Rubenerd

Remember when I blogged about things other than keyboards? Yeah, me neither. But this may be the keyboard post to end all keyboard posts.

In my opinion, everything is a compromise compared to the Model M. But I can’t use that in the evenings, and I wouldn’t want to subject coworkers to it. For this, over the past few weeks I’ve been looking for a quieter alternative that still has some nice tactile feedback. As the master chef has quality knifes, those who spend their days at a computer should have a quality input device to reduce finger strain.

For this, I’d mostly turned to the Cherry MX line of mechanical key switches. The range offers offer everything from tactile bumps and clicks and in all manner of actuation weights. WASD’s customisable keyboards seemed to be the best choice; all that was missing was my payment details for them to start shipping one over.

And then I found the Topre RealForce. Specifically, the numpad-less 87U and the full 104U. They’re Japanese, have “silky smooth keycaps” and are awesome.

The technology behind the RealForces is fascinating. The keys consist of a rubber dome sitting atop a large metal spring, which activate an electrostatic capacitive switch. This arrangement offers “smooth” tactile feedback, while being quieter than the mechanical Cherry MX series or buckling springs. I like springs.

As some people do by mixing Cherry MX Greens and Blues, the RealForce keyboard keys are tuned to finger strength. For example, keys under your index fingers require more force to press than the ones under your pinkie. I’m a medicore touch typist, but this could provide the impetus for me to get better if I knew it could further reduce finger strain in the long term.

And finally, along with black (the beige of 2014) the keyboards are offered with the same beigetastic colour scheme of the first keyboards I grew up with. I’d customised the WASD keyboard to resemble this, but this even has that beige colour on the bezel. All I need is a WordPerfect shortcut key sticker to run along the top, and I’d be home free.

It seems to be the ultimate balance of performance, quietness and retro appeal I was looking for. So naturally, you have to sacrifice a goat and part with upwards of $270 Australian. With that, I could almost buy two WASDs, or a couple thousand cheapies. Would I want to though, when I could get one keyboard that satisfies all my pedantic needs?

Other posts in this series

• WASD keyboard design fun
• CoolerMaster QuickFire, via @screenbeard
• The CODE keyboard
• My second workstation: Unicomp keyboards
• My Unicomp keyboard

To round off my exploration of Cherry MX switch based keyboards, today we’ll be taking a look at WASD Keyboards. I first heard of them as the hardware guys behind Jeff Atwood’s CODE keyboard, though they’ve been in the business for a while.

Compared to most other keyboard manufacturers, WASD custom builds their hardware specifically to your design. After you’ve chosen a US 104/86 key or ISO 104/77 layout, you’re given the choice to customise the type of switches, keycap colours, typeface and function key labels.

I’ll admit, I’ve spent many a happy afternoon creating all manner of fanciful designs. In predictable Ruben fashion though, I eventually standardised on the classic typeface and beigetastic colours I remember from my 1990s childhood: pretty much the boring design in the photo above. Given the price and ability to customose everything else, it’s a shame the bezel has to be black, but é assim que a vida é….

For someone looking specifically for a quieter alternative to his Unicomp IBM Model M clone, the Cherry MX Brown switches seem to be the best choice. The Cherry MX Clears offered on the CODE keyboard are unfortunately absent here, though given their steeper price it’s probably for the best, lest I be tempted.

There are a few more keyboards I want to look into, but for now this seems to be the one I’ll be going with. Maybe. Good thing I’m not indecisive, pedantic or detail obsessed.

Other posts in this series

• Topre Realforce
• CoolerMaster QuickFire, via @screenbeard
• The CODE keyboard
• My second workstation: Unicomp keyboards
• My Unicomp keyboard

Soon I’d come to the Leopardstown dual carriageway.

It was the first dual carriageway in Ireland; and it was a 100 yards long.

I liked the name.

I don’t remember a town being there; and I certainly saw no leopards.

But I had to cross it anyway to get to the house at the top of the world.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

This originally appeared on PenguinCoffee, Clara’s and my old shared weblog.

Clara: Tiger stripe thigh high sukumizu!

By Azalanz on Pixiv.

Today I had the giddy pleasure of talking with some really nice, crazy smart nerds doing wonderful things. I knew several on Twitter, but meeting them in the flesh (oh my) was rather something else. The word “disruption” has been used enough to have lost all meaning, but in their field this outfit in Sydney is ready to take on the world. And they already are.

With regards to recent topics though, the keyboards of choice for these veritable electronic craftsmen were interesting. Of all the different types and styles, it seems that Cherry MX switches really have won out over competing tech. Among a Microsoft Natural Keyboard (I can haz split MX?) I counted no fewer than three such Cherry specimens.

During my needlessly obsessive exhaustive research, I’d discounted the MX Reds and Blues for either not having enough tactile feedback or being too noisy. Hearing them today, feeling one for myself (oh my) and talking to their owners though, both seem compelling. I’d chosen the Browns (or Clears, if I can find) on account of their tactile bump and less loud tactile feedback, but the Blues and Reds were both far quieter than the buckling spring I’m using right now!

Thanks guys, you’ve made my search for a secondary keyboard that much harder.

