Rubenerd

You would not be reading this site today if it weren’t for the pioneering work of David Boggs. The co-inventor of the Ethernet standard died in late February at the age of 71. 🥃

It’s hard not to think of an industry or life that David hasn’t touched. The framework of our entire modern world wouldn’t be possible without his forward-thinking contributions to packet switching and the IP stack we take for granted today.

I’m on a bit of a computer history kick lately, so if any of you have a documentary or short film to recommend about this gentleman and his achievements, please let me know and I’ll share it here.

This silly milestone aside, wc(1) reports I’ve also written 881,118 words. That’s delightful.

I started this blog as a teenager in late 2004, and it’s among the longest-running projects I’ve ever maintained. Sitting in a coffee shop in my thirties writing it, and reviewing back at home, it doesn’t seem real.

Thank you for taking time out of your day to read my disparate ramblings, whether you’re a new arrival or someone who’s been coming back for years. You don’t know how much it means to me. 💙

I love that mini-ITX builds are becoming more popular. It wasn’t that long ago when people would scoff at the idea of making small computers, perceiving them to be compromised builds that valued style over substance. Thanks to increasing density and more hardware availability, this isn’t the case… as much.

Hardware Canucks did a great video exploring some of the history of the mini-ITX form factor, going back to those original VIA boards. He explored the challenges of size, price, and performance, and called out the disconnect between mini-ITX case and component manufacturers. I agree that while the sales volume will never be there for these small machines, I’m still surprised there aren’t more options from the larger companies that do have the scale and budgets to do something good.

Optimum Tech honed in on compatibility in his Intel 12900K build video. I was especially struck by how the boards themselves have evolved over time, with taller components, passive cooling for board power, and stacks for M.2 storage. This has packed more into this smaller size, but complicates cooling options given the limited available clearance. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we start to see AIO liquid coolers becoming standard or required equipment for some of these boards, given large air cooling stacks will become harder and harder to fit around all the board components.

My hope is we start to see more manufacturers take this segment seriously after the huge success and positive press CoolerMaster had with their colourful and fun NR200P mini-ITX cases.

It’s hard for me to talk up or share accomplishments, positive reviews or mentions; it still feels a bit like showing off.

If you’ll indulge me, the BSD Now podcast has featured another post of mine, this time on my FreeBSD/Linux game machine setup. It’s available for Patreon members now, and should be available on their site and public feed soon.

BSD Now have been sharing a lot of posts of mine lately, which I credit for a big uptick in my readers and subscribers. Their show has also become a highlight of my week!

Check them out if you’re at all interested in BSD operating systems and broader discussions about *nix, networking, databases, and computer science. I’d even recommend it to Linux people as an introduction to the ecosystem.

If the guys mention this post, would that be inception or recursion?! 🤔

I’d spent the better part of a year deciding which GPU to get for my FreeBSD/Linux tower, whether I should wait, and where prices would need to be for me to buy. I did all the research and determined the RTX 3060 Ti or 3070 hit the sweet spot for my requirements. Finally I shouted screw it into the ether, and hit the buy button with the determination of someone buying an overpriced graphics card.

As I cynically predicted, GPU prices fell within days after! You can now buy a 3070 Ti or even a 3080 in Australia for the price I paid for my 3070, and with much better cooling performance than the ITX-friendly Zotac 3070 Twin Edge I needed to fit my case.

This is good news for the industry, video editors, hobbyists, artists, and gamers who until recently have been robbed blind by scalpers and crytobros converting these cards into bullshit and carbon dioxide. If only it’d happened a week sooner!

It shows how weird our brains are… or maybe just mine. Loading Minecraft with Optifine and EminGTR’s Complementary Shaders pack at 4K with my new 3070 made my jaw drop. The light effects off the quartz blocks, the glassy waves and soft clouds, the swaying of leaves, the warm glow of lanterns, it was all spectacular. If Clara and I can’t travel, at least we can explore our little world we’ve built together over the last two years; and this slab of platinum opens a beautiful new window into it. Ditto railways in Montana that I wander around in my BNSF GP38-II in Train Simulator, and my Cessna 172SP in X-Plane. Even Cities Skylines looks gorgeous.

Knowing cards are cheaper now doesn’t change or negate those experiences. It’s not like a 3070 starts performing like a 6500XT at the sight of 3080s encroaching on its price point. It feels like an order of magnitude better than the 970 and 5500M I had before.

There is, and will always be, newer and shinier kit. Admittedly the time between realising it for me was a week, not a year or more, but does that matter? Or perhaps more importantly, should it matter?

I’ve been getting stuck into watching videos about computer history again, from 1980s home computers and core memory, to fundamental concepts about programming languages and system design.

