Rubenerd

This post is dedicated to Michael Dexter of Call For Testing, bhyvecon and the BSD Fund.

Rumours are swirling that the latest MacBook Pros will have HDMI ports and an SD card slot again. It’s been met with universal praise on Twitter, blogs, and podcasts, with pundits going as far as to say Apple will finally be returning to their functional peak with these additions, before they fell off the keyboard bandwagon. They won’t be.

HDMI is sorely needed. Dongles are breakable, are easily lost or forgot about, and will never match the reliability and performance of an internal port. If Apple thought they’d force projector and television manufacturers to adopt DisplayPort the way the accelerated adoption of USB with the original iMac, they failed, and their customers have paid for it in lost time and money.

SD card slots are the same story. There’s a reason every MacBook Pro user carries a dongle or port expander, and why almost all of them include USB-A and an SD card slot. Those same pundits laud its inclusion given its ubiquitous use in AV, but what nay gets a mention is how it serves as the only way to physically expand internal storage without a protruding appendage. Wait, why is that you ask?

This leads us specifically to why a 2021 MacBook Pro still doesn’t match their earlier models, despite those hypothetical ports and a functional keyboard. These new laptops still have soldered storage. It baffles me how rarely this is mentioned, and how resigned the industry is to it.

I can already hear the justifications. Flash storage is more reliable now, and will likely outlive the other components on the machine. Likely? Okay, but what if it does fail? What if the operator thinks warranties are a guarantee of service, but that they still intend to use the machine after as well?

What about privacy and security? While we now have to return entire machines just to fix storage, at least whole drive encryption means a nefarious actor can’t do anything with it in transit or in a repair centre, and it’d be safe to throw away, right? Except, full drive encryption is not enabled by default, so you can bet most users haven’t configured it. Granted the people who know how to swap an NVMe drive or an SSD likely would be the ones who use whole drive encryption, but what if you’re helping a friend or family member?

Soldering storage to the board saves space though right? It might, but then other laptops with a smaller physical footprint have more storage, so that’s immaterial.

There might be performance benefits, but if they’re smart enough to build their own CPUs, I’m sure they could design their own high-performance interconnect if they saw it as a design priority.

Soldering storage and memory is a deliberate design decision, which aside from being a great form of alliteration, is tragic. It ties the lifespan of the entire machine to the first failed component. Replacing an entire motherboard because a process has worn-levelled your SSD to oblivion is absurd, not to mention environmentally wasteful. Sure Apple have the tech to refurb the board; I know, I’m using a refurb’d machine for work right now. But you know what’s even better? A plug.

I suppose the industry is trending in this direction, and you know that if Apple does it other companies are soon to follow. It won’t stop be being all crotchety though.

Rebecca Hales emailed to let me know that this site has a LiveJournal. It’s news to me, I didn’t make it, nor have I ever had an account.

It’s basically an RSS scraper. They include the following disclaimer:

LiveJournal.com makes no claim to the content supplied through this journal account. Articles are retrieved via a public feed supplied by the site for this purpose.

Yet the big blue SUBSCRIBE button links you to the signup page for LiveJournal, not the RSS feed itself. At best that’s misleading.

I’m glad I include a link directly to the site in the footer of each blog post in my RSS source. Fortunately most automated RSS scraping sites are too oblivious to remove these.

But it does make me think what kind of mischief I could get up to. Maybe I could write an nginx or Varnish rule to redirect requests from LJ to an RSS feed that just contains links from this section of their Wikipedia page.

With Clara as my witness, I jumped out of my chair when Gura mentioned why she can’t watch TED Talks. For all the reasons people have become cynical about them, this is reason why I can’t either!

Get it? As opposed to headphones receiving a signal?! I’d ask you to humour me, but you might not be listening to comedy at all.

Make enquires as to the purpose and function of headphones, and you’ll undoubtedly be judged as being a few notes short of a symphony. Of course they’re for listening to music! Maybe podcasts too, and audio books. And unlike speakers, headphones and studio monitors let you do it in relative privacy, a fact that people who blast music on public transport must conveniently forget as they play music well suited to narcissists with poor taste.

But they serve other functions. Back in the day they were an invitation to be robbed for your precious Walkman or iPod connected to the end of the headphone cable (the “white slab of gold”, as the New York Times once referred to them). That’s perhaps not a function as much as a side effect, but worth mentioning.

