Rubenerd

Every forensic science show I watch that involves tyre imprint evidence either interviewed or referenced Peter McDonald. He literally wrote the book on tyre evidence, and was also one of those frustrating people who was a technical expert and an artist. Compared to many stone-faced officers and prosecutors, it was also clear how much he cared about the victims he helped investigate.

Sadly he passed away in 2013, but I only just realised his book is publicly available in print, and not locked away in academia. I’m tempted to find a copy, even if I have to go the paper route.

I love non-fiction, and especially books that explore topics I have no background in whatsoever. As Merlin Mann says, there’s something invigorating about reading or listening to topics from passionate people, regardless of what it is.

Who knows, given how some Sydney Buses drive around pedestrians, I may find this book useful sooner than I think.

It seems like an age ago now, but a big part of the appeal of the original iPhone was that it synced easily with the Mac. Other phones had given up on the Mac platform by the mid-2000s, relegating their syncing duties to clunky intermediate applications. More like SINKING, am I right Peter!?

The iPhone slurped up your contacts, calendars, todo list items, and mail with the same ease with which the iPod did for music. It shouldn’t be understated just how brilliant this was; I loved my ageing Palms, and my Symbian Nokia E61i was decent, but having a device that just worked with my computer of choice at the time was game changing.

My computer… computer of choice. You can sync with this, or you can sync with that. You can sync with this, or you can sync with that. You can sync with this, or you sync with that. Or you can sync with us. ♫

Few people sync their phones with their computers anymore, relying instead on remote sync. That’s fine, but I prefer keeping things local under the increasingly misguided belief that it’ll work better. I’ve also only ever synced photos and password manager stores locally, because it’s what I trust. Turns out, that’s was a good bet.

Unfortunately, the decline of this use case has been mirrored in testing and updates. Pulling a stream of photos off a modern iPhone with Image Capture is often an exercise in futility, with the process grinding to a halt and cryptic error messages sput out that wouldn’t look out of place on a 16-bit version of Windows. “Sput?” Performing a restore or an update on a phone works as often as it doesn’t.

I’ve been sitting here waiting for this iPhone 8 to do a factory reset so I can send it to Apple this morning for a new battery. I’ve confirmed at least four times that I want to do the restore, after which the Finder sits there doing absolutely nothing. I rebooted the phone, and now the Finder is telling me to unlock it before proceeding. It’s been unlocked for five minutes. In the words of Scotty from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home: “Hello computer!?”

It shouldn’t be like this. Local sync has fewer moving parts, a guaranteed data channel, and oodles of storage. It feels like I’m back in the 2000s trying to get sync working on another phone through an obtuse, poorly maintained abstraction layer. Probably because I am.

Sync without rhythm, and you won’t attract the worm. Sync without rhythm, and you won’t… attract the worm. Sync without rhythm, and you won’t… attract… the worm. If you sync without rhythm, HAH, you’ll never learn. ♫

Update! I rebooted the Mac and the phone a couple more times each, swapped out the Lightning cable from a USB-C to an older USB-A with an adaptor, force quit the Finder, plugged the phone into another port, burnt some toast, tailed system.log, charged the phone battery from 70% to 100%, and put some refresh essential oil in our Muji diffuser. I can’t tell you what combination fixed it, but now I have a phone that’s restoring. Touch sandalwood.

As I drift off into the night… I’m in flight [… mode]? ♫

I’ve been working at importing more content from old services I no longer need to keep around. There’s no guarantee these sites will be around indefinitely, and plenty of anecdotal evidence that they’ll vanish one day with all our data with nay a peep or warning.

It’s been fun seeing how much you can grok just from URLs. Here’s some stuff I learned looking at links from 2013:

• Mobile-specific sites, usually with a “m” or “mobile” subdomain, were still common, especially with newspapers.

• UTM tags hadn’t started their widespread URL pollution yet, but there was inklings that people were thinking that you could track people with get request parameters.

• Compared to earlier lists from 2009 etc, there were even fewer addresses that ended in an extension, like html or asp. I endeavour one day to resurrect my CGI site again with .pl, just for fun. I blame Hales.

• There were still a lot of http sites in the mix, instead of https. I still think the widespread adoption of TLS was a mixed blessing, but that’s for another time.

• There were already a lot of URL shorteners. My scripts tried to follow as many of these as it could, so my archives reflect the original site. Most no longer resolve, like SgLinks that I mentioned yesterday.

• Sites are mostly, and unsurprisingly, not built to last. Newspaper sites tend to be robust, but most 2013 IndieWeb stuff I linked to is long gone. It’s a bit humbling to think the only records of these sites existing are in the sites of schmucks like me, and the Wayback Machine. Me and the Wayback Machine sounds like a ELO cover band.

I’ve decided to stop talking about housing and the housing market and start talking about homes. Because that’s what they are, or that’s what people are being deprived of for the sake of speculative investments. But I digress!

I was having a great conversation with my dad just before the Christmas break. He started telling me about his partner’s attempts at selling her antique furniture, but what fetched thousands of dollars a few years ago barely generated hundreds today. It was across the board, regardless of what it was.

It’s easy to see how the pandemic might have affected this. People wanting to hunker down in place might mean fewer people wanting to move, which is the time when you’re probably wanting to get new furniture. People on high disposable incomes are the ones who’d be buying the bulk of antique furniture, and they’re precisely the ones who can afford to stay put rather than moving every year because a landlord has bumped up rent while wages remain flat.

But I get the feeling there’s also something else going on, and it’s the reason why chains like IKEA are doing stupendously well. More and more of people’s incomes are being disproportionately spent on either rent or mortgages in places like Australia than ever before. Even compared to prior decades with high interest rates, prices in cities like Sydney are unprecedented.

