Rubenerd

Last year I wrote about buying a Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard 2019. I was inintially underwhelmed by the predictable mushiness of the keys, but it became noticably better after breaking in with frequent use. The difference is stark when pressing lesser-used keys on the right.

I had two reasons for getting it. I wanted to address some immediate wrist discomfort, and to see if a split keyboard worked for me without splurging on an expensive piece of kit. It achieved both, only now I’m in less of a hurry to replace it than I thought. It just works, and feels fine.

That said! I do keep an eye out for alternatives if and when they surface, and I just saw the Maja 2 by Vulcan and KBDFans:

It has a split keyboard design, a proper set of cursor keys, and a cluster for Insert, Delete, and Page Down (though curiously not Page Up). The physical arrangement looks a little haphazard, but it means a minimal number of custom key shapes need to be created to achieve the split design. The caps also look like they can be customised, so I can add hiragana if and when I pick up Japanese again.

The great thing about indie split keyboards is that they’re willing to experiment with modifier keys, something the conservative Microsoft keyboard doesn’t have the freedom to. Note the position of the control and shift keys near the spacebar in the photo above. I suspect this would do as much—if not more—to help reduce strain than the split itself.

My main gripe is a lack of a slope. I think the split design has been more important when using the Microsoft board, but I do notice I’m holding my hands at a more comfortable angle now that I watch myself type on it, compared to placing my hands on the Commodore 128 sitting next to me. I think?

Mechanical split keyboard fans, do you think slopes are important or is this a placebo?

There’s a shopping centre in Moldova called MallDova. Here’s a photo by PhotobankMD hosted on Wikimedia Commons:

This might be the best-named shopping building in the world. It makes me happier than it should.

Shamelessly reposting myself from Mastodon last night:

I’m logging off for the night. Happy New Year everyone. I’m taking that as a challenge. Let’s do this 💪👋

What have you got planned for today? I’m finally going to upgrade my last Mac to Monterey Jack, commit all the stuff I didn’t get around to in various personal Git repos, and have a long, socially-distanced walk with Clara.

A cup of coffee sounds like a good idea, too.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

36:36 – Join your host as he finally gets around to uploading some festive cheer and other rambling nonsense. Talking about Xmas lights, the programming VCR meme, Travan tapes, health fun, couch potato-ism, coffee chains in Asia, trying a seasonal brew, and the infamous “much more!” Happy new year from us to you ♡.

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

Released December 2021 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts; this one notwithstanding. Hosted graciously by the Internet Archive.

Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.

Thanks everyone for the feedback on my Nintendo Switch Lite post; there’s more interest in this budget console than I realised! Many of you noticed from screenshots that I’m playing a female character again, and wanted to know why. A few more were trolls, though that’s to be expected for people who have yet to face their own repressed feelings.

The answer isn’t anything special: it’s because I can. Back to Pokémon!

Okay, maybe there’s more going on here. Some of the nicest, most heartfelt comments came from my scribbled posts on masculinity and male hobby judgement that I thought it was worth exploring more here.

The most obvious reason, and one that my friend Amy pointed out, is that women tend to be more interesting in games! With a few genre exceptions, anime, mobile apps, and related fandoms clearly spend more time and attention on the designs of their female characters, for reasons that could skew either way. I was tired of looking over Clara’s shoulder at all the cooler stuff she could get with her avatars compared to mine. If you’ll forgive the self-quote:

… the general idea that it’s permissible for boys to be interested in what’s basically dress up of electronic dolls is a monumental step forward in breaking down these gender stereotypes. I don’t think that gets enough credit.

Coupled with the fact that almost all my favourite characters in pop culture are female (WAH!), the choice is obvious. In the timeless words of an anime club member who’s name escapes me, Kaito is great, but who wouldn’t choose Miku?

People using avatars with a different gender, especially in the anime and fantasy communities, is also nothing new. I’ve read armchair philosophers ascribe this to escapism, but I also see it as a way of living out an alternative persona, especially for those who may be too shy to explore certain aspects of themselves in public. Game characters are no different. They have no basis in reality whatsoever, so why not?

That question wasn’t always easily answered, at least personally. I still cringe over a trip to an arcade when I was an early teenager, where some classmates tore me a new one for choosing a female character in one of those forgettable fighting games (and not even one of the “sexy” ones). I was already regularly bullied enough to tears, but coupled with my anxiety about masculinity at the time, it stung enough for me to retreat further into my shell. I’m relieved that I can be a grown, mostly-straight gentleman now and choose things without caring about fragile egos… theirs and mine included!

