Rubenerd

I just discovered Terraaeon’s Misc Stuff site, where he laments the bland “me too” attitude of computer manufacturers:

I am tired of nearly every new laptop computer looking like a MacBook Air clone [..] What is it about large companies that makes them nearly incapable of creating a fun, interesting, and nice-looking laptop with a unique personality? I can’t argue that MacBook Airs are not great-looking laptops, but does nearly every laptop made in the last eight years really have to look like one?

You can see what he means just by walking down the isle of any electronic retailer today. It’s obvious computer companies would rather be making phones; the computers they make look largely the same. They’re basically uglier, plastic Macs with the same island keyboards wed to a nasty screen and imprecise trackpad (though we all know ThinkPad TrackPoints are the best)!

But even the Mac has been boring for a long time. Not from a technical perspective, but they’ve had no personality, charm, or what I’ve started saying again: whimsy. It’s one of the things that makes computing fun. So many technical people and engineers see no point in whimsy; if it can’t be distilled into a feature spec sheet, it’s meaningless fluff. Or as that Amiga marketing critic once said, it’s like arguing that sushi is just raw fish. The nutrients are the same as what I can get frozen at the supermarket; anyone who goes to a sushi train is a sucker for advertising.

Which is why, for all the shortcomings, compromises, and design flaws of the new coloured iMacs, I’m happier it exists over than the machine it replaced.

I got my first blueberry iMac DV back in the late 1990s because it was fun. Also because I discovered years too late than classic Mac OS kicked the pants off Windows, but that’s for another post! It was so cool having this fun piece of tech sitting on my table. I felt the same way about those funky coloured SGI machines, those Iomega drives, heck even that gorgeous purple of old Sun Microsystems kit. The G3 CPU in that machine was probably better than the Pentium tower it replaced; its Gigabit Ethernet and USB ports definitely were.

In the paraphrased words of Keith from the TryGuys talking about Taco Bell, why do some things in IT have to look like… all of it? Why does everything have to be grey metallic (or in the case of PC hardware, metallic-coloured plastic) or black? Why must the only alternative be tasteless, RGB gamer kit? Okay, a bit of my own biases are coming through there, but my point is there’s value in how a computer looks to people in the real world. If it didn’t matter, we’d all just be driving Corollas and eating nothing but salads. We may even be better for it, but what’s the point of life without having a bit of fun, too?

I’m not a fan of 2021 Apple. Their hardware is disposable; not as recyclable as they claim, nor is it user serviceable. The UI of Big Sur continues the precipitous decline in macOS usability and design. Even the latest batch of iPhones can’t be used by a significant amount of people owing to OLED photosensitivity. Apple writers who lamented the state of the company during the butterfly keyboard days seem to be all on board with this new direction though, so I know that I’m in the minority here.

But! A bit of that inner child that bought that first iMac smiled today for the first time in a while. I hope the PC industry does what it’s always done well: copy this, but with a few more intelligent design decisions. They can start with not shipping crappy screens.

If I had a billion dollars, I’d buy the rights to SGI from HPE, and make modular, coloured computers. Surely Apple can’t be the only company with industrial design chops making UNIX workstations in 2021.

Brandon quoted Madison Cowan in his journal:

It’s not the name they call you that’s important, but the name you answer to.

In light of my Pentium 1 and Commodore 128 posts (that are still pending because replacement parts are now more than a month late!) I realised I’ve only ever briefly talked about my other childhood electronic obsession, and a series of devices I’m also getting back into with earnest.

I saw my first Palm device at a COMDEX trade show in Singapore. The late EDPOL Systems from Funan Centre had a booth where they were showing various generations of Palm devices. This little grey slab with its giant monochrome screen and friendly green power button sitting in its docking cradle looked like the future. Seeing the EDPOL staffer write in Graffiti and have her strokes translated into characters on the screen was one of my first whoa moments in IT. Those stick with you.

For the next few months I poured over the specifications for the devices in PC World and PC Magazine reviews, and cut them out into folders. I was in primary school at the time, and had no need for complicated calendars, to-do lists, expenses, or business contacts. But I was deeply fascinated with how they could fit an entire computer into such a small space, and how the interaction model worked. The idea of HotSyncing things from a desktop to a small device was equally compelling. I wanted to know how it worked as much as wanting one.

The Palm V was a sleek new addition to the line, but I was most interested in the IIIx that I’d seen demoed. It also had a whopping 2 MiB of extra memory! Both had a new inverted backlight which made the screen even sharper and clearer in low light compared to the original III and PalmPilots, a feature those aforementioned reviewers raved about.

