Rubenerd

So you’re sitting there, catching up on your social media accounts, RSS feeds, and news articles. Maybe you’ve committed to watching a webinar where the presenter is answering questions, or a YouTube video by an indie presenter discussing a topic for which you have an interest. What do they all have in common, besides communicating in a language you understand, and being disseminated on the Intertubes? “So, …”

So, it turns out, it’s everywhere. Every journalist and their dog did articles about this verbal tick a decade ago, but it’s identification hasn’t put a dent in popular usage. It’s usage is increasing, at least based on my own anecdotal evidence. I catch myself doing it too.

So, there may be a few reasons for this. Some of the articles quoted The Zuck as popularising it, but whether he was the source or not, I’ve seen it lace all manner of communications from Silicon Valley. My theory is the industry subconsciously picked up on it, and began using it to sound more tech. So, it then seeped into popular culture, much like software versioning by saying a building or a food is a “two point oh” release.

So whatever utility prefacing sentences with “so” once had, it’s pervasiveness and cringe factor have lead to it becoming a cliché. So, we can all do better.

I completely forgot about Audioboom. It was a popular audio uploading and sharing service back when Twitter was a site that only asked “what are you doing?” I used it from 2009 to 2012 according to my profile.

I wrote a quick script to download all my posts, and uploaded to Archive.org. You never know when these services will disappear, even if the value of what you put there was questionable! I might listen to them all again and shove into a Rubenerd Show at some point, there might be something silly/fun/nostalgic among the pointlessness.

Maybe I should upload something else to say where my current stuff is. That might be fun.

Speaking of NetBSD and pkgsrc, version 9.2 was released on the 18th of May. It included this, according to the release notes:

pkg_add(1): moved the default package database location on new installations from /var/db/pkg to /usr/pkg/pkgdb, for consistency with the pkgsrc bootstrap and pkgsrc on other platforms. It can be overridden in pkg_install.conf(5).

Nice!

My post about FreeBSD on my tiny Panasonic laptop reminded me of a pitfall of suspend/resume. It’s great for power consumption on desktops, and saves time when you’re carrying a laptop around, but it encourages you to accumulate more stuff, such as:

• open browser tabs
• open terminal tabs
• unsaved text editor buffers

I’ve talked before about seeing colleagues and friends open their laptops to hundreds of open things, and being amazed that their brains don’t collapse form cognitive overload, to say nothing about the RAM and swap space on their machines! My machines are lightly-loaded by comparison, but there’s room for improvement.

It plays into an overall issue with state. The dream would be that I could immediately pick up where I left off if my laptop were to be stolen or broken. These get in the way:

• I try and keep meticulous file system trees for documents, but I still end up with random stuff in Downloads and Desktop folders.

• Git repos for work projects are always checked out and committed, but I can go for days without doing that for my blog, for example.

• I can stand up servers with Ansible and scripts down to the exact packages I need. Software on my desktop seems to be an ever-moving target.

These are somewhat mitigated by having automated backups, but that only encourages a pile of junk somewhere else as well. Information you can’t find or use is just data.

It’s getting a bit silly, so I’m thinking through what I can do:

• Discipline! I thought about applying David Allen’s Getting Things Done task system to other things, like open files and tabs:

  • Do: It’s open for a reason. Action it.
  • Defer: Save the file, bookmark on Pinboard, make a #TODO.
  • Delegate: To a script to process without me thinking.
  • Delete: Just close the damn thing!

• Supporting infrastructure. The wisest advice I ever got for backups is that it has to be automatic, otherwise you won’t do it. Maybe I need to have a Perl script to watch specific folders for new files and organise it for me. Like Hazel, but cross-platform.

• Make it easier to do the right thing. This overlaps with above. Using pkgsrc instead of multiple other package managers has helped. Having fewer folders and a less complicated tree structure for projects makes it easier to regularly use them. Tree Style Tabs for Firefox enables hoarding even more open tabs, so going back to a limited horizontal list means I have to keep the list short.

I’ll report how successful (or not!) I’ve been with this.

The Marshall Project quoted Jenn Budd, a former senior US Border Patrol agent:

You can’t deter people running for their lives.

Josh Simmons from the Open Source Initiative:

Communities dominated by people with the privilege of copious free time.

And my friend @_BADCATBAD from uni:

One day I will get “none of your business” business cards.