For introverts or those trying to thrive and concentrate in troubling environments like open plan offices, headphones serve as a vital “leave me alone” signal. It’s normal for me to have nothing playing in my headphones so I can maintain situational awareness, but I’m letting people know around me that I’m not free to talk. I’ve not come across any other prop that is as effective in my decade working in IT; people don’t respect overt signs that say “busy”.

This lack of availability for attention is also useful in the street. I know that someone wearing headphones doesn’t have that full situational awareness I just mentioned, so they may be distracted and not paying attention. Motorists and cyclists know to stay well clear of headphone zombies crossing the road. This might sound—heh—counter-intuitive to praise headphones for this, given they’re the source of the distraction. But hear—heh—me out.

Apple’s AirPods, and all of the subsequent shameless clones, remove the useful bar that connects the two sides in addition to the cable, so one can lose “half” their headphones. But this class of device has also made it more difficult to see at a glance if someone is aware of their surroundings or not. I don’t have any data that demonstrates that they’ve caused more accidents, but I suspect so.

I don’t own AirPods, and the fact I use a mix of macOS and FreeBSD equipment means I’m unlikely to anytime soon. Headphone cables are a pain, but they mean its one fewer thing I have to remember to charge every night. They also serve as a useful social signal that discrete pods in my ears don’t.

Maybe I’m weird for finding the social impact of these sorts of technical changes interesting.

Clara and I watch a lot of those true crime shows. My mum and I used to watch the Discovery Channel’s Crime Night on Friday evenings growing up, just around the time CSI was taking off. Over time I’ve found more and more things that are, for want of a better word, problematic. They raise important questions, but this post just observes one of them.

Money is the motive for most of these crimes.

In which case, what if everyone had a baseline of income, either a UBI or similar? What if food and shelter weren’t an issue? If people had access to free mental and physical healthcare, a good education, and a feeling of safety? I guess what I want to know is: could some of this be preventable?

To be clear, I’m making no excuse for these people. Most of them are sociopaths who can’t be reasoned with, as best we understand. I’m already not sure whether I should even be posting this. My compassion and empathy have also been exploited by people my whole life which I should learn from. But they’re still my core values.

If just one person, or ten percent of those who’d otherwise be driven to crime, could be dissuaded by the stabilising influence of a regular income, I say it’s worth trying. It could end up being the best investment in society we’ve ever made.

And yes, I’d be willing and honoured to pay for it. Even if I’m still working at my full time job and they’re not working at all. Because the alternative is to cast people out, then spend money investigating and prosecuting them later.

This video of the Sanriku Tetsudou made Clara’s and my evening. What a beautifully produced documentary for such a jaw dropping part of the world. JJ was also a respectful and fun host :).

Update: Of course, being a Japanese railway, they have a store. It’s not that I want this keyring, as much as I need it!

This is part five (already!?) in my Commodore 128 series. I wrote about Retr0bright back in early February. To recap, involves buying new capacitors. Ah, that was so good.

Retr0brigting is a process that was discovered to reverse the bromide-yellowing of plastics. The Commodore 128 that Screenbeard of Mastodon and Geekorium fame gave me was already in excellent condition, but the keyboard was a different shade to the case pieces. I’m not bothered by a bit of yellowing from age, but I thought it’d look nicer if the pieces match.

(Hi, it’s Ruben here, from The Future. I can’t find my “before” photo of the 128 anywhere! I didn’t want this to delay uploading this post, so for now imagine a Commodore 128 with a beige case and yellowed keycaps).

The original Retr0bright recipe called for hydrogen peroxide from hair dye developer, some laundry booster as a catalyst, and xantham gum to create a paste that could be applied to the case. I bought some cream developer from Priceline in Sydney that seemed to do the trick for all three, but then I started reading reports of marbling and inconsistent results on smaller pieces like keycaps. Retr0brighters on YouTube now recommend submerging the pieces in warm water and liquid hair developer. Problem was, I could never find any non-cream developer in Australia, and ordering hydrogen peroxide through the post seemed like… a bad idea!

The solution—wow, I’m on fire with these puns today—came from a forum or blog post that I’m also blanking on right now unfortunately. But they pointed out that Oxy Vanish powder contains a sufficiently-high concentration of sodium percarbonate which, when mixed with water, forms hydrogen peroxide. The chemistry checks out.

Hydrogen peroxide is nasty stuff. By attempting this yourself, you agree to have read my site disclaimer and accept full resposibility for your safety and decision to do so. I suggest gloves at a minimum.

