Rubenerd

Speaking of travel, or lack thereof, here’s something else I was thinking about that we could do in the Before Times.

Coffee was among the first funnels of culture shock I encountered when moving back to Sydney from Singapore. Australians are globally recognised coffee snobs, to the point where dunking on Starbucks is a part of the citizenship test, and anything less than the best is consigned to the same heap as that nasty, granulated instant. It’s lead to a personal struggle between loving single origin brews made by an artisan barista taught in Sydney’s Newtown sporting a fedora and listening to out of tune folk music, and the kopi-o brews I used to have with kaya toast at the foot of HDB blocks or hawker centres.

But that wasn’t the shock.

I prefer to have black coffee most of the time, having weaned myself off sugar in almost everything, and milk in coffee years ago. But occasionally I like to indulge in a bit of a treat, especially on a Friday afternoon like this. For that, I used to turn to a frothy cappuccino.

The problem is, Australians don’t do them. I’m not sure when this started, but Australian baristas will give you a flat white or a latte with chocolate powder on top and call it a cappuccino. It tastes great, and is probably among the best made coffees you’ll have in the world. It’s just not a cappuccino. It’s not even close.

Milk foam is the key to a cappuccino. It’s what makes drinking them fun. The light smattering of chocolate powder over the foam is the same reason why the creamy froth of a Guinness is so iconic and tasty. Sure you’d be getting more liquid beer if you have less foam, but where’s the fun? Where’s the unintentional moustache, I ask you!?

Kiwis are as selective and skilled with their coffee across the pond, I wonder if they do the same thing? It’d be a shame if they did, they have the best dairy in the world.

(Hi, it’s Ruben, from the future. I started writing this with a clear view of my conclusions, but thinking out loud lead me in a direction I didn’t expect. Normally I wouldn’t post such half-baked thoughts, but I’m risking it. Time will soon tell if this was a good idea).

I’ve fallen head over heels for documentary-style YouTube channels over the last year, as I’m sure you’ve noticed based on what I link to here. Learning about geography, science, and engineering is fun, and especially so when it’s from an independent producer who’s doing it for the love of the subject.

These range from channels with thousands of subscribers, like David Frankal in the UK, to millions like Techmoan and Real Engineering. I keep a list of my current obsessions over on my Omake page for those interested.

Authenticity is a big reason why I love them. Unlike big budget productions that so often bring in someone to read a script, these creators present themselves as a friend; someone who talks with you in your loungeroom about a topic they’ve researched. Even the most polished productions still try hard to come across as friendly and approachable.

You’re smart enough to know where this is going. I know that when Techmoan reviews a Panasonic boom box, he’s being genuine with his comments. He doesn’t claim to be impartial; he has strong opinions, and doesn’t compare devices against hundreds of other products in a detailed spreadsheet. But he’s also honest about the capabilities, limitations, and prices of what he discusses.

This is why it hits hard when that trust feels like its violated. I admit to being taken aback by Veritasium’s self-driving car video which, despite his admission of sponsorship, still felt one-sided and lacking in important information and context. Specific claims were also poorly cited and, as much as it pains me to say, dubious.

Tom Nicholas has a compelling series of videos explaining how company PR budgets are influencing independent creators, one of which I linked to last week. He also talked about another prominent YouTuber prompting the world view of a specific international organisation, under the guise as a documentary. I’m glad these have sparked discussion.

But here’s where I’m struggling. Critics of sponsored content point to the fact that advertisers may (being the operative word) have editorial control over the material, and that it naturally follows that we can’t trust them. Having healthy skepticism is good and even necessary, but I think disqualifying someone’s points entirely on such a basis is simplistic.

My issue with the Veritasium video wasn’t that it was sponsored, but that it was framed as a scientific discussion on the merits of self-driving cars. I think the distinction is important; had it been listed as a “tour of company X’s self-driving cars”, the entire tone of the video changes. I still think his selective use of statistics was misleading and less forgivable, but even then I think we’d be more disposed to looking at the claims critically if we know it’s an advertisement.

Well-cited, independently-verifiable data can still be skewed to fit any agenda or perspective (lies, damn lies, and statistics), but that’s true of any media, commercial or not. What I’m more concerned about is independent creators claiming objectivity, or being misleading about the genesis of a video.

