Rubenerd

Speaking of locomotives, you’ve still got half a day to buy Train Simulator at a steep discount, and a bunch of the routes and rolling stock. The game is incredibly expansive, so sales are a great way to build up a new library.

These are some of my favourite routes that are on special:

• Marias Pass: My favourite line from the original Microsoft Train Simulator is even better here. Such an amazing mix of landscapes from flatlanes and lakes to hilly pine forests. I’ve joked that Ruben in an alternate timeline became a recluse in the Montana highlands near Whitefish; Clara and I will travel on the Empire Builder to get there one day!

• Tadami Line: the most beautiful route I’ve tried, though you need a good GPU to render all that detail with the flowers and trees! While we can’t go to Japan, we may as well explore it here.

• Arosa Line: this Swiss route is challenging and beautiful, with cute trains and steep, winding curves leading to charming Swiss stations. I’d say its the most unique route in the game.

• Stevens Pass: another stunning route, this time in the Cascade Mountains in Washington State in the US. I swear this route has done more to alleviate my anxiety than almost anything else.

And an honourable mention with caveats:

• Northeast Corridor: New York to Philadelphia: this is fun nostalgia trip, especially on the Acela consists that Clara and I were lucky to experience before the pandemic. Hi Frank, Denise, Esther, and Jim! Alas, it has a bunch of bugs which can get frustrating when doing some of the scenarios.

(Full disclosure, Dovetail did not pay for this post!)

My second-favourite railway after the LNER, the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe in the northwest United States, has an online store that accepts international railfans. This is potentially a dangerous discovery.

I’m a fan of drinkware, in particular this orange insulated stainless steel camper mug and classic Burlington Northern mug. This power bank in the shape of one of their locomotives is both adorable and practical.

But I think I’d have to get this 40 cm wall-mounted sign for no reason whatsoever. That would look handsome in our kitchen.

When building a game machine, the conventional wisdom is to allocate as much money as you can to your graphics card over your CPU, motherboard, and memory. It’s the part of the system that will have the biggest impact to the performance you care about.

I took that to heart perhaps a little too much. Rather than replace the parts in my 2016 sixth-gen Skylake machine, in February I threw all my money at an RTX 3070 graphics card, and swapped out the previous GTX 970. Turns out this was specularly bad timing, given the precipitous drop in GPU prices over the last month, but that was for another post!

The difference was stark, even with half-decade old hardware! Minecraft at 4K went from “only enable shaders for screenshots” to almost playable at 50 FPS. Save for some long chunk loading times when the game initially started, I was surprised at how playable it was.

Last week Clara surprised me with some Ryzen parts for my birthday, including an AMD Ryzen 5600x CPU, an Asus ROG Strix X570-I board, 16 GiB Corsair 3600 DIMMs for dual-channel, and matching CoolerMaster NR200P mini-ITX cases in teal and pink! Have I told you she knows me shockingly well?

We spent the day upgrading yesterday, along with building her new machine. It was a ton of fun, and I was proud that she was able to assemble something for the first time. Build photos and process will be in another post.

Booting it into Kubuntu, I fired up Minecraft and enabled OptiFine and the Complementary shaders at ultra settings. The game loaded almost instantly, including all the chunks around me. I walked around in some of our relaxing parks, and it comfortably sat at almost 70 FPS at 4K. On the other side, jumping through nether portals also went from waiting ~20 seconds to 5. Using our over-engineered nether Shinkansen system is now tenable again!

Minecraft is a creaky, unoptimised game, but OptiFine and this new hardware brute forces it so well on this one screen I have space for. I know shooting for 4K is a bit silly, but I need it for my WFH setup, so to be able to swap the input to this game system helps.

I suspect it’s less to do with the CPU here and more the memory bandwidth for loading assets. Minecraft isn’t that multithreaded either, so the 5600x’s fewer cores with higher burst performance might run cooler and work better too.

There are plenty of other sites online where you can get detailed benchmarks; this was more a post to express my joy at this build, and to remind people that while GPUs are the most important part of a build, don’t skimp too much on the other parts if you can. You can definitely stagger them though so you’re not spending too much at once.

Given my breathless excitement over Wave Dreamtech’s Ayanami Rei last year, I was also surprised and happy to see her getting the Pop Up Parade treatment. This is Good Smile Company’s “affordable” line of figures designed to bring the hobby into the realm of mere mortals, not just those who can afford hundreds of dollars for statues of their favourite characters.

