I'm still getting used to using YUM and RPMs again after being a FreeBSD ports guy for so long. YUM certainly makes it much simpler and faster to update packages, but there are still a few little gotchas! I'm getting used to ;).
Don't read this post, it's completely pointless.
Remember when I said we were trying to get rid of crap? During our last family move we had over 700 boxes plus 80 in two self storage lockers. On this latest move we cleared out all the storage and combined have just shy of 380. Some of it was my mum's stuff, but a lot of it was just junk we never used. For example, we had nine scanners. Jebus.
I think we could have got rid of even more but time was against us; I figure when we arrive at the new place we can keep getting rid of crap. The money we're going to save from renting a smaller place to not needing extra storage will go a long way.
Anyway the packers are about to turn off the router, so better go. Tethered iTelephone to the rescue!
While we're on the subject, isn't it pathetic that I get more data on my phone in Singapore than I do on home net connections in Australia? We transferred hundreds of gigabytes of data this month on our home internet connection at full speed: movies, persistent VPN connections, other tunnels to control systems, online games, music… and certain Aussies keep telling me throttling is necessary and you only need a few gig a day. Wonder how many fat cheques they're getting from the NBN folks and the ISPs to astroturf for them? ;).
Ugh I haven't had more than three hours sleep a night for a week. Perhaps I should seek out one of those panda eye remedy things they always advertise on the sides of buses here.
A few people on Twitter this evening reported that YouTube had been [maliciously] hacked. I clicked the first featured video on the YouTube homepage and was given a blank page that abruptly ended after a few comments containing attempted script code. Seems like a code injection attack exploiting incorrectly sanitised comments.
I run NoScript, so perhaps that's why I didn't see anything. If that's true, its for unexpected situations like this that I insist on running Firefox and with such an extension!
UPDATE: People are now saying it was /b/, the same mob that tried to send Justin Bieber to North Korea. They should have just left it at the latter; it was kinda funny.
I'm not really into sport, but Germany were amazing again tonight. 4-0 against Australia, 4-1 against England and 4-0 against Argentina. We agreed on Twitter that Germany may not be the most artistic side, but they're amazing team players and have the best defence. @TylerMassey put it best:
#arg Argentina look increasingly frantic and #ger Germany have stayed calm. SO patient. Careful, well-researched German football. Not flashy. Clever.
My dad and half my family are German :)
If you've been reading my blog for a while you'd know I'm a huge fan of Taco for Firefox, the Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-out extension. Running an update yesterday I noticed there are now two different versions: the classic Taco and a new Beef Taco fork. Ugh, too many food puns.
One of the most perfect foods in the universe. In this context though, it's an extension that does some cool stuff:
Sets permanent opt-out cookies to stop behavioral advertising by 102 different advertising networks, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, all members of the Network Advertising Initiative, and many other companies.
From what I can ascertain (I hate that word, but it fits) the classic Taco extension developers decided to take their extension commercial and add a lot more features with the 3.x series. The 2.x series which was F/OSS licenced has been forked as Beef Taco for those who find the new terms unacceptable.
I thought the new developer of BEEF TACO was quite the gentleman and civil about the whole thing:
Also, please do not be too harsh on Abine in the reviews. They are trying to start a commercial company and made some (IMHO) bad decisions. That doesn’t mean they are malicious or evil, TACO 3.0 is actually a decent product when you take time to understand it. You can read more of my feelings on this ,a href=”http://www.velvetcache.org/2010/06/17/forking-taco-2-0″>here.
In the meantime, let’s keep this a positive, happy place, shall we :-)
Fair enough :).
Personally I'll be sticking with Beef Taco now, not because of the licencing issue (which I'm fairly indifferent to, that's why I use ZFS on FreeBSD!) but because I'm generally a feature-phobe. In general I feel more features generally degrade the usability of existing ones, introduce bloat, slow software down and most critically they introduce new vectors for exploits. For something as relatively simply as an extension that just sets cookies to opt me out of targeted advertising I prefer keeping things simple
As far as I can tell, the old Taco and Beef Taco don't even have a UI, they just work in the background doing their thing like a studious worker who… eats tacos.
And now if you'd excuse me, I'm off to pack more boxes. I took a break from packing and cleaning to talk about a browser extension I love. Is there a sign of something there?
My old man told us the packers would be here today. They arrived yesterday. D'oh! This is our seventh massive family move thing. I love travelling and living in many different places, but packing sucks. Fortunately we've got rid of so much stuff, this is the first time we have less stuff than what we had before. It's also our first family move since mummy passed on, which has been really fricken hard. I found it harder going through her stuff now than I did when we were choosing clothes for her funeral, which makes no fricken sense.
That has to be the most fractured paragraph I've ever written here. My writing sucks, but that was even worse than usual. Fricken is such a fricken awesome word. Fricken heck.
Here's a little narrative story thing that actually happened, as opposed to all those other narrative story things that kinda happened, but didn't. Can't think of any off the top of my head, but they probably have to do with grilled cheese sandwiches, somehow.
So having been a computer nerd since before I started school or could talk, I've had my fair share of electronic gadgets and whatnot. Couple that with the fact I'm a bit of a hoarder, and I've ended up with more electronic crap than a dump truck outside a Best Denki. Think store rooms. Think full cupboards. Some of my friends had lads mags in boxes under their bed growing up, I had boxes of disks and ISA or PCI cards. Oh yeah and Magic and Pokémon cards. Conclude from that what you will.
With our latest move the cold reality set in that we can't afford to maintain all the stuff we have, so my dad, sister and I set out on an ambitions plan to get rid of most of it. As a result, I've been making some painful (for me!) decisions about some computer crap, and finally deciding to get rid of anything I don't need. Well okay, most of it that I don't need ;).
