Rubenerd

This post was originally written in early October 2018

I haven’t been able to get into personal information management (PIM) software since Lotus Organiser in high school. That program was such a delight to use, even looking back on it now when it’s trendy to hate skeuomorphic interfaces. Lotus Agenda was before my time, but I’ve heard that was even better.

Thesedays the world largely organises itself around Outlook’s calendar, which for whatever reason I can’t get into. Ditto the otherwise excellent Lightning plugin for Thunderbird, or the KDE PIM suite, or Xfce’s Orage, or Apple Calendar and Reminders. My brain just doesn’t work like that.

For tasks, I realised I’d been using OmniFocus as a dumping ground, and had long since abandoned assigning Getting Things Done-style contexts. Almost everything I do is online and can be done anywhere — a blessing and a curse — other than groceries which I use plain lists for. It’s great software, but overkill for what I do.

I gave some thought to how I organise my day, and realised I have a couple of different rituals.

• I get to a coffee shop across the street from the office early in the morning to plan the day. This involves cracking open the laptop, checking my calendar for meetings, and converting emails to text file tasks where needed.

• During the day, I delete the completed tasks in the text file. Unfinished ones are rolled over into a new file for the next day.

So! It’s in this context — glaven — that I’m finally getting around to reviewing BusyCal for Mac.

What it does better than any other PIM I’ve used since Organiser is reconcile tasks and calendar events. The calendar sits in the middle, and your task list is docked to the side, organised by calendar and due date. Tasks appear inline in your calendar, and roll over to the next day if not completed. It sound so simple, but it’s a game-changer for me.

Outlook kinda does something similar, but its not the same. It’s also superficially similar to Apple’s Calendar, but again, not the same.

What makes this a killer app from the techical side is support for CalDav tasks, which Outlook for Mac can’t do. Shame on you if you don’t use Fastmail, but if you do, BusyCal works great with it.

In five words: it’s expensive, but worth it.

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.

02:43:52 – A bunch of great and unique Halloweeny ramplings and monologues from some of the best that there are!! Chad Bowers, Dave in Kentucky, Rubinerd, Frank Edward Nora, and Doc Sleaze all join PQ Ribber in this sincere attempt to captivate and amuse you!!

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

Victorian state opposition leader Matthew Guy had this suppository of wisdom to share, as reported by Henrietta Cook in The Age:

Religious instruction classes will be reintroduced into the Victorian state school curriculum if the Coalition wins next month’s election.

“A government I lead will always believe that you determine the values by which you raise your children, not the education department,” he said.

So why does he want the education department teaching religion again then?

In 2015, the Andrews government scrapped special religious instruction from class time, following a vocal campaign from parents who said religious instruction has no place in secular state schools.

The classes were replaced with lessons on respectful relationships, global cultures, ethics and faith education.

Heaven forbid! Australia has among the lowest religious adherents in the world, so it makes sense.

My dad was a business traveller, it’s how we ended up living in Singapore. But for a few years before then we lived in Brisbane and Melbourne, and I had religious classes. Though they should have called them Christian classes.

They were great, because us heathens could play on the Apple IIs and Commodores in the labs next door at the opt-out discretion of our parents. My first brush with agnosticism was attempting to explain deities in BASIC, but the booleans didn’t compute.

(Also fsck them, a religious teacher was the only teacher with whom I had a very specific issue; a sentence I’ve wanted to write for two decades but only worked up guts to today, in the context of a random blog post).

For those who didn’t get the reference, Guy’s federal colleague Tony Abbott was responsible for that suppository of wisdom gaffe. I think it perfectly encapsulates issues like this.

It’s Music Monday time! Today’s is by the Japanese group WORLD ORDER. It’s a repudiation of Trump, though it’s catchy and great even if you’re not political or up to speed with what Mr. Orange is up to.

Their choreography is spectacular! And the flag at the very end was a beautiful touch :).

ZDNet Australia had these articles under the More From Australia heading:

• Trump unveils 5G spetrum memorandum
• M1 quartery net profit down to SG$34.5m as it mulls buyout

Maybe they think Trump news is Australian because we’re the 51st state. And if SingTel can run Optus, M1 can run another Australian phone company?

But from the latter article by Connie Reichert:

Operating revenue was up by 10 percent to SG$275 million; however, operating expenses were up by 14 percent to SG$231 million … However, it lost 152,000 prepaid customers over the same period, down to 584,000, for total mobile customer base of 1.95 million, down from just over 2 million this time last year. According to M1, it holds 23.5 percent of the Singaporean mobile market.

