Rubenerd

This Hacker News thread response was like a flash of lightning:

chess44 7 hours ago [-]

What if I don’t want to be who I am and I want to change myself?

Apparently I am a very feminine man and I don’t want to be like this at all. I can’t stand how people treat me. When I am being myself I’d much rather not socialize at all than try to meet people.

This was me for the longest time, and I’d be lying if I said if that aspect of myself still didn’t bother me a bit now.

I invariably preferred female-dominated activities in high school, and only chose the male ones out of peer pressure. I far preferred gymastics over the contact sports that made my clothes muddy and gross. The Sims was far more fun than any first person shooter. Most of my best friends in primary school were girls, until hormones and shyness kicked in; I just felt like I had more in common with their interests and thinking.

This all sounds incredibly sexist now, and there are plenty of women who’d prefer the so-called male versions of activities above. But the pressure to conform and be into those guy things in school was huge, lest you be called a wuss or a homosexual slur. Because, naturally, exhibiting traditionally feminie traits is an affront to masculinity. And this thinking still exists in the real world to an extent.

The reason I’m posting this on my blog as opposed to replying under my HN pseudonym is I don’t have any concrete advice, other than the stereotypical be yourself. Because trying to be someone else is soul crushing.

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.

01:50:58 – Rubenerd, Doc Sleaze and Frank Edward Nora join your host, PQ Ribber in a friendly, informative, rampley look at Cathode Characters!

You can view this episode on the Underground, listen to it here, and subscribe with this feed in your podcast client.

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

31:36 – An homage to The Overnightscape episode Mother’s New Mineral Dream. Talking about white walls everywhere in new buildings, 1970s era shopping malls, struggles with junk, Staten Island, and personally generated media. Because you can’t take it with you. Cover art of the Metropolitan Museum of Art taken from Clara's and my trip to NYC in 2016.

Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released December 2018 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts.

Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.

The first thing I do with any new external keyboard, or new Mac, is set modifier keys. But with this new MacBook with its godawful Touchbar, remapping Caps Lock to Escape is a criticial necessity.

Create a new blank file with 1.44 MiB:

$ dcfldd if=/dev/zero of=floppy.img bs=512 count=2880

Attach the disk image, but don’t mount it:

$ hdiutil attach -nomount floppy.img
==> /dev/disk2

You’ll get a device identifier back. After that, it’s the same as FreeBSD to create a FAT volume:

$ newfs_msdos /dev/disk2
==> /dev/disk2: 2829 sectors in 2829 FAT12 clusters \
==> (512 bytes/cluster) bps=512 spc=1 res=1 nft=2 \
==> rde=512 sec=2880 mid=0xf0 spf=9 spt=32 hds=16 hid=0 drv=0x00

Or you can use hdiutil:

$ diskutil eraseVolume MS-DOS "LABEL" /dev/disk2

And then you can use it in your VM, or however else you need.

Last week I commented on the Australian government’s proposed draconian encryption backdoors. The agencies tasked with soliciting industry feedback should return a single comment: break encryption, and you’ll break the economy, to say nothing of civil liberties.

Faced with irritating things like mathematical certainty, facts, and a reluctant opposition party, what is a politician to do? It’s so laughably predictable I feel it’s an insult to your intelligence even quoting it. As Siobhan Kenna reported:

[Finance minster Mathias] Cormann told Sky News on Sunday that Labor is deliberately playing games with the proposed laws, which aim to give Australian security and police agencies the power to access encrypted communications on services like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Viber.

Oh, but it gets much better.

“To think that Labor would want terrorists to able to communicate with each other… I think that Labor are using excuses.”

This is gutter politics emblematic of desperation. When you’re terminal in the polls, whip up unjustified fear and anger.

Apple’s T2 Security Chip Security Overview notes on their T2 security chip had this pragmatic gem that made me smile:

All Mac portables with the Apple T2 Security Chip feature a hardware disconnect that ensures that the microphone is disabled whenever the lid is closed. This disconnect is implemented in hardware alone, and therefore prevents any software, even with root or kernel privileges in macOS, and even the software on the T2 chip, from engaging the microphone when the lid is closed. (The camera is not disconnected in hardware because its field of view is completely obstructed with the lid closed.)

Wow it’s a scorcher outside. No wonder this Microserver’s fan is running like crazy. But I digress; I saw this Xorg error on a FreeBSD Gen8 HP Microserver with a low profile PCI-E card:

(!!) More than one possible primary device found

As the error suggests, Xorg is detecting multiple cards. One way is to configure xorg.conf manually, or xorg.conf.d files for each card. I don’t use the onboard Matrox VGA, so I just disable it.

Reboot the Microserver and hit F9 when prompted. Then choose Advanced Options, then Video Options, and choose Optional Video Primary, Embedded Video Disabled, as this pseudo-screengrab shows:

ROM-Based Setup Utility, Version 3.00 ...
   
╔══╔════════════════════════════════════╗
║Sy║Advanced System ROM Options         ║
║PC║Video Options                       ║
║PC║Power Supply Requirements Override  ║
║PC║Thermal Configuration               ║
║St║S╔════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║Bo║A║Optional Video Primary, Embedded Video Disabled ║
║Da║D║Optional Video Primary, Embedded Video Secondary║
║Se║A║Embedded Video Primary, Optional Video Secondary║
║Se╚═╚════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
║BIOS Serial Console & EMS ║
║Server Asset Text         ║
║Advanced Options          ║
║System Default Options    ║
║Utility Language          ║
╚══════════════════════════╝

Xorg should now start with startx, assuming you have the drivers configured or available for that PCI-E card.

It’s another Yuletide season! And it reminds me of this desktop background by Karafuru Sekai Designs of everyone’s favourite moe microwave time travelling scientists I started using a decade ago. That was a long sentence, unlike this one.

In 2018 I had to waifu2x it to make it fit my MacBook Pro, but it still works. I wonder how many more years it’ll stick around?

I’ve yet to upgrade to VMware Fusion 11 from 10, but I’ve been bitten by the all-too-familiar greyed out network options bug again. If you go to configure the NIC for a VM, you’re presented with this quandary:

You can’t change to Bridged Networking at all, even if you uncheck and recheck Connect Network Adaptor, or remove the NIC and add it again.

The GUI semi-workaround is the same for whenever this happens. When the VM is running, click the Virtual Machine menu, hover over Network Adaptor, and choose your desired setting.

schmitgreg over on the VMware Communities forum also suggests some file removals to restore this functionality, which I haven’t tried yet.

I was one of the beta testers for the original Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion back in the day. The former seemed more polished, but I ended up buying Fusion for its FreeBSD support and better compatibility with other VMware systems for work. A little birdie at AsiaBSDCon in Tokyo joked that a surprising amout of bhyve was written on Fusion.

But these niggling issues do keep cropping up, a decade later.