Rubenerd

I’ve talked a lot about my quest to rid my life of “stuff”. I’ve tied much of my anxiety to physical clutter, having grown up in an environment in which it was a fixture. Paring back to useful or meaningful stuff has also give me more a sense of control over my environment and life, which is welcome during These Times.™

Ironically, it’s another hang up of mine that has successfully helped me stave off buying too much more. I get into this mental cycle of research and confusion about what to buy, then I’m hit with buyer’s remorse upon committing. Did I end up with the best option? Was it necessary? This means the next time I’m even less likely to commit to something, even if it’s important or necessary.

I don’t envy impulse shoppers; the financial and mental impact could be ruinous. At worst I end up with a neurotic fixation on my perception of stuff, boo hoo! But surely there’s a happy medium.

Haven’t I written this same post a few times now? Probably.

Today I found out about the Vim Awesome site:

Vim Awesome is a directory of Vim plugins sourced from GitHub, Vim.org, and user submissions. Plugin usage data is extracted from dotfiles repos on GitHub.

My experiment with emacs wrapped up last month (a topic for another post), and this gets the closest to giving me a similar experience to the MELPA web interface for Vim. I love the breakdown of plugin types, and the ability to search and sort results.

I tend to keep pretty lean config and only run a few plugins, but it helped me a discover a few new gems like Syntastic and the energetically-titled TOAST!

I wrote a post back in May saying I wasn’t sure that UNIX won, as so many media outlets were claiming. I said I was on the fence, but that I saw Linux continue to depart from UNIX’s legacy in meaningful ways. It’s since been picked up and circulated on the usual news aggregator sites and social media, most of which have generated relevant, tactful comments that swayed my opinion and… nah, got you!

Nobody that I could see challenged the post’s premise that UNIX didn’t win (which for certain Linux and BSD folks was seen as a bad thing for the ongoing project of cross-platform compatibility and good system design, or fabulous by others who claimed it freed their systems from perceived UNIX baggage).

Great, end of the post then, time for a beer! Wait, what do you mean it’s Tuesday morning?

I just saw this description on an auction site:

GEFORCE GTX 1660 VENTUS XS 6G OC. Not used for mining.

I’ve been having a lot of reverse-flashbacks lately. Could you imagine telling someone in the early 2000s that they could buy a GPU with confidence, given the above reason? People would think you were a few triangles short of a pyramid [scheme].

Apple’s Magic Mouse charging system is, like the design of this blog, the stuff of legend. The lightning connector located on the underside of the device necessitates it being upside down to connect and charge. It looks absolutely ridiculous, but also renders the device inoperable while charging. Their new wireless charging pad looks smarter, though they carries the same functional limitation.

Apple aren’t alone with this design decision, unfortunately. Some wireless devices let me operate them with their charging cable attached, such as laptops and kitchen appliances. Others don’t. Maybe Apple’s purported inspiration from classic Braun industrial design carries over in more ways than one.

Take my Braun Series 7 electric shaver, a device that Twitter had a small meltdown over a few years ago when I admitted to having bought one. It didn’t matter that it was more convenient and gentler to my sensitive skin, owning such a device was an affront to manhood. The fact so many people’s masculinity were threatened based on my lack thereof was a bit funny. Facts over feelings, amirite!? But I digress.

I attempted to use this shaver this morning, only to discover that I’d been lazy enough charging it that it ran out of juice. No biggie I thought, as I connected its charging cable and tried again. Nothing happened. Wow, the battery must really be dead, I assumed. I plugged it into another socket just in case, and left it for half an hour. Same result.

At this stage I wondered if the device itself was dead, which would have been a proverbial bummer. Not that I’d ever need to use the device on that part of me anyway. This is strictly for use on the face, as unappealing that side of me is as well. I struggle to grow even the smallest beard (hence the shaving), but at least it’s limited to my mug. What were we talking about?

I unplugged the shaver and tilted it to the light to read the label on the back of the device. Pressing the power button again startled me awake as it buzzed to life, with all the shaving vigor I’d come to expect over the last few years. I’m not sure who Vigor is and why I’m shaving them now too, don’t they know we’re in lockdown?

That lead me to run an experiment. With the shaver still buzzing in my hand, I plugged it back into the wall socket. The device immediately shut off, just as a regular person does after I regale them with another fantastic story about home appliances. I unplugged it again, and it buzzed back to life. I think Evanescence wrote a song about this, not that I even know how to pronounce their name all these years later. Evan-e-scence? Schweppervescence?

Please reach out if you’re an electrical engineer and know why certain devices with batteries have this as a design requirement, and others don’t. I wouldn’t expect safety to be an issue for a computer mouse or an electric shaver that couldn’t knick you by accident even if tethered to a wall. Perhaps the circuitry doesn’t operate unless the battery itself has a minimum amount of charge? But then, if so, why do other cheaper and more expensive devices operate just fine?

Also, I’m aware that a straight razor doesn’t have such electrical issues. Neither does the dish washer compared to the sponge and hand towel in our sink, or a book compared to the device you’re reading this on. The modern world sure is something!

Customer support is one of those terrifying phrases that customers don’t want to engage with, and workers don’t want to think about. There is rarely much positivity to be gained from workers who have to enforce arbitrary rules and decisions, and customers who feel like they’re not being taken seriously. The entire edifice of modern customer support is set up for failure from both sides.

I did customer-facing support for an IT company (albeit among other things) and I don’t begrudge either party here. Customers have a right to be frustrated when they can’t get the answers they need, and support staff need to professionally detach lest they become emotional basketcases from the abuse. Some places do support properly, and some callers are patient. But we all know those are vanishingly rare.

(Check out Moisés Chiullan’s Thank You for Calling podcast archives for some of the best discussions on this topic).

