Rubenerd

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40:29 – Banana with apple, walking distance to work, uncooperative throat coughing and iOS 10 upgrades, never using Apple 1.0 releases, going to NYC and Philly, the Kobo, the US ESTA, the Clinton Trump debate, becoming an Olympus camera guy again, and a friggen vanishing iPad!

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

Released October 2016 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts.

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This 11" MacBook Air is still an incredible machine for its size, though its aging 60GB SSD is getting a bit long in the tooth. While I decide what to replace it with, I’ve been trying to scrounge enough space to live on.

GrandPerspective highlighted something rather eye-opening with a default macOS install:

$ ls -lh /usr/bin/emacs
==> -r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   274M Sep 14 10:57 emacs*

I guess kitchen sinks wrapped in paretheses come with a steep cost. By comparison, here’s my primary web browser:

$ du -sh /Applications/Vivaldi.app/
==> 178M    /Applications/Vivaldi.app/

And iTunes, which everyone claims is bloated and slow:

$ du -sh /Applications/iTunes.app/
==> 184M    /Applications/iTunes.app/

And my weapon of choice:

$ ls -lh /usr/local/Cellar/vim/8.0.0005/bin/vim
==> -r-xr-xr-x  1 rubenerd  staff   2.1M Sep 25 10:44 vim*

Crazy stuff. I’d delete Emacs from my machine if it weren’t for having a discrete, console-based tetris game.

Footnotes

Inb4 people tell me Emacs can do more, than Vim isn’t as good as Emacs, that Vim needs extensions, that kitchen sinks are actually more portable than they look, that iTunes stores plugins and metadata elsewhere, and that if I think 287 megabytes is large it’s a problem with my SSD, which I already addressed.

This photo by cmglee of the Kelana Jaya line in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia took me back. PJ is classed a satellite city of Kuala Lumpur, but it may as well be a suburb.

If I may put on my thirty-year-old man hat, time was this line was called the Putra LRT. Today, it’s part of the RapidKL system, and one component which will be eventually integrated with the new MRT lines they’re building. I had a job interview at the Dang Wangi station on that line back in 2006. I haven’t been back to KL in almost a decade, I wonder how much its changed?

Now that I think of it, have a picture of the aforementioned Dang Wangi station by Two hundred percent on Wikimedia Commons too. It’s cleaner than the stations in Australia, go figure.

Almsot eight years ago, I wrote a post about the Convair 880, one of the earliest commercial jets.

Unfortunately the niche market for the type was much smaller than Convair anticipated and was largely viewed as a commercial failure. This despite Convair’s later build option for extra revenue generating seating in the form of bolted on deck chairs on the wings which were later deemed a safety hazard. Seems snorkels don’t really deliver as much oxygen at several thousand metres above sea level as they do in a pool.

It was written at the Boatdeck Cafe in Mawson Lakes, Adelaide. Either the power was out when I wrote that, or they swapped my coffee for something else.

Last night, South Australia lost its entire energy grid.

In case you skimmed that, an Australian state larger in geographic size than Texas, lost its entire energy grid. Wild weather is being blamed for toppling key pieces of infrastructure, though the regular chorus of “coal is good for humanity” folks took it upon themselves to proclaim the issue was a reliance on renewable power. If only Mike and I were still doing Fake No Agenda…

Anyway, I figured if an entire Australian state can handle having their power knocked out, I can make up for a week’s worth of posts.

Static site generation is great for operations, but it does mean publishing and uploading posts are two separate steps. A week of posts were “published” since Humble Bundle, but unfortunately the uploading never happened. Not to get all Gladwell on you, but turns out an errant pf rule had blocked the host uploading the changes.

So have a week’s worth of posts, preceding this one.

For better or worse (depending on your disposition), GNU/Linux has become the defacto *nix standard. But there are still plenty of unices out there, even Debian uses ash during start. If you’re concerned with script portability, you should abstain from bashisms.

I normally just call it Linux like a normal person, but this post concerns GNU bash, so I figured I’d make an exception. Purple monkey dishwashers).

A quick way to check your scripts is with the excellent checkbashims script by Yann Dirson and Julian Gilbey. And it’s even available on homebrew, boom.

$ checkbashisms -p retina.sh
==> possible bashism in retina.sh line 29 (<<< here string):
==> _original=`sed "s/this/that/" <<< $_image`
==> possible bashism in retina.sh line 61 (should be 'b = a'):
==> [ `uname` == "Darwin" ] && echo $_html | pbcopy

Heh, whoops. I’ve got some scripts to fix.

I used to hate Facebook. It’s blatant intrusiveness and downright creepiness (Mark invented it to get girls’ phone numbers) were more of a stick than the perceived carrot. I’ve since come out of my cave, felt the sunlight singe my pasty skin, and realise that if I want to be a part of the twenty first century, I should probably use it.

Carrots don’t actually make you see any better in the dark, did you know that? Table corners have been exploiting this for their own twisted satisfaction for years. Bastards.

Now my lack of Facebook usage stems from apathy. It’s one more inbox I need to check, and another social network clamoring for my already short attention span hey look at the kitten.

Then a light came on above my head, like so may proverbial carrots. I already have a perfectly good terrible blog, why not just automatically cross-post from that? Then I can pretend I give a damn about Facebook.

If this appeared on Facebook from rubenerd.com, my IFTTT recipe worked. If it didn’t, then it didn’t.

Adam Morton reported this in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Just one electorate in the country has a majority of voters opposed to same-sex marriage, according to new research that suggests MPs and public debate significantly trail voters in backing change.

You’d never guess which state. No wait, I’ll try. It’s on the tip of my tounge. Does it start with a rarely-used letter and rhyme with Russel Brand?

Maranoa, in outback south-western Queensland and held by the Coalition’s David Littleproud, has just over 50 per cent of voters who do not want a change to allow same-sex couples to wed.

Hey, we have a winner!

Australians have consistently shown a preference for marriage equality for decades. For a country that was among the first to grant women universal suffrage, we’ve sure slipped.

For what it’s worth, the Sydney Morning Herald backed the Coalition in the last election. Labor promised marriage equality within 100 days of assuming office.

This originally appeared on the Annexe, when I documented inconsiderate drivers parked illegally on Mascot footpaths. It used to bug me no end!

There’s a macOS convention that pressing Command along with the first letter of a push button will press it. This is most useful for quickly dismissing Save dialog boxes for documents I want to discard.

In the above screenshot, I activated the modal dialog with Command+W, to close the window. Pressing Command+D here presses the “Discard Changes” button, which means my fingers haven’t left the keyboard to close this window.

Unfortunately, support for this time-saving convention is patchy, with even some of Apple’s own tools ignoring it. The following require a trip to the mouse to dismiss their dialog boxes:

• Apple TextEdit.app
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• More I’m blanking on right now

As much as I’ve begrudgingly switched to Outlook for $reasons, being able to dismiss dialog boxes with the keyboard has already made me far more productive. If you’re a macOS developer, please implement this.