Rubenerd

You can learn a lot about computer history, or any history now that I think about it, just by looking through eBay.

Case in point, 5.25 inch floppy drives. Nobody in the right mind would be looking at or purchasing these clunky, loud boxes now unless they were interested in building vintage computers, or replacing parts in one. Or in my case, seeing how much extra gear I can cram into either my sleeper NAS or vintage DOS tower, like a gentleman.

Say for example, you only had one 5.25 inch drive bay available, but you needed two floppy drives. Epson made a legendary SD-700 SD-800 combo-drive that crammed independent 5.25 inch and 3.5 inch floppy drives into a single housing, and even rendered them visually consistent. Here’s an example from teknix-solutions:

I love how they matched the cutouts like that. And also note the eject button on the lower 5.25 inch unit to match the 3.5 inch drive; other 5.25 inch drives at the time had levers which either rotated or lowered down to clamp disks into place.

But hold on, what if you like the idea of a more modern drive interface, but you didn’t need one of those newfangled 3.5 inch drives with their rigid cases and extra capacity. Maybe your machine already had a 3.5 inch drive occupying your twisted ribbon cable, or you were trying to cut costs. Maybe you wanted your machine to look more impressive with two physically-separated drives.

For that, today I learned Epson also sold the SD-700 separately, with the same modern front mechanism and bezel. You can tell; from the back it’s the same slimmed down unit with space to accommodate the 3.5 inch drive on their presumably pricier model, as zacmis shows:

It definitely shows an evolution in hardware design and miniaturisation. The Panasonic I scavenged from the family 486 for my Pentium 1 box needs the full volume for all its mechanical and electronic parts!

Sydney Then and Now is one of my new favourite Twitter accounts. I love seeing all these now-familar sites and how much has changed. The photo above is the approach to Sydney from the Harbour Bridge in 1956, and 2016.

I don’t remember what convoluted route I took to get to an English furniture manufacturer, but I was intruiged by their [hideaway computer desk]:

The desk enables you to have all the functions of a Home office, but the pleasure of closing the doors at the end of the working day and hiding all the clutter away.

I wanted all my computer stuff everywhere most of my life, but I’m increasingly seeing the appeal of something like this. Aside from having an uncluttered appartment, I like the idea of having a little workstation space to myself that I could arrange with all my peripherals and the precious few computer books I’ve kept.

Better still, wouldn’t it be great having one of these setups and only having vintage gear in it? You could have a time capsule, with DOS books and everything!

Hmm, wonder if they ship halfway across the world? I know a plane they could shove it on.

location: sydney

2018 hadn’t had a goodbye post yet, until now:

We are shutting down Digg Reader today. We would like to thank our community for using Reader for the past five years. It’s been fun.

You’ll still be able to export your feeds, diggs, and saves from Reader. Please export your feeds from Reader at digg.com/settings to save your subscriptions to use in another reader service like Feedly, Inoreader or a number of others. Read more about all that in our FAQ.

Contact us at [redacted] you have any questions.

Thank you for all of your support. We love you.

-Digg

Digg Reader was the best post-Bloglines reader out there. It was fast, had a clean UI, and was compatible with all the usual iOS third party reader suspects. But I suppose much like Digg v4, it didn’t catch on.

The good news is we can still export our digged (dug?) posts, and OPML of all the feeds. Time to add to the museum among the littany of other servies we’ve all used and had shut down on us over the years.

Digg-knockoff Reddit survives, but for RSS readers, it looks like self-hosting is the way to go for those who can. I’m thinking I’ll expand my install for family.

I’ve been waiting to announce this since my sixteenth birthday in Singapore, which was now sixteen years ago (and a decade after turning twenty-two when promising I wouldn’t wear one):

I am now a 32-bit human!

That is, assuming the number of memory locations one can address corresponds to how many years one has been alive, which is almost certainly bullshit. However, that can’t stop the fun.

I fired up my old Windows 2000 VM, like a gentleman, and composed this screenshot to mark the occasion.

Yes, that’s Chips Challenge and SkiFree, two of the best 16-bit games of all time. But what are those delightfully-Elmer Fuddian twunk_XX executables, I hear you ask? Let’s find out:

In the field of software development, trunk refers to the unnamed branch (version) of a file tree under revision control.