I gave it a try, or at least attempted to. What proceeded was more than a week of overcast weather in Sydney. I posited that it was the universe conspiring against me! I could have got some UV lamps, but our balcony normally bakes in sunshine so it seemed like a waste. I also had plenty of other things to fix and clean in the meatime.

Eventually we had a clear day with plenty of sunshine, so I placed the keycaps in 1 L of warm water and 50 g of the Oxy Vanish, and let it sit for 6 hours. I couldn’t tell any difference, which was disheartening.

On the next day of sunshine, I upped the concentration and the size of the container. I thought I might not have left enough surface area for each keycap, and the solution might not have had enough of the hydrogen peroxide. I left it out for the same amount of time, and Clara helped stir it while I went to a work appointment.

The difference was dramatic. The “top deck” chocolate look of the caps was almost completely gone! The spacebar key was still a bit yellow, so I’m going to give it one last treatment. (With hindsight, I didn’t do an especially good job with “before and after” shots here, but I couldn’t be happier with the results).

In the meantime I added the keys back to the C128, and it all matches! Maybe if I did the whole case and keys a few more times it’d match my little second-hand VGA LCD I bought in Akihabara for my DOS and Commodore machines, but again my aim was just to have all the parts on the Commodore match.

I have a replacement function key, spring, and plunger in the post from a friendly seller in Hungary, and the spacebar key will be added back soon. Now back to getting this stubborn 80-column VDC working!

I work down the street from the state parliament building for New South Wales. Did State and Parliament need to be capitalised? Get it? Because it’s the capital of the state and… that’s the sound of you humouring me about that excellent pun. Such was its excellence, it needed to be pointed out twice. Or does that already count as three times?

(Have you ever noticed the number three is the first positive, non-zero integer consisting of more than three letters? I derive more joy from that, and on a more regular basis, than perhaps I should).

I apologise, I was distracted by a gentleman’s shirt that said “we connect machines with people”. You know the number (ah, see what I did there?) one way to do that? By having your machine follow me on Mastodon. Don’t have an account? Go to mastodon.online. It’s like Twitter, but not awful.

If you’ll stop interrupting me, the state parliament house building—Parliament House?—understandably has an adverb and a secured entrance with which politicians and their minions may endure the premises. My iPhone autocorrected “enter” to “endure”, which I adore. This point of ingress is secured in a way not previously mentioned, but eluded to by way of employing the word “secure”.

Secured building entrances may use a series of traffic control measures… in order to control traffic that can me measured. This may be achieved using a simple boom, a sliding gate, or bollards which produde from the road surface such that motorised conveyances may still proceed, albeit with significant and permanent damage. It is assumed by these operators that such wanton destruction and risk to the driver and their occupants pose a sufficiently high barrier to entry—literally—as to render such incursions improbable, if not impossible, for motorists attempting to force their way through.

The device employed at this building consists of a brightly-coloured ramp which may be retracted to permit access. Ramps are used to great effect in car park facilities to afford otherwise vertically-challenged cars the ability to scale buildings and be placed there for future extrication. This ramp’s steep rake renders such an exercise futile, as both axles of a car wouldn’t maintain road contact.

Or… would it?

Security Theatre is a well-established and widely-deployed system of hyphenated phrases that merely offers the illusion of protection. Most airport security and container advice, for exoplanet. No iOS, that was supposed to be “example”… how often in the time I’ve been using you have I used the word “exoplanet” compared to the word “example”. Wait I get it, now you’ve got me using it twice. You’d better not use that to inform your autocorrect algorithm.

What if that steep ramp were made of cardboard, or thin aluminium foil with a sufficiently convincing structure to discourage motorists? It wouldn’t need to be expensive; though rain may force the formers’ regular replacement. Drivers would be as dissuaded as the other methods above, with a fraction of the capital expenditure.

I wouldn’t want to be the person to find out, though. Hey, the system works!

Today in my ongoing Commodore 128 series, I’m talking about my adventures trying—and unfortunately failing—to restore an original 1541 disk drive over the weekend. Hopefully I’ll have a follow-up at some point.

The Commodore 1541 was a 5.25-inch floppy disk drive released to compliment the C64. Commodore had sold drives for its PET and VIC-20 computers, but this was arguably the first to achieve a significant install base. They were faster and easier than data cassettes, and eventually became the preferred way to distribute software and store files in most markets.