I just finished watching Kevlin’s talk from 2017, which took us through Algol-68 to golang, with as much explanation given for the why as much as the how (everything that’s old is new again)! Also, who knew Shakespeare was a developer?

This is one for rewatching on the couch next weekend.

I’m just getting around to reading about this. A FedEx MD-11 freighter had an aborted landing at Sydney Airport last weekend, with reports of stuck flaps limiting their ability to slow down on their second approach. The pilots issued a mayday, and notified Sydney air traffic control that they’d “require the full length of the runway”.

The plane landed at 365 km/h. To get an idea just how fast that is, Adipasqu on the Airliners.net forum linked to Boeing’s FAA Reference Code and Approach Speed document, which lists the approach speed for the MD-11F at 155 knots, or about 287 km/h (not that far off a 747-400). Even if we assume a higher landing weight and faster approach speed, that’s a huge delta.

No, not that delta. Or that Delta. Or even… thank you.

Aviation journalist Andrew Curran reported the potential reasons at Simple Flying:

Possible problems onboard the FedEx MD-11 on Saturday evening include flap asymmetry (where there is a difference between left and right side flap positions); split flaps (where the flaps may be symmetric, but either the inner flap or outer flap pair has not reached the commanded position); and stuck flaps (where one flap fails to do as commanded, causing the opposite flaps to stop automatically).

Michael Evans at the The Sydney Morning Herald published part of the exchange of the crew and air traffic control which made me smile. Job well done!

“I really appreciate the help, sir. We had a flight control malfunction.” The pilot expressed concerns about “a flap” and treated it as a “flight control issue”.

The air traffic controller congratulated the pilot: “Very well handled,” he said.

I’m so relieved and happy that this review was real:

“From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.”

I’ve been staring at this photo for the last fifteen minutes. The clouds, the light, the curvature of the atmosphere. Wow.

Catalogued by the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, NASA Johnson Space Center, via Wikimedia Commons.

Remember Winamp and iTunes? Remember ripping CDs to a local collection, then burning mix CDs? What about transferring to Minidiscs, or Creative Zens, or iPods? Remember when you’d buy an album, and it’d be yours to play forever, without a media company revoking access when the person in charge of licencing sneezed?

I remember, because I still do it! But I also acknowledge I’m part of a rapidly shrinking minority. Which is a shame, because collecting and playing music is not only safer and more fun, but helps artists far more than the pittance that streaming services provide. But I digress.

I wrote a lot about my own journey back to local audio files a few years ago, but codecs were one aspect I didn’t touch on. What’s the best audio codec to use in 2022, especially for someone rocking (HAH!) a mix of different OSs and kit?

Wouter Groeneveld did a great post last Sunday about choosing an audio codec. He discussed the history behind Ogg/Vorbis, MP3, and AAC/MP4, some of his own tests, and his decision to use Vorbis. From a technical, legal, and capacity perspective, it looks like the best choice.

I ended up going with 320 kb/s CBR MP3 for new files:

• MP3 is no longer patent encumbered, so I don’t harbour concerns about being locked out of my files.

• It’s a simple codec with broad support in retro devices, like the Palm Lifedrive and iPod that I use, and even my Pentium 1 tower with Winamp for nostalgic fun. CBR isn’t as space efficient, but it’s also universally supported.

• It’s fast to encode, and familiar. I already have a toolchain for encoding podcast files, so I know the process and pitfalls very well.

• FLAC files might be useful for archiving or re-encoding, but 320 kb/s gives me an ample quality ceiling for what I can perceive, even with monitor headphones and a decent Hi-Fi. I was tempted to do a series of double-blind tests to get that down to 256, but the space saved wasn’t worth worrying about.

Marco Arment waxed lyrical (HAH!) about MP3s in 2017, which also broadly tracked with my views at the time. He compared MP3s to AAC and Vorbis, and concluded the mighty MP3 to be just fine.

AAC and other newer audio codecs can produce better quality than MP3, but the difference is only significant at low bitrates. [..] Ogg Vorbis and Opus offer similar quality advantages as AAC with (probably) no patent issues, which was necessary to provide audio options to free, open-source software and other contexts that aren’t compatible with patent licensing. But they’re not widely supported, limiting their useful applications.

MP3 is supported by everything, everywhere, and is now patent-free. There has never been another audio format as widely supported as MP3, it’s good enough for almost anything, and now, over twenty years since it took the world by storm, it’s finally free.

(I’d say WAV is even wider supported than MP3, but his point stands)!

Maybe at some point I’ll switch, but right now MP3s hit the sweet spot for me for practicality, file size, support, and perceived quality. It’s the same reason I carry a Ricoh GR III with me now rather than a full-frame SLR, and use a Mini-ITX case for my game machine.

Audiophiles who disagree with Wouter, Marco, and myself, are free to choose another format for their own libraries.