That Christmas my parents surprised me with one! I was told years later that it was one of the best things they’d ever bought, considering how captivated I was with it during long trips or holidays. They even bought my sister a IIIe, which had less memory but a translucent case which looked awesome. We used to swap programs and write all sorts of things on these little slabs.

Windows CE soon came out, and a few years later I was using a clamshell HP 620 LX with a physical keyboard. But tellingly I kept going back to the IIIx, and longed for the 256-colour IIIc which had come out. I used the infrared on my first Motorola phone to use a WAP browser. I even had a BASIC interpreter application for it to write my own little programs, right on the device.

Over time the Pocket PC, Blackberry, and Symbian eclipsed the performance and feature set of these Palm devices. My first smartphone in the 2000s was a Palm Tungsten W, which was incredibly underpowered compared to what others in the industry offered. But it pared the elegant Palm interface and HotSync software with a colour screen and a phone. What more would you want?

By late high school I’d started using these Palms for their intended purpose. I had my class and exam schedules loaded into the calendar, to-do lists for homework, and study notes to revise from on the train. My school had official paper organisers you were supposed to use, but I hollowed out one so I could use a Palm inside on the sly. I don’t think I fooled anyone.

My first high school crush even realised what was up when I let her take a look at one of my Palms, and realised her email address was the only one in my Contacts app that wasn’t family. I still get flustered about that even now! How do you say whoops! in Korean?

I still maintain the classic PalmOS has the best mobile UI ever designed, and their Palm Desktop PIM software still kicks the pants off anything else. The mobile OS had no discoverability requirements, unintuitive gestures, or other required nonsense; everything was behind context menus that you’d tap a program’s title to access. Tappable elements were outlined buttons, what a concept! I’m not sure how the UI would have carried over to touch screens over resistive ones, but the UI mess of Android and the precipitous sliding standards of iOS pale in comparison.

Palm no longer exists. After a string of musical-chair buyouts, they eventually released webOS to compete with modern smartphones. It was, again, better than Android or iOS. But their underpowered hardware struck again, and they were eventually bought by HP and LG. It was the end of an era.

I say all this because I’ve had some saved eBay searches and price ceilings up for a few years, and have got some replacements for my long-lost and stolen original Palms in the post. I even managed to score a Grail that I always wanted growing up, but could never afford. The good news for people like me is that Palms haven’t achieved any kind of cult status to the same extent Commodore hardware has. Or at least, yet. You can pick them up for very cheap, and thanks to their build quality and hardware simplicity, they all largely still work. Hopefully I’ll be able to write about them soon :).

A testy server woke me up from sleep this morning. Well, monitoring did specifically. As much as you don’t want to see those alerts while you’re asleep, it’s better than not seeing alerts.

Once I’d sorted it out, the situation reminded me of something which has since escaped me. Here are some other thoughts:

• Pretzels?

• I counted Aloe Blacc saying he needs a dollar twenty times in his 2010 song I Need a Dollar. That means he needs $20.

• Why do detective shows always talk about “the body” and how “it” was found, rather than “his/her/their body” and that “he/she/they” were found?

• Alpha Omega have released a cat-eared version of Rem from Re:Zero, because of course. Why not Ram though? I can only assume she’s pending.

• The first mention of Rem on this blog was back in 2016, when I said the franchise name sounded like a forensic drive wiping tool that used blue bob cuts.

• Maybe it was all the Mary Tyler Moore Show reruns I used to watch with my parents, but bob hair is so my thing. As in, really my thing! Should I be saying that out loud?

Alright, back to bed.

Josh Nunn asked me on the better social network about why the CSS in my blog theme is 580 pixels wide. It’s a fascinating story, which I posit is true because I said so despite clear and present evidence to the contrary.

(Contrary is only one letter away from Country. No, wait, I count twenty-three letters between them in that sentence. Is this what people subscribe for? Don’t answer that).

I ran the first version of my blog on shared web hosting from 2004 to 2005, and so needed to limit the disk space and bandwidth use. I settled on 500 pixels for image widths, and wrote my first themes to accommodate this. Later when I moved to WordPress I styled the Sandbox theme in the same way, and then on from Jekyll and Hugo.

Over time I increased the font size of posts for legibility, which meant there were too few words per line. The solution was to expand the width of posts so the same amount of text fit as before. 500 pixels at 0.8em was roughly the same as 580 pixels at 1.0em, give or take. But I’ve stuck with 500 pixel-wide images ever since, for reasons of shameless nostalgia and the fact all my image-processing scripts assume it.