Her Rebuild of Evangelion hair has to be her most notable feature. You can tell the level of detail isn’t at the level of those gold-pressed latinum versions from premium fig manufacturers, but the colouring, shading and styling are still there. Her reserved pose looks natural and in keeping with her character, and her chest passes my sister’s “uncomfortable water balloon” test. The details of her white plugsuit are also all there, though we’d have to see how well that carries through to the final release (you can’t always trust initial press photos).

If I had one minor quibble, it’d be that I think her face is a bit flat. Head on it she looks fine, but from the side it’s a bit more obvious. I’ve noticed this trend on anime figs of late, especially for more moe moe characters. Compared to her Wave Dreamtech rendition, she doesn’t look quite as mature.

She’s up for preorder now in the usual places. My precious few sagging shelves will be abstaining, but I’m happy that fans of the franchise now have a more affordable version.

This seems like a big occasion. I bought a few stacks of Aeropress filter paper right when the Covid pandemic hit Australia in early 2022, and today I used the last one. I’d better order some more!

I’d loved the Aeropress before, but it’s definitely proved itself over the last couple of years. I’ve pulled between one and four cups of encouragement juice through it every day for Clara and myself, which has to be thousands by now.

Save for a few occasions where I didn’t put the filter paper in properly and had it explode tasty beverage across the counter, it’s been one of the few reliable, stedfast things in my life over this time. Between that and my budget K-Mart grinder, every coffee I’ve made has been delicious. Like precious few things, it hits the marketing triangle of good, easy, and affordable.

I’m on a bender to get rid of junk I don’t need, but recently I’ve been flipping this thought process into what I do need to the exclusion of other things. The Aeropress would not only be on that latter list, but I’d go as far as to 3D frame it when its no longer tenable to use. It was one of the things that saved us during lockdowns, and for that I’m grateful.

You know how Arthur C. Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic? I’m staring to think we assume there’s more magic going on in the world than there really is.

But let’s start with the title. You’ve probably heard the phrase Mechanical Turk before, but did you know it was a real device? As in, it physically existed, though its workings were a glorified magic trick. Wikipedia summarises:

The Turk, also known as the Mechanical Turk or Automaton Chess Player (German: Schachtürke, “chess Turk”; Hungarian: A Török), was a fake chess-playing machine constructed in the late 18th century. From 1770 until its destruction by fire in 1854 it was exhibited by various owners as an automaton, though it was eventually revealed to be an elaborate hoax.

This is why it’s such a powerful metaphor. A Mechanical Turk is a physical system that appears superficially automated, but its operation requires active human involvement. Mechanical processes gave way to electrical relays and switches, then to the electronics upon which you’re reading this meandering post now, but the principle remains the same.

It’s always surprising, and a bit disarming, when you realise the extent of that human input in something. It’s like the cloak has come off, and you’re seeing it for what it really is. Doing so can challenge a lot of assumptions, especially if its outside your comfort zone or area of expertise.

I always talk about IT here, as if it’s where I work! But this extends even beyond databases, load balancers, application servers, and networks. Tom Nicolas explained one such example in his rebuttal of Veritasium’s self-driving car video, where autopilot landing was made to appear more automated than it was:

Derek: The pilots didn’t [land the plane]. It was a Cat III Autoland procedure: the plane just came in and landed itself essentially.

Tom: … Autoland involves a lot of human input. There are several videos on YouTube of pilots flying the exact same model of plane … and watching them, one finds it to be an incredibly involved process. They’re not just monitoring the landing either; pilots are actively engaged in adjusting the speed of the aircraft, the flaps, the landing gear, and much more.

Tom indirectly touches on two points here, there’s proactive (monitoring) and reactive (live adjustments) human input in automated systems. The more you look into this, the more you realise every single industry has it.

Distant Signal’s excellent video about railway crossing signals show that while circuits themselves are bridged by the automated movement of trains, humans are still involved in monitoring certain intersections, and they’re predicated on trains operating at the correct and expected speeds. A simple switch circuit will not lower the boom gates in time for a speeding train, for example.

Behind every automated system, there are real people on-call to jump in and take over or alert people in the event of something going awry. This could be triggered by a monitoring system (ideally), or from customers complaining they can’t access something! And this doesn’t even account for ongoing maintenance and upkeep, for which even more humans are required.

Chances are, something you think is entirely automated, isn’t.

Among all the senseless carnage and destruction wrought by Putin’s illegal and unjustified invasion of Ukraine, we also lost one of aviations most iconic aircraft. Andrew Curran reported for Simple Flying:

Antonov is asking for donations to get the An-225 into the air again. The world’s biggest plane was destroyed in the early days of the Ukraine invasion. Until now, Antonov has remained relatively circumspect about its flagship aircraft. But late on Thursday, Antonov CEO Sergii Bychkov acknowledged the An-225’s destruction while kickstarting a campaign to revive the plane.