And the great irony is, I doubt being truthful would have much of an impact on their viewership. Techmoan getting a paid tour of a Sony factory might be really cool! Veritasium pitching his video as a behind-the-scenes look at self-driving car tech would have been just as interesting.

I guess I tend to be skeptical when I see people claiming issues are black and white, whether such advice is well-intentioned or not. I do look more critically at sponsored content, but I’m not going to dismiss it entirely.

(I get around this issue by having day jobs and other sources of income, and not being paid by companies to write this blog. It’s a luxury)!

This feels very strange, but I’m writing this post from my on-call FreeBSD laptop, without X! I have everything I need here to remotely troubleshoot stuff and write, all without needing a GUI. It’s been oddly fun getting back into all this stuff, so I thought I’d share it.

To take a step back, might lead you to fall off a cliff. I’m working on creating the ultimate “on call” FreeBSD laptop. It needs a few VPN clients, text editors, orchestration tools, QEMU for quick tests, git and rsync for keeping things current, and… that’s about it. When I realised that none of these require a graphical environment, I decided to see if I could live entirely within a tty, just like the old times.

My cute Japanese Panasonic Let’s Note CF-RZ6 (details on the FreeBSD Wiki) that I bought during AsiaBSDCon 2019 in Tokyo is perfect for this:

• It supports full suspend/resume, either with zzz(8) or simply closing and opening the lid. I can add a new Wi-Fi network by adding a few lines to wpa_supplicant.conf(5) and issuing service netif restart. Easy!

• Booting with UEFI brings up beautiful, crisp, HiDPI text automatically on its screen. The resolution, and my self-inflicted myopia, are more than adequate for a couple of vertically-tiled terminal windows.

• Its trackpad, like most PCs, is terrible, so anything to avoid using it is a plus. The keyboard is tiny, but my fingers are spindly and hit the keys just fine.

I settled on tmux to use as my de facto window manager. I moved the notification bar to be at the top of the screen, because I’m a gentleman, and remapped some of the keys. Soon after I was listening to music, committing changes, editing files, and logging into remote servers, all within a comfortable text environment.

It also had some other side effects. I wondered if I could run this stuff in a jail, which I’d always wanted to do with Xorg. You can! Say hello to separate isolated jails for work and personal stuff.

The problem was, it lead me down a rabbit hole of what else I could run on this thing without touching a GUI.

• links for text web browsing. It’s amazing how distraction free the web is once you strip it back. You can also tell immediately which sites are designed with accessibility in mind (or not).

• Bombadillo for the new Gemini protocol, and Gopher. Living in text makes you appreciate the simpler times (I’ve got something to announce about that too at some point).

• Musikcube for local music files. Its UI is everything that was great about the original iTunes, with a sidebar for artists and simple navigation.

• nnn is a shockingly fast and flexible console file manager. I used Midnight Commander for nostalgia before, but this is next level.

• Alpine is still the nicest mail client I’ve used, even after all these years. Getting it to run with all my disparate email providers was… fun? But it works. Maybe that’s a topic for a future post.

• QEMU can export a curses interface, so I can run DOS software alongside contemporary and actually useful stuff.

• bsdgames, nbsdgames, ttysolitare for other pointless useful distractions.

Graphical web browsing, and monstrosities like Electron-based chat apps won’t be running in here any time soon (at least, not without a proxy). But I can farm that off to my smartphone.

It also has a touch of nostalgia, not just for classic *nix, but for the MS-DOS machine I had as a child. Only this one is rock solid, fast, has a great battery, and I can carry it anywhere.

I’m sure I’ll run into edge cases that require X at some point, but for now I’m enjoying this bizarre little setup.

I’m certain nothing here is new, or a revelation, or isn’t a mainstay talking point among self-help gurus and those life hacking sites of yore. Here comes the proverbial posterial prognostication: but… implementing this myself by accident recently helped a lot.

I’ve started thinking about home and personal problems at a smaller scale, and giving myself one to tackle every day. It reduces the mental burden associated with thinking about something, which means I’m more likely to start it. Because it’s smaller, I’m also more likely to finish it, which feels like an accomplishment and gives me motivation to do more.

It also builds up. I’ve let myself take a day to declutter a box, or to recycle dead electronics, or sort through mugs, or rewire the graphic equaliser on our Hi-Fi, or fix that weird bug with grep(1) that turned out to be an errant line in my ~/.kshrc. Some days I even just decide to change the clocks everywhere for daylight savings. These have made measurable improvements to our lives.