We could leave it at that, but I’m the son of Debra Schade, and I like to pretend there’s a subversive reason too. I resent the idea that being male is the default, and that the onus is on us to defend an overt choice to play as someone else. She was the first to tell me how everything from psychology to pop culture are set up in this way, given the taboo in most circles for men to exhibit any traits that would be perceived as feminine. As she said, there’s an attitude that doing so is a “demotion”, which is so much tosh.

And finally, who can resist the temptation to push back against those who decide, without authority or invitation, through whom we can play. As @Azusa__cat said:

They’re called fantasy games for a reason. Enjoy the games however you want. There is a reality game called life, and it’s shit. There is too much “I don’t like this so you can’t have it” around lately. Life is too short so just have fun.

I need that on a shirt, that my alter-ego Ruby wears in her isometric worlds. It’s amazing how much more travel she gets up to than me thesedays.

I’ve been on a multi-year quest to reduce the amount of stuff that I have, in real life and electronically. I like being tidy, and clutter is a source of anxiety.

One way I thought I’d achieve this is through consolidation of multiple things into one. Yes Ruben, that’s the definition of consolidation! Or in the words of culinary philosopher Alton Brown, do we need all these unitaskers? I’ve had some positive results this year, but I deviated in ways I didn’t expect.

Building a new homelab server was one of the best things I could have done for myself. I was going headfirst into a proper homelab with racks, switches, and cabling a few years ago, but in the end I decided to replace multiple boxes and NAS devices into one hulking tower. bhyve and jails on FreeBSD makes virtualising stuff so simple. It’s cleaner, quieter, takes up much less space, and is less physical stuff to maintain.

In the kitchen we’ve been using an air fryer for so much, but we also splurged and got an electric kettle. Shocking! It is a bit, because our apartment is so tiny and our countertop space so precious, but working from home meant Clara and I were boiling water for tea and coffee often enough that it was worth it. Going from minutes to seconds to boil water has been a boon.

Portable electronics were probably the most interesting takeaway this year for me. I intended to replace everything with one laptop and a larger phone, but I ended up hating the compromises. Maybe smaller devices have narrower tolerances. I’m now back to a smaller phone, a large work laptop, a tiny “on-call” writing laptop, a tablet just for reading newspapers, books, and manga, and a game console. I cheat and consider this a win, given it all still takes up a fraction of the space that my aforementioned, decommissioned homelab did. Those were some big words.

I also finally got around to retiring an old XFS array I may or may not have forgotten about… what is it about the cobbler’s son walking barefoot? Now all Clara’s and my data sits in redundant, backed up, regularly scrubbed OpenZFS pools on FreeBSD 13. The array was so old and fragmented, the performance improvement alone could have been worth it, let alone having peace of mind.

Online, is a word with one word. I’ve been ruthlessly closing accounts and preparing their content and links to import. I already did this with Tumblr, but Instapaper and a few others are still works-in-progress. I’m learning to be more circumspect about these sorts of services, because you never know when they’ll arbitrarily change their rules, move you somewhere else, or close. At least if I self host everything in one place, I only have myself to blame when it goes down.

The last thing I’d wanted to figure out was our Hi-Fi system. I’d wanted to consolidate playing CDs, VCDs, and Laserdiscs in the one unit, but unfortunately I suspect our AC-3 equipped Kenwood has a shorted power supply. Hi-Fi repair people haven’t wanted to touch it with a ten-foot pole on account of it being unusual. Anyone in Sydney or surrounds know of a repair place for old stuff rational people wouldn’t use?

Indepdendent bloggers are rare thesedays; those that have an archive are rarer still. Blogs are written in the present, so their archives are a fun, if bittersweet time capsule.

I’ve been stuck in 2009 with Marco Arment this afternoon, reading about the Palm Pre, coffee, and Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Earlier today I was checking out my personal mirror of the J-Walk Blog before he took the site offline. Cornfields, clocks, and banjos.

Just don’t ask me to read my own archives. I can barely tolerate myself from one year ago, let alone five or fifteen!

Who else has some great archival material?

I’ve been feeling this for a while, but Ken Kocienda crystalised it so perfectly, I have to share it:

“I saw this thing a few days ago and I want to see it again but I can’t find it.” This is my most persistent frustration while using my computer. The OS gives me no help. Where did I see it? Twitter? Slack? YouTube? Messages? Web? Email? Ugh!

