Rubenerd

You know when you’re filling out a survey, and it asks you to pigeonhole either something about yourself, or how you use something? I’m always struck by the limited range of choices, and the assumption of atomicity.

Albacore on Twitter uncovered a new settings screen in a Windows 10 build that will let you report how you use your computer. You can choose from:

• Gaming
• Family
• Creativity
• Schoolwork
• Entertainment
• Business

Granted you can choose more than one, but I’m still wondering how much useful data they’d get from this. Some have dedicated work or study machines, but barring stringent corporate networks I’d be surprised if people aren’t using their computers for all of this. The same would apply for phones, and especially during remote COVID work.

Schoolwork is also an interesting one, and not just because I didn’t realise that even existed as a single word. I wonder why they didn’t go with education?

It also raises the question about why they’d be interested. For feeding into Telemetry to target you with more ads? Optimisations?

No, I suspect the real reason is so when Microsoft completes the migration of Windows from the Windows NT kernel to Linux, they’ll release flavours for each use case. This is merely market research to justify this to management. Yes, that’s it.

Walk past the entrace to Lemon Grove’s carpark in the Sydney suburb of Chatswood within which I reside, and one may notice a revision to its clearance sign. A lighter patch of yellow next to the scalar value of the ceiling height now exists.

Clara and I discussed what that could be for. It could be covering:

• An innaccurate number. Perhaps the carpark ceiling posessed less clerance than first thought, resulting in the wrong number being printed. Maybe engineers measured it wrong during or after construction. Maybe it was a clerical or printing error.

• An outdated number. Perhaps the ceiling of the building sank, or the ground rose like a cake. Maybe they built new ductwork or pipes that reduced the ceiling’s effective height. Maybe the road was resurfaced which added just enough height to round the advertised clearance up by a significant figure.

• A number in the wrong scale. Perhaps the sign was first installed prior to Australian metrication, and the architects had the “metres” sign added by mistake.

• An erroneous character. Perhaps the 0 underneath the paint was actually the capital letter O, and the building’s management couldn’t deal with being inundated by frustrated typeograpers. Maybe it wasn’t a meaninful shape at all, or an unlucky one, or something vulgar painted either by the original builders or a subsequent vandal.

• A rip in the space/time continuum. Perhaps covering it with a striking colour sealed it, or rendered it less dangerous. Perhaps the bright colour was to serve as a warning for those so inclined to be affected by such a vortex, or for those actively seeking them.

• Nothing at all. Perhaps it’s blank space underneath. Maybe the owner of the paint had more than he needed and didn’t want to go to the trouble of disposing it in an environmentally concious way. Maybe they like the visual chaos afforded by the contrast of two differing yellows, or desire to frustrate people who are angered by such visuals.

It’s safe to say that all were contributing factors. Like 2 and 8 to 16. Hey, maybe one of those were a former number on this sign.

I used CompactFlash cards in my Pentium 1 tower in lieu of spinning hard drives. CF cards implement ATA/IDE, so all you need is a passive adaptor. I had two SanDisk Ultra 16 GiB cards from an old digital camera that worked a treat.

CF cards don’t posess that nostalgic clattering sound of mechanical hard drives, and chipset throughput limitations likey mean they generally don’t perform much better either. But they’re much easier to source, don’t draw anywhere near as much power, take up less space in cluttered cases, and in a pinch can be unplugged and easily connected to a card reader on another machine to transfer files.

They’ve worked so well for me so far, that I decided to upgrade one of the 16 GiB cards to a brand new 32 GiB SanDisk Extreme. It claimed to have a 140 MB/s sustained write speed compared to the 16 GiB card’s 30 MB/s. Again, not a big deal considering it’d still bottleneck on the VIA chipset. At the very least I expected a slight performance improvement along with more space.

The exact opposite happened! This card has been glacially slow. PartitionMagic took more than 45 minutes to move a 24 GiB partition. Installation of Windows NT 4.0 Workstation took longer than the time Clara and I went out for dinner, and 95 didn’t fare much better. The installers for BeOS 5 and NetBSD 8.1 never finished loading before I gave up, and OS/2 4.5 Warp didn’t want to boot at all.

So what went wrong? Either I got a dodgy card, which I can’t discount because I don’t have a similar card to test. Or there’s a protocol mismatch. Maybe UDMA7 isn’t as backwards compatible as UDMA1 on the 4 GiB card, and the VIA chipset invoked a fallback. I’m not well versed in the IDE protocol standards, but is such a thing possible?

I didn’t think to run any benchmarks, because I was too busy putting the old card back in so I could boot and read Encarta 95 again :). My subjective view of the card’s performance might not be as stark as what raw numbers suggest; I’ll leave the card out for now in case I want to do a more quantitative comparison at some point.

Leonie Doyle gave food for thought this mornng:

It’s cheap to label anything that isn’t work or study a “holiday”. There are myriad valid reasons why people make journeys.

This was in response to Australian tourist minister saying that business trips and interational student travel would be prioritised over people taking holidays.

(I’ve also been told by people who’d know that we use holiday for what Americans call vacations. But that doesn’t sound the same to me somehow, let me know if I’ve been misinformed).

There’s an entire philosopical, legal, and environmental discussion surrounding the right to repair, and the societal implications of using devices that have become disposable through consolidation, minaturisation, and the use of hostile parts like proprietary screws and glue. We’re trained to think electronic devices have a servicable life within warranty periods. Any problems after this, and you need to throw them away and replace them.