Dave Winer raised another aspect to this last Friday:

I’m doing user support for the first time since Fargo days and am reminded of what sucks about it. In the groups I am part of, as a user, when I ask for help I have reproduced the problem on my machine several times. I have tried workarounds. I’ve thought about it. I don’t immediately ask for help, because I know the other people are like me, doing it for love, it’s not their job, they’re helping because they like to help.

This is in the context of a free website or service, but you could see the same frustration borne out even if you were a client or paying for a support contract.

For whatever reason the groups I assemble often don’t do this. At the first sign of trouble they post something that’s impossible to understand, and it’s really clear they didn’t try it again, or they would have spotted their mistake.

What’s the old adage? Help us to help you?

He concludes:

Support is a dear resource. Use it when you need it, but be sure first that you do need it.

This has become one of Clara’s and my favourite episodes of his. This was a proximate cause of mirth.

You know when you’re talking with someone online, or reading a forum thread, and the conversation devolves from discussing ideas and opinions to dismissal based on something about the OP themselves? Logicians refer to these as ad hominem attacks, which to me always sounds like ad hummus despite not being spelled anywhere near close to that.

(Vim is telling me hominem is a misspelling of hominid, which I suppose we all are. There’s a profound statement about the human condition in there somewhere. Emacs with aspell, on the other hand, had different fingers).

Among the sillier of these retorts I’ve read is that someone “wasn’t there” if they don’t remember a circumstance the exact same way they did, or arrive at different conclusions. I’m seeing this pop up more frequently on social media, because of course those sites turn anything good into stale hummus. Maybe we’re all a bit anxty being IT workers stuck at home without introvert time for years now.

Aside from being an aforementioned self-defeating ad hummus—damn it—laced with some pretentious gate-keeping, it’s trivial to challenge if one were bothered to. Yes, I was there! Now we have a feedback loop justifying a person’s lived experience, rather than the original discussion. Gee, I wonder why they’d want to direct attention away like that?

My experience is that it’s simple projection; people fall back on these when they themselves have something to hide, or haven’t been entirely truthful themselves. I’m no saint here; I’ve caught myself saying words to this effect many times, especially in the heat of the moment. It’s easier to make sweeping statements and assert the OP “wasn’t there” when challenged. Facts have to be argued on evidence, but someone’s experiences are just that. Experiences are as much emotional journeys too, and we all know they aren’t governed by logic.

I get there are some circumstances where such dismissals could be warranted. Say, if someone cosplaying a cancer survivor talks about the herbal remedies that cured them, or a veteran claiming to have served in a country in which they’ve never set foot. But even then, the fact “someone wasn’t there” wouldn’t be the most egregious detail in that exchange.

Heaven forbid such trolls ever need to converse with a historian. Those damned professors, they weren’t ever in third century Crete, eating hummus.

There are times at the end of some days where, synapses firing, I think back on the week that was and am overcome with the desire and motivation to smash out a dozen blog posts from all manner of topics. Did you know topics is an anagram for cipots, which isn’t a word?

Other days, such as this one, are different. It’s the late afternoon and I’m staring down Outlook with six draft emails and a rapidly approaching Friday evening. I think back to all that’s happened in the last week, and struggle to think of anything specific to mention that hasn’t already been said. My drafts folder and #TODO file overflows with topics, and I can’t bring myself to discuss anything in particular.

The word particular itself is peculiar, just like the world peculiar. Particular sounds like particulate, which could go in the direction of particles or articulate. Articulate particles sounds like a backhanded compliment for a literary genius of below-average stature, which wouldn’t affect a literary ungenius of above-average stature such as myself. Is ungenius a word? I feel asking that already disqualifies me from being a genius.

Ungenius. Harrison Ford. Get me off this genius.

Thank you.

I follow the same process whenever I have to sign up for a website. I unlock my KeePassXC keychain, create a new item, paste the URL for the new site, then use the Password Generator to spit out 128 characters of gibberish. That then gets pasted into the target site. No muss, no fuss.

(As an aside, please check out KeePassXC. It’s cross platform, open source, written in snappy Qt, and has plugins for Firefox, Vivaldi, and the death star. I send money to them each month, it’s that good).

This process continues to expose websites and their redundant passphrase requirements. Here was a warning I got from a site having pasted my latest string of alphanumeric soup:

Password must contain: Uppercase, Lowercase, Number, Symbol (#$@!%*?&) and be between 8 - 20 characters long

We’ll tackle the broader issue here in a moment, but has anyone else noticed the validation checks for these are almost always flawed? This passphrase was rejected, and I still can’t see why:

Ji5$356fS#@1uYqQD!Va

It took me thirteen (!) attempts to generate a passphrase that worked. Those superstitious among you would expect no less from such a number, but for me it was just a frustrating exercise in painful frustration. Not that I’d ever use redundant phrasing.

But even if one day every frontend web developers figured out how to do client-side validation, that still doesn’t address the fact these rules hurt security. Short keysmashes manage to be more difficult to remember than passphrases, and are less secure. NIST has advised against mandating these requirements for years.

Length requirements are also pointless if the passphrase is being stored as a salted hash, something that should be considered a minimum technical requirement in addition to sounding tasty. My German genes lead me to being a potato rosti guy, but hash browns are also excellent.

I’ve heard from sysadmins working in finance that shorter passwords were mandated based on the assumption that longer ones are harder for customers to remember. That might have been true prior to those additional symbolic requirements above, but I’d challenge that assumption now! Another told me that shorter passwords are also easier to be read out over the phone… which is multiple levels of problematic.

I appreciate the real issue here is that passphrases are an antiquated and creaky auth method, and that it needs to be replaced. But not letting perfect be the enemy of good, we could start by removing these silly limitations.