(Ignore the partially disassembled Commodore 128; I’m cleaning and retr0brighting the keyboard!)

Among its quirks, the last digit “1” on the front badge looks more like a pipe character! I assume this was done to maintain kerning, but it’s always fun hearing the audible gasp from even veteran Commodore users when they realise they hadn’t noticed this before :). It’s also single-sided, but could use both sides of a disk if flipped and a notch punched into the opposing side.

The unit contained an entire computer with similar circuitry and ICs to the C64 itself. This freed the main computer from needing drive controllers, which kept costs down and meant (in theory) any type of drive could be added in the future. Unfortunately this meant the drives were physically larger and more expensive, and thanks to a bug in the original VIC implementation, were significantly slower than drives in the Apple II and others. Still better than tape, though!

I got my 1541 from eBay years ago for an abandoned Commodore project, so I decided I’d give it a try with my Commodore 128. I inserted a disk, plugged the drive into the cereal (heh) port of the Commodore 128, and powered both devices on. The 1541’s green LED powered on, and the drive span for two seconds as expected.

Then I tried loading the contents of the disk:

READY  
LOAD"$",8
SEARCHING FOR $
?FILE NOT FOUND ERROR

The sounds emanating from the drive were horrifying. It made the head-knocking sound for what sounded like an age, then flashed the red LED on and off continuously. Ejecting the disk made no difference.

I opened up the drive and marvelled at the complex logic board and mechanics. A couple of traces had been bypassed with patches on both sides; I’m not sure if this was done at the factory or someone else tried to fix this drive one before.

I lifted the logic board off, and gently cleaned the drive head with a q-tip soaked in isopropyl alcohol. The drive head is under the top black plastic mechanism in the below photo:

The small metal circle to the top right is part of the pulley mechanism that transfers motion from the stepper motor to the drive head; retro64 has a great diagram. I noticed that when I started the drive again, it would lurch slightly as though it was stuck, and the drive head only darted up and down the rails by a millimetre in either direction.

I added some lithium grease to the drive head rails, and a little to the metal wheels. All the parts move freely now and don’t make nasty sounds, but the drive head still refuses to move.

Various forums and mailing lists suggest it could be a drive alignment issue, so I have a 1541 cart in transit just in case to test. Ray Carlsen’s excellent 1541 drive guide also describes similar symptoms and suggests I check some of the ICs:

UE4 LM311 COMPARITOR (READ): Drive powers up and resets normally. Spindle motor runs, stepper moves slightly, but “FILE NOT FOUND” error, and red LED flashes. Check also UF3 and UF4.

I have a Commodore 1571 in transit at the moment, which supports burst mode on the 128, and drops to a 1541-compatible drive for my Plus/4 and C16. That said, if anyone has any suggestions about anything else I should try, please ping me!

I reworked the title for this post at least a few times, but I ended up sticking with this seemingly obvious one because it captures the absurdity of this issue so well.

Earlier in the month I wrote about how “cord cutters” weren’t saving any money with all these new streaming services. Whereas one could watch Netflix before (for example), now every media company is launching their own me too service. Even former computer companies… oh Apple, how far you’ve fallen. This dilutes the utility of any one platform each time, as more and more shows are splintered off into their own paid services that fewer people are likely to subscribe to in aggregate.

Media companies either don’t realise this is happening, or they think that a tiny and ever-shrinking piece of pie is better than bending to the whims of Netflix, or not having pie at all. Both are silly.

In that post I theorised that piracy would be the natural outcome of this. If you don’t make your content accessible, people will resort to the methods they used to access it before streaming existed. You know the adage about fences keeping honest people honest? This is not how you make honest people.

But it’s perhaps even sillier than that. I realised recently I don’t even consider shows I might otherwise be interested in if they’re on an unsupported or different platform. Media companies are still used to living in the days of limited public airwaves and cable TV channels. We’re living with an embarrassment of riches now; we’ve got plenty of other entertaining things to enjoy if you lock your show behind another streaming platform.

(Original programming is about the only direct counterpoint I can see to this. It might be better overall for the industry, if your metric is the quantity of shows being produced. But it’s the same outcome: Apple releasing shows on their platform don’t even cross my radar because I don’t subscribe, and I ignore recommendations as soon as I realise I can’t watch it. But I suppose for companies like Apple, or Amazon, the content is there to have you buy hardware from them).