Rubenerd

Along with all the talk about IKEA decking out Paris Métro stations with couches and lamps as an advertising stunt, there have been a ton of comments that pretty much follow this formula: "That'd never work in New York, the subways here aren't clean like the ones in Europe!"

As someone who recently zipped around in Paris on the Métro, the word clean wouldn't be one of the words I'd use to describe it! Intensely interesting, reliable, fast, affordable, comprehensive, yes. Clean? Eh, maybe not ;). The photo I took above shows one of the few good ones, but often there's litter everywhere and… certain odors which we won't discuss here.

As a matter of disclosure…

• Everything's relative, expensive private hospitals in Australia seems dirty after riding the Singapore MRT.

• I'm a self confessed IKEA nut because it's like Lego for adults, which allegedly means I'm a loser with too much free time. Yeah, thanks again Dave :P

• On our latest Eurotrip we also spent time in Munich before heading off to Paris and the Munich U-Bahn is beautiful. I'll upload my own photos eventually, for now check them out on Wikipedia and see for yourself :O

• And because it's St Patty's Day, don't mock Dublin's Luas system for its silly name (that probably means something which means I just made myself look like an arse), it's pretty cool too!

• Oh yeah, and my father's side of the family is also German, which means I'm biased ;). I kid, Paris is amazing, but Munich is a nicer place. I think I'll stop now before I get myself intro trouble!

As you’re probably aware by now, my current pet project is installing FreeBSD on my new (a relative term!) Libretto 70CT, and on today’s agenda is building a custom kernel with the right PCMCIA card support.

This is the part I’m concerning myself with:

# SURFIN BIRD SUPPORT
option WORD=BIRD
device BirdBirdBirdTheBirdIsTheWord

Well that’s clearly the wrong section. I’ll try again.

# PCCARD (PCMCIA) support
# PCMCIA and cardbus bridge support
device    cbb         # cardbus (yenta) bridge
device    pccard      # PC Card (16-bit) bus
device    cardbus     # CardBus (32-bit) bus

The Libretto only has 16bit PCMCIA card support which means the Cardbus line can be safely commented out, but I’m not so sure about the bridge. This machine is so… retro that I’d like to slash and burn all the device support I don’t need (USB, FireWire, SCSI, RAID, TLA…), but on the other hand I’d hate to wait for this thing to compile for an age and then no be able to use PC cards.

One of the great things about FreeBSD is how trivially easy it is to build and install a custom kernel (and world!) to remove unessisary hardware support and make the machine boot faster, run faster, use less memory and potentially be more secure. Or perhaps it just seems really easy after doing it on certain other free operating systems ;).

The hardware itself

The other thing to think about is what kind of networking card I can actually use with this machine! I have plenty of 16bit 10/100 PCMCIA cards back home in Singapore that I inherited from my dad’s numerous dead computers which all work fine (maybe), but I’m assuming I won’t be able to get a 16bit non-Cardbus Gigabit Ethernet card, or a 16-bit 802.11g wireless card that supports WPA encryption. Just a hunch.

One thing that piqued my interest though was this line from the kernel confiuguration file:

# SURFIN BIRD SUPPORT
option WORD=BIRD
device BirdBirdBirdTheBirdIsTheWord

Hey, HEY, stop messing with me!

# Parallel port
device    ppc
[…]
device    plip # TCP/IP over parallel

I can only imagine that’d be insanely slow, but it sounds so cool I might need to look into it. The Libretto has an adorable little docking cradle which has a parallel port, if I could use that and leave the only PCMCIA slot for something else, that’d be pretty schweet. And in retrospect it wouldn’t need to be that fast anyway for the things I’ll be using this machine for. I don’t even intend to SSH into it!

Can someone like, go punch Conroy in the face? and by punch, I mean not, because that gets you in trouble. But maybe just grunt at him? ~ Monnie

Yo, Conroy! Mandatory-internet-filter this! sock!

Please don't ask me to elaborate on specifics just yet, I will once I'm safely enrolled somewhere else.

(Update 2021: I've removed this open letter).

It's so rare for me these days to have an excellent customer support experience that when it does happen I feel compelled to tell as many people about it as possible.

