I noticed this when checking my Outlook Web Access email filters:
The Inbox rule “Sent to ‘[ADDRESS]’” contains errors. To resolve the error, please edit the rule or re-create it.
Okay, let’s check it out.
The rule you’ve selected can’t currently be viewed in Outlook Web App. Please use Outlook to view it.
I’ve never used Outlook for this account; I don’t even have it installed.
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01:16:30 – Ruben engages in Australia’s democratic process, motorcycle commutes, frigid weather, preferential voting systems, democracy sausages, colour logic behind wheelie bin lids, and a frustrating rail journey into geo-blocked gaming.
Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.
Released July 2016 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.
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13:10 – Onsug hosts released Mystery and History, so here’s... Fixtery? Brief topics include fixing things, Australian lifts starting at G instead of 1, QBASIC nostalgia, giant rubbish piles for bulk collection, decluttering, uninspired etymology, and general frostiness.
Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.
Released June 2016 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.
Vim keeps finding ways to surprise me, even after all these years. And yes emacsen, that’s (generally) a positive!
Say you’re working in a typical editor and you do this:
What typically happens? You’re asked if you want to save your changes. This despite the file being empty, and rolled back to an unedited state. Most editors must have a condition to say “if anything has been typed, set edited to true”.
In Vim, the file is considered unedited again, and it closes without a prompt. This is the way it should be.
Contrast with this:
Despite it being empty, the editor records that you still did something to the file, and it prompts you to write.
There could be case for even the latter to not prompt you, but I’ll still take the former in the meantime.
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.
02:13:11 – Doc Sleaze!! Jimbo!! Chad Bowers!! Frank Edward Nora!! Rubenerd By Proxy!! A deep, rich, and Mysterious entry in this Collaboratative Series that YOU should be taking part in!! Jimbo has the ONSUG Week in Review and as usual, PQ Ribber acts as your Master of Ceremonies!!
You can view this episode on the Underground, listen to it here, and subscribe with this feed in 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.
01:55:25 – Frank Edward Nora!! Doc Sleaze!! Rubenerd!! Jimbo has the ONSUG Week in Review!! PQ Ribber is your very late and confused host!!
You can view this episode on the Underground, listen to it here, and subscribe with this feed in your podcast client.
In what’s likely the most mundane news you’ve read all week, posts on Rubenerd are now in boxes again. Boom!
I tried the whole miniamlism thing, but I like the clean breaks between sections. I think it renders the site more readable, and easier to visually separate the wheat from the chaff (admittedly a risk when most of your site content is the aforementioned chaff, including this post). The drop shadows and borders also harken back to DOS in a delightfully tacky way.
For what it’s worth, the original Rubenerd in 2003 had a similar arrangement. Now all I need are tabs along the top, and we’ll be rocking more nostalgia than I know what to do with.
I used to follow the Apple rumour sites, MacWorld (RIP) and WWDC with gusto. Cynical folk would have referred to the condition as rabid fanboyism, but I considered it reasonable for one who’s personal and professional life revolve around the use of a specific collection of products.
(Fanboy also denotes unquestioning devotion, which I’ve never had. Nor most people who are branded with the term, honestly).
Lately, my enthusiasm has been tempered to things just working, with some occasional esoteric pontifications. Wow, what a wanky sentence. Generally though, I see events like a Daring Fireball podcast episode with Apple execs again and think “yeah, I’ll be good”.
That’s not to say I abstain from all media coverage. For example, this byline by Alphr was a corker:
Apple iOS 10 preview: “Biggest update ever”? Hardly. Apple dedicated an hour of its recent WWDC keynote to iOS 10, but it’s a major disappointment
Hell will freeze over when the tech press applauds Apple for an iterative feature release. The good news is, such dismissive clichés mean Apple has done something noteworthy, so I was interested:
iOS 10’s home screen looks wonderful. I barely even looked at the notification screen before, but I could see myself using the heck out of these new “card” rich-notifications. It neatly ties together functions from the home screen and lock screen, and provides the first compelling reason for me to upgrade my old phone to one with force touch.
Changes to watchOS look great; my Apple Watch may become more than just an analogue face with live weather and multiple timezones. Not that it doesn’t do those really well, it’s just a lot of overhead (size, charging time) for that.
My Siracusian side is most interested in this new macOS file system. I trust OpenZFS exclusively for data backups, but there are enough limitations (resource use, no native encryption) that would render it problematic on portable devices. If they can make AFS work, it’ll be a sight for sore eyes after years of HFS+ ickyness.
(To clarify for the same pedants who likely called me a fanboy back in the day, yes ZFS in the new Oracle Solaris 12 has native encryption. I know, because I use it. Note I said “OpenZFS”;. I can’t see Oracle allowing Apple to use it on macOS. See, being a pedant works both ways).
Anyway, interesting stuff. Back to work now.
I’ve seen a rise in emails that follow this formula:
Dear Ruben,
As a valued customer of [service], we are very interested in understanding your impressions of [service].
As such, we would really appreciate it if you could assist us with a short survey. The survey will only take a moment of your time to complete and your feedback will help us improve our services to members.
How likely would you be to recommend Bupa to friends and colleagues? (please click below to start the survey)
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Note that they say “start the survey”; merely stating your chances to recommend Choosing the number from one to ten is a gateway.
This must have been born out of marketing research that suggests higher conversion rates if you spam your customers with.
I emphathise getting feedback can be hard, and that people generally only want to comment when something goes wrong. But when I get a message or two like this a week from every provider and website under the sun, it gets mighty tedious.
Marketers, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much of a better idea can you come up with?
I got a surprise this morning (June 8) when updating Homebrew:
$ brew update
Updated Homebrew from b9552a5 to b2c9625.
Updated 4 taps (caskroom/cask, caskroom/fonts, homebrew/core, homebrew/dupes).
==> Cleaning up /Library/Caches/Homebrew...
==> Migrating /Library/Caches/Homebrew to /Users/me/Library/Caches/Homebrew...
==> Deleting /Library/Caches/Homebrew...
Seems weird to move the cache to your home folder, when the default for the package manager itself is still /usr/local/bin. I suppose at some level this means one could run multiple Homebrews on the same machine without caches clashing.
Caches Clashing. HARRISON FORD. “I’m going to clash your cache!”
It also looks like the Cask caskroom has moved as well:
$ brew cask update
==> Warning: The default Caskroom location has moved to /usr/local/Caskroom.
==>
==> Please migrate your Casks to the new location, or if you would like to
==> keep your Caskroom at /opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom, add the following to
==> your HOMEBREW_CASK_OPTS:
==>
==> --caskroom=/opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom
==>
==> For more details on each of those options, see
==> https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask/issues/21913.
Fortunately, this hasn’t moved:
$ apt-get update
==> Ruben you eejit, you're on your Mac.
$ pkg update
==> Ruben you eejit, you're on your Mac.
Cue a reference to the Universal Install Script, which regrettably uses bash and is therefore less portable than it first suggests. Shocking, I know.