Rubenerd

This description made me chuckle:

“Rather than entering a corporate reception, you feel as if you’re entering a hushed antespace of timeless power.” — Herbert Wright, Johnny Tucker, Journalist (architecture) (2016)

It’s name has also always bugged me, given its roof clearly is a pyramid. At best, the rest of the tower could be described as a rectangular prism. And it’s not even in Canada.

Rather than departing through an exit, one is left with a sense of a transient awakening that inflames the senses with hashed antipasto. — Ruben Schade, esq. (2021)

Geoff Marshall did a fun video where he tried to take the shortest London Tube journey that ticks off the alphabet:

Clara and I thought we’d plan out such a trip for Sydney.

Bexley North is the only station with an X, so we’d start there. Conveniently, these are all clustered together on the Airport and South Line line:

• Kingsgrove: G K L N O R S V
• Bexley North: B E L T X Y
• Bardwell Park: A D P W
• Green Square: Q U
• St James: J
• Central: C

Then you’d have to change at Central for a long trip on the Blue Mountains Line to get to Hazelbrook, the only station with a Z:

• Redfern: F
• Hazelbrook: Z

According to Sydney TripView, the total time would be 153 minutes. We might need to give it a try… maybe with a good book in between!

Speaking of the Raspberry Pi, I’ve been in the market for an integrated keyboard case for one. I’ve rediscovered the joys of couch computing, and love the idea of having a small machine I can emulate various vintage games on the TV (mostly DOS), and take with me to other places.

Using a Raspberry Pi for this has a few advantages:

• It easily has the compute power for the old stuff I love.

• I can emulate a few different architectures and software platforms from the one device, rather than needing a bunch of separate boxes. Space in our tiny apartment is at a premium at the best of times.

• Running ARM FreeBSD or Debian/Raspberry Pi OS gives me access to a huge library of stuff, including DOSBox, QEMU, VICE, SimH, and Bochs.

• The Raspberry Pi’s HDMI port and software scaling negates the need for an expensive analogue video upscaler.

• I keep my precious vintage computer kit firmly on my desk where they’re not getting rattled around. They also have so much stuff plugged into them, it’d be a pain to carry them around.

• I can carry my entire software library on one or more cards. Using the CD-ROM and Iomega drives on my Pentium 1 tower, and the 1571 disk drive on the C128, C16, and Plus/4 is fun, but not that portable!

There are a few options, some of which involve some manual soldering. But then I discovered what everyone else had for a year now:

This looks so cool! It’s a remodelled Raspberry Pi 4 in the company’s official little keyboard, with ports and GPIO pins running along the back. It reminds me of a 1980s home computer, both in form factor and spirit.

I can’t stop grinning at this beautiful little thing!

I was intending to write a grand long post about how the Vilros Keyboard Trackpad Hub looked disappointing, and that I wished more people did something better. I might just bite the bullet and get one of these… or add it to the Xmas wishlist!

One of my kicks is seeing characters from fantasy or far-flung futuristic franchises featuring casual wear instead. I was proud of that alliteration. NIAN’s drawing of Nero from Fate/EXTRA and Fate/Grand Order is so cool; I’d buy this rendition as a fig in a heartbeat.

Heartbeat… now there’s a show and an accompanying theme song cover I haven’t thought about in a long time. I could imagine Nick Berry being summoned as a Caster or Ruler.

That reminds me, I haven’t logged into Fate/Grand Order in a while. I feel like I’ve had a bunch of unintentional spare time recently, but it’s been taken up by other things. Isn’t that how it always goes?

I know this will sound incredibly rich coming from arguably one of the most verbose bloggers on the planet, but hypocricy isn’t the only river in Egypt. Wait, that’s not how that goes.

I needed a specific key command to break out of a console in a certain hypervisor. I couldn’t rememeber what it was, so I searched online and found someone’s site explaining it.

From the top of the page to where the key combination was, it was:

• six presses of the spacebar
• four banners
• 180 words
• one slideout chatbot
• one newsletter popup

Lesson learned: if I need to share a tip or remember something here, I’ll put it at the very top of the post, then explain after.

I’m sure all of you have heard about what the press have dubbed Log4Shell, a growing family of vulnerabilities affecting the log4j package. Some of you may even be responsible for patching and auditing affected systems… assuming a nefarious actor hasn’t done the former for you to get a permanent foothold. Fun times!

Much like other high-profile exploits like Heartbleed and Meltdown/Spectre, it didn’t take long for the armchair experts to weigh in with the steamiest of hot takes. I don’t even especially like hot cakes, but I think we’d all benefit from consuming those instead.

What’s the difference between a hot cake, pancake, or pikelet?

These reactions have been as predictable as the silliness resulting from my various hat choices:

• Java itself is antiquated, pointless, shouldn’t be used, not type safe, etc. One wonders how many of these people still use bash after Shellshock, or OpenSSL after Heartbleed, or a modern CPU after speculative exploits, or…! Heaven forbid when a data sanitisation issue affects a Rust package.

• More broadly, the developers and maintainers of the affected log4j package were stupid, made elementary mistakes these experts would never be caught making, and could have benefited from their hindsighted wisdom.

I liken these reactions to the critics who point at an artwork and say “eh, I could have painted that”. More to the point, where were they before the details were announced? Funny how that works.

At least this time it didn’t take long for people to recognise another under-appreciated and under-resourced open source team who’s efforts hold up so much infrastructure we depend on. Whether that translates into meaningful action within the industry we’ll have to see. I donate to a bunch of projects and foundations, though I’m sure I could be doing more, too.