With such little disposable income to spend outside these huge sunk costs, it’s no wonder people are shying away from luxuries like heirloom furniture. If you’re always going to be moving, you want something disposable, cheap, or can be easily (re)assembled. Antiques will just get scuffed and damaged each time, which would only add to their cost.

I’m sure this manifests in plenty of other ways too.

Thirteen years ago I wrote about the dangers of URL shortners, and how adding an extra layer of abstraction was only going to accelerate digital decay:

Aside from search engines, I can’t think of any other type of website that could disable so many links on so much of the internet in one fell swoop than a URL shortening service. You take out that middleman and suddenly millions of links don’t point to anything. It’s like an electronic basket of eggs, only the basket is used by millions of people and the eggs are links. Hey, and they’re fragile too, that analogy worked better than I intended! I mean… um… yes, that’s exactly what I meant from the start. Smart right?

I just noticed we can add SgLinks to the list. The site was a URL shortener for the Singaporean SgForums site, which went read-only in 2018. Their links ended up in a bunch of places where Singaporeans shared news and ideas, including Twitter.

I have a bunch of them sprinkled through various online accounts that I’ve since been importing. All no longer resolve. Wah lau eh.

I haven’t had much opportunity to go outside and use mine over the last couple of years, but my Ricoh GR III is my favourite camera of all time. After years of convincing myself I needed a viewfinder and interchangeable lenses, the GR III is tiny, sharp, fast, and fun to use; all with the same APS-C sized sensor of my beloved boat-anchor Nikon SLR kit it replaced.

The best camera is the one you have on you, and I always have mine in my bag. I imagine Henri Cartier-Bresson using one of these things if he were snapping around today.

Unbeknownst to me, Ricoh released an update to the GR III in the form of the GR IIIx. The main difference is a new lens:

The RICOH GR IIIx incorporates a newly developed 26.1mm F2.8 GR lens, which harmonizes exceptional image quality with a slim design. Unlike past GR-series models which featured a 28mm wide angle of view for exaggerated perspective, this lens provides a 40mm standard angle of view in the 35mm format, delivering images with a more natural perspective and a more truthful sense of depth for a completely different type of street photography.

Save for a precious few times where I wish I had a telephoto for a distance shot, I haven’t ever felt limited by the III’s lens. I also like capturing more detail in a shot when travelling, mostly because I want to remember a scene I visited. But this looks like a compelling option for people who want that human scale. If you held off looking at the GR line before because the lens was too wide, I’d highly enourage you to give this a try!

Most importantly of all, I appreciate the naming scheme as a Palm fan.

I made a list of pictures of the day last year that I added to my RSS reader. I want more nice things in my day, and this seemed like a great, reliable way to do it.

Dave Winer noted a fun trend on Twitter in a similar vein:

My favorite community project of 2021 are the art curators on Twitter. There’s a group of Twitter users who, on behalf of great painters throughout history, are posting their works to Twitter.

He’s made a list of these on an application he’s written, all of whom have now made it to my follow lists! Here’s a Gauguin from 1922, which I only just realised was exactly a century ago:

Going through the blogroll on my omake page was bittersweet. I discovered all these new, related blogs when I was updating the OPML to point to the correct RSS feeds, but I also realised more of the IndieWeb has slipped into the waves.

Plastikitty was one such blog. From their about page:

Plastikitty is a site for toy lovers, by toy lovers! We are two dedicated collectors who want to bring the best news, features and reviews to the figure collecting community. We’ve been working together for 6 years in the industry, though Plastikitty itself is a bit younger than that. This is our passion and our hobby, and we’re so pleased to share that love with all of our readers!

It showed. There were plenty of sites one could read reviews and speculation on upcoming anime figures, but Leah Bayer and Stephen Donaldson’s writing style and enthusiasm endeared me to theirs. I appreciated their attention to detail, going beyond the shallow aesthetics of a particular fig to discuss if it represented the character well, how they differed from prototypes, as well as meta debate about whether the hobby was getting too expensive.

Alter was also Leah’s favourite fig manufacturer, and she especially loved the Racing Miku aesthetic, which clearly spoke to her excellent taste!

As I used to say about GigaOm, their comment section was also shockingly reasonable. It spoke to the community they were able to foster around this niche interest starting in 2011.

I hope they’re going well. I didn’t realise how much I missed their stuff until I checked out my feed archives.

Via Wikiquote:

Stay out of the spotlight. It fades your suit.

I had a shower thought of my own this morning, in the shower. Like a gentleman. Redundancy, as we understand it in this industry, isn’t.

All the online dictionary I’ve read equates redundancy with being superfluous, unnecessary, or surplus to requirements. Collins takes it a step further by also claiming it can mean:

duplicated or added as a precaution against failure, error, etc

This is what I understand redundancy to mean. I want offsite backups, multiple copies of data in a RAID or OpenZFS pool, and read replicas of my live databases. These are all forms of redundancy, because they can improve performace by spreading load, continue to operate in a degraded state and, most critically, recover from loss.

If we consider redundancy to be an essential requirement of a system then, is the existence of said redundant data not redundant? Anyone who claims backups are redundant in the traditional English use of the term isn’t qualified to design or operate computer systems!

Much as my old boss said that anything that isn’t documented doesn’t exist, I’d argue any data without redundancy is ephemeral. If your system can’t tolerate that, redundancy is therefore a requirement.

Each industry has its own vocabulary and nomenclature that may conflict with definitions in other spheres. It’s why nerds get up in arms about the word hacker, despite violent and negative connotations predating our use (Jack the Ripper wasn’t hacking people up to fix them in an innovative way). I wonder what other terms don’t just have different meanings, but are polar opposites?

I always thought OSPF sounded like a laundry detergent.