Rubenerd

Beware the wrath of Dave, poke fun at his netbook and he'll just crassly assume you're a spineless puppet of Apple folk because they're naturally the only ones who are uninspired by flimsy designs. I resemble [sic] his remarks… for one thing not all Apple fans are boys ;).

DaveWiner: People who say the Asus isn’t pretty — balderdash. People are always commenting on the cute little computer. It’s like a Prius.

Rubenerd: Sorry @davewiner, but that Asus really is an ugly machine. That’s not to say it isn’t convenient or useful though.

DaveWiner: @Rubenerd — you ever actually used one or are you just parroting what the apple fanboys told you to say

What was it that Adam West said on The Simpsons? I don't need moulded plastic to improve my physique… pure… West! If I had a point for this post, I've forgotten what it was.

As I pointed out back in 2006, in that above photo Dave looks just like my dad. Turns out they actually look nothing alike at all.

As a FreeBSD guy (and even on my Linux boxes) I've been using tcsh as my shell for years, but I never noticed this easter egg before. If you have your prompt defined to show the time with %T, at the top of each hour (as my American friends say it) it replaces the time with the word "DING!", how cute!

Chan-andler Bing Ding! Ring a Ding Ding, it's a new hour! Is it sad that something like this made my day?

Links shared from del.icio.us today:

Minaiture Food – Croissants and Choc Croissants #2 on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

(categories: photos cute food)

Would the extreme cyber-libertarians please stand up? | EFA

(categories: censorship nocleanfeed openinternet australia)

MichaelWolff.com: The official website of jazz pianist Michael Wolff

This guy's music is AMAZING!

(categories: jazz music cool)

Clone a disk using dd – LQWiki

(categories: dd linux bsd freebsd software howto cloning hdd)

Parted Magic/PartImage issue – Linux/BSD

(categories: howto partedmagic partitions freebsd bsd)

CrossFit FX » Store

"Don’t use machines become one"… wait what?

(categories: shopping funny australia)

How to keep Windows relevant – Holy Kaw!

(categories: microsoft software news blogs windows)

rg35g.jpg

(categories: funny art internet twitter google facebook)

adorable toshiba libretto – The latest information and links on the Toshiba Libretto

(categories: hardware libretto toshiba retro)

My Linux Toy — the Libretto 50CT

(categories: hardware libretto toshiba retro)

Hide/Show Close Button On Tabs | Firefox Tips | Skidzopedia

(categories: firefox howto tips software)

iPhone addiction creating iJunkies – Holy Kaw!

(categories: iphone apple hardware funny)

Favorite Anime Characters of 2008 « Open Your Mind

(categories: toradora anime blogs)

Moves to lift English proficiency – Straits Times

(categories: singapore news language)

textmate-missingdrawer – Project Hosting on Google Code

(categories: apple programming editors gui plugins textmate)

Just a quick headsup (or is it "heads up?" or "heads-up" or "Bird is The Word?") that @roel247 ust used the Buy Ruben a Coffee button on the blog sidebar here to buy me a cup of coffee because he contains an abundance of awesome :). Thank you sir!

(Original link here, but image no longer exists).

Continuing in our seven day Whole Wheat Radio Artist of the Day experiment here on Rubenerd.com, today's artist is the awesome jazz pianist and composer Michael Wolff.

I can describe Michael's jazzy tunes in one word: cool, suave, cool, awesome, sophisticated, cool, swish, cool, fun and cool. That was substantially more than one word. Then again so is "Michael Wolff", so we've come out ahead again. All is good with the world!

As with all Whole Wheat Radio artists you can request a show of his songs to be added to the webcast in real time as well as view his artist page where you can leave comments. He also has an official website where you can listen to a few tracks.

I keep trying to branch out of my music comfort zone and try new things, but Michael's style of music is still by far my favourite and he more than does the genre justice. He is just so friggen awesome to listen to! If you can get a more glowing endorsement from a computer nerd who knows nothing about music terminology than that, I haven't heard it!

@cb60089 just bought me a cup of coffee using the button on my blog sidebar, which makes him the epitome of awesomeness! Well he was the epitome of awesomeness before, but this just further cements his reputation. Thank you :).

I stopped putting ads on my blog a few years ago and replaced it with a coffee button, and I've been blown away by people's generosity. I think this model works great, if your readers like what you do they'll support you, and from a purely business standpoint I've been able to buy more coffee with that little button than years of having Google ads here!

