Rubenerd

Replacement ink cartridge mess from this evening

Ever since I was a tiny little person I've always found photos of environmental destruction and human excess to be disturbing. This evening I had a quick first hand experience with both.

The Canon Pixma Pro9000 is a remarkable printer; the photos my father takes with his Nikon D90 and the ones I take with my Nikon D60 come out looking absolutely stunning. To my untrained eye the quality matches that you would get at a professional photo developing shop. It has borderless printing options, it can print up to A3 in size, it's surprisingly quick even at high resolution settings and the drivers are a breath of fresh air, even if the driver CD also attempts to intstal a lot of other unnecessary cruft unless you tell it not to.

One of the features this Pro9000 shares with other higher end photo printers is it's individual tanks for each colour, in this case there are nine. The logic behind this is that if one colour is exhausted, you don't have to resort to throwing away a whole cartridge which may have plenty of other coloured inks still available. I called B.S. on this the instant I saw it; if a printer company really cared about saving us money they wouldn't price the ink at levels which beat precious metals in weight, and they would let us… shock horror… refill the cartridges! What is the point of throwing away a perfectly usable storage tank like a cartridge?

But this isn't the worst of it. As you can see in the image above, this evening I replaced three of the cartridges out of the nine: and look at the amount of waste! To get to the cartridge you need to:

1. Open an oversized cardboard box that could easily be half the size
2. Open a thick, non-recyclable plastic bag that also could easily be half the size
3. Open another shrink-wrapped piece of plastic
4. Turn and pop off another thick plastic tab with a huge handle to expose the tiny ink outlet

Why does Canon need to do this? I am always impressed with the quality and build of Canon products, but this amount of protection seems (at least to me) to be really wasteful and superfluous.

What would make sense would be a system to refill the cartridges with licenced Canon ink. I don't care if they charged as much for a refill as they currently do for a regular cartridge (let's be realistic, as if printer companies are going to give up that golden goose), the point is we're trying to reduce waste.

Beautiful graphic by User:AnonMoos at the Wikimedia Commons.

The superfluous is very necessary.
~ Voltaire

This is exactly what I've been saying all along.

As a person who reads tens of blogs on a daily basis through various aggregators, I can say with confidence that posts which include graphics, photos, diagrams, real world experience, humility and a sense of humour along with the text are so much more interesting and engaging and will make me come back for more. There's a topic for a killer novel there.

I also prefer reading posts that are conversational rather than just dry text — if I wanted the latter I'd pick up one of my university textbooks. Such people are missing out on what I consider to be the core strength of the internet: presenting varying and diverse content. What's the point of changing mediums while being tied to the limitations of what you used before?

ASIDE: I didn’t think this one quote from Voltaire would turn into a rant about the boring state of blogging. Perhaps I could see it coming subconciously and my mind tricked me into posting it to set this in motion. Motion rhymes with horseshoe. Wait… no it doesn’t.

I suspect much of this stems from the fact many people just don't consider comedy, humour, comedy, photos, personal experience or a sense of humour professional; how stuffy. People like why the lucky stiff push the envelope in randomness, quirky sidebars, diverging threads of conciousness and awesome graphics alongside his text, but he's in a minority. As in a one in a million minority. It's a shame.

All this I've said before; what I'm fascinated with is that Voltaire was a blogger and understood this. Do you reckon his blog is still online after all this time? The Internet Archives might be the place to look. What was his webhost? Did he have translations of his posts? Did he have hairstyle instructions?

Explanation below!

From time to time I like to check how many of my images are being hotlinked from my server here. Given I'm in the process of moving to new servers (anyone at Ourmedia? Can you reply to my three emails please?) I thought I'd have to re-evaluate my previous position on hotlinking but for now the bandwidth these free-loaders waste is insignificant when compared to MP3 downloads of my Rubenerd Shows, and still much smaller than all those blasted screenshots I post here with such fervour.

Why have I shown the above image of Aka Onda from the Rec anime series above though? Well if you stopped talking perhaps I would have time to answer. I've included this image because despite this blog not being an anime blog with very few posts about the subject out of now thousands of posts, this is currently my most hotlinked image.

No screenshots from how-to's regarding the maintenance and reviewing of software for FreeBSD or Mac, no photos taken with my FinePix S9600 or my new Nikon D60… the most hotlinked image is a cover from an anime series. It blows my mind!

It's made me rethink my priorities somewhat: clearly people are more interested in my pontifications about life, the universe and everything as well as my anime talk that perhaps my focus on software reviews and advice is misguided? My dedicated anime blog doesn't even get this level of traffic for anime material!

I must admit I've been giving more thought to just giving up and merging all four of my blogs into this one, with clearer categories of course. I've talked about this several times in the past and ended up dismissing it each time, but perhaps with my current and ongoing webhosting crisis this has given me the opportunity to go ahead with it after all.

The ultimate question!

As friendly and preciously valued readers of the Rubenerd Blog, how would you feel seeing anime, study material, my podcast and general philosophy all merged into one entitiy? I would of course keep each section separate with their own RSS or Atom feeds so if you're not interested in some material there would be no need for you to put up with it… but at the same time you could get one uber feed that has everything!

