Rubenerd

A brief housekeeping note and apology if I duplicated a bunch of posts in your blog reader. Earlier this week I put an SSD in my Mac Pro and had to reformat OS X; then I promptly forgot to set my TZ environment variable. This reset all the dates on everything, which some readers construed as new posts.

Defining GUIDs was supposed to prevent this behavior.I suppose enough readers have seemed malformed feeds with duplicated GUIDs, and define uniqueness from a mix of attributes.

Sayonara my friend, see you next year. Have a blast in Japan!

When I laid eyes on the original Byword, I knew it was the editor for me. It wasn’t pretentious or loaded with features. It had iCloud and Dropbox sync, local storage, and a clean interface. Occasionally its two settings screens or tiny sync conflict previews would trip me up, but overall it was a solid piece of kit.

Despite this, and the fact it sounds more like an abbreviated Microsoft product, 1Writer has supplanted Byword as my primary editor on iOS in 2014.

It could very well be a case of PEBKAC, but Byword 2.0 introduced a few strange anomalies. 3G syncing stopped working, regardless of whether it was enabled to use mobile/celluar data in Settings or not. Renaming notes was a hit and miss operation. As with Drafts, the loading time got rather silly. After a while, these quirks started to wear me down, so I decided to finally look for alternatives.

Turns out, Shawn Blanc recently moved off Byword himself, citing reliability concerns. On his company’s site, he listed 1Writer as his chosen alternative. I trust Shaun’s sensibilities, so I decided to give it a whirl.

Suffice to say, I’ve had it for about a week now, and adore it. Its design reminds me of Fantastical, which makes me happy. Its file hierarchy is logically laid out, its Markdown preview is a visual improvement, and it feels subjectively faster. About all that I’m missing is Byword’s night theme for those evening train trips.

It’s US$2.99 on the App Store, and no I was not paid for this. Though if the developer liked the free publicity and wanted to shout me a coffee, I wouldn’t object ;).

What could be a more civilised activity than going to an Irish tea house in The Rocks with friends for your 28th birthday? That’s a trick question, the only valid answer is “nothing”. Well, unless we’d all managed to find fake monocles.

It was great catching up, as well as saying goodbye to my good friends Vadim and Amy who’ll be leaving on a jet plane for Japan soon.

Thanks (from the head of the table!) to @Adasifs, @Dekopatchi, @JamieJakov, @Sebasu_tan, @mr_gazpacho, @baek88, @maidforclass, @Sashin9000, @wonkhaus, @Valtism and @fekete_rigo. And of course, to tireless @hanezawakirika for taking the above picture, and putting up with her slow-witted, recently-ancient partner. You all made me more happy than you may realise :’).

With so many figs (and a couple more since my birthday, thanks to Clara!), I’ve been giving more thought to photo opportunities. I haven’t really done a proper shoot since at least 2009 when Kallen and I were acquainted.

Taken by Pandafigures on MyFigureCollection.net, the above image shows our beloved Princess of the Crystal from the 2010 cult hit Mawaru Penguindrum. For fans of the series, the imagery of the urban subway is instantly recognisable.

I’d long wondered whether we could use computer displays to mockup a scene. The main concern I had regarded overexposure of the screen, or the fig becoming an indiscernible dark shadow in the centre of an otherwise lovely background. Under certain circumstances and for certain characters, the latter may be quite an interesting effect, but if I’m taking a picture with a meadow or daylight scene the effect wouldn’t be great.

Needless to say, this photo has rekindled my interest. Assuming of course, e-ink Kindles could display colour. Perhaps the [chroma?] key would be to flood the subject with enough light from the front to balance the background, or reducing the brightness of the display to the point where it’s closer to the intensity as the surrounding room. In either case, maintaining colour balance would still probably be challenging.

Or, I suppose, one could just shoot RAW and adjust the exposure around the figure. An optical solution is always a better one though. Worth a try!

Yes, I’m shamelessly backdating this post, on account of the fact yesterday was my birthday, and I spent the whole day with people and went right to bed afterwards. If any day of year should excuse someone, a birthday should.

Where was I going with this?

As I slowly creep closer to the big Three Zero, the significance of birthdays seems to diminish. Maybe I’ve finally reached the stage where I’ve had enough of them to render them old hat. Good heavens Ruben, don’t use the word old!

Still, Clara and my family went absolutely out of their way to make yesterday special. Breakfast out at the epic Blu Water Grill, an afternoon Starbucks coffee like I used to share with mummy, a quiet homecooked German dinner. Hugs and bad jokes. Unwrapping an unreasonable number of thoughtful presents. Being reminded of all these wonderful people in my life.

As my sister Elke has also noticed, we’ve done a lot of growing up since we came back to Sydney. Since my last birthday in particular, the world has started falling into place and making slightly more sense. Which is to say, it’s a big, crazy, unfair world out there, but friends and personal reflection really do make such a big difference.

I’m not intelligent enough to get philosophical without referencing code, so it’s as though this perennially beta instance of Person has incremented his version number to 0.2. Or maybe 0.3, learning how to walk and talk was probably a big enough revision. Maybe when I’m 80 I’ll finally get to version 1.0, but one step at a time!

And as for Clara’s drawing skills, I’m sure you’d agree her apology was utterly unnecessary! ^_^.

