Rubenerd

youtube-dl is a Python utility to download videos from various websites, such as YouTube (surprise!) and Vimeo. I use it to archive channels I like into Clara’s and my Plex server. I’m surprised how often videos disappear, especially history and science channels that discuss sensitive topics. It doesn’t matter if the host is respectful, or sticks to facts, the Almighty Algorithm won’t have any of it.

But I digress. I was downloading a certain British Rail Pacer video yesterday on my fresh FreeBSD 13 laptop install and hit this error:

[metadata] Writing metadata to file's xattrs   
ERROR: Couldn't find a tool to set the xattrs. 
Install either the python 'xattr' module, or the 'xattr' binary.

It was easy enough to fix:

$ printf "%s\n" "Cheese Steak Jimmy's"

That was clearly the wrong command.

# pkg install devel/py-xattr

Thanks to timur@ for maintaining the ports :).

Clara and I watched the latest episode of Veritasium last night which discussed VARK. It sounds more like a C preprocessor or a secret government weapon than a learning framework, but it breaks people down into four types:

• Visual learners
• Audible learners
• Reading/writing learners
• Kinesthetic learners, or learning by doing

I drew a lot of diagrams in school and uni, and I’ve always loved maps. I also typed so many notes that people even started asking for them back in the day! Writing is also my favourite activity in the world, especially first thing in the morning sitting outside with coffee in hand, and reading is among my favourite ways to pass time.

But there was no doubt in my mind, or any other body part, that I was predominately an audible learner above the others. I used to record classes and lectures, surrepticiously or otherwise, and play them back on my iPod while going on evening walks, or cleaning, or doing other menial tasks. It made studying more accessible, but over time I came to realise that I was absorbing more of the information hearing someone explain something over seeing a diagram or reading a textbook. This was especially true for subjects like history and geography.

Audible learning didn’t always work. Highly-symbolic subjects like maths, chemistry, and computer science had an important visual component, but even among those I was able to grok concepts and reasons behind certain theorums and data structures by hearing someone discuss them. It also meant that come class time, I was able to ask better questions.

But back to the Veritasium video. Turns out this identification and classification of people into different learning styles has little to no scientific basis whatsoever! People performend similarly in tests whether they were placed in classes matching their professed learning styles or not. The best approach to learning, as far as the scientific literature demonstrates, is to have multiple types of information presented. Written and visual, for example.

I can only go by my own lived experience and emprical evidence here. Granted I haven’t ever conducted a test where I only studied by reading, then again with audio, for example. But I can say that I performed better in subjects where I heard a component rather than relying on just reading for subjects. But as I write this, I realise now that the audio was in addition, so it really was multiple types of information helping.

Clearly I had to hear someone say it before it sank in #badumtish.

The Audiacity team found themselves in hot water last month after telemetry data was included in the venerable open source audio editor. This was only ever optional, but the loss of trust it represented was enough to spawn a fork.

The initial problem with the Tenacity fork was as open source community as they come: harassment levelled at the maintainer over the name. I’d be more surprised if it was the result of something substantive.

Audacity has been the de facto indie podcast audio editor since the concept was first floated in the mid-2000s. I had come to expect it would always be there, but these tools are built, maintained, and supported by people in the real world, often times with other motives.

Speaking of migraines, Melissa Davey wrote a great article for The Guardian’s health section about this pervasive problem that isn’t just a headache!

At first, [my migraines] were similar to [my mum’s]. A sudden onset of blinding, stabbing pain on one side of my head, an overwhelming nausea, eventual forceful vomiting, dehydration, intolerance of light, exhaustion and fatigue.

This is spot on. Mine usually end up with vertigo and a dry mouth as well, just for added fun. Unlike a stomach bug where nausea instantly improves how you feel, it does nothing for a migraine.

I’ve had imaging scans of my head. I still don’t know a clear cause.

Lord almighty, me too! All I’d theorised thus far is that it’s genetic; many of my early childhood memories were formed around being told to leave mummy alone in the bedroom because she was having a severe one. But even that link might be tenuous:

Griffiths says [..] the role of inheritance pattern and the genes involved are less clear-cut. She hopes in the future, the involvement of other genes in these migraines will be better understood, leading to more diagnostic tests and personalised treatment.

What I also didn’t realise before reading this was how much more prevalent the affliction is with women, and how little research has been put into it compared to other diseases and disorders. This might go part of the way explaining why:

Migraine is quality-of-life threatening, not life-threatening, so is doesn’t pull the heart strings for resources and funding in the way the conditions like cancer do,” Prof Anne MacGregor from the Centre for Neuroscience, Surgery and Trauma at the Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, says.

The standard units of measurement for most American documentaries I watch aren’t feet, inches, or some other archaic unit based on the width of a king’s left bicep in the 14th century, but football fields and Rhode Islands.