I was about to launch into a guide about this cute little Japanese laptop, before finally deciding to make a page on the FreeBSD Wiki about it. I also updated the laptops page, and submitted another dmesg to the NYC*BUG.

The FreeBSD Wiki comes up in search results sometimes, but I still think it’s an underutilised and underappreciated resource. Between that and the canonical Handbook, you can figure out most of how to build and maintain FreeBSD systems. Special thanks to Benedict Reuschling for accepting my application to contribute, and Mark Linimon for sorting out my account :).

As for this laptop, I bought it in Akihabara during a trip to AsiaBSDCon 2019. It already seems like such an age ago now. I miss the chats and beer 🍻.

Speaking of school memories, I was listening to a podcast recently in which the host mentioned comparing and contrasting two things. Out of the blue, I was sitting in a mid-2000s high school science class looking over exam results, and having a conversation that’s stuck with me since.

One of the questions asked us to compare and contrast renewable and fossil fuels (I think). I understood this to mean writing about similarities and differences, so I got full marks. But this was an international school in Singapore, and we had a large cohort of ESL students who didn’t understand what was being asked. Some listed the benefits of both, others only talked about differences. At best, they got half marks.

Enough of the class got the question wrong that the teacher took time out to explain what compare and contrast meant, and what he was looking for. One of my more outspoken friends piped up that he didn’t realise that it was an English class, and that the exam was testing phrasing and not technical understanding. I agreed.

The teacher smiled and said “life’s not meant to be fair”.

I learned three things that day. One, that he was right about fairness. Two, that I’d be spending more of my time after school helping friends study than I expected. This worked out well, because in exchange we’d all go get hawker food for dinner and they’d shout :).

But three, I sound like a broken record here: effective communication is about being understood. It’s why I endeavour to be accurate and understandable when I do technical writing; it isn’t just important for accessibility, or when talking with people learning English, it’s professional courtesy.

I’ve been advised on Mastodon and Twitter that some of you think I was paid off or unduly influenced by the NetBSD maintainers to spruik their cross-platform pkgsrc package manager. pkgsrc is a cross-platform package manager by the NetBSD maintainers that’s a cross-platform package manager.

To assuage any concerns that I was uncritical in my approach to discussing pkgsrc, below is a short list of things it cannot install:

• Bagels
• The Firth of Forth
• Season two of Star Trek: The Next Generation
• A coaster depicting Hatsune Miku or Renoir’s La Grenouillè
• Renoir
• A 3D-printed 3D printer
• Apple’s Final Cut Pro X
• A palmtop tiger
• Chocolate-covered mozzarella balls
• Clothing racks, with or without clothing
• A can of compressed air for repairing butterfly keyboards
• Jelly
• Drop-tile ceiling panels
• The source code to either Palm OS or Garnet OS
• Esther Golton’s 2007 album Unfinished Houses
• Silicate sand
• A Japanese maid and/or butler café
• A Teac A-30 integrated amplifier with phono input
• Exactly 3 grams of peanut butter
• Plastic slippers (not that you should wear them anyway)
• Patio furniture and awnings
• Tsundere trope characters, with or without zettai ryouiki
• Apple pies, but with a banana filling
• Carbon nanotubes fashioned into gravity-defying pants
• A 1930s edition of the Encylopedia Britannica
• Knödel

From Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs:

The Prime Ministers reaffirmed the excellent relations between Singapore and Japan. Prime Minister Lee said that Singapore looked forward to deepen economic and public health cooperation with Japan to support the post-COVID-19 recoveries of both countries, including in areas such as the mutual recognition of health certificates.

I wonder if this will end up being the model for Covid border openings?

(I’ve also started referring to it as Covid, instead of COVID or COVID-19. We don’t write LASER anymore, and it’s become a genericised acronym. It also looks less shouty, which I think we all need).

This Music Monday came as a bit of a mid-afternoon treat from Eliza, the other KDE music player. I was testing sound on my Japanese Panasonic laptop and this was the first song on random to come up. It has my favourite intro and instrumentation of any song on her 2007 album Unfinished Houses, and I’ve taken the message to heart over the years.

I trust you’ve all bought her discography on Bandcamp already, but it’s still available for those who need their second or third copies. Better yet, you can use Bandcamp’s Send as Gift feature on any album page to send it as a gift. I feel as though you didn’t need that specific function explained, but I did anyway for your convenience.

If you’re a streaming service subscriber, please consider sending the money to artists directly who make your life better. ♡