Last Friday I went to Dick Smith Electronics in the Myer Centre in Adelaide and bought an Ethernet PC Card. When I took it home to try out in my Libretto I realised it was unsupported (Librettos only take 16bit cards) so I took it back this afternoon and with the simplest of explanations got a complete refund.

I'm aware Dick Smith's has a 14 day "change your mind" policy, but to be given the refund with a smile and no lengthy forms or BS was amazing. Kudos.

Now just change your logo back to the old one :).

From the I Can't Believe They're Serious department, Bruce Schneier has blogged about a hilarious memory key product (link fixed) that doesn't get its security from sound, well implemented cryptography, but from.. get this… a two wheel physical combination lock that hides the contact pins!

Make sure your important files are locked up with a Combination Lock USB Flash Drive. Each custom flash drive uses two 10-digit dials to provide access to the USB plug and keep your files safe.

The best (and most revealing) part of the product description is in the second paragraph.

A great gift for technology companies, these logoed flash drives show potential customers how seriously your company takes its security.

Yes, yes it does.

What's worrying is I'd wager a nice sushi lunch that if someone like Senator Conroy saw this, he'd buy hundreds of them and use them to carry around sensitive, confidential government data about us. I'm scared, really scared.

Having let more unread posts pile up like a massive pile of unread posts, I've decided once and for all to declare Google Reader bankruptcy. George Bush, I Can Haz Bailout?

As stipulated in the bankruptcy agreement with the Court of Google, I have clicked the Mark All As Read link and deleted all the feeds I've subscribed to, on the proviso I lead a more sustainable lifestyle from now on and only subscribe to enough feeds that I can afford [with my time].

And because it's easier to write about something instead of actually doing something, behold a post discussing my new Google Reader strategy in all its strategic gloryness. I'm pretty sure that isn't a word.

Where’s my jetpack?

Back when I first started using blog readers in the day with Bloglines, it was assumed in the tech community that aggregators would somehow become intelligent over time and relieve us of information overload. In that context it made sense to subscribe to as much stuff that interested us as possible so the super smart software intelligence smarts would be able to paint a more accurate picture of our tastes and preferences, and help us in our quest for enlightenment.

Of course, this never happened, and here we are in 2010 with trillions of web pages and billions of web feeds (probably). Alas the burden is still on us to select feeds we think are useful and be selective about what we subscribe to, because if we subscribe to everything that looks interesting, we end up reading less, if that makes sense. It's like an inverse relationship thing.

Henceforth, Ruben Schade's Google Reader 2.0 will only have feeds I've vetted and am confident I'll read often. Each feed might be free in terms of moulah, but they all have an opportunity cost.

Google Reader isn’t for realtime news anymore

With the advent of Twitter and near-realtime news, I've decided to ditch news outlet feeds from Google Reader entirely. Combined they added up to hundreds of new posts to read each hour which would be added to my dismayingly large "All Items (unread)" number with alarming speed. Besides, I would have already seen the news they reported in TweetDeck hours before.

Henceforth, Ruben Schade's Google Reader 2.0 will only be for analysis and fully fleshed out posts, not just headlines.

Only a summary? Cheerio!

This is one of the arguments that's as old as RSS: should whole posts or only summaries be included in feeds? As a blogger myself I can understand the attraction with only including a summary in a feed so people come to your site (which means they're more likely to click other things and leave comments), but as a blog reader it frustrates me when all I get is a truncated version of a post.

Henceforth, so I don't have to leave the Google Reader environment, in Ruben Schade's Google Reader 2.0 I will not be subscribing to blogs that only post summaries.

No moreth of Ye Blog Networks

I've lamented the appearance of huge blogs with lots of writers several times here before; suffice to say with them around there are fewer individual voices with their own ideas and insight and more homogenised material churned out that's largely indistinguishable from other homogenised material.

There are still some insanely interesting people who are allowed a certain degree of individual freedom on blog networks (Om Malik's GigaOm for example) but henceforth if I can find an independent writer who's passionate about a topic, I'll choose them over a network writer. Personally maintained and written blogs by interesting people are so much fun to read.

Can I pull it off?

Or perhaps a more pertinent question: will all of these "henceforths" make any difference? Probably not!

By the way, //rubenerd.com/feed/. Cheers :)

Update!