I said Thunk, not Trunk. Let’s try that again:

You can run 16-bit applications with 32-bit drivers on your Windows-based system as long as the 32-bit driver does not explicitly call Win32 API functions that create threads. The Windows on Windows (WOW) subsystem runs the applications in 16-bit mode and resolves 16-bit calls to the operating system.

I assume I’ll require this to talk to people still on 16-bit brains, though with my current software toolkit it’d probably closer resemble FreeBSD’s Linux binary compatibility mode, which doesn’t function if applications attempt to enter 8086 mode. We’ve come full circle!

What did I do on my thirty-second birthday? Wait, it lasted much longer than thirty seconds. Work was brutal, and interrupted breakfast and dinner celebrations with family. But I did have lunch with my rather fabulous colleagues, and Clara treated me to sushi and bubble tea in the evening.

On top of that, earlier this month I was in Tokyo meeting my BSD heroes, and buying myself a cute little computer. But most importantly, my dad marked a year since his heart bypass surgery, and he’s in fantastic health.

Sometimes when you’re in the pits it’s hard to see, but I’ve got a very, very good life. But here’s the question: will I be lucky enough to write a follow-up when I become 64-bit? Let’s find out ^_^.

At the risk of sounding like an advertisement for a certain airline, I’d be remiss for not sharing this news given my penchant for aviation.

Back when Australia was a British colonial outpost, it would have taken months on boat or steamship to get from London to Sydney. By 1947, Qantas was flying Lockheed Constellations with stops at Darwin, Singapore, Calcutta, Karachi, Cairo, and Tripoli. The idea you could fly directly would have seemed like space-age stuff.

Wikipedia describes the route:

The Kangaroo Route traditionally refers to air routes flown by Qantas between Australia and the United Kingdom via the Eastern Hemisphere. The term is trademarked by Qantas, although it is used in the media and by airline competitors

I didn’t know that. I’d assumed the term was a generic one describing the need for a few hops. You know, because kangaroos do that, when they’re not being used as transport conveyances by the rest of us here to get to work in the mornings.

Anyway yesterday Qantas flew the world’s first direct flight from Australia to the UK, using Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner. Albeit from Perth, but that’s still awesome—in that I’m in awe we now possess an airframe that can do it. Still not sure I’d want to do it in economy though.

According to the same Wikipedia article, Qantas have now challenged Airbus and Boeing to make an airframe that can go from the east coast to London, or from Perth to New York.

I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to justify such a flight, not least because the Kangaroo Route goes via Singapore which I still consider home, despite certain other advertisements! My experience with Japan Airlines 787s also makes me think I’ll need a bike helmet, given open overhead lockers strike me right on the temple as I walk out!

Thanks to Mertie on Flickr for the Creative Commons photo of a Qantas 787.

I’ve got so many post drafts either inspired by or directly discussing AsiaBSDCon I can barely keep track. So I thought I’d start with something fun that I can tie back to other things later.

It all started with a tweet by Mike Larkin about his new GPD Pocket he bought in Akihabara, running his awesome OpenBSD vmm hypervisor. I’d wanted one of these tiny, crowdfunded computers ever since I saw one, but the idea it was VT-x capable, and a prominent member of the BSD community had one, finally rendered my fiscal prudence inoperative.

(VT-x is Intel’s hardware-accelerated virtualisation available on certain CPUs. Modern hypervisors like bhyve and vmm require it. This machine has a 64-bit quad-core Atom with VT-x, which blows my mind).

So Clara and I went to Akihabara one evening, shopped around a bit, and snagged a new one complete with case, charger, and screen protector. In hindsight the charger was pretty dumb considering I’d be using it in Australia, but hey a USB-C cable’s a USB-C cable!

The unit

Despite a few flaws, in my mind the GPD Pocket is the first machine worthy of following in the footsteps of the Toshiba Libretto. It’s unfathomably small for a proper laptop, right down to the awkward keyboard layout and tiny screen. But in that small space we get a:

• 1.6GHz Atom x7-Z8750, quad core
• 8GiB LPDDR3-1600, if you set the BIOS RAM speed to “Auto”
• 7" 1920x1200 IPS display, which is Retina grade at 2x
• 128GiB eMMC

The external physical build quality is reminiscent of my Macs; the antithesis of those awful plastic netbooks of yore. And it only weighs 480g!

