I was keen to try the new LibreOffice 6 on my Macs. I have Microsoft Office on here, but only for emergencies; LibreOffice/OpenOffice has long been where I do important work.
Unfortunately it’s too unstable to use. Through trial and error, it looks like its a problem with OpenGL. If you leave it disabled by default, it’s fine. Enable it, and all hell breaks loose.
I’ll see if I can find their issue tracker and report it.
So after two years of squirreling away a bit into the discretionary budget each month, I got a new iMac!
Coming up with hostnames is always the primary concern when procuring new hardware. This time was made more difficult by the fact I’d run out of good Star Trek ships and weeb characters.
@LucretiaPruitt suggested I go with Egyptian gods, which led us to Medjed and her representation in Fate/Grand Order. Which lead me to my favourite Saber, Nero Claudius, and her infamous catchphrase. At that stage, it felt all but inevitable.
$ hostname
==> iUmu.local
I was holding out hope for the modular Mac Pro floated last year, but hardware failures in my current setup and realisation that it’d probably be too expensive hastened me just biting the bullet.
Originally I was going for the 21.5" model, because I didn’t think I needed a 5K screen. But then I realised the 27" version:
Is equivilent to a non-Retina 1440p display, which is what I use at work, and find useful. Especially when tailing logs and editing stuff, you can get three columns out of it very comfortably.
Is the only consumer Mac that can be upgraded to decent graphics. The Radeon Pro 580 renders Train Simulator, Cities: Skylines and the Portal franchise beautifully at scaled 1440p, at least as good as my neglected game machine I built around a 980 in 2016. And best of all, I don’t need a separate machine and cables and KVM any more.
Has a user-accessible flap for memory upgrades, so I could put the initial money towards a better CPU and graphics from the onset, and add to this later.
Comes in silver, rather than the dirty-looking space gray the iMac Pro I couldn’t justify comes in.
The iMac sits perfectly in our tiny apartment, with enough space for the first computer I built with my dad when I was a kid that I keep around for DOS nostalgia.
How does she compare? I did some pointless and technically questionable calculations, and determined iUmu has almost 19x the resolution, 21x the CPU clock speed, 256x more memory, 2,024 times the video memory, and 16x more storage.
More importantly, it meant I could get rid of no fewer than six cables, two power bricks, an extra cable organiser box, and got almost a third of my desk space back. I could also finally swap out my huge powerbaord for a smaller one that fits in the remaining cable box much more easily, and may be less of an imminent fire risk! Also, no more flaky Thunderbolt dock!
Now I can keep a laptop in my bag for remote troubleshooting and writing, then come home to the mothership. DAMN I missed having a good desktop.
I’ll be blogging about various vices I’ve rid myself of over the coming weeks. It is my hope, and intention, that a typed record will keep me accontable, and motivate me to cultivate positive habits.
Here’s the vice for February:
Ahaha Hah! HAAAAAAH! It’s been a hard week.
I was sitting at a coffee shop across from our office this morning, like a gentleman, and someone was being grilled for their drink preferences:
Person A: But that’s why I have decaf.
Person 2: Y’know even butter has caffeine in it, y’know?
You know the type, people who ask you if you know something, with the assumption that you don’t. But it’s not sufficient to pose it as a question, they need a condescending tone to drive home you’re an idiot for not knowing, and a level of smugness that their superior intellect is enforced and demonstrated by such shenanigans.
Wow, I thought this post would be going in the direction of mocking someone for mocking someone, coupled with a question about where I could get some of this awesome caffeine butter, but it went on a whole other level.
Seriously though, where can I get caffeine butter?
I’ve been reading HomePod news out of interest; as opposed to non-interest, which would be counter productive. I have credit cards for the points, but I always keep reserve cash in the bank and pay them at the end of the month. The only interest I get is the paltry stuff from savings. How’s that for a digression.
I’d been considering a HomePod for our studio apartment. We’ve been told endlessly by certain pundits the sound quality is decent compared to other intelligent boxes. It’s small and relatively unobtrusive. And after spending multiple weekends up at my dad’s place fiddling with amps, speakers, and thick copper cables, I just want something simple.
Turns out though, it doesn’t have an aux audio jack. Those same pundits are quick to defend the decision on the basis that “they removed the headphone jack on the iPhone”, when their latest iMac generation most certainly has a headphone jack, and even USB-A ports which they removed from their MacBooks.
