Rubenerd

Such a great summary in The Guardian last week:

Australia was not immune to a year of absurdity and high drama. Politicians disappeared – one by one, party by party, in a sort of bloodless revolution known as the “citizenship saga”. No one saw it coming. Grown men started blaming their parents for not telling them about their ancestry, for not putting in the paperwork. The high court did its proper job of upholding the constitution.

I still think the idea that dual citizens can’t be parlimentarians makes no sense, but even I have to admit this whole farce was absurd. And not the good kind of absurd.

On social media – and in some cases, the streets – people were engaged in what seemed at times like hand-to-hand combat over same-sex marriage. The plebiscite felt dirty from the get-go. The win for yes and the joy that followed was pure, but the rest, leading up to it, carried a taint of stinky politics.

Great summary. I’m relieved and happy for my queer friends, but there was a lot of needless pain. Worse still, we told the Powers That Be that it’d be the case.

There was no taint to what happened to refugees and asylum seekers on Manus Island. It was pure bastardry.

Indeed, And we’re stuck with the two major parties in agreement on it. It’s worse than pure bastardry, it’s Australia’s shame. You know you’ve plumbed the depths when Drumph says this on a call with your PM:

Drumph: Why haven’t you let them out? Why have you not let them into your society?

Turncoat: OK, I will explain why. It is not because they are bad people. It is because in order to stop people smugglers, we had to deprive them of the product. So we said if you try to come to Australia by boat, even if we think you are the best person in the world, even if you are a Noble [sic] Prize winning genius, we will not let you in. Because the problem with the people

Drumph: That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.

There was a lot of compassionate Australia on display this year. Let’s apply it to everyone.

It’s December, so time to crack open the drafts vault and publish a post that never was. This was originally written in... December 2017!? Why did I already forget about it then?!

VyOS – the FLOSS fork of Vyatta – is a fantastic software-defined network router. I’m not a network engineer – fortunately – but I’ve learned a ton using it. It’s also my goto on Joviam, and other good clouds that offer it.

“Floss fork” sounds awful, and not terribly practical. You could use a fork as floss, but a thin piece of waxed material would likely cause fewer injuries. It’s almost as if it were designed like that for a reason. Which is distinct from a raisin, which I hear some uncultured people refer to sultanas as.

The latest 1.1.8 version spits out a series of these when running in PV mode on certain Xen environments:

init: ID "T1" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

If you check /etc/inittab, you’ll see:

$ tail -n2 /etc/inittab
==> The funk soul brother
==> Check it out now

That’s clearly the wrong machine. How it’s accessible at all, let alone right about now, is beyond me. A little Fatboy Slim reference for those of you who praise people like they should.

$ tail -n2 /etc/inittab
==> T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L hvc0 9600 vt100
==> T1:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyS0 9600 vt100

We already have console access via hvc0, so we can comment out the T1 line. Which in the case of Sydney, would prevent us travelling to Hornsby via the North Shore at about 1.5 megabits. Hiven glaven.

Only problem is, this line is restored on reboot. Even if you change the baud rate, or to something a bit more modern than a vt100.

This is a prime lesson for dealing with VyOS: don’t mess with it outside its internal state machine. No really, read that line again. I know, it’s Debian underneath and it’s sure tempting, but don’t. No, really, don’t.

Turns out, there’s a directive to disable that console device:

$ configure
# delete system console device ttyS0
# commit
# save

This will write out to your config, and will persist on reboots. Unless you use ephemeral storage, you wild person you.

I feel this entire post could have been written in one line.

This takes the cake for partner holiday emails. No upselling disguised as well wishes, as most of the emails I get this time of the year, just some holiday bling!

For being such a class act, have some free advertising.

I’d seen the split shape of the US state of Michigan, and wondered if there was a way to cross from one to the other without going through another state. For example, one has to travel through the East Malaysian state of Sarawak to get between the two halves of Brunei.

Which reminds me, I’ve been to Sarawak but not Brunei. I could even spend my Singapore dollars there! More just for curiousity than anything else. But I digress.

Turns out, there is, and it’s the Mackinac Bridge, as photographed by Justin Billau. From Wikipedia:

Sortland is a town and municipality in Nordland county, Norway. It is part of the traditional region of Vesterålen. The administrative centre of the municipality is the town of Sortland. Other population centres in Sortland include Bø, Holand, Holmstad, Liland, Sigerfjord, and Strand. The Norwegian Coast Guard has its northern base in Sortland, called Kystvaktskvadron Nord.

That’s clearly the wrong article.

The Mackinac Bridge (/ˈmækɪnɔː/ MAK-in-aw) is a suspension bridge spanning the Straits of Mackinac to connect the Upper and Lower Peninsulas of the U.S. state of Michigan.

This was the part that made me smile:

The 722-square-kilometre (279 sq mi) municipality is the 153rd largest by area out of the 426 municipalities in Norway.

Oh for Pete’s sake. Let’s try that again.

Some individuals have difficulty crossing bridges, a phenomenon known as gephyrophobia. The Mackinac Bridge Authority has a Drivers Assistance Program that provides drivers for those with gephyrphobia, or anyone who is more comfortable having someone else drive them across. More than a thousand people use this service every year. Those interested can arrange, either by phone or with the toll collector, to have their cars or motorcycles driven to the other end. There is no additional fee for this service.