The benefit—dare I say necessity—of such a tiny, high resolution display is you can run your desktop environment at 2x/192dpi. I’ve been spoiled by Retina displays, so to have one in such a tiny machine is a double bonus. The only weird thing is it boots oriented in portrait mode, so you need to force X.org to rotate it back.

And while the keyboard puts stuff in odd places, the travel is better than Apple’s current nasty butterfly switches. Go figure.

Flashing the BIOS

I generally eschew (gesundheit) Reddit, but /r/gpdpocket is invaluable. According to their wiki, you want to download and flash GPD’s unlocked BIOS to enable or unlock extra features, like full-speed memory.

This turned out to be a harrowing experience, not least due to the official documentation being ambiguous on some of the steps. I ran the install script in Windows and got an ASCII-art PASS, but when I restarted for the new BIOS to install as per the official docs, the screen went black and seemingly did nothing.

I waited half an hour, then issued a CTRL+ALT+DEL, and Windows booted back up. Whew!

Getting into the BIOS took me longer to figure out than it perhaps should have, but the key is to hit DEL once you see the first GPD logo on boot. Your reward is a surreal, portrait-stretched BIOS with a cursor.

Installing Linux

I eventually want FreeBSD on this device, dual-booted or otherwise. Partly because I’m a gentleman, but also I want the giddy thrill of a 480g bhyve box. Hell, maybe even dual-boot it with OpenBSD for vmm too. This will no doubt be a weekend project.

But for some instant gratification and a proof of concept, I used nexus511’s excellent modified Xubuntu distro that bundles many of the Linux kernel patches and other fixes required for this odd grab-bag of hardware. To the credit of all those tireless maintainers, everything just worked.

I’ll probably throw dwm, or xmonad, or i3, or whatever tiled window manager the cool people use today, but for now I’m just rocking standard Xfce; my favourite desktop environment of all time.

Usage

I bought this principally to tinker with BSD, because I’m a sucker for tiny computers, and it was an excuse to explore Akihabara yet again. Everything that follows is a lie.

But the other reason was to supplant my MacBook as my primary luggable. I need a laptop with me when I’m on call, so this thing with VPNs, SSH, RDP, and a serial adaptor for console access could make it the ultimate remote debugger. We’ll see.

Here’s something fun I discovered by accident. When you typo a path with double forward slashes in a bash prompt with a default PS1 listing the working directory with \w, you get double slashes:

user@machine /path/$ cd //
user@machine //$

This also happens in sh on Linux and Mac OS X, presumably because sh aliased to bash.

$ cd //
$ pwd
==> //

This is not the case in tcsh:

[machine:/path/] user% cd //
[machine:/] user%

Or with Almquist sh on FreeBSD:

$ cd //
$ pwd
==> /

But it gets funky if we chain shells. If we start with bash, then launch tcsh, the current double slash working directory is preserved:

user@machine /path/$ cd //
user@machine //$ tcsh
[machine://] user%

I haven’t tried with zsh or fish.

Friday fanmail! Each and every Friday, except when I don’t, I post some of the fanmail I receive from my fans of the blog, so we may all share in their enthusiasm. Today is some fairly generic SEO spam:

Hello.

Greenthings.

I noticed that your website isn’t ranking as well as it should be for certain keywords in your industry.

Oh no! How will Rubenerd Industries rectify this?

Id like to take the time to talk to you about the keywords your successful competitors are using and how we can get you the same results.

I wonder who my competitors are?

Please let me know if you are interested so I can send you a proposal.

Thanks Mary White

I tell you what, if you’re reading my site, you must see this blog post. In which case, I’m letting you know I’m interested here (^_~).

Let’s see if we ever hear back.

Let’s upgrade something, like Jinja2:

$ pip upgrade Jinja2

Wait, damn it. Do this:

$ pip install --upgrade Jinja2

One of these days we’ll have a unified, standardised syntax for package managers.