The dichotomy in this spam is amazing.
Nothing over 899: How to draft termination clauses in employment contracts to ensure that you don’t unintentionally displace your common law rights to terminate
Pre Valentine Flash Sale: Register by 10 Feb at only 899 AUD
You’re fired, and don’t expect any favours from us owing to our sweet, sweet termination clauses. Happy Valentines!
This originally appeared on the Annexe.
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hosts: localhost
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gather_facts: false
I was born too late to be a (concious!) part of the 1980s home computer revolution, but that hasn’t stopped me reading obsessively about all the machines from that era. If I could time travel, I’d only want to go back thirty years.
(Are you reading this, time lords? Thirty years is nothing! I’d use barely any of your mana at all! Or deuterium, or whatever it is that powers your USS Relativity or your TARDIS with).
Despite pouring over schematics and photos for years though, I never noticed something basic until I saw this photo on Wikimedia Commons. The Commodore 128 was no wider than the 64 it replaced!
From top to bottom clockwise, we have the Amiga 500, the Commodore 128, the Commodore 64C, the Commodore 64G and the original black-keyed Commodore 64.
I visualised the main alpha-numeric key cluster as being the same size on both the 64 and 128, so there’d be no space on the side of the 64 for those extra numeric keys. The 128 is definitely deeper, but it just looks like the keys are somewhat smaller, and the bezel narrower.
This blew my mind more than I expected it to.
The Commodore 128 was fascinating. It ran in three modes: Commodore 64 mode, a Commodore 128 mode with its namesake amount of memory, and a third mode to run CP/M, arguably the precursor to DOS. It did this by being a hardware chimera of sorts, with separate MOS and Zilog chips. It’d be like buying a laptop today that uses an Intel and an ARM chip in the same board.
(Oh wait, we have those already, wild)!
For someone trying to reduce junk, I still badly want a 128.
In our ongoing series of posts cleared from my long-neglected draft folder, have this post originally written on 14th of August 2016. I think I couldn't find the screenshot at the time.
Speaking of an anime I tried a decade ago, it was ten years ago since The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya anime began. I feel old.
I was living in Malaysia in 2006 when KyoAni began screening her escapades, evidenced from my FreeBSD screenshot below. I can still remember seeing all the gigantic posters and Hare Hare Yukai dancers around Bukit Bintang and Arab Street, and wondering what the hell it all was. It was oddly intriguing.
Within a few days, I was downloading (cough) and watching my first serious anime series with subtitles, joining all the forums, changing my avatars from a Star Trek combadge to the Haruhiism logo (well, specifically Mikuruism on my blog here, Haruhiism on the podcast site, and Yukiism on my former tech blogs that all ended up merged here), and buying anime figures.
Granted I’d watched Sailor Moon and Dragonball Z as a kid, but Haruhi was the first series I saw as an anime, rather than just a cartoon. Suddenly I was exposed to this universe of otaku culture and fandom around this universe of media straddling every conceivable genre. Who would have known?
This was around the time Rubenerd was also getting serious, but I kept a separate anime blog that was deleted a few years later without warning by my campus IT department. I sorely wish I could go back and see all these old posts.
Years later, I’d move back to Sydney and join the UTS Anime Society. It was there I met all my dearest friends and my partner for the last four years. And in a case of coming full circle, Clara has even cosplayed as Yuki!
Happy decade of Haruhi everyone. Nyoro~n…
People become cynical when their concerns appear to be viewed as somehow less valid or important.
Australia’s housing bubble is a prime example. We have a generation who’ve been priced out of the market by those treating housing as a speculative asset, but we’re told the needs of investors trump those of young families struggling to pay exorbitant rents, let alone even thinking of saving for a deposit.
(Worse are the smashed avo economists who insist they had it just as tough when interest rates were higher, despite housing costing orders of magnitute more now than when they bought into it).
Michael Janda’s report in ABC Business is emblamatic of reporting around this issue:
Real estate: Housing outlook moderate to grim, according to experts and property industry. [..]
Grim because people can’t afford to buy or rent houses? Are people finally fessing up to this? Your optimism may be misplaced.
[..] Millions of Australians have profited from the mantra that house prices only ever go up. But is that shibboleth about to be demolished?
And millions of Australians have been greatly hurt by it. Though it’s not till the second last paragraph we get this throwaway line:
Given that Australian housing remains among the least affordable in the world, according to Demographia’s latest annual report, it would seem logical that the nation’s booming markets must cool soon or face a bust.
A bubble burst would wreck havoc across the board, but an entire generation of struggling Australians could be forgiven for wanting to burn the whole place down and start again.
I did the whole Solarised colour theme thing for a few years, but (ironically) I never found the contrast great. So now I’ve gone old school and installed a Borland theme; it’s nostalgic, clear, and convinced my colleagues that my machine had crashed.
delip was the original author, but I first found it through this fabulous collection of iTerm themes on Github. People take their colours seriously.
My Rubenerd Show podcast episodes are produced with a series of shell scripts to save me time and effort, so I’m always looking for ways to optimise them.
Today I learned about Apple’s afconvert utility. The manpage may as well have been written by GNU given its lack of useful info, but “-h” tells you all you need to know.
Currently I use avconv (previously ffmpeg) to convert CAFs from my iTelephone to an intermediate format. This is then rendered as FLAC for archival purposes, and MP3 for the podcast feed:
$ avconv -i "source.caf" "output.aiff"
Through some digging, the afconvert equivilent is:
$ afconvert -f caff -d BEI16 "source.caf" "output.aiff"
But how do they stack up? I ran these three times on the same 201.1MiB source file using afconvert in macOS Sierra, and the latest avconv from Homebrew:
| Pass | afconvert | avconv |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0.416s | 1.189s |
| 2 | 0.577s | 1.339s |
| 3 | 0.416s | 1.302s |
The results from this (albeit limited) test are clear, afconvert is faster. Whether I’d notice a second or two difference is another question, but I’ll be adjusting the scripts to preference afconvert when available.
Podcast: Play in new window · Download
32:15 – Join Ruben as he wanders to his office to retrieve some Australian power cables to replace the Singapore/UK ones he had to lug around because the world couldn’t make life easy for everyone and standardise on one plug! Also formal clothes, Convair tower fans, Koala mattresses, dangerous lifts, problematic fire stairs, mesh WiFi networks, and seeking shelter in coffee shops.
Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.
Released January 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.
Earlier this month, I asked a question regarding the procurement of a certain fantastical automobile device:
BBS cars! They’re slower, but they’re retro. Can I get a NOCHANGE BBS car so I can play games while I drive to oblivion?
Ask, and ye shall receive!
Sure! Here you go my friend:
Note the driver’s seat logo, created using Microsoft Image Composer, another classic which also seems to suffer from lack of notability ... although it could instead be that this ancient mariner is incapable of navigating with his trusty sextant to the appropriate webpage shore, instead flailing around demasted on a stormy sea of angry growing data. Que sera sera...
Sir James
Whatever will be, will be!
This originally appeared on the Annexe, chronicling my adventures unsubscribing from email newsletters. The only acceptable outcome from clicking unsubscribe in an email footer is immediately being unsubscribed!
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FAIL.