As for the above image? This was a press image or Corsair for their latest full colour backlit Cherry MX switches. While I care little for a backlight given I don’t look at the keys when typing, I’ll admit I’m a bit of a cloudy trance staring at them.

A few days ago, I talked about using Tumblr as a general blog publishing platform. The barrier to entry is far lower than “traditional” blogging software, and doesn’t seem to have too many downsides.

We’ve since found a major sticking point. Tumblr’s permalinks can’t be changed, and use numeric IDs. This shouldn’t be an issue if you start there, but importing an existing blog will break your permalinks.

The only solution we can think of is some server-side logic to translate potentially hundreds of exiting permalinks into Tumblr equivilents. This would involve either hundreds of handcoded rules with Tumblr numeric IDs and the original URL, or some simple Redis backed thing.

Either way, this simpler blog platform just got much more complicated, and would still require you to maintain a webserver somewhere, thereby defeating the purpose.

Of course, the other solution is not to care, and let your permalinks break. If you’re okay with that, no worries.

This evening I had to repair a family external hard drive. To run a few of my repair and recovery tools, I needed to give QEMU raw disk access to the drive on my Mac. Usually, this is a fairly easy task:

1. Plug in the external drive
2. Use “diskutil list” to find the device identifier
3. Unmount with “hdiutil unmount /dev/diskX”
4. Launch QEMU with “-hda /dev/diskX”

The same could be done in VirtualBox using raw disk images.

In this case though, the volume was so badly corrupted that OS X got caught in a loop trying to mount it when the drive was plugged in. Manually mounting and unmounting didn’t work, and the system maintained a lock on the device.

There were several possible solutions, but I chose just to prevent that particilar drive automounting. First, find the UUID of the affected drive partition in question, where X is the drive and Y is the partition number:

$ diskutil info /dev/diskXsY

Then add the following to the legendary “/etc/fstab” file, substituting the file system if you’re dealing with others. Newer versions of OS X don’t include the file by default, but still respect it if you create one:

$ sudo echo 'UUID=[from diskutil] none hfs rw,noauto' >> /etc/fstab

With that, I was able to plug the affected drive in, launch QEMU and be on my way.

Image of everyone’s favourite three star by saya556 on Pixiv. Because all the cool people, regardless of whether in anime or stock photography, diagnose their computer issues with a laptop on one leg.

We’ve reached 808 pages of Rubenerd posts. Be still, your beating heart!

The most common search result for the term is the Roland TR-808, an “rhythm composer” with a seemingly cult like following:

The Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer was one of the first programmable drum machines [..]

Introduced by the Roland Corporation in early 1980, it was originally manufactured for use as a tool for studio musicians to create demos. Like earlier Roland drum machines, it does not sound very much like a real drum kit. Indeed, because the TR-808 came out a few months after the Linn LM-1 (the first drum machine to use digital samples), professionals generally considered its sound inferior to sampling drum machines; a 1982 Keyboard Magazine review of the Linn Drum indirectly referred to the TR-808 as sounding like marching anteaters. However, the TR-808 cost US$1,000 upon its release, which was considerably more affordable than the US$5,000 LM-1.

You had me at marching anteaters. That and this rather lovely pillow.

We’ve now been living with the fallout of Heartbleed for a few weeks now, and if anything there’s more to be concerned about.

Very, very brief

Earlier this month, the now infamous Heartbleed bug was discovered in OpenSSL. In an extreme, abridged nutshell, the library allowed malicious users to access private data from a server. By over-reporting packet length, memory extraneous to that request could be leaked.

As with memory leaks on our desktop OSs, the implications are applications, and nefarious users, gaining access to memory they’re not supposed to. In the case of servers, this could include anything from private keys, to session data, to login credentials for users, databases, accounts, the works.

It’s terrifying, not only because traffic to so many unpatched sites could be compromised, but that they could have been compromised for so long in the past, and retroactively so. For so many servers rattling along without carers, or embedded systems, or others that will take time to patch, its feasible this attack could render some traffic insecure for the foreseeable future.

In his classic, no nonsense style, OpenBSD and OpenSSH’s Theo De Raadt took issue with the OpenSSL team’s use of a wrapper around C malloc and free calls, thereby sidestepping any future potential security improvements. In this case, the burden of maintaining secure memory was drawn away from the OS, which is rarely a good idea.

Broader implications

Regardless of whether the age old issue of performance and security played a part, the issue has raised several key questions.

• Should we be writing such critical security code in languages that have arbitrary access to process memory at all?

• Is the Torvaldian “with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow with open source code” meme dead and buried now?

• Will this finally provide the impetus for widespread perfect forward secrecy deployment, given its random session keys could help protect against such attacks being retroactively used on archived encrypted communications?

• For such critical software, should the overworked OpenSSL team be given more resources? Should we all be contributing to software that we all depend on?

• Should organisations, such as the NSA, be obligated to share bugs of this nature that potentially affect everyone? Or more bluntly, should we be surprised that they exploited such a bug?

I’ve yet to develop my thoughts on these sufficiently, so they’ll have to be for future posts. Well, other than the NSA one, I think we all know the answer to that already.

If you see a sysadmin around, or know one, give them a hug and maybe some chocolates if that’s her/his thing. We’ll need all of it we can get.