This has happened to me so many times I thought I'd post a clarification here to help myself remember, while passing it off as a legitimate blog post topic. Clever yes? Don't answer that.

Having moved to Unix-like systems from Windows when I finished high school I'm used to firing up my shell and entering ifconfig with either the -a option or by specifying a specific network interface such as eth0 to find out DHCP assigned IP addresses, subnet masks, grilled cheese sandwiches and the like.

Xfce Terminal on FreeBSD with ThinIce theme

As shown below, on Windows the command is deceptively similar in all but one letter: ipconfig. As with the classic DOS goodness Windows replaced the commands also accept flags with forward-slashes instead of short dashes.

Command Prompt on XP with the least ugly Windows theme

ASIDE: According to the completely infallible Wikipedia, ifconfig sloppily stands for "interface configurator", whereas ipconfig stands for "internet protocol configuration". Don’t you just love unambiguous commands?

It's interesting how our minds change isn't it? I started using our DOS desktop back before I even started primary school and I got so used to the commands they became second nature. Since moving to the wonderful world of FreeBSD and cross pollinating my knowledge on similar GNU/Linux, NetBSD, Mac OS X and OpenSolaris machines, my DOS knowledge hasn't been forgotten, but it's become something I have to "think" to use. If I had a cent for every time I attempted to type and use ls and top on Windows machines now, I'd have at least enough cash for a grilled cheese sandwich with at least avocado and onions.

Mac OS X Leopard Terminal.app

Two grilled cheese sandwich references in one post, three including this sentence. I'm on a roll. Wait I'm not discussing eating a "roll", it's a "grilled cheese sandwich". Wait, that's four times. Grilled cheese sandwich.

Getting FreeBSD 7.1 torrenty goodness!

You know why January is the best time of the year? Is it because of snow? You moron, I live in Singapore! The closest we get to snow here is the white powdery condensate you scape out of the freezer. Unless your freezer is one of those frost free models, in which case I'm stumped.

Yes folks, FreeBSD 7.1 RELEASE is out now and ready for downloading. It has some exciting new features, one of which is the ability to download one DVD ISO instead of several regular CD-Rs, very nice. And I can't wait to finally give DTRACE a try!

From the official announcement page:

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE. This is the second release from the 7-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.0 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights:

• The ULE scheduler is now the default in GENERIC kernels for amd64 and i386 architectures. The ULE scheduler significantly improves performance on multicore systems for many workloads.
• Support for using DTrace inside the kernel has been imported from OpenSolaris. DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework.
• A new and much-improved NFS Lock Manager (NLM) client.
• Boot loader changes allow, among other things, booting from USB devices and booting from GPT-labeled devices.
• The cpuset(2) system call and cpuset(1) command have been added, providing an API for thread to CPU binding and CPU resource grouping and assignment.
• KDE updated to 3.5.10, GNOME updated to 2.22.3.
• DVD-sized media for the amd64 and i386 architectures

For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list, available at:

• http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/7.1R/relnotes.html
• http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/7.1R/errata.html

For more information about FreeBSD release engineering activities, please see:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng/

I think sometimes with free and open source computer software we tend to forget that there are some tireless folks behind all this good stuff, and they don't get the recognition they deserve.

In this case I want to personally thank Ken Smith, Robert Watson, Konstantin Belousov, Marc Fonvieille, Maxime Henrion, Bruce A. Mah, George Neville-Neil, Hiroki Sato, Murray Stokely, Marcel Moolenaar, Takahashi Yoshihiro, Kris Kennaway, Joe Marcus Clarke, Erwin Lansing, Mark Linimon, Pav Lucistnik, Colin Percival and Peter Wemm for their work on 7.1.

I also want to send my gratitude and thanks to the rest of the FreeBSD team for continuing to craft this masterpiece of computer science. You folks create the single greatest piece of software on the planet, and you've made all my FreeBSD machines such fun, reliable, secure, fast and dependable devices to use.

Thank you again!

Mii charcters are of course the little people you create on the Nintendo Wii console. The resemblance is uncanny, but I reckon they should have made him smile instead of that rather angered expression he's currently pulling!

From die Homepage der Familie Rudolph :).

Below are some photos of the real guy for your comparative convenience if you knowledge of said person is lacking. You can also visit his official site or visit his Wikipedia article. Comparative convenience?

Danke schön, gute Nacht!

Too… many… drives!

I tend to follow a similar familiar pattern of behaviour whenever I get a shiny new gadget or install a brand new operating system I've never used before that has a solid package manager.

1. Get excited
2. Check out available software
3. Download and install ridiculous numbers of titles based on the loose criteria that "it looks interesting"
4. Attempt to organise and maintain all the software
5. After a few weeks I realise I didn’t use most of the software, start pruning back
6. Rinse, lather, repeat

I'm reminded of what my grandfather on my mum's side back in Australia has always said about clutter and junk: if you haven't used something in a month, it's safe to assume you probably won't ever use it, and it's time to sell it or give it away. Like a Greek or Chinese philosopher he claims that the amount you paid for something should NOT be a factor in whether you cling to it, because clutter just isn't worth it.