“… We propose to establish the International Fund for the revival of the transport aircraft An-225.”

I’m absolutely down for this. The An-225 had carved out a special niche in commercial aviation, and was a continued showcase of Ukrainian engineering excellence.

It does raise the larger question of rebuilding. We should confiscate the wealth of Putin’s cronies, and direct it to humanitarian aid and projects like this.

CDE was a bit before my time dabbling in UNIX, but I’ve always loved that chiselled Motif aesthetic. Remember when Xfce was billed as CDE-like, and had that bottom panel configured in a similar way?

But I digress. I wanted to give a shoutout to /u/paprok getting CDE running on contemporary NetBSD, which I might have to try on my vintage builds!

As an aside, is a phrase with three words. I subscribe to various BSD subreddits in The Old Reader using RSS feeds, so I don’t have to go to the site directly.

• https://www.reddit.com/r/FreeBSD/.rss?sort=new
• https://www.reddit.com/r/NetBSD/.rss?sort=new
• https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBSD/.rss?sort=new

Given how much of my life I spend brewing in, lifting, drinking from, and washing these aqueous comestible conveyances, I thought it’d be fun to share some of them here, and a bit of the history behind them.

We start this inagurel… inaugural… ina… first episode with our most recent purchase. This black mug comes from Apothecary Coffee near where we live in Chatswood, pictured with Darjeeling from Girls und Panzer holding her own namesake beverage, an Adelaide Starbucks mug we used as a flowerpot, and my Ryzen CoolerMaster NR200P computer case. Reviews for all of these are pending, especially the crockery.

Apothecary Coffee is one of my new favourite places. In Adelaide I practically lived in the Boatdeck Café in Mawson Lakes, and in Singapore I had the Viennese Coffee House and a few Coffee Bean and Tea Leafs. Apothecary Coffee has reached that level for me in Sydney. Their batch brew coffee is exquisite, the staff are friendly, and I love the atmosphere.

The coffee shop is situated on the commercial side of Chatswood, so they were hit especially hard by Covid and remote work. Clara and I would often walk down there and be their only customers for upwards of an hour at a time. We started buying their swag to support them, but they turned out to be great purchases in their own right. Like this mug!

It’s a solid device with thick walls, a generous handle, and is machine washable. My only criticism is the shiny black surface is almost impossible to photograph without reflections obscuring the logo. Fortunately, this does not affect its hot beverage capacity, and I can only assume the colour’s light absorption characteristics help to keep contained beverages hot. That’s how that works, right?

There’s something bittersweet about finding an abandoned blog. They’re windows into another time like a news article, but personal. So many were started in the golden age of blogging in the mid-2000s, replete with that header-sidebar-content design that I miss. There’s also the question about why so many of them stopped, and why a precious few kept going.

I may or may not archive their posts into a local WordPress install for exploring at a later date. Copyright prevents me from republishing this amalgamated site, even if I doubt their original authors would mind, care, or even remember.

This morning I found Cori’s parenthetical, which ran from October 2005 to May 2012, almost a decade ago. He had active conversations with Dave Winer back in the day about RSS and OPML, though it was his comment about a flyer his wife received that piqued my interest:

No where on this document does it say who printed it or who’s handing it out. Who are these people? Do they have an interest in this company aside from concerns for the safety of the community? maybe they work for a company that lost the bid? Or maybe there’s a disgruntled ex-employee behind it all. Taken as a sum, the anonymity of the source of the flyer and the alarmist language and graphics make me pretty much have to dismiss the whole thing.

I used to get similar flyers walking around Sydney. Some were carefully written and presented, but almost all had 1990s-era WordArt, default fonts, and generous amounts of spelling mistakes. I always wondered why people put so little effort into the design; surely they must know people dismiss their message out of hand when they look like that. I guess not!

Cori also gives food for thought on the scientific method, which journalists often fail to communicate in their research reporting:

[A]n experiment only fails if you approach it with the intent to prove a specific hypothesis. In the truest spirit of the scientific method this should never be the case – you undertake an experiment in order to form a hypothesis. If the experiment doesn’t support your conclusion then either your conclusion is incorrect, you have misinterpreted the data, or the experiment you designed isn’t testing what you thought it was. The experiment always does what it’s designed to do, and any failure is with the experimenter.