I started off with good intentions, but for the most part I ended up subscribing to virtually everything I had before. I suppose I'll just have to get used to clicking that big ol' "Mark All As Read" button more often!

Remember when I said (and Craig said) Australia was starting to lose global respect because of Conroy's internet filter scheme? It's started.

Australia’s proposed online filtering system is something RWB says it has “never before seen in a democracy.”

Thanks to Josh Nunn on Google Reader for sharing the link.

The fact more people in Canberra aren't worrying about this is scary to the point of being Orwellian. Australia is one of the most free, open and tolerant societies and yet our government is okay with this aforementioned dubious distinction?

What's worse is even if all of this nonsense was dumped now, Australia will still be seen as the place where it almost happened. It's one heck of a tarnish that'll take a long time to recover from. Conroy is sidekicking us.

And it just gets better. The people running the show on this are the Labor party which are [supposedly] centre-left, and while some Liberal party staffers have voiced tepid opposition to the scheme, their new leader almost certainly only dislikes the scheme because it's a Labor initiative, and if he were elected he'd do the same thing. We're screwed.

Oh well, at least we can take some comfort from the fact China approves of the Australian filter scheme. Hey, wait a minute.

Quickie update

I just noticed when this went live that some of my posts were tagged as "openinternet" and some as "open internet" which means they would have appeared in different places. I've merged the two, hope I didn't cause you any confusion.

A photo of Josh Nunn taken by tstadler on Flickr

Every so often you read a blog post by someone that talks about an issue so close to you and using words you would have used that it's not only spooky, but makes you think there's a secret evil conspiracy going on. I accuse Josh Nunn of orchestrating such a conspiracy this evening with his latest blog post.

Despite his above average awesome name which I can only assume he legally changed to from a far more boring, generic name, Josh Nunn seems to be suffering from something many of us who pour so much effort into online endeavors have. He doesn't get as much feedback as what his posts deserve. Okay I admit I don't have that problem per se because my blog here on the whole is so terrible the posts don't deserve comments, but still!

If you spell Zero as Zer0, it self references. Trippy!

First, and it's a rude and nasty thing to do, but it helps to put things into perspective. Estimates place the internet at having several trillion pages, with billions added daily. In this kind of competitive environment, unless you're Leo Laporte or someone else in the top 0.000000001% of bloggers having any comments on your blog at all is not only amazing, it's a statistically, mind blowingly amazing achievement!

Coming back down to Earth though, I do know what Josh is going through, for years I used to lament the relative lack of comments on my blog here given I spent close to an hour each day writing posts for it. With the exception of Alex Lindsay, John Dvorak, Brent Spiner, Marian Call and Dave Winer I've also never had any feedback from any comments I've sent famous people (a relative term in itself) on Twitter, and I've uploaded thousands of photos on Flickr over the years and have only had a handful of comments.

I think a large part of it has to do with what you want to get out of your online activities. My goal when I first started blogging here was to voice my frustration with high school life, then when I graduated it became a site where I'd write about what I'm learning in my spare time because I was so disillusioned with how useless university was, then it became a mixture of trouble shooting problem solving and utter nonsense. Once I realised that's what my ambition was, having fewer comments didn't feel as bad. In fact it meant the few comments I do get feel more special and awesome, if that makes sense!

Contrary sounds like a Babar character

Despite his assertions to the contrary, Josh has been able to maintain a far greater degree of cohesion over on his site; his posts are interesting and often very useful, and the conversational tone of the posts makes you feel as though you're speaking to a knowledgeable, quirky guy instead of being lectured by some second rate professor who only started teaching to get a paycheck and his name in gold leaf on a door with rusty hinges. He implied his writing style was at fault, but I swear to him right now that if he changes it I'm going to be cross, mad and angry, simultaneously and at the same time. Both.

I was going somewhere with this.

So to be a completely useless arse, to a certain degree I know what Josh is going through, but as of yet I don't have a answer on how to deal with it. Perhaps the reason why it doesn't bother me as much anymore is blogging has become a coping mechanism for my own problems, rather than a cause of worry.

I really had high expectations for this post, I was going to make both Josh and I feel better about our common problems, but in the end I just talked about arses! I'll attempt this again tomorrow when I'm not half asleep :).

Feel free to leave some comments over at Josh's blog though if you something [more] constructive to say.