I think the same can be said for computers. People tend to see clutter in a more physical sense, and I admit even as late as a few years ago admitting that the amount of data and applications you have on a machine doesn't matter because your computer doesn't physically grow in size or get heavier. It may sound silly, but I suspect more people think like this.

It's too tempting to install tons of free, quality software from pkgsrc!

ASIDE: The irony isn’t lost on me that I’ve taken this NetBSD pkgsrc screenshot on a Windows machine. I’m on my dad’s machine here while I fix his partition table. That didn’t sound right.

While I am a fan of Mac OS X, this is one of the things that really draws me to FreeBSD. Unlike OS X or Windows or the vast majority of GNU/Linux distributions, FreeBSD starts off clean, simple to understand and small, and you only add what you need.

I don't quite know how to describe it, but when I view the few hundred packages I have on a FreeBSD tower compared to the thousands that Ububtu or Fedora installs or the many applications OS X or Windows come with that I'd never use, I feel as though I'm using a far more elegant system. Of course the trade off is you have to invest a not so insignificant amount of time initially setting it up compared to Ubuntu or OS X, but the results are worth it!

ASIDE: I would have said Windows too, but I find the initial stages of installing, locking down and securing a fresh Windows install takes even longer! I’m serious, I have timed this!

The same clutter talk can also be applied to data. As I said before I used to assume data had an inexhaustible potential, for if I ran out of disk space, I could just add another drive! When you've had this attitude for your whole life and have piled up terabytes of crap, backups and general hardware maintenance end up taking up more time than what I suspect the data is worth.

I have [almost] never deleted any of my data, unless I was compressing (and checksumming) it using the latest and greatest algorithm; and while I've always been rather messy in my living environments (though seeing others I think I'm quite tame!) I have always been obsessively meticulous when it comes to sorting and organising my data. I have a complex directory structure that has evolved over the years but it's clean enough that I can find a book report I typed up in primary school without using any search system… if I really wanted to!

Imagine if I printed everything I had on hard drives onto paper… sheesh!

The question is… Is it worth maintaining all this data and infrastructure? When should common sense kick in? Should I be performing the same kind of auditing on data as I tend to do with software on a regular basis?

I suspect this is a fairly open ended problem, and as with clutter in the real world some people are naturally better at not letting it accumulate than others. I still have my Pentium MMX 200MHz desktop running the latest version of FreeBSD and it still performs great. I guess you can tell the nature of my hoarding habits from that :)

As I've said on Google Reader, there is something alluring about buying a sturdy backpack that can hold a laptop, clothes and a teddy bear and living out of it as I spend my money travelling rather than buying more crap. I suspect I'll always need to have a storage room somewhere though… for my box of my late mum's handwriting and her paintings for example. And I'll always need a big arse external hard drive to store digital crap, even if I leave it in the same storage room.

I guess this post could have been summarised in two words: delete superfluous crap! Hey wait a minute.

The New Brighton Tower and Lusitania by noctorum on Flickr

Famous old postcard comparing the tower at New Brighton to the RMS Lusitania. Features in the intro to Martin Parr’s book The Last Resort.

How does your amazing tower or ocean liner compare to these fine, modern examples of engineering?

What unit of measurement are they using though? A foot? Do you measure your feet and use them as a guide?

Photo of the Discover Germany balloon in Singapore

Sometimes you learn something so interesting while browsing the net on a Saturday afternoon after you've long forgotten what you were supposed to be doing, you just have to tell someone. Or maybe that's just me.

In this case this afternoon I started by searching for the name and location of a certain German restaurant in Singapore for my dad, sis and I to go to for brunch tomorrow (my dad is German of course) and I came across the Discover Germany in Singapore website. I had no idea there was so much Deutsch goodness here!

For example, did you know according to the aforementioned site:

• About 6,500 Germans live in Singapore.
• Over 700 German companies are based in Singapore.
• Germany is Singapore’s largest trading partner in Europe.
• German visitors are second only to the British among European tourists in Singapore.
• With over 1,000 students the German European School Singapore is the largest German school in Southeast Asia.
• Over 150 years old, the German Club is the oldest foreign club in Singapore.

And some facts about Germany itself that I didn't know about, from the same site:

• 32 of Germany’s many unique sites of natural and cultural interest have been designated as UNESCO World Heritage sites.
• Germany’s classical music heritage is second to none: Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms and Wagner are just a few of the many great German composers.
• Germany’s rich theatrical landscape includes 180 public theatres, 190 private theatres, 30 festival theatres and countless independent groups and amateur theatres.
• There are around 6000 museums in Germany.
• In Germany, more than 300,000 people earn their living as musicians, performing artists, and specialists in academic & governmental institutions, the media & the arts.

There you go, you can't say you never learn anything here! Well you could, but you'd be awfully disingenuous. Or would you? Perhaps I'll just stop here while I'm ahead.