It made me wonder just how big Rhode Island is, and how I could make it relatable to what I understand, such as SI units and how many Singapores and Tasmanias such a geographic approximation represents.

The first question was trickier to answer than I expected. Rhode Island is an American state, formerly known as the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Despite the name, most of the Ocean State resides on the US mainland, a fact that makes as much sense to an outsider as Kansas City being in Missouri, or the fact everything is bigger in Texas is a meme despite it not being the largest state in the US, and its size being diminutive by global subdivision standards. But I digress.

The entire State of Rhode Island covers 3,144 square kilometres, which can be expressed in miles as another number. This dwarfs Singapore’s measly 728 square kilometres even with its extensive reclamation works, though it’s well shy of Tasmania’s 90,758. Placed over a map of itself though, and the ratio would be exactly 1:1.

But this area is a bit misleading. 407 square kilometres of the state’s area is water, a aqueous substance of which I keep small portions of by my bedside for late night consumption. This means the total landmass is only about 2,700 square kilometres, assuming the Dutch don’t invade and put dikes everywhere as they are want to do. Amster-damn that was a good joke.

Then we get to the Rhode Island… island itself, also known as Aquidneck. This island island is connected to the mainland mainland via a series of bridges and ferries, granting access to the English-sounding settlements of Newport, Portsmouth, and the delightfully geographically-accurate Middletown. This comes in at a paultry 98 square kilometres, which a hastily-written Perl script tells me is smaller than the state with which it shares a name.

Stood on end, Rhode Island Island (… island) and its neihbouring island of Prudence would stand the same height as they would lengthwise when positioned as they regularly are. Everything would likely fall off too, including Newport State Airport which reported 20,238 aircraft operations in 2011. I’m assuming they’re not counting each door closing and each prop spinning up as seperate operations; that’d be a bit misleading. But isn’t that the lesson of this whole post?

Now I know that next time someone says it’s about the size of Rhode Island, I have three measurements to keep in mind and not just one. Maybe saying a few thousand football fields would be easier.

The latest Nintendo Switch uses an OLED screen. Most of tech press and social media are tripping over themselves with excitement at this development, saying it’ll improve battery life, colour reproduction, and weight. They’re right.

Here comes the proverbial posterial prognostication: BUT… the lack of reporting on the accessibility concerns of these panels continues to astonish me! Can you imagine if a new battery technology caused electrical shocks to certain people, and it was just ignored?

These horrible panels of death cause headaches, migraines, and eye fatigue to a significant amount of the population (I’ve seen estimates of 5–10%, though I’ve never read that figure formally quantified). Even a conservative estimate places that at millions of people. If I wanted a strobing screen shooting knifes into my eyes, I’d…

… wait, I can’t think of a single situation where I’d ever want that. Unless it was to win a lifetime coffee subscription, and there was a trophy at the end full of codeine and jars of Tiger Balm to salve the inevitable head throbbing from looking at such a screen. Actually, I’d rather pay for coffee.

We can only hope Nintendo will continue shipping the previous LCD version, just as Apple still sells their low-end iPhone SE with a usable display. But it’s one more data point in a wider industry trend away from caring about accessibility. I’ll keep calling it out whenever I see it… as long as it’s not published on an OLED, and I’ll have to get someone to read it to me.

On Monday I wrote about unscrupulous eBay sellers who repurpose packaging to sell unrelated items, because they’re unscrupulous sellers who are unscrupulous. I said it was false advertising and raised accessibility concerns over the caveat emptor defence.

Asherah Connor:

“Much as people say about my physical appearance, the problem isn’t just cosmetic.”

Thank you for the laugh. I am having a hard morning and reading that first thing really helped.

I live to serve ^^; like a Gemini server running on a Zigbee box!

Ivalderrama:

One week later, I have already installed Trojan virus to Operating Systems of all the devices that you use to access your email. In fact, it was not really hard at all (since you were following the links from your inbox emails). All ingenious is simple. =)

Wait, that’s spam. I’m tempted to make that last line the slogan for this site though. Hey suckers, welcome to Rubenerd.com! All ingenious is simple!

Bradley M:

You can always return them.

True, but that’s beside the point. Like the pen I snapped the tip off yesterday by rolling over it with my chair.

Rebecca Hales:

Bingo! But you didn’t mention the main problem: it erodes the trust in legitimate sellers as well which hurts everyone.

I hadn’t considered this. How many people have been scared off buying anything in the future because they were burned by another seller? Unless that’s your thing, in which case, carry on.

From Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, as presented on my Microsoft Bookshelf 1991 CD-ROM on my Pentium 1 tower this evening:

My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not live and utter it.

~ A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers [1849]

And this helped me more than I expected:

The fate of the country [..] does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street each morning.