Think bags of parallel port printer cables. Think dead SCSI flatbed scanners. Think 14.1 inch CRTs that never used to sound that impressive to me because as a little kid I thought an inch was the same as a centimetre. Was I in for several rude shocks.
Anyway recycling is one of the few things Singapore really needs some serious work developing, but fortunately we were able to find a computer and electronics recycling centre in a warehouse district not too far out from the city. Well okay by world standards nothing is too far from the city because any further than a dozen or so kilometres from where you are in any direction is either ocean or Malaysia. You get my point.
While leaving a practical treasure trove of useless crap at said computer recycling depo this evening, the lift opened to a scene reminiscent of a treasure hunt. From the lift door leading to the warehouse was a line of discarded Windows 98 CD-ROMs glinting in the artificial light of several high intensity halogen lamp things. I'm not talking five or ten, I'm talking at least a hundred or so of these genuine discs strewn all over the floor in a rough line. Someone must have dumped a heck of a lot of old Windows machines from 1998!
Most of the discs or their cases were cracked or smashed to bits, but after we left our stuff my dad and I found two discs that were still in surprisingly good condition on the road outside, even if their cases were a bit worse for wear. They were a genuine copy of Windows 98, and the Windows 98 Year 2000 Update!
Don't get me wrong, Windows 98 was a godawful operating system (it came with DOS like Windows 95 so yes, it may as well have been an OS) but I used it for many years and retro is retro, right!?
Decided to archive this news graphic here for posterity, might be funny to look back on in a few years. Was lifted from the ABC News website on the 25th, I'm assuming as a product of a publicly funded company I have permission to use it here, or barring that there's some fair use clause in there somewhere.
Sheesh, I feel as though I need to drop economics as my minor and take legal studies instead. Copyright is perhaps one of the few things more broken than DRM and my old sandals.
So all you guys have been asking me for about a year now when the next Rubenerd Show is coming out, and I reckon all things considered I've done a pretty good job dodging the question up until now. With this latest flurry of retweeted messages though, I figure I finally owe you all an explanation, so here it is.
MI5 is on to me. There, I said it. I said something about the Queen's hair and they want to take me out quietly before anything can leak out to a tabloid. While I can't tell you much about my huge scoop (say no more), what I can say is she's not naturally that grey. Keep watching WikiLeaks.
I kid in jest of course. As opposed to kidding in something other than jest, which I don't think would be kidding then, would it? Does the term kidding imply jest, or can it also refer to something else? Say for example, chess?
I'm very good at talking nonsense when I don't want to answer something. Maybe I should become a politician, or a public serviceman. Serviceperson. Servicehuman. Someone who provides public service. Like, say, chess.
Okay okay, for real this time! This is the part of the post that contains all the pertinent information, all that other crap above this sentence was entirely pointless and should really have been discarded in favour of starting the post here. In fact, that last sentence was also entirely pointless which isn't helping my case.
I'll tell you why the Rubenerd Show is on another extended hiatus again. Is it because I lost all the equipment in a fire? Is it because I'm lazy or couldn't be bothered doing another one? Is it some technical reason to do with webhosting or post production? Is it because I can't stand to be reminded that open source people can't name applications whenever I compress shows with LAME?
Possibly a little of each of those may be true to some small extent, but there's another reason which is so lame and stupid it's taken me six long and painfully useless paragraphs to reach it. Seven even, because I'll be starting that thought on the next line.
That was way harder to admit than I thought it was going to be. Hopefully things will get easier now. Forgive this self indulgent nonsense!
Look for most of my life I've been a painfully shy person; I never liked having birthday parties as a kid and working up the guts to approach someone I didn't know was the stuff of nightmares. Perhaps because I was forced to, but by late high school and university I'd started getting a little better. I didn't need detailed plans before I left the house and I didn't feel as though everyone was staring at me.
For a reason that continues to baffle me, since about late 2009 I feel as though I've started to regress again. Whereas a few years ago I'd be a bit jittery and nervous, sometimes now I'm flooded with feelings of anxiousness and fear at the prospect of leaving the house. Once I've made that critical first step I'm mostly okay, but sometimes its just too much. Its impacted relationships with friends, my studies and heaven knows what else in a way that I thought I'd got over in primary school.
Its got to the stage where I'm worrying that I'm worrying, and that can't be a good thing.
This is where podcasting comes in. It sounds preposterous, but the idea of recording my own voice for other people to listen to scares me in a way it never did before. Literally I look across at my mixer board and I break out in a cold sweat. Jokes about the quality of the Rubenerd Show aside, I can't explain it, but it feels like this deep seated fear that something terrible is about to happen, like that a grand piano will come hurtling through the ceiling as soon as I speak.
For some reason blogging isn't a problem, perhaps its because I feel insulated from the outside world because nobody can see or hear me as I type this. Except maybe the people down the hall, this buckling spring keyboard is as loud as all outdoors.
Anyway I know this is a maddeningly ambiguous conclusion to leave you with, but while I'm pledging the Rubenerd Show hasn't been retired, as much as I would love to produce more episodes, right now I just… can't.
I appreciate all your support and comments, I really hope one day I'm confident enough to do the show again for all of you. In the words of Monty Python, the Rubenerd Show isn't dead, it's just resting.
Thanks :)
Ruben
I predicted recently that having Julia Gillard as our new PM wasn't going to affect the party's plan for a mandatory internet filter, but that I wanted to be proven wrong.
zdnetaustralia: Conroy confims that the filter is still going ahead, despite a change of leader. http://bit.ly/dfEdou
First time I'm right about something, and it's not something I wanted. Sh*t.
