosphere as a settled thing, when it was in fact never settled at all. Just as social media remains unsettled. Its fate has not been written yet. We’re the ones who’ll have to write it.

Blogging was an evolution of the personal home page, but it revolutionised it by lending structure and consistent nomenclature. We arranged discrete ideas into posts, sorted them by date, and added metadata like categories and tags. No matter what blog you read, you could grok it. I don’t think that change gets near enough recognition, save for narrow discussions on RSS.

This idea today has generally been expanded to mean a network site with dozens of writers and a ton of nasty tracking. But to Tim’s point, blogging doesn’t mean that to everyone.

Blogging to me was always a deeply personal thing: a way to express thoughts in short to medium form writing I find so much fun. I can’t honestly say people reading it was an ancillary concern; if it was I’d have a private diary. And I’ve had jobs directly because of what I write.

To others though, blogging was about community and engaging in discussion. So it’s understandable why they jumped ship to social networks; the very name for that type of service shows it’s a better fit. But there’s no reason blogs can’t capture this back; in some ways the rigid structure of sites like Facebook and Twitter are their biggest weakness as well as strength.

As Tim says, blogging’s fate hasn’t been written yet. I personally hope for a return to a federated approach to writing, linked together by metadata and ideas. I’m just not sure what it would look like yet.

Update: This post originally attributed the quoted article to Jason Kottke, not Tim Carmody. The one thing I have over Jason’s site is I’ve written all my own posts, consarnit!

Happy Sunday! How you going? Enjoying your breakfast roll with bacon and egg? Great, more power to you! Some of us are eating a similar roll, but with this great facon that this vegetarian company makes.

Unfortunately, this is often perceived as an affront. Or worse, it results in people asking why one would bother. I’ve maintained these deliberately obtuse people have all the facts to know why a vegetarian or pescetarian may eat fake meat, but the question keeps coming up.

So for those who are still puzzled, here are some reasons to choose from. Some people…

• eat what they want to eat;
• don’t/can’t eat meat, but they can eat mock meat;
• used to eat meat and miss the taste;
• still want to engage in social activities like BBQs;
• use mock meat as a stepping stone to wean off eating meat;
• don’t eat real meat over environmental or ethical concerns;
• think mock meat tastes delicious.

There are really only two responses to this. Some mock meat is so heavily processed that it’s unhealthy; but there are plenty of healthy ones. And certain Buddhist traditions tolerate mock meat but claim they detract from what they see as a moral life; this stance does not present a moral issue for me.

I hope that clears up any confusion. Further inquiries will result in Merlin Mann’s “yeah, well why am I not a potted fern?” response.

Update 2021: I’ve taken down fewer than twenty posts out of more than seven thousand in this blog’s history, and posts about this guy are some of them. MBMBaM’s tweet put it best explaining why, though I also have personal reasons. Thanks for understanding.

Interrobangs: a question mark with an exclamation mark, merged together into a single cohesive unit, saving previous horizontal screen real estate and characters. I’m trying to bring them back, having failed many times before. Yes Vim spell checker, they’re called interrobangs, why aren’t you aware of that‽

Speaking of bringing things back and saving characters — how’s that for a segue — the evil geniuses at Gainax are releasing a figure of fan favourite Yoko Littner from the twelve-year old science fiction epic Gurren Lagann. And she’s adorable:

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (天元突破グレンラガン) was, and is, one of the greatest modern anime series of all time. I use the term modern to distinguish it from the 1990s and earlier anime that had a very different feel and tone to them. People watching anime today would already likely consider it old and dismiss it, which would be a crying shame.

Kamina and Nia Teppelin were my favourite characters, but Yoko also kicked arse. She was the straight-shooting muscle, but also had a caring side that leant Simon strength after a certain event. I blogged about it back in 2011.

She’s sculpted by ATOMIC-BOM SUZU to resemble the cover page of Yoko’s photo collection book, according to her AmiAmi description. I think they’re referring to this:

If I had any criticism, it’s that its not Nia Teppelin instead (cough), and that she looks more mature in her art. I know cute sells, but I’d be keen seeing more grown up versions of characters from older series as well. Gurren Lagann would be a prime candidate for this given the series’ second arc.

She’s available for pre-order now, and will be shipped in June 2019. If only my studio apartment shelves could accommodate. Sorry Yoko, but my Japanese NCC-1701-D took up that last bit of space.

A certain chat application changed their logo to include a negative space swastika, with an understandably mixed reaction from the public.

Some employ the ignorance is bliss defence by claiming they can’t see it. Others that spiritual practices have used the symbol for thousands of years, obtusely ignoring the fact this logo was designed in 2019 with full knowledge of what it means to most of their clients.