It’s probably one of the biggest technical things I regret about this site. Scaling Retina/HiDPI graphics would have been far easier if I started with 640 pixels instead of 500, even if the surrounding text would have needed more padding. I was doing HSC Extension English in high school at the time though, so was used to padding words. But I suppose 500 still made more sense when I was counting every cent in hosting costs, and I didn’t work at a cloud infrastructure provider who let me run it for free (cough)!

After my family migrated to Singapore in the 1990s, my dad’s firm gave him an allowance to spend on trips back to Australia to visit relatives and friends he left behind by being transferred. It was literally called hardship pay; something we thought was funny given we liked living there. I love Australia, but the hope is there that one day I’ll make it back with my own green card and eventually PR.

But I digress! We’d come back to Sydney each year and do the rounds. I can’t remember how I was related to this one gentleman who came to our big family dinners, but he’d spout what could best be described as confident nonsense. He’d hear a topic, riff off it, then go into the weeds with concocted fantasy. My parents would later tell me he was infamous for it, but we’d smile and nod out of social obligation. Nobody likes flareups, especially with family involved.

I remember a few specific examples. Upon hearing that we lived in Singapore, he talked about all donations he made to help famine victims, and all the good work these charities were doing helping Singaporeans and other cities in China. Singapore wasn’t undergoing a famine, nor was it in China. It’s not even a “Chinese city”, but that Western misconception is for another post.

Another example had him explaining electronics. My cousin James and I were the only ones in the family with the reputation of being “computer people”. This didn’t stop this gentleman loudly complaining that Windows 95 was no better than Windows 94 (a non-existent OS), and that his new mobile phone charged from radio waves faster than all ours thanks to an ingenious antenna modification (which is not how that works).

Australians and Kiwis take the piss like its a national sport, which at times gets us into trouble internationally. We have the driest sense of humour, and will outrightly say something factually ridiculous with a straight face. It’s probably one of the biggest things that differentiates us from Canadians whom we otherwise have a lot in common, at least based on my experience.

The other charitable interpretation was that he was making broader points with hyperbole. Maybe he thought Windows 95 was overhyped, or that income inequality in Singapore was too high, or that Singapore’s Indian and Malay populations were disadvantaged compared to the Chinese. These involved stretches so vast, I’m still recovering from tendon damage in my thighs.

No, this gentleman was someone else. He wanted to dominate the discussion and have people regard him as well-informed and intelligent. He sure achieved the former, though the latter meant I now only remember a caricature. I wonder if he’s taken credit for an antimicrobial COVID tablet, or a revolutionary triangular tyre… it has one fewer bump than square ones. I don’t think he ever knew we lived in Kuala Lumpur for a couple of years either, though I’m sure he’d have stories about South America to relay about that. Those Malaysians sure love their Chimichurri, but what about all the native French speakers?

We’re told by self-help gurus that confidence is a positive attribute. It renders you more attractive, gets you further in business, inspires people, and reinforces your self-worth. But I can’t tell you how relieved I am to have a discussion with someone in real life who isn’t; or at least, not to the same extent. Confidence is only worth something with substance.

It’s Music Monday time! Each and every Monday without fail, except when I fail, I discuss and share music here that makes me especially happy.

Today’s is especially important. Esther Golton has bundled her entire discography on Bandcamp for US $17.53, or you can choose your price. I cannot overstate how much you owe it to yourself right now to stop what you’re doing and buy this. No really, this page will still be here when you get back.

Each of her albums has its own character:

• Unfinished Houses is fun and just a little cheeky, and Going to Shadu is still one of my all-time favourite songs.

• Stay Warm is her most recent mix of beautiful instrumentation and vocals. It gets a lot of play in our office now.

• Meditating to the the jaw-dropping, lucid sounds of Aurora Borealis has become a ritual for dealing with anxiety, and is my go-to for listening in the evening with Clara.

Please consider throwing some money Esther’s way, and enjoy. ♡

I’m all for electronic nostalgia, but I haven’t written much about my haunts themselves growing up. Singapore’s electronic retailers aren’t faring much better than their American counterparts, based on the sad news I heard about Fry’s Electronics.

I still fondly remember Funan Centre before it was gutted, and am counting down the days before Sim Lim Square meets the same or worse. But I’d completely forgotten that there was a period during the 2000s when Suntec City even had its own dedicated electronics section. Sengkang shared this picture on Wikimedia Commons:

Everything about this screams 1990s and 2000s, from the name and use of the @ symbol, to the glass panels and Suntec’s industrial-looking metal cladding. This was just above the round atrium and escalators as you came in from the CitiLink Mall from the Town Hall MRT. I’m fairly sure this is all gone now, probably replaced with an ESPRIT or similar.