Back in 2006 I posted some of my favourite Bruce Schneier facts. Here we are in 2010 and I still read ones that make me laugh out loud!

• The sum of the ASCII values of the characters in Bruce Schneier’s passwords is always a prime number. Their product is too.

• Bruce Schneier; brain the size of a planet…. Reduced to writing about encryption for mortals; gets very depressed.

• Bruce Schneier can read and understand Perl programs.

• There are no prime numbers, only numbers Bruce Schneier lets you factorise.

• Bruce Schneier knows a deterministic algorithm to generate non-pseudo random numbers without need of an entrophy source.

Self professed blogging experts (who's blogs aren't well known, go figure) say you should never write posts discussing why you haven't blogged. I've already used the word blog four times here. Anyway what have I been doing in this two day absence?

Don't read this post, the quality doesn't improve.

Melting Snow Leopard with a hair dryer

Or would that be a fur driver, wait fur dryer? The former sounds like an upholstered golf club.

First things first, given it was a public holiday in South Australia yesterday (something about a race, I think) I took most of the day to wipe my MacBook Pro and downgrade it back to Leopard. Is it redundant to say you've "gone back" and "downgraded" something? Stop interrupting me.

There are a few features I took for granted in Snow Leopard I took for granted (wait, I already said that) that I'm already missing, such as timestamped screenshot files (WOW that was a huge improvement!). I plugged all my external drives (seven… yes I know I know) and not one single Finder crash. Phews. Is Phews the plural of phew?

Corn chips

They've started selling CCs in Woolworths again! Unfortunately despite this awesomeness, I went to their Mawson Lakes branch late this afternoon and they were completely sold out of bread. Completely! Not a single loaf, not even that Home Brand bread that tastes like cardboard flour, or flour cardboard. I took that photo with my iTelephone and showed my sister, she said "WHOA". Her exact word.

Programming

The Perl script I wrote to sync a few computers back in Singapore in 2003 for a small company is still running, albeit with a few modifications since the last time I saw it! They called me up to take a look at it, and it consumed an entire afternoon.

I try my best to love object orientation, but clean, simple, modular code is still so much friggen fun. Heck I'm enjoying working in C again recently for similar reasons, it feels like I'm working with the computer on a problem that's easier for it to visualise instead of attempting to model objects from our world onto it. Does that make any sense? Damn I want to do assembler, but as if the university will do anything cool and interesting like that :(

Smileness

I was at a coffee shop this morning as I was typing on my new(ish) Libretto 70CT and a cute girl smiled and waved at me as she walked past. I'm such a pathetic simpleton, that one smile was enough to make me feel all warm and fuzzy all morning :).

I GOT A LIBRETTO 70CT!

HUGE news, but will be waiting to blog about it in more detail tomorrow.

Links shared from del.icio.us today:

Enabling sftp and ssh? – Mac-Forums.com

Not right, of course.

(categories: mac osx howto ssh sftp)

Boot from bootable USB drive in VB? (View topic) • virtualbox.org

(categories: virtualbox virtualisation booting)

ABC Q&A – God, Science and Sanity

(categories: australia richarddawkins religion rationality television transcripts)

According to @singtwop1000 who informed me this afternoon, I've been using Twitter now for three years. That's a good thing… right?!

Trawling through the archives here, the first time I mentioned Twitter was this post published in June 2007 about another international move and my mum. As was my style at the time I talked about many different things in one post, ironically I hadn't done that for ages until recently!

The screenshot above was the first I took of a Twitter client, from this post in October 2007 when I was talking about my mum's ICU scare and some random crappy photos from around Singapore with my then new Nokia e61i phone thingy. I used Twitteriffic right up until they started putting ads into the software and charging for it.

ASIDE: Oh and Michael Atkinson, my mum was having chemotherapy NOT playing computer games. Go step on a pine cone.

Twitter has become such a critical part of my life, I get nearly all my news through it and for an awkward, introverted person like me it's been a great way to meet people and make friends. I may be programming late at night by myself in the dark, but I have all these friendly people asking how I'm going just a click away. People say they don't get Twitter, that it's stupid and it drives them crazy, for me it may have prevented me from going crazy.

Cheers Twitter, I'll have a coffee for both of us :).