This happens to me at least a few times a week, if not more. The thing could be something concrete, like a document, quote, or photo; or something intangible like an idea or concept. Each time is a maddening, and often times fruitless, exercise in using all the search boxes across all the applications trying to find something.

I’m often shocked at how tenuous some of those searches end up being to the final result. I knew a client I was talking with before Christmas had a fruit in their name, but it was the fact he made a dad joke that I quickly transcribed that let me find the text file where my notes were.

Two things amaze me about this. At a high level, I think it’s surprising that we’ve turned computers—these logical, mathematical devices with enough raw processing power to crunch through billions of records—into something that can’t process data… for us, at least. It’d be like taking water and making it flow a bit better, but it loses its ability to fall from the sky or wet things.

Yes information is distinct from data, and that data have to be stored and organised and indexed and all those other fun things data scientists spend their lives working on. But it borders on surreal to think how so much stuff is designed to be hostile to interop, when it doesn’t need to be. Social media closing their graphs is but one tiny manifestation of this. There is public good in being able to do these searches, but we’ve let private companies dictate the practical future of how the web works.

I’m also amazed at a personal level. I’ve always meticulously maintained my file systems and directory trees going back to my teens. Almost every file I’ve ever saved ends up being organised by purpose, then date, then context. I have a glorified personal database that logs when and where backups are stored, when I last did a ZFS scrub, and so on. If I have trouble finding things in this hierarchy sometimes, what chance does a person with a life outside of tree pruning possibly have?!

It felt like Christmas came early this year with the release of Krita 5!

I’m not a digital artist, as evidenced by anything I’ve posted here. Krita is first and foremost a digital art tool, but I’ve found it invaluable for graphics and photo editing as well, especially projects that require layering and transformations. You can download it for all the major OSs here. I’m sure it’ll be in package managers soon, too.

If I had one quality-of-life wishlist for the software though, it would be more consistent and foolproof grid and guide snapping regardless of layer type. Emphasis on the fool in foolproof! A year into using Krita as my primary graphics editor, I’m still utterly confounded about how it works; most of the time I give up.

I suspect it might be a case of me using the tool wrong, or expecting it to do something for which it wasn’t designed… refer to my comment above about not being an artist. But The Gimp, Pixelmator, and Acorn let me align and snap layers without a second thought.

I’m not religious, but if the road to hell is paved with good intentions, articulated buses are the public transport that drives on them. This post explores the accurate reasons why I’ve made such an astute observation of accurate astuteness:

• They’re loud. I’m not sure why they’re exempt from implementing the same soundproofing as in almost every other modern bus, but you do not want to be on a street corner as one roars past. You know how you’re not supposed to stare directly at an eclipse? You’re not supposed to directly hear one of these six-wheeled monstrosities.

• They’re unpredictable, or at least, drivers think they are. From my balcony I routinely see motorists who think they can get around the articulated bus that’s making a corner. They almost never can, because basic laws of physics get in the way. And forget about it if you’re a pedestrian or cyclist.

• They’re uncomfortable. In a stroke of engineering genius, the designers managed to make bus ride quality worse. The entire back third of the bus pivots up and down, not just left and right when turning. Bob bob bob… hope you don’t get motion sickness!

• Their drivers don’t care. Some do, others are fine with blocking entire intersections in any direction by stopping right in the middle of them. Traffic is unavoidable, how you deal with it is what counts. These buses routinely can’t.

• They’re inefficient. You kinda sorta save a bus driver for every two or three of these, but that’s it. They take up more road space than an equivalent double-decker (given sufficient clearance for their operation), and the long, flexible accordion section can’t reasonably carry passengers. We lose a lot for this gimmick.

• You can’t be polite. I always shout out thanks to drivers before alighting. Unless you can project like Shaggy, good luck being heard over the sound of the infernal engine from the back doors.

• They’re ugly. This may be the biggest offence of all. Some of us were born this way! But buses are an artificial construct; there’s no reason for them to look like tissue boxes stuck together with a half-used tube of toothpaste.

These deplorable contraptions work better when they have permanent right of way, such as in a bus-rapid transit system, or sections of Adelaide’s pioneering O-Bahn. Otherwise, it’s time to make some pretty coral reefs out of them; assuming ocean life would want to be seen attached and growing on such despicableness.

I’d say this post was tongue in cheek, but the back of this articulated bus just hit a pothole, and made me bite it. Okay not right now, I’m remembering back to an incident earlier this year. Grr articulated buses; bad enough that I can remember an experience riding in you all these months later.