Rubenerd

I’m seeing a lot of renewed interest in FreeBSD from GNU/Linux people. This is encouraging! You should be familiar with much of the userland, but there are a few differences, which I hope this new post series will help with.

lspsi is a common tool for listing PCI devices, as the name may suggest. For example, in a Xen domU:

00:02.0 Unassigned class [ff80]: XenSource, Inc. Xen Platform Device (rev 01)
00:03.0 VGA compatible controller: Cirrus Logic GD 5446 (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])

The broad equivilent is pciconf -lv:

xenpci0@pci0:0:2:0:	class=0xff8000 card=0x00015853 chip=0x00015853 rev=0x01 hdr=0x00
    vendor     = 'XenSource, Inc.'
    device     = 'Xen Platform Device'
vgapci0@pci0:0:3:0:	class=0x030000 card=0x11001af4 chip=0x00b81013 rev=0x00 hdr=0x00
    vendor     = 'Cirrus Logic'
    device     = 'GD 5446'
    class      = display
    subclass   = VGA

Note the subtle differences with the PCI addresses, which you’ll need to tweak your scripts for if you parse them.

While Australia was obsessing over its yearly disgusting horse race, and the rest of the world was looking at the US midterms, New Caledonia voted on its independence. Stephen Dziedzic filed this report with the ABC:

Early results indicate more than 60 per cent of voters in the territory have cast their ballot in favour of staying with France.

In a televised address from Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron said a majority of voters chose to remain part of France and he pledged “there is no other path than that of dialogue” on the future of New Caledonia.

France 24 reported pro-independence voters was buoyed by the result:

Leaders of the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Movement (FLNKS) hailed the narrow vote as a step closer to breaking free of France. Under a 1998 deal called the Nouméa Accord to devolve powers to the territory, two further referendums can be held by 2022.

New Caledonia is geographically close to Australia, and their economy is larger than New Zealand’s per capita; though its unevenly distributed. I’m surprised we don’t hear about them in Australian news more often.

Earlier this year Clara and I started Gintama again, mostly on account of not being able to remember where we got up to. There are a lot of episodes.

This evening’s trip down memory lane was the infamous episode where Gin and Katsura were drafted to work in a bar of a specific persuasion. They wore their makeup somewhat better than I would have, naturally on account of a certain amount of naturally wavy hair. And as always, Gin’s expression was perfect!

Not to be outdone, the episode reminded me of an anime figure we’d seen earlier this year of everyone’s favourire Shinsengumi. Megahouse did an online poll for who their next G.E.M. line addition should be last year, and a gender-swapped Souko Okita from the Dekobokko Arc decisively won.

OtakuMode has the details:

Name: G.E.M. Series Gintama Okita Sougo Seitenkan-hen
Price: 12,528 yen
Recommended age: 15+
Sculptor: Fukumoto Noritaka (IMC)
Colorist: Moriyama Nana (Revolve)
Size: 1/8th scale (approx. 190 mm tall)
Material: PVC/ABS
Country of Manufacture: China
Vendors: Premium Bandai
Reservations period: from Feb. 2, 2017 at 1 pm
Release date: July 2017
Manufacturer: Megahouse

I did a genderbend cosplay a few years ago. There aren’t too many types of media or social settings where that’s considered appropriate! I like that an outlet like that exists. But don’t read too much into that.

Let’s go out open my mind, let’s go sweet dream other side~ ♫

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.

1:44:45 – Join Doc Sleaze, Rubenerd, and Frank Edward Nora in this escape from the dull care of current events into a land of candy and fun!! PQ Ribber is your host!!

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

These look cool, and I love the name. Think of Raspberry Pis, but with a quad-core Intel Atom CPU instead of an ARM chip, and Arduino compatibility. It seems the world is moving towards the latter CPU architecture, but you can’t beat amd64 compatibility.

The site lists the following specifications:

Processor: Intel Cherry Trail Z8350 Quad Core 1.8GHz
Operation System: Pre-installed full edition of Windows 10
RAM: 2GB DDR3L
Storage: 32GB
GPU: Intel HD, 12 EUs @200-500 Mhz, single-channel RAM
USB: One USB 3.0 port and two USB 2.0 ports
Wireless: WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0
Arduino Co-processor: ATmega32u4
Video output: HDMI, MIPI-DSI, touch panel overlay connector
Ethernet: 100Mbps
GPIO:
• 6 GPIOs from Cherry Trail processor
• 20 GPIOs from Arduino Leonardo
• 6 Plug and play Gravity sensor connectors
Power: 5v/2A
Dimensions of Board: 88 * 70 mm/ 3.46 * 2.76 inches
Packing Size: 110 * 94 * 30 mm/4.33 * 3.70 * 1.18 inches
Weight: 55g net, 100g gross

I wonder if it’d run FreeBSD, or NetBSD?

It’s Music Monday again, that time of week where we take a look at a song I may be obsessing over.

Today we have this delightful song by the TECHNOBOYS PULCRAFT GREEN-FUND, with Hiroshi Takano (centre-right above) providing his unique vocals.

Everything about this is perfect. I loved the visual imagery, the shots of all the vintage electronic gear they’re using, the endless shots of Tokyo. I badly want to get back there as soon as humanly possible!

And of course, the music is great. Their smiling is infectious! The closest I can describe the sound is soft, happy electronica.

What a beautiful song :).

Christopher Scanlon asked in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Co-ed or single-sex schools? Are all-boys or all-girls schools still relevant?

No.

It’s so much easier to manage all of these silos!

2006’s smash hit Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu was the the series that got me back into anime. I thought I’d seen all of Ikeda Shouko’s art for Kyoto Animation, but her one for this 2007 Megami issue slipped under the radar.

Itsuki looks like he’s having so much fun being the ace of clubs! Then again, when was he ever not smiling? I think we could all learn something from that.

Signed, decade-long SOS団 member Ruben.

I was doing some more research into the new kit Apple released last week, and came across this worrying FAQ on Apple Insider:

The 13.3-inch LCD display on the new MacBook Air has a native resolution of 2,560-by-1,600 pixels, with scaled resolutions of 1680 x 1050, 1440 x 900, and 1024 x 640.

This means the MacBook Air doesn’t have native 2:1 Retina scaling. It should default to 1280×800, not 1400×900.

It’s not the first time Apple has done this, but it’s still a worrying trend. Benjamin Mayo summarised the issue for 9to5Mac when Apple did this on the MacBook Pro recently, emphasis added:

The images the GPU is creating cannot fit cleanly onto the native display resolution; they are not integer scalings of the native resolution.

macOS cheats a little by squeezing in the images into the screen pixel matrix using algorithm tricks to smooth out the effect. The consequence is that text is not perfectly sharp and things like 1px lines will never quite fit the pixel grid. Some UI elements will look a little fuzzy.

Perhaps they wanted to fudge the Air’s resolution to appear higher than it really is; we can only speculate. But the end result is the same: a MacBook Air bought today will have a blurrier screen.

Since the iPhone 4, Apple sought to define Retina as being 2:1 for pixel ratios in the same physical space. So a 2560×1600 display was 2x horizontally and 2x vertically of a 1280×800 display. It makes so much design work simpler, and screens automatically look crisper. Double the resolution of assets, and be done.

By comparison, Windows 10 and PC manufacturers default to 1.5:1 for high resolution display scaling. That’s to be expected for cheap hardware, but not for the calibre and attention to detail Apple is known for. Or at least, used to be.

I hope Apple Insider was wrong, and we get hardware with the correct scaled Retina resolution. Otherwise, it’d be hard for me to recommend buying this machine.