It warms my heart that this exists.

macOS High Sierra no longer bundles an ftp client or server. Regardless of technical merit or justification, there are still large install bases for ftp, especially in embedded and legacy hardware. The same goes for telnet, but that’s for another discussion.

For the client side, I’ve found NcFTP by the illustrious Mike Gleason a more than capable alternative. It works as a drop-in replacement interactively, and within scripts, as ftp. The only caveat is it handles auth differently.

Using standard ftp, you can create an age-old .netrc file:

machine  <host>
login    <username>
password <password>

Then just log in as such:

$ ftp <host>

NcFTP uses the concept of bookmarks instead. To create one, log in as normal:

$ ncftp -u<username> -p<password> <host>
==> NcFTP 3.2.6 (Dec 04, 2016) by Mike Gleason (http://www.NcFTP.com/contact/).
==> Connecting to <host>...
==> Logging in...
==> User <username> logged in
==> Logged in to <host>.
==> ncftp / >

Then type bookmark to define one. It’ll ask for a name; I just use the default hostname. Now you can log in like this:

$ ncftp <hostname>

As with .netrc, caution must be exercised with bookmark definitions given you’re storing plain text passwords. You’ll also want to scrub your shell history if logging in interactively.

(I use an Ansible Vault for deployments that need to interact with ftp. The ftp protocol itself also sends your password in the clear, but presumably you’re using it in an isolated environment or tunnel to mitigate this).

As an aside, this thread about removing FTP is so typical. If you need to be a dick to make a point, as far as I’m concerned you’ve utterly conceded any point you were making.

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

35:20 – A compendium of random recordings Ruben did with Clara over the last month. Topics include a modern moose, fabric couch advocacy, comparing Fate Grand Order addiction to Hearthstone and Pokemon, a tiny North Sydney park at night, Clara cosplaying Shielder, getting holiday beverages from an Aussie bottle-o, frustrating support questions, and Jimbo ♡. Proper Jimbo show coming up next. Recorded November and December 2017.

Recorded in North Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released December 2017 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts.

Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.

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.

02:44:34 – Dave in Kentucky! Cali Dingo! Rubenerd! Frank Edward Nora! Doc Sleaze! Chad Bowers! Amazing stuff!! 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.

Goodbye, AIM. ICQ and MSN Messenger were always far more popular in Singapore, but “AOL” was useful for catching up with American friends.

From the announcement:

AIM tapped into new digital technologies and ignited a cultural shift, but the way in which we communicate with each other has profoundly changed. As a result we’ve made the decision that we will be discontinuing AIM effective December 15, 2017. We are more excited than ever to continue building the next generation of iconic brands and life-changing products for users around the world.

That last sentence had more cringe than anything early-teenage Ruben ever posted on AOL Messenger. They even worked in an excited.

The best I could for a send-off screenshot was to resurrect the background of Sailor Mercury — the gentleman’s choice — that I used for years, and the login prompt given I’ve long since forgotten the password! Or maybe I didn’t forget, and the auth server isn’t responding already.

Where’d all the drive space on this MacBook Pro go? What a handsome question. Let’s ask GrandPerspective, the tool every Mac user should have. WinDirStat and QDirStat are useful analogues for those of you on Windows or Linux/BSD.

Well then! Not to get all Malcom Gladwell on you, but turns out that gigantic rectangle is a Windows 7 virtual machine bundle created to help with games interfacing with old BMCs and other poorly-written, Windows-only utilities. In a fit of shortsightedness, I provisioned it as a preallocated disk for performance reasons, but on SSDs in 2017 I barely noticed a difference.

If I had used a default sparse disk, I could compact it.

Update 1: Turns out this VM wouldn’t have compacted well anyway, it’s cached every single Windows Update it ever did. The Windows folder is over 100GB!

Update 2: Comes after update 1.

Update 3: Remember when that folder was C:\WINNT? Jim Kloss would remember. It was even still the case with Windows 2000. Now if I didn’t also need this VM for games 64bit Windows software, I’d use 2000 in this capacity. It’d probably still work. Chips Challenge and SkiFree still would too.

Update 4: Windows 2000, built on NT Technology, it said. Or expanded out, Windows 2000, built on New Technology Technology.

I set a goal for myself in 2016 to get rid of most of my stuff. Growing up my parents had tons of stuff, as this post from a decade ago shows! While I could appreciate their reasons, I didn’t ever want my future plans or anxiety to be encumbered by stuff.

Now we’re at the end of 2017, and all the easy wins* have been had, so I’m stuck with stuff that isn’t financially valuable and easy to sell, and/or can’t be recycled or reused. And I hit that brick wall where I don’t want to get rid of something if I know it’ll end up in a landfill.

(* Well okay, I say easy wins, but they weren’t. I still place far too much sentimental value on stuff, but fortunately in most cases this was mitigated by scanning, replacing with digital copies, donating to good causes, or selling to nice people).

It reminds me of finishing food. Most Singaporean parents I knew would get offended or cranky if you didn’t eat all the food on your plate; my parents said eating when you’re not hungry is unhealthy and treats your body like a garbage disposal. Now I feel like I’m doing that with stuff!

All the self help books that discuss getting rid of clutter are light on details when it comes to ethical disposal. The Minimalists discuss American services that will sort through your stuff; sounds great, but we don’t have them here. Donations have all been done, and getting a giant skip doesn’t sound great.

Maybe the takeaway from this is to send the remainder to landfill, and channel the environmental guilt into making sure I don’t buy pointless shit anymore.