I’m not even Internet Outraged, I’m just surprised an entire team of talented designers could have overlooked it. It’s London 2012 all over again.

People have asked how I downloaded FTP mirrors I mentioned on the archived hat episode, especially in light of recent news.

There are so many tools you can use, but wget makes it simple:

$ wget -m ftp://site.tld/folder/

And If you need authentication:

$ wget -m ftp://host.tld/folder/ --user=username --password=password

There are tools that will let you do batch downloads, but wget works sequentially on one file at a time. I think that’s a reasonable balance between getting the material and respecting the target site’s bandwidth.

As I said on that show, I’m realising that if you treasure something online, you need to preserve it yourself. Or if you’re allowed to, send it to the Internet Archive.

IBM and Red Hat’s boards have approved the buyout plans they both announced last year. Red Hat included some assurances nine paragraphs into their press release:

… IBM will remain committed to Red Hat’s open governance, open source contributions, participation in the open source community and development model, and fostering its widespread developer ecosystem. In addition, IBM and Red Hat will remain committed to the continued freedom of open source.

And some nothing-will-change:

… Red Hat will join IBM’s Hybrid Cloud team as a distinct unit, preserving the independence and neutrality of Red Hat’s open source development heritage and commitment, current product portfolio and go-to-market strategy, and unique development culture. Red Hat will continue to be led by Jim Whitehurst and Red Hat’s current management team. Jim Whitehurst also will join IBM’s senior management team and report to Ginni Rometty. IBM intends to maintain Red Hat’s headquarters, facilities, brands and practices.

We’ll see how long that remains the case. The hero image from the press release already has a twilight road fading into the darkness.

I remember reading years ago BenQ chose purple because it was a combination of the red in Compaq, and the blue in many other IT companies. Maybe this deal will need to be an Indigo Hat. No wait, that’d be the XFS team’s name.

Jokes aside, this is a huge change. It’ll be interesting to see how the industry responds and adapts now that the news is official. As I said the first time, I’ll be interested to see how AIX plays into this, among many other things.

I’m also feeling a bit melancholic with it all. Red Hat Linux was the first *nix I ever bought in a retail carton, from Challenger in Funan Centre. I felt like I was using the future when booting with those CDs. That distro no longer exists, the place I bought was closed down and gutted, and now the company is being absorbed.

I suppose that’s the march of progress. In the words of that mis-attributed Ghandi quote in Red Hat’s reception: First they ignore you; Then they laugh at you; Then they fight you; Then you win they buy you.

I wrote earlier in the week that I was relieved seeing the Internet being used to disseminate facts, especially in light of malicious actors who most certainly want to muddy the waters and divide us. I think just as large an issue is how joyless social networks are rapidly becoming. An informed populace is critical, but the unrelenting barrage of bad news and snark is soul-crushing.

So I loved that this perfect 10 routine by UCLA student Katelyn Ohashi was briefly one of the trending topics on Twitter. She was so friggen cool! Even if you know little about gymnastics beyond the fact they do seemingly impossible acrobatics, you need to check this out.

As of posting this, she’s still #19 on YouTube; not a small feat itself.

Alongside badminton—the national sport of Singapore—gymnastics were about the only aspect of school sport I didn’t entirely suck at. I still have huge respect for people who can pull off one of these moves, let alone entire routines like that, and with such personality and good humour. I think this frame captured it best.

I’ve also decided to share more stuff like this that makes me smile. To co-opt a prase from the religiously-inclined, heaven knows we need it.

When did politicians and news outlets start referring to Australians as the Australian people? And why? Either this is a new trend, or my defences have worn down over time and it’s starting to grate.

I never heard a politician back in my adopted home saying the Singapore people or the Singaporean people. They would say Singaporeans: short, sweet, and to the point.

Whenever I hear someone say the Australian people, I tend to tune out because I know the next few sentences are going to be a long-winded speech charged with political gobbledygook. It’s a crutch, like mumbling and trailing sentences that seemingly…

The Free Lossless Audio Codec is supremely useful for archiving audio. You can compress audio using the flac tool, surprising though it may seem. This will compress it to the best size:

$ flac --best $SOURCE

But what if it can’t read the source? I’m trying really hard to avoid making one of my bad Tabasco puns I would have worked to death even a couple of years ago.

I previously batch-processed audio to aiff or wav first before feeding them in, before realising FFmpeg can transcode to flac in one step. And today I learned you can set an equivalent compression level:

$ ffmpeg -i $SOURCE -q:a flac -compression_level 12 $OUT.flac

I haven’t tested this on avconv, but I assume the same command would work.