I’d be sad to see M1 go, and not just because they’ve bucked the trend and kept their angular logo. They were around before StarHub, their little orange Motorola pagers were ubiquitous when my family and I first moved there in the 1990s. I was always on SingTel, but most of my friends’ Nokia 3310s were on M1. Hmm, maybe there’s a theme here.

But Singapore’s a comparatively small market, I was surprised it could service multiple telcos of that size. They’ve since launched fibre to homes — who’d have thought there’d be demand for that, Australian LNP — but the bulk of their revenue still came from mobile:

M1’s mobile telco services brought in the most operating revenue, at SG$142.6 million: SG$129.4 million from post-paid and SG$13.2 million from prepaid after the carrier added 90,000 post-paid customers during the past year for a total of 1.36 million.

As another pointless aside, I always liked the design of the M1 store in the Paragon. They were doing the couches and coffee style shop before any other utility company or bank in either Australia or Singapore.

There’s another run of the DAN A4-SFX in silver and black; preorders close on the 4th of November. I was not paid for this, I’m just a fan.

If you haven’t seen one before, the A4-SFX was a Kickstarter project to make the world’s smallest computer case that can still take a full graphics card. The photo above shows its dual chamber design with a mini-ITX motherboard and a riser to connect it to the GPU. It performs surprisingly well in cooling benchmarks owing to the CPU and GPU fans pulling air directly through the perforated case sides.

You’re limited to a few SSDs, assuming one of them is an M.2 stick. You won’t fit desktop hard disks, optical drives, or any other PCI expansion; but then that’s why you’re buying it.

I’m looking to get one to scale down my exising game machine which has become a glorified, upgradable Steam console of late. It’d be a great fit for Clara’s and my studio apartment and tiny desks.

From the press release:

IBM (NYSE:IBM) and Red Hat (NYSE:RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source cloud software, announced today that the companies have reached a definitive agreement under which IBM will acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Red Hat for $190.00 per share in cash, representing a total enterprise value of approximately $34 billion.

They assure us nine paragraphs in:

With this acquisition, 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, via such efforts as Patent Promise, GPL Cooperation Commitment, the Open Invention Network and the LOT Network.

But the overarching theme is cloud; the word appears forty-eight times. I guess that’s where their focus is.

I’m still mentally processing this, but wow. All I could think of early this morning was Red Hat AIX!

Random followup thoughts

• Red Hat Forum Sydney 2018 might have some interesting new talks.

• The press releases are quick to mention Kubernetes, but not my beloved Ansible. D’oh.

I don’t know much about cars, have little desire to own and operate one, and lobby against road infrastructure coming at the expense of public transport. But I can appreciate them as works of design.

My favourite sedan of all time prior to last week was the 1991 Mercedes Benz E Class. It was compact and well proportioned, and had clean lines without looking boxy. Compared to the over-engineered car designs you see today with swooping bodywork and other superfluous junk, this one just looks classy.

That’s all well and good, but I have a new favourite sedan now, thanks to Doug DeMuro on YouTube: the Aston Martin Lagonda. And here it is for visual comparison:

I took a screenshot with Doug to prove I didn’t play with the aspect ratio; this car is long, boxy, and flat! It has that 1970s-1980s aesthetic, but its exterior dimensions, wedge-shaped hood, and utter lack of any pretence of visual balance at all between the bonnet, doors, and boot make this such a visual mess I can’t not love it!

But this is sometimes an IT blog, so that’s where my real fascination with this car comes in.

The driver’s seat is incredible. The Lagondas were designed when home computers like the Commodore were cutting edge and modern, and its reflected in their advanced — for the time — instrumentation. There are two generations worth mentioning.

The series 2 Lagonda above had the best steering wheel ever, attached to the bottom with a drooping bar. I’ve never seen anything like it before. The side controls look like rounded buttons from a game console, and the instrument cluster is made of LEDs housed in a drooping hood that could have come from a 1970s arcade machine.

The series 3 is almost as amazing. You have to watch Doug’s video to witness its green and black CRTs flicker to life, I got a shiver seeing it! And I love the retro-futuristic fonts and rocking switches.

I do enjoy racing games, so I think the next step is to get a larger apartment, and attempt to build a dashboard console and steering wheel configuration like this into a huge controller. I may only be half joking.

Back in January — wow how is it almost November — I blogged about an inexplicable Azur Lane Neptunia collaboration:

So for a limited time in January 2018, you’ll be able to play ship versions of that Hyperdimension Neptunia series in Azur Lane, of whom Purple Heart is pictured above. So you can mix your post-World War II era ship girls with computer hardware components that now fly with attached…

Turns out there was more art for the event:

And @AUperMurloc linked to the proposed British Neptune-class cruiser. I see what they did there.