I almost got a job at the EpiCentre, albeit their Wheelock Place branch back in the day. I even have photos of it from when Mac OS X Leopard was released, back when Apple made kick-arse UNIX workstations.

I miss Suntec, more than I realised.

This post is dedicated to Michael Dexter, for his encouragement and support.

The Free Software Foundation has been in the news again for all the wrong reasons. Their board has reappointed a well-known person of disrepute, and details of their toxic work culture continues to emerge from former employees and contributors. The Foundation should welcome the scrutiny and use it as an opportunity to renew focus and be more welcoming, but there’s no indication they’re about to budge.

The good news is that it’s forced a spotlight onto the Foundation and its viability, effectiveness, and impact. Open source licence discussions have been moribund since version 3 of their GNU General Public Licence (GPL), though that’s been to their detriment as more people adopt non-copyleft, permissive licences for their projects.

But let’s take a step back for a moment. Alienating a portion of your support base as a movement seems counterproductive at best. At the risk of sounding a little realpolitik, an ideology of software freedom matters little if you outwardly project hostility and toxicity to your potential allies. Or put another way, ideas of such importance should be able to stand on their own, and not be dependent on one orator who has a record of shitty behaviour. I’d be tempted to leave this post here.

This alienation seems to be theme, regardless of intent. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I think the GPL has been a mixed blessing for open source software. Its goal of enforcing freedom on derivative software sounds noble, but has locked contributions out of other open source code such as the BSDs, MIT, and ISC. Non-copyleft code lifted into a GPL walled garden is as inaccessible to the original project as proprietary code. Suddenly the proposition that it ensures freedom comes across a little disingenuous.

The FSF have also used their clout to affect software outside their remit. The BSD and Python licences have had clauses updated or removed to accommodate GPL restrictions, at the behest of the FSF. I happen to think these clarifications were useful, but I’m wary of one organisation dictating how everyone else does software. This is why I find the Open Source Definition more useful.

But has it at least been worth it? I’m not sure. The Linux kernel, once the poster child of GPL code protection and collaboration, won’t budge from the GPLv2. I haven’t seen much evidence that the GPL shepherds code more effectively than permissive licences, given the latter’s success without the GPL’s redistribution requirements. It’s also complicated integrations, for no good technical reason. Like dedicated licencing servers for certain proprietary software, I bristle at the idea of code and infrastructure being built to service arbitrary human constructs instead of improving functionality.

GPL violations are also among the worst-kept secrets in infocomm circles. This isn’t the fault of the FSF or GPL, but political movements are judged on their effectiveness. High-profile legal cases have forced dodgy companies to comply with their licence obligations. But we all know there are plenty of others, and there aren’t enough lawyers or money in the world to go after them. We can keep chasing people down this rabbit hole, or acknowledge this reality and figure out alternative ways to foster collaboration that aren’t as punitive.

There’s a philosophical debate about proprietary code I don’t want to get into here, though I feel I should at least acknowledge that permissive licences do more to spread good code and standards than GPL’d code. The FSF would treat that as a feature not a bug, considering they see proprietary software as an injustice, and liberal licences as not enforcing freedom. But this philosophical position has real-world consequences; see Clang/LLVM’s encroachment on the GCC as another example. The opportunity cost spent thinking about all this could also be spent on building software.

I’ve wanted to write this post for many years, but have shied away owing to the toxic comments this will generate. It wasn’t my intention to be inflammatory for no reason, nor do I want to sound ungrateful for all the GPL’d software I use on a daily basis. You might also disagree on my views about the GPL, which there’s room for. I just think there’s so much damned potential in open source software, and right now the FSF is not a productive partner, nor does it show any sign of changing. That hurts us all, and we should want better.

News has been moving fast about Google’s FLoC system. If you don’t know what it is, look at where it’s coming from and you can probably guess. Last Thursday blog posts were recommending the addition of this line to your web server software, which I did:

Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=()

Rohan Kumar elaborated that while this is technically correct, it’s not always necessary, nor the best way to do it:

If your website does not include JS that calls document.interestCohort(), it will not leverage Google’s FLoC. Explicitly opting out will not change this.

He recommends not using third-party scripts, and implementing a Content Security Policy header to block execution. I’ve been doing this for years; it’s good advice in general.