Rubenerd Show 287: The fire alarm episode

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Rubenerd Show 287

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11:59 – A brief trip in time and space to an apartment building fire evacuation in suburban Australia. Did Ruben survive!? Of course he did, he uploaded the episode. No wait, I mean... listen to find out!

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

Released August 2015 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.


Rubenerd Show 286: The hardware store episode

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Rubenerd Show 286

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54:48 – Topics include losing and finding things with Tiles, recording phone crashes, living without bags, 24 hour hosting jobs, gym memberships, building file servers, taking lifts, brick and mortar stores, the Australia tax, a live trip to Bunnings Warehouse (cat6 cables, USB power outlets, dust mitts, fun warning signs, floating floors, newspaper circles, cheating with pebbles, self-service checkouts), fake wood laminate on 70s appliances, paying for journalism, The Guardian Australia, disease-resistant tomatoes, worst nightmare bananas, charity sausage sizzles, feedback from Dave Wares, the great Coffee Freezing Debate, IKEA breakfast cereal, high fructose corn syrup, feedback from Julie about crashing podcast clients, and a very creepy dream with one way mirrors and giant 80s rooms.

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

Released August 2015 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.


Taking the hint, git

Software

We’ve likely all seen git errors like this at some point:

hint: Updates were rejected because the remote contains work that you do
hint: not have locally. This is usually caused by another repository pushing
hint: to the same ref. You may want to first integrate the remote changes
hint: (e.g., 'git pull ...') before pushing again.
hint: See the 'Note about fast-forwards' in 'git push --help' for details.

Each time I see it, I read it like this:

HINT. updates were rejected because the remote contains work that you do HINT not have locally. This is usually caused by another repository pushing HINT to the same ref. You may want to first integrate the remote changes HINT (e.g., 'git pull ...') before pushing again. HINT See the 'Note about fast-forwards' in 'git push --help' for details. HINT.


The HTML5 be evolving, breaking

Internet

The W3C Validator has recently started redirecting HTML5 queries to the Nu HTML Checker instead. And it’s like a box of chocolates...

Warning: Element header does not need a role attribute.

How far we’ve come. We used to need elements with role attributes, because in the frantic rush to cull all style from HTML and move to CSS, they cut too deep and removed meaning. Then we needed HTML5 elements with these role attributes for older clients. Now I suppose it’s assumed everyone recognises HTML5 elements, and casts them to their appropriate roles.

Warning: Consider using the h1 element as a top-level heading only.

Funny, we used to be told h1’s were appropriate in the context of article elements. No longer, it seems.

Warning: Zettai ryouiki is not grade A

To be fair, I don't have fabulous thighs.

But I digress. It brings me one step closer to just saying screw it, and going back to XHTML+RDF. At least then once a page is done, it’s done. Agents know exactly how to display it, because the version is right there in the first (or second) line. Future generations will need to consider when an HTML5 page was created to even have a shot at rendering them correctly.

But hey, “at least they're just warnings”, right?


Overnightscape Central: Show of Shows Again

Media

View episode

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.

03:29:54 – Doc Sleaze!! Clara Tse!! Chad Bowers!! Mike Boody!! Frank Edward Nora!! Rubinerd!! An amazing omnibus of Night Radio Magic!! 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.


Using Safari for a week

Software

Firefox has been getting flaky for me again, after several years of rock solid performance. On a whim, I switched to Safari as my default browser for a week. The results are below, listed by area.

General browser

  • It’s fast, in every sense. It’s also true, it uses less battery power.

  • The narrow Address Bar in Yosemite is maddening, and you can never get it centred correctly again after you install extensions.

  • No vertical stacked tabs. How anyone can cram all their tabs into a horizontal bar (with barely readable titles) in 2015 blows my mind.

  • The bookmarks sidebar is inefficient. I can fit barely half the bookmarks vertically in it than I can in Firefox.

  • Firefox’s developer tools are getting better, but they’re still no match for Safari’s Web Inspector.