But the calculus changes when it comes to vintage tech. All the parts from the 1980s and 1990s have been built, there’s no new supply. Well, there are people using original moulds and emulating old ICs, but you know what I mean.

There’s a pinch on both sides, from those who don’t value old computers and throw them away, to collectors who really want to keep these legacy machines running. I bought most of my Commodore computer hardware in the early 2000s, back when it was old but not collectable yet. I’d easily be paying 10x more for it now, and not just because 8-bit computers are cool again. The supply has shrunk spectacularly since, as these old parts keep failing and people harvest other machines to keep the remaining fleet running.

Which leads me to the brainwave I had last night. I was sitting at my new vintage computer desk tinkering with an old Sound Blaster card, like a gentleman. I got it working again by replacing a corroded jumper! There’s a sense of satisfaction and joy that comes from fixing things as opposed to just replacing them.

But now I’m starting to think I have a responsibility to. Me fixing that SB card means someone else out there has one more that they might be able to use for a retro build, or to replace something that is irreparable.

At the risk of overstating the case, if we want to preserve this hardware for future generations, it’ll be people like us doing it. I want to learn more!

I overheard this at a coffee shop this morning and can’t get it out of my head:

The tech in fintech is a tonne of spreadsheet warriors behind the scenes doing due diligence.

And does blockchain provide value?

For M&A compliance? No. For dodgy forex trades? Yes!

This tweet made me so happy; it’s my two favourite VTubers!

You definitely should subscribe to Ame and Reine, assuming you want to go down the Hololive rabbithole. Which you definitely should. They even got Clara and I into Minecraft.

There are a new breed of services coming out that purport to make the modern web less frustrating to use in specific circumstances. But they’ve incurred the wrath of creators in doing so, and don’t address the structural issues for why we’re at this point.

A recipe site scraper was the most recent and publicised example. Its developers claimed the tool removed superfluous paragraphs of text surrounding actual cooking instructions, based on the perception that recipe sites are mostly filler. In the social media space, “unroll” services present long Twitter threads on a single page, making them as easy to read as a blog.

Both of these types of services address a real need people online have, for better or worse. I love reading about the history of a family recipe, but there are far more people who think the padding is only there to serve more ads. Likewise, as long as people insist on using Twitter’s threads feature instead of linking to a blog post, unroll services render them more accessible.

The idea of tools stripping out complexity and redundant content isn’t new. Marco Arment’s Instapaper didn’t just save pages for later use, it removed everything except the content of a blog post or news article. Services like Mozilla’s Pocket do the same; even Apple’s Safari has a Readability mode. Opera’s mobile web browsers used to proxy content on your behalf and optimise it for tiny data plans.

Why I think these specific tools rub people the wrong way is that the resulting pages are publicly accessible, not just for personal use. This means there’s an unsanctioned, unauthorised version of their work elsewhere, bereft of their monetisation or social capital. This feels like wholesale theft.

I’m not qualified to discuss the legalities of scrapers like this. Ethically though, I think it’s clearer cut. It’s not cool to take people’s content like this. If you don’t like scrolling past the history of Aunt Jessie’s apple pies to get to a recipe, there are other sites out there you can use. Or you can buy a cookbook! As much as I hate Twitter threads, and think unroll services help to raise awareness of just how bad they are, you’re still publishing someone else’s words in full without their permission.

And really, once again, we come back to the core thing I’ve been talking about here for years. The web feels like its trending backwards in usability and privacy because writers feel this is the only way they can monetise their content. Until this is addressed, writing and site designs will continue to be optimised for ads, not readers. I wish half as much effort was being spent on figuring out this problem, rather than treating the symptoms!

Practical Engineering did the best video I’ve seen explaining what happened to our Texan friends earlier this year, with their unprecedented snow storm and outages.

One of my first ever blog posts back in 2004 was about the Southeast Asian tsunami which killed thousands of people, wiped out entire cities, and brought down everything from power to water supplies. I see these disasters and have no frame of reference whatsoever; with all my family troubles growing up I’ve never not had water, food, or shelter. As I said back then, I can’t think of anything else to say.

Comments, feedback, and civility—or lack thereof!—seem to be recurring themes here of late. Lest anyone think I’m repetitive, here’s another related post I thought of while commuting to work today. Wait, I got that backwards.

My blog has been running on rubenerd.com since 2004, though it also briefly spent time on rubenerdshow.com/blog when I lost control of the former domain for a few years. That’s an adventure to recount another time. But prior to this it hosted a personal site I’d carried over from Tripod to a shared hosting account, most of which was split among a few fandoms. I had the four big S’s: Maxis Sim games, steam locomotives, Sailor Moon, and the world of Star Trek which I was just getting into.

The page on starship schematics had a complicated layout that relied on the schematic tables not getting too wide. I’d read that the USS Voyager could operate at Warp 9.999 for brief periods, which I summarised as Warp 10.

I could feel the collective bristling of all the Trekkies reading that. For the rest of you, Warp 10 is impossible with “conventional” warp drives; you can approach it but you can’t meet or exceed it without transwarp. This is what the USS Excelsior first attempted to do.

And boy did I get told that! I was getting emails from all around the world from people not only telling me that my website was factually inaccurate, which was true, but the entire site was shit, and that I was an ignoramus… all recounted in colourful language. Some of the screeds went on for paragraphs. I wish I’d kept some of them now, they’d been hilarious.

I was told once that friction and fireworks in anime and tech clubs at university was all but inevitable because you’re putting socially awkward people together in one place. Isn’t that just the Internet in general now?