~ Slavery in Massachusetts [1854]

Clara’s and I still love Miku’s 2011 Good Smile Racing rendition above every rendition of her since. The subtle shape Yuichi Murakami gave her eyes convey the same friendly vibes as her millions of other incantations, but with a bit more maturity and class.

Here she is next to her cute 2016 version for comparison, where the difference is somewhat obvious!

Her 2011 racing fig and artwork were a bit of an anomaly, admittedly. Miku is supposed to be one of the cute and energetic Vocaloid singers, with Luka bringing the deeper voice and calmer disposition. But Miku is nothing short of a blank canvas for so many artists and designers, so I’m always interested to see what directions people take her in.

Kotobukiya’s recent Bishoujo Remix Series Miku takes it one step further, and shows her perhaps as she looks in her mid-20s rock stage! I love figs that look like action snapshots in time. The detail is unreal, especially around her billowing twintails and cape. Yamashita Shunya’s original illustration has been captured so well.

What would Miku look like in another decade, if she were a mere mortal like us and not living in a futuristic synthesiser? Would she be wearing a beret in her mid-30s jazz funk stage? Maybe I’ll ask Clara to think about and draw for us :).

I’ve been buying retro computer gear online for many years now, and have seen my fair share of tricks and swindles designed to part money from unsuspecting nostalgic shoppers for something they didn’t want or expect. Peripherals listed as “new old stock” that have scuff marks from regular usage, for example. Or hardware with minor version differences being passed off as something rarer, newer, or in better condition.

For each seller who makes a mistake, I’d be willing to bet there are a billion others who do it on purpose. Statistically speaking, is a phrase with two words.

Something I’ve started seeing more of is packaging being used to sell something else entirely from what the box depicts, describes, and other d-words. Take this box for a Microsoft Mouse 2.1a from 1996:

Your eyes are not deceiving you! This isn’t the right mouse. It isn’t even the right manufacturer. The cutout for the box is comically wrong. The photograph of the instruction manual clearly depicts a different mouse from what’s being sold. It’s the wrong shape, the wrong size, has the wrong number of buttons, and it even has the wrong physical connector. I wouldn’t be surprised to crack open that other mouse only to find the trackball is a Maltezer.

Is that what you want us to use as a mouse? A chocolate ball!?

The seller in these circumstances could claim they were being transparent by providing photos that are your responsibility to review, as a responsible civic shopper of responsibility. What you see is what you get, and caveat emptor, right? I’d be sympathetic to this, but why list something in the wrong box for any reason other that to deceive? There’s no escaping the trifling fact that the title of the listing is for a different device, and the description only doubled-down like that proverbial fast food chicken burger. Only that isn’t heartburn, that’s the feeling of a hole being burned in your wallet. Brilliant.

Yes, this is an especially silly and contrived example that’s visually obvious, but other sellers are far more subtle. I’ve seen old peripherals put into newer packaging as a way to tart up their condition, or to mislead buyers into thinking it’s a rarer device, or one with additional features. I saw someone try to pass an IntelliMouse with a scroll wheel off as one that Microsoft shipped for MS-DOS. That’s why they called those games side-scrollers, don’t you know?

Much as people say about my physical appearance, the problem isn’t just cosmetic. Minor version differences in legacy computer peripherals could mean the difference between compatibility and not. Without even leaving the realm of mouses, there were multiple competing protocols from the likes of Microsoft and Logitech, requiring different driver configuration and software support. Some work with passive PS/2 to serial DB9 adaptors, but some don’t. Ah USB-C, we’ve learned absolutely nothing.

The end result is a buyer could be on the receiving end of a device that looks the part, but simply doesn’t work for the use case they bought it for. That sounds a bit less like false advertising and more outright fraud, if one were susceptible to embellishment to make a broader point about the reputability of eBay auctions as I’m attempting to do now. Like a gentleman.

But it’s even worse than that. I can tell immediately the bundled IntelliPoint software on disk would not be compatible with this device either, nor would be the PS/2 to serial DB9 adaptor. An unsuspecting buyer would be receiving something that’s either not functional at all, or wouldn’t have the features they expected by reading reviews or the box itself. I can only imagine the frustration of someone trying to troubleshoot why bundled software doesn’t work with what they bought. Is it a problem with my machine? Why would this manufacturer bundle incompatible software!?

Even if you’re not convinced this is an issue, consider accessibility. People with poor visual acuity or those who use screen readers only have the false or misleading information to base their purchasing decision on. Is it reasonable to expect these users, or anyone for that matter, to enquire about every device they buy online to confirm whether the box includes what it claims to? I appreciate this is a second-hand market and not retail, but in what other context does that burden on the buyer make sense? People would shout murder if Amazon sent you a budget Android phone in your iPhone box.

My approach thus far has been to assume good intentions, and to ask the seller to revise their listings for what must have been a mistake. Those who aren’t responsive to this need to start being called out like the rodents they are. Hands down.