It feels overwhelming when I add “clean up apartment” to a #TODO list. But thanks to rethinking about the problem this way, I’ve done far more than I would have. This is why I don’t even say it takes “longer”, because the alternative was not doing it.

A map of the United States flooded by rising sea levels went viral again recently, with the usual people replying that climate change is a hoax. The fact the caption was a joke, and that the floodplain was the Mediterranean Sea was, unsurprisingly, lost on them. You’d think the massive, Italian boot would have kicked them into thought, even if they didn’t recognise any other part of it.

Funny story, I tripped on a boot and hit my head on a banister once, and even I could make out what it was.

It’s easy to see how someone predisposed to believing in conspiracy theories would also lack basic knowledge in other areas, such as geography. It’s also as much a failure of society not preparing people for our complicated world as it is a lack of curiosity or interest on their part. Critical thinking isn’t a skill you can learn by rote, despite the best efforts of certain educational systems!

But more broadly, it demonstrates how knee-jerk social media can be, and how we’re all susceptible to it if we’re not careful. All it takes is for a story or graphic to push our buttons or conform to our own views, and we’ll respond without thinking as critically as we should. I’ve fallen for it, and I’ll bet you have too at some point.

I’m starting to think this is another way social media is corrosive, at least in its current form. It doesn’t elevate thinking, it conforms to our baser instincts. It’s the inevitable outcome when platforms measure their success based on “customer engagement”, a phrase that I thought referred to marriage.

I always liked how the late, great J-Walk Blog arranged posts with date headings on his home page. It made his site seem more like a periodical, rather than a stream. I finally got around to implementing this here.

I’m not sure if the style will remain the same, but it works for now.

I also took the opportunity over the weekend to remove a ton of legacy code and CSS, so let me know if it breaks anything for you. Thanks :).

Across the street from our Sydney apartment complex is The Concourse, a multi-function public building with concert halls, Willoughby council’s largest library, a reflection pool, restaurants, and a green space. The sides of the building consist of walls to prevent weather getting inside, and a form of roof to achieve similar weather-proofing. These are punctured with a series of doors, windows, and skylights to permit ingress of light and human beings. I’m told it also has a floor, as much for convention.

Get it? Because it’s a convention hall that… shaddup.

The external walls are clad with hundreds of metal panels of various sizes, some of which wrap more than 270 degrees around curved sections that jut out from the main structure. I can appreciate architects trying something a bit different, or at least giving us something that isn’t a box.

For the better part of a year, workers have been hammering, sizing, grinding, and replacing each and every one of these panels. Their agonisingly slow (and loud!) progress hints at just how complicated the removal and installation of these panels must be.

I’ve been wondering why they went to the trouble. My selfish hope was that they were replacing glossy panels with matte ones to minimise reflections into our apartment building. Not being blinded by a narrow beam of focused sunlight when I inadvertently pass by a window would have been most welcome for my headaches and eyes. Alas, the new panels are just as shiny; perhaps even moreso. This could hint at it being cosmetic.

Those plastic sheets might in fact be insulation they’re installing for saving energy. It could be the rails used to attach the panels to the walls were rusting or bent, which could have been a safety hazard if a panel were to detach itself. They could have replaced those panels, attached them more securely, and got some energy savings for free. Well, not free, but insulation would surely pay for itself quickly.

Or finally, the elephant in the room attempting to perform the Safety Dance might have realised those panels were fire hazards. We’ve seen a steady stream of news reports of buildings across the world that have used flammable plastics in their cladding because of shortsighted engineering. These ridiculous panels have cost lives. Not having a flaming building spewing plastic smoke at our apartment would be rather lovely, to say nothing for the building’s occupants.

Maybe it’s a combination of the above. All I know is I can’t wait for BANG them to BANG be finished BANG sometime BANG soon!

Go’s date formats are a special beast, as everyone else already realised a decade ago. I’m not a Go developer, but I do use a few devops and blogging tools written in it, and as such I work regularly with its unconventional date representation.

Unlike other languages, Go works against a reference date which you refactor to get the format you’re after:

Mon Jan 2 15:04:05 -0700 MST 2006

I can see the appeal of this rather than an alphabet soup like strftime, even though I committed most of that to memory by now. It’s more WYSIWYG, and easier to visualise in something like a template.