The UTS School of Software had another free book table today. Naturally, with precious remaining shelf space, I hurriedly combed through the treasure and picked up these two classics.

So much changes, but among their photos of IBM punch card machines and logic gates, you get a sense of just how much the fundamentals have stayed the same. I overuse the term, but it really is humbling.

Logical Design of Switching Circuits

By Douglas Lewin, 1968, reprinted 1976.

“This lucidly written book describes those methods of designing logic circuits which have emerged as useful techniques from the vast amount of published work on switching theory. An engineering approach, rather than the more mathematical treatment, has been chosen.”

Computer Organization, 1978

By V. Carl. Hamacher, Zvonko G. Vranesic and Safwar. G. Zaky.

“A considerable number of books on “computer organization” [sic] aimed at first-level specialist courses in computer science and electrical engineering curricula have been published in the last 15 years. These books usually assume background in digital logic. Many books start with a description of the basic parts of digital systems and then proceed to a design of a hypothetical computer, which is intended to illustrate most concepts discussed in the books. Such hypothetical machines are never manufactured, they are seldom subjected to practical constraints. This leaves the reader in a dilemma about the relative merits of various features.

“Our resolve to write a book stems from our experience in teaching computer organization to three distinct types of undergraduates: computer science specialists, electrical engineering undergraduates, and engineering science undergraduates. We feel that a book has to come to grips with problems, even if they are ill-defined. Thus one of our basic decisions was to avoid hypothetical machines and instead make use of examples take from commercially available computers [the PDP-11!].”

Forgive the ridiculous size of the accompanying image, but it’s not often an icon of your childhood is brought back to life again! Earlier this month, the SAILOR MOON 20th Anniversary Project Official Site released the first official art for the upcoming Sailor Moon Crystal series.

For a Sailor Moon nerd, there are a few things of note here. First, references to the original Jupiter, Mercury, Venus and Mars senshi appear in the background, suggesting the cast will be limited to them… maybe? Usagi is also sporting her original transformed seifuku from the first series, albeit with a different bow clasp. A reboot ala Star Trek?

As I’m sure many of you would have done if you were a child in the 1990s, I grew up watching those horrible DIC dubs of Sailor Moon. Imagine my surprise a decade later when I watched the original Japanese series’ and saw all the things the Western distributors saw fit to omit. I’ve also been catching up with the Sailor Moon manga which has been re–released into English; no more lamenting not being able to read one of my all–time favourite series like I did back in 2006!

Sailor Moon Crystal was due for release last year, but was repeatedly pushed back. I’m fine with this, they should take all the time they need to get it right. When dealing with such a venerable cultural icon, one can’t be too careful!

I swear by TextExpander. Along with Quicksilver and nvALT, its functionality is now triggered from muscle memory. My beloved ;shortcuts activate autocompletions, expansions, tedious code and markup boilerplate, forms and even fire Perl scripts. Without it, I feel like I’ve been thrust in front of a shell and asked to draw a picture.

(As I wrote that, I could hear the voices of a thousand pedants shrieking that there are ways to draw in a shell window, from box characters to ASCII art to cowsay to figlet to launching graphical tools. Smart–arses may even decry shells don’t need further decorating, as the sea creatures already did such a beautiful job. And yet, I still wrote it. Maybe I’m a blogging masochist).

Trouble in paradise

Perhaps the most common error I get with the tool, besides occasional clipboard dumps, is Disabled by Secure Input. Unfortunately, what used to be a once–in–a–month occurrence has now been happening almost hourly.

From the error message:

Secure event input is enabled when you type in a password field (•••) and in other instances by certain applications. Secure input prevents key–logging malware from recording applications, but it also prevents snippet expansion.

Fair enough, the benefit outweigh the potential inconvenience. In the last few days though, the application that has enabled this mode has become loginwindow. Smile’s online docs explain:

When TextExpander tells you the name of the application that has enabled secure input, it’s giving you a “best guess” that’s sometimes inaccurate. When TextExpander reports that “loginwindow” has enabled secure input, it’s likely that TextExpander can’t quite tell which application has enabled secure input, so instead it’s showing that application’s “ancestor, ” loginwindow. This can also happen when OS X itself has left secure input enabled after you’ve logged in, or after you’ve entered your password to wake the computer from sleep or from screensaver.

Where do I even begin?

In the New Normal where applications routinely update themselves in the background, Mac App Store updates occur overnight and others inform us they need updating upon launching, it could be almost any application on my machine that’s triggering this Secure Input mode and not gracefully turning it off again. I’m hoping its not one of the Important Programs people use; physically impaired people who use OS X’s accessibility options must be even more frustrated than me.

For now, I’m learning to appreciate all that TextExpander saves me from doing. Typing all this stuff out manually again feels more archaic than using a shell to draw pictures.

Suffice to say, I was far too busy jumping around and generally making a complete nerdy arse of myself to take decent pictures during Kyary’s first Australian concert. In a nod to her fans here, she even donned koala ears towards the end!

There was a time in my teens and early twenties when I gave a shit about what other people thought of my hobbies, musical tastes and so forth. Surrounded by anime otaku, nerds and J-Pop fans all dressed in their costumes dancing along to the shamelessly clean fun of Kyary was an amazing experience. That feeling of belonging as we revel in this unique culture was even more so.

Arigato~ ^_^. Both to Kyary, and to Clara for shouting me these tickets for my birthday :”).