Rubenerd

The Overnightscape Central is a fun weekly podcast hosted by the illustrious PQ Ribber. Hosts and listeners of The Overnightscape Underground participate in a topic each week, and you’re welcome to join.

02:08:42 – Dave in Wisconsin!! Doc Sleaze!! Frank Edward Nora!! Rubenerd!! Another montage/round-table pseudo-discussion in duelling monologues!! PQ Ribber is your host and producer!

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Have some things I’ve heard in the last five minutes, as I sit here beveraging this coffee. I’m making beverage a verb, try and stop me.

• I don’t have cash, I’m a millenial!
• Not the lanky one, the odd one.
• … it’s the same drink except for all that stuff.
• Don’t you have anything carbonated?

For reasons that were not entirely my fault, my beloved IBM Model M4 compact keyboard bit the dust late last year. It was smaller, quieter, and arguably less tactile than my Model M, but it was also two-tone beige and matched my computer so well. eBay has more, but they’ve gone up in price steeply since I bought this a decade ago.

So I’m looking for alternatives, and Dan Benjamin posted his handsome Vortex Race 3. It has the same two-tone beige colour, but I can get it with Cherry MX Clear switches. They’re no Topres, but this board’s interface could be used with a USB-PS/2 adaptor, which means I can use my PS/2 to AT adaptor for this vintage machine. Maybe.

It doesn’t have chintzy coloured LEDs, and has the all-important insert, delete, home, end, pig up and pig down keys which are important for DOS and other older OSs. A colleague noted the escape key doesn’t look standard, but given I’m buying it in part given it’s two-tone beige, I doubt I’d be replacing them anytime soon.

I might grab one when we’re back in Akihabara this year, assuming the Australian Dollar hasn’t slipped further in the interim.

The SortedFood gents had some great sandwich filling recipes which Clara and I are going to try this week. This is their tuna mayo sandwich filling:

• 1 stick celery
• 1 160g tin tuna, in spring water
• 4 tablespoons mayonnaise
• 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice
• 1 teaspoon lemon zest
• 1 tablespoon salted butter, softened
• 4 slices soft wholemeal bread
• 1 handful watercress; I’m going to try alfalfa as well

And their egg mayo sandwich:

• 4 eggs
• 2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
• 3 tablespoons mayonnaise
• A pinch of cayenne pepper; I’m going to try paprika
• 1/2 teaspoon malt vinegar
• 2 tablespoons watercress
• 1 tablespoon salted butter

The celery and cayenne pepper look like the standout secondary ingredients. My sandwich fillings have tended towards the bland side. Nobody made them like my mum or dad could.

Matt O’Sullivan wrote this for the Sydney Morning Herald this morning, having received material from a state government freedom of information request:

Peak-hour delays due to Sydney Trains’ fleet surged by 41 per cent in the six months to June, compared with the same period a year earlier.

I can believe it. While he attributed the issues to reliance on older rail stock, that number popped up again in an article he wrote in 2017:

Some 41 per cent of trains passing through Central Station during the morning rush hour in March were overcrowded, compared with 25 per cent six months earlier.

Passengers begin to suffer from overcrowding when trains have loads of 135 per cent, which is the benchmark used by transport officials.

This is what underinvestment looks like.

Clara and I are halfway through Double Decker! Doug and Kirill and it’s already one of our new favourite series. The Japanese/Western style harkens back to Tiger and Bunny that many of the staff also produced. Only this time the art, costumes, and situations are even more colourful and fabulous.

I’ll save my review, but in the meantime I loved Max’s apartment. If I weren’t hellbent on going minimal, I’d want this.

The Hugo static site generator creates four types of RSS feeds, for:

1. the whole site
2. each section, such as posts and pages
3. each taxonomy, such as categories and tags
4. each taxonomy value, such as the weeb tag

You can disable all of them, but you can’t pick and choose. I’m not a Go developer, but if I were it’d be the #1 feature I’d request and help build.

I wanted feeds for my root site and for categories, but I didn’t want for tags. My blog is almost old enough to be a learner driver, so has accumulated thousands of tags, which means as many superfluous RSS feeds.

My terrible hack to spare CPU cycles is creating an empty template for the taxonomies I don’t want feeds for:

$ touch ./layouts/taxonomy/tags.xml

Hugo’s tag feeds will now be empty, save for an XML header. Then you can edit your web server configuration to 404 on these.

This one trick shaves between 10-15% off my build times.

TigerVNC is by far my favourite cross-platform VNC client. Others try to shoehorn all these extra features, but TigerVNC presents you with a connection dialog. It’s not Retina/HiDPI, but nothing I’m connecting to is anyway.

But it stopped loading starting with macOS 10.14 Mojave. I tried the latest stable and nightly builds on two separate Macs, and both times the icon for the application would bounce once, then quit. Launching from the Terminal worked.

I filed a bug report, and one of the developers suggested I remove my ~/.vnc folder. I didn’t think to move that folder instead so I could check what was causing the problem.

Anyway, it worked!

This was from @NyadolNyuon:

I was once given useful advice: never let anyone scare you into silence.

I forgot that one, too many times. My mum had a corollary: never give the bastards the satisfaction of knowing they’ve got to you. They’re not absolutes, and are often easier said than done, but I think they help.

Update: I misspelled life as live in the URL for this post. I like it.

I’ve been trialling Ghost, and been impressed by its clean design. I’ve got it working nicely in a set of FreeBSD jails, with nginx proxying the requests and fixing up some of the headers, and Varnish for caching.

All was working great until I started using its editor. The delayed response time between typing a key and having it register was slight but instantly perceptible. I typed the same sentence in Vim, and a rich text fields in Tumblr and MediaWiki, and text appeared instantly.

It was so bad, I felt like I needed to pipe this visual editor through mosh.

I fully concede I’m in the minority if my eyes can perceive OLED screens refereshing, and can be irritated by JS-induced visual lag in Ghost, Visual Studio Code, Atom, and other memory abominations. It’s odd having accessibility concerns for a sense that’s apparently better.

I’m also open to the possibility there’s something about my client setup. Maybe there’s a Firefox plugin playing up. I have everything scripted with Ansible now in case I want to reproduce the environment and give it another try.

So I’m going back to the drawing board, and optimising my Hugo pipeline instead. Vim is such a better editor anyway, all it needs is some macros or scripts for automating some basic blog operations. That might be a fun project itself.