  • I didn’t realise how much I rely on favicons as visual indicators, now that I’ve lived without them in Safari now.

Extensions

  • No Tree Style Tabs. See comment about vertical stacked tabs and how critical they are.

  • No PrivacyBadger, though the EFF has never cared about Safari.

  • Safari Cookies is a solid cookie blacklist/whitelister, though the lack of a quick toolbar icon limits its utility.

  • Disconnect doesn’t provide a Safari extension on their website anymore, but their Git repo hosts an old version. Still seems to work.

  • JS Blocker is a nifty extension for making 2015-era cruft pages usable and more private again, like NoScript on Firefox.

  • The DuckDuckGo extension isn’t really necessary, now that we can choose it as the default search and can use hashbangs to get anywhere else.

Conclusions

As I have since Safari was first introduced, I used it briefly before moving back to Firefox (and Camino back in the day). Old habit die hard, and there are a still a few things that prevent Safari being my primary browser. The state of things are much better than last time I checked, though.

I'd also use SeaMonkey again as well, if it were for sidebar tabs. Maybe I do need to brush up on XUL after all.


Rubenerd Show 285: The construction site photo episode

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Rubenerd Show 285

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01:28:37 – Topics include Haunted construction sites, abandoned building shells in Kuala Lumpur, South Park, travelling from Singapore to Malaysia, bus coaches, squeaking chairs, concrete monorails, SMASH!, anime conventions, doujinshi and anime fanart, grey-area fansubs, Reuben Hills coffee from Brasil Souza Farm, coffee plungers, a random observant, fuel caps, rubbish skips, “WE SAVE and YOU $$$”, boy racers, “Only Milk and Juice Come in 2L”, Toradora, root sudo, xkcd, response to Frank discussing fictional coffee shop chains in anime and Need for Speed Most Wanted (Sudoh-bucks, Deep Cups, OMG Coffee), trying Apple Photos, Adobe Creative Cloud (Photoshop, Lightroom, Bridge), anime figures, unintentional pantsu, model ship kits of the RMS Queen Elizabeth and RMS Mauritania, 1940s and 1980s design, and photos as memory supplements, not memories themselves. Music by PHINX.

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

Released August 2015 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.


Dave Chinner on XFS scalability

Software

Play XFS: Recent and Future Adventures in Filesystem Scalability - Dave Chinner

Some of this video went over my head, but it was still a fascinating talk. Dave Chinner is an Australian working for Red Hat on XFS, the file system developed at SGI for Irix and ported to Linux.

I use ZFS for my personal data stores; for the integrity checks that Dave says belong in different layers, but also because its way easier than dealing with a disparate stack. But for my Linux boot partitions and other places, it‘s XFS all the way and has been for a few years.

Incidently, the normally conservative CentOS has adopted XFS as its default file system for 7. That said, they've also adopted systemd.


Overnightscape Central: Rock n Roll

Media

View episode

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.

02:20:45 – Mike Boody!! Clara Tse!! Chad Bowers!! Frank Edward Nora!! Rubinerd!! An awesome, ONSUG look at Rock n Roll!!

You can view this episode on the Underground, listen to it here, and subscribe with this feed in your podcast client.


Goodbye, Bronwyn Bishop

Thoughts

Australian Speaker of the House Bronwyn Bishop has resigned, after several weeks of damning evidence showing her abuse of government entitlements. Likely most famous was her taxpayer–funded, meme–generating helicopter trip to a party fundraiser.

For a government claiming the “age of entitlement” (whatever that means) is “over”, this was particularly egregious. Ditto how hard they came down on former speaker Peter Slipper, who’s expenses look like a coffee run compared to Ms Bishop. And even as Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced her resignation, he chose to blame the system rather than Ms Bishop specifically. Of course.

History will tell if she’s judged most harshly for her biased performance as Speaker (ejecting hundreds of opposition members, compared to single digits for the Government), or her entitlement abuse.

May some dignity and respect return to the post. We all deserve better of our elected officials.