I always wanted to know why this specific date, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment. It lead me to this old Hacker News thread from 2015, and a quote from the documentation that shows this ascending mnemonic:

Mon Jan 2 15:04:05 -0700 MST 2006
0   1   2  3  4  5              6

But there are some assumptions and i17n drawbacks here. Non-American readers would have immediately spotted a problem: we generally don’t put months first. Most of us would write long dates like this:

Mon 2 Jan 15:04:05 -0700 MST 2006
0   2 1    3  4  5              6

It’s not a big deal, the mnemonic holds even though it doesn’t have the elegant ascending numbers anymore. But it’s a bit weird.

The far bigger problem comes when you want to validate short dates. Americans use MM-DD-YYYY, whereas the rest of us use DD-MM-YYYY. At a glance, will this render as the first of February, or the second of January?

02-01-2021

Using a day (02) and a month (01) that can be easily confused is, to use the Shakespearean term, a huge pain in the asp. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked at a template and had to do a double-take on the date, or troubleshooting why the months on a page are all wrong.

Conventional wisdom in documentation is to always use a day greater than 12 to remove global ambiguity. The order of this date looks wrong to me, but at least it’s mutually intelligible:

01-27-2021

We’d all be using YYYY-MM-DD in an ideal world, but alas we’re all stuck in meatspace. I’ll continue to work around this, but it’s disappointing that such a high-profile tool would make this difficult to satisfy a mnemonic that doesn’t even hold that well outside the US.

There are altogether too many unpopular opinion posts circulating on social media and blogs. This is my attempt to reverse this.

• Freshly-baked bread, toast out of the toaster, and a pan with frying onion and garlic, all have breathtaking aromas. In that you voluntarily take more breaths to smell them.

• Repairability is a good thing.

• It’s a nice gesture to let people with prams and wheelchairs into lifts and trains first. Even better if you assist if they look like they’re struggling (I qualify that, because I had a colleague in a wheelchair many years ago who said he wanted to be “treated like everyone else, not a unique case”).

• Cheesecake is pretty great.

• Few things are as satisfying as removing redundant code.

• Sleep is underappreciated, even among those who admit they need more of it.

• The Beatles had some good music.

• Respecting someone’s privacy and security is almost always a good idea.

• Cleaners, garbage collectors, sewer maintainers, and sanitation workers keep us healthy, deserve serious respect, and should be paid much, much more.

• Hello dog. Who’s a good dog? You are! You’re a good dog.

• Under-promise. You can either over-deliver, or use the added slack in the timeline to absorb the things life likes to throw at us.

• It’s a shame when you spill coffee on your beige pants, as I did this morning, surprising nobody.

• It’s better not to buy the junk than recycle it.

• Text-based server logs, and basic UNIX text-processing tools, are wonders of the modern world and don’t get nearly enough praise.

• Hakos Baelz has unreasonably funky opening music on her streams.

• Mismatching socks are more fun, especially if they’re bold colours. Related: Japanese idol costumes that go as far as having mismatched sock and stocking lengths are the pinnacle of fashion design.

• Art galleries, museums, and art gallery museums are amazing places that Ruben needs to spend more time in.

• A working computer, if rare, is wondrous.

One of my favourite engineering YouTube channels recently did an episode on the Hudson Yards development in New York. Clara and I saw the construction zone when we were there a few years ago; it’s massive.

Unfortunately, scale is about all it had going for it by the time I saw photos of phase one. The buildings themselves are typical glass boxes with the barest of nods to something interesting, including slanting roofs and the faintest whisper of a curve here and there. The cool Vessel pine cone aside, it felt like a wasted opportunity given the area’s prime position, and the opportunity to really make something pop. One day one of my favourite cities in the world will have another Guggeneheim; just not today.

But there’s another aspect to the development I didn’t realise. Samuel Stein, from the Community Service Society of New York had this to say:

We should never allow the public benefit to come in “phase two” of a majorly-financed public/private development [lest it be put on hold indefinitely].

If we ever do another project like a Hudson Yards, we should be looking at what the needs of people are in terms of housing, jobs, open space, and not building for the highest-end and assuming that it’ll trickle down.