Appreciate for a second though: we’re at the point where design decisions about a speaker are informed by a phone. Cray.
Anyway, I understand Apple’s reason for eschewing (gesundheit) it, just as I understand therefore it’s not for me.
So I’ll be going with plan B: using our existing Apple TV but replacing the speaker with a better one. It’s also easy to use, and I can throw our Apple and Plex music at it. Eventually when I get a replacement turntable, that too.
I’ve come to terms with the fact most sites I’ve linked to since this blog’s inception in 2004 no longer exist, or 404 on newer versions of their sites. Ditto my Pinboard (n.e. del.icio.us). The Dark Web is real, and its a bit terrifying.
So it’s always a delight when I find an old post linking to a site, and the site still exists! I wrote this a decade ago today:
Big thank you to going out to Chris Messina from FactoryJoe.com for getting me on Upian’s Hot Links website, I’ve received hundreds of extra unique visitors just this evening from being on their front page!
The site has changed, but still exists. And if you do a search for Rubenerd, it still has a preserved screenshot from 2008, back when I was going through my horrible green design phase. Funnily enough, my current site theme is a reproduction of the one I was using just prior to that one.
On the off chance the site does go offline at some point in the future, have this screenshot.
I use and love Perl. I haven’t been a full time developer for several years now, and have used half a dozen other languages, but Perl still feels the most natural and in tune with the way my mind works. Read into that how you will.
Which renders the current and seemingly-expanding schism between Perl 5 and 6 an that much more painful.
As the official project site takes great care to point out, Perl is a family of languages that include Perl 5 and 6. The former is the old one we know and love, warts and all. The latter is a reimplementation on the Parrot VM that fixes some of the perceived problems and arcane syntax.
There are technical considerations about running Perl 5 in a Perl 6 world, including implementing a package that would let 5 programs run on Parrot. But the larger issue in the community appears to be nomenclature.
Perl 6 detractors lament the version ceiling imposed on Perl 5. No matter how many further refinements or features are added to Perl 5, it will always sound more outdated than 6. How far along is Perl 5 going to end up, Perl 5.1023?
Advocates claim, with the backing of Larry Wall, that Perl 6 is most definitely a refinement of Perl 5; borne of its legacy, and necessarily the future of the language. They also assert, I hope it’s fair to say, that there’s room for both, even when retaining the name.
I can see merit in both sides, but probably lean slightly in favour of the Perl 5 camp. Not only because I have a vested interest in the language’s continued success, but that I think it also limits Perl 6’s wider use by people who hate the old Perl.
But maybe that’s the issue. Could 6 make it on its merits without the Perl name? I think it’s strong enough a language that it could, but it would be a needless battle if it does share so much with Perl 5.
Maybe the solution then is to do what Microsoft did with C++ and Visual Basic when they moved to .NET and drop the version number. People in the industry know Visual C++ .NET came out after 6.0, but the names don’t otherwise indicate one is better or newer than the other.
Or maybe, just maybe, I’m overthinking this again.
Here’s some fun. My work MacBook Pro machine erroneously detected itself as having an 800×600 resolution yesterday, because High Sierra. I took and screenshot, then restored its native resolution, which rendered the screenshot at this exact size:
If you have a Retina/HiDPI screen, you can see how tiny it looks. If you don’t, you can see how much more resolution is in a Retina display if 800×600 is rendered like that!
Our first family machine had an SVGA card and a CRT set at 640×480. It could go up to 1024×768, but we thought it made things too small. Then I go back to my Commodore Plus/4 I got on eBay years ago, and check out its 320×200 output. How far we’ve come.
Best, and cheesist, Fate/Grand Order event ever! You do battle with evil servants to get Valentine’s chocolate. Some people spent fortunes and time getting them, Clara and I just played for our favourites. Umu!
As I’ve mentioned on the podcast, FGO remains the only mobile game I’ve ever been interested in and played reguarly. It got me through some tough family stuff early last year, so it has a special place. And now that’s available in English, you have even less excuse to join us in playing it, right?
I can’t wait to get goodies from Paracelsus on White Day, which I can only assume is happening.
Last Tuesday I mentioned the way I use ImageMagick to concatenate images. The @ozzmosis shared an alternative:
convert 01.png 02.png +append out.png
And for vertical concatenation:
convert 01.png 02.png -append out.png
I like these approaches even more. Thanks!