Hug a Java developer or sysadmin, I’m sure they need it. Maybe make them a nice pancake.

I’ve been trying to subscribe to more RSS feeds that publish pictures of the day. So far I’ve found:

• Japan Today
• The Guardian
• Konachan image board landscape art
• NASA Astronomy
• NASA’s Earth Observatory
• Wikimedia Commons

Anyone else have some good ones? I’d love to have more art to brighten up my mornings.

Thomas Belsham over at the The Bank of England’s Bank Underground blog does a thorough job explaining the mechanics of Bitcoin and its inherent architectural and speculative dangers. This was my favourite quote:

The problem is that, unlike traditional forms of money, Bitcoin isn’t used to price things other than itself. As Bitcoiners themselves are fond of saying, ‘one Bitcoin = one Bitcoin’. But a tautology does not a currency make.

Its volatility, unworkable transaction volume, energy use, silly name (it should be 2-bit coin, amirite!?) and lack of financial regulation (aka, what’s my recourse when I make a mistake, or am the victim of fraud) also don’t.

Thomas concludes:

[S]imple game theory tells us that a process of backward induction should, really, at some point, induce the smart money to get out. And were that to happen, investors really should be prepared to lose everything. Eventually.

But here’s the rub, and not the good kind. You and I know Bitcoin, NFTs, and all this associated architecture is pure, uncut nonsense. It demonstrates on a regular basis how ineffective it is, and it implements this ineffectiveness with grossly inefficient technology that’s more centralised in practice than its proponents claim.

But the quoted advice will fall on deaf ears precisely because it’s coming from the Bank of England. And dare I say, I’m sympathetic to that.

Whether your memory stretches as far back as the Great Depression and hyperinflation, or even the 2008 global financial crisis, the public is wary of bankers and financial markets seemingly getting away with blue murder and poor behaviour that would be criminal if you or I engaged in it (token gestures like Bernie Madoff notwithstanding). The general public don’t know the differences between monetary or fiscal policy, or how the complex web of manipulation, government bonds, and the terms of trade dictate exchange rates and the value of currencies. All most people have now is cynicism.

That’s a huge problem, because cynicism is so easy to exploit.

Crypto-“currencies” are the perfect technocratic snakeoil for this receptive audience. Point out its foibles, and you’ll have whataboutism thrown back that would make a Soviet official blush. It’s the perfect defence.

I’m staring to think that’s what makes it dangerous above all else. It breaks my heart seeing all the people falling for this and losing their life savings based on the advice of charlatans.

Out of absolutely nowhere, I used an adverb. I also remembered someone I knew in primary school who insisted to me that shot put was pronounced shut put. And not subtly either, he referred to the specific action one takes when closing a door or gate. As opposed to shot, which it literally was.

He didn’t even have the excuse of being a Kiwi.

It makes me think what confidently incorrect statements I’ve made to people that they remember. Like using an adverb again, which writers say we’re not supposed to do. It’s all remarkably worrying.

I love the Raspberry Pi. I could never get into Arduinos, but these single-board computers have lowered the barrier to entry for so many personal projects. For less than we’ve spent on some meals, Clara and I have a couple of their Model B+ units with a familiar FreeBSD console we can hack on. One of which will be related to some Commodore and DOS stuff I hope to talk about soon!

But I digress. I also bought the smaller, cheaper Model A+ on impulse when it debuted. It’s a third smaller than the B+, with a single USB port instead of four, and no Ethernet. I thought it sat in the sweet spot between the larger B+ boards, while still being more practical than the USB stick-sized Picos. I never used all the USB ports on the B+, and who needs a keyboard once you have SSH configured?

While all that was true, that lone USB port did turn out to be its Achilles’ heel. Using a serial cable for initial configuration was fine, but the B+ was easier and therefore got more use. Buying the appropriate cables also ate into the cost advantage the A+ had. I may have also lost it in a house move (cough).

I even ran it briefly with a powered USB hub salvaged from another project, so I could use a keyboard and Ethernet dongle without one or both dropping constantly. This made the A+ bigger, more expensive, and have more cables than the B+… for a more limited machine! It worked, but it was a bit silly.

Which leads me to Pi-Hole, something that sounds like a cronut or a similar culinary abomination. The DNS filter has existed for years, and it can run on any Linux machine now. But it started on the RPi, and I wanted an excuse to tinker with the Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS again.

I downloaded the latest image, used dd(1) to copy it across to a micro SD card, booted it off the card, and it just worked. To my surprise, my tiny Wi-Pi USB wireless NIC from one of my B+ machines drew such little power that I could connect it with a passive USB hub, and attach a keyboard. Nice!

Installation of Pi-Hole was as easy as any console-based tool I’ve ever used. I didn’t think I needed the web-based GUI, and wasn’t sure how well it’d run with the A+’s limited resources, but I opted to install it anyway.

It’s been a month or so now, and the A+ has been sitting on top of my bhyve box with just a USB power lead and the Wi-Pi module, filtering our DNS. It works a treat, and the GUI uses very little memory. I suspect these were the sorts of use cases the A+ was designed for.

Our favourite Hololive time traveller Amelia Watson is there given the Raspberry Pi has no real-time clock. I was tempted to buy one, but NTP seems to work just fine when it boots. Part of the appeal of the A+ is it’s just there, in the corner, affordably doing its thing.