Rubenerd

A day after my birthday last year, Andreas Kluth wrote for Bloomberg about one potential ray of sunshine in These Covid Times™. It’d be a tad solipsistic to assume the date of publication had any bearing on its significance, but it’s still fun to pointlessly speculate!

Now what is the essence of quarantine? “Social distancing,” of course. [..] unlike an open-plan office, Zoom can be turned off.

Introverts in quarantine are thus less likely than extroverts to feel deflated, isolated or bored, and more likely to be energized, perhaps welcoming the lack of distraction to go deep into, well, whatever. Solitude can make people creative.

Plenty of other journalists have followed a similar theme. Introverts appreciate quiet time, and working from home is quiet, therefore we’re hard wired to thrive in this new world. Yay!

Except, it’s not true… at least not for most of us.

Isolated introverts still need varying degrees of physical contact, for our emotional and psychological well-being. We’re still human beings, and video calls are a poor replacement at best, and counterproductive at worst. It’s something we have in common with extroverts, though it manifests in different ways.

Conversely, the journalists who write these posts forget that the rest of us still live with people! Just because we’re not in an office doesn’t mean we’re not in close quarters with other human beings. Some of us haven’t had more than an hour or so of occasional alone time for almost a year, and it makes us anxious, fatigued, and irritable. Not to mention what parents must feel on top of that, or their kids.

Even in Fortress Australia where we have cases in the single or double digits at any given time, plenty of us are still working cautiously from home. In certain states lockdowns still occur when a flareup happens. Our weird introvert brains don’t care if the people we’re surrounded with are friends or loved ones, alone time is still as non-existent as the open-plan offices we escaped from. In some ways it’s worse, given we never get a break at all, and the lines between where work ends and personal lives resume are blurrier than the RF-modulated output on my 8-bit Commodores.

None of this should come as a surprise, and chances are you’re in a similar boat if you’ve come across my silly blog and have made it this far reading this. But in the rush to talk up what are assumed to be our strengths to cope with these circumstances, our extrovert friends miss the point once more. Maybe it’s the fact they’re not getting their own dopamine fix from the parties they can’t attend. Covid is fun for all of us, isn’t it?

Douglas sent through a couple of fascinating quotes about some recent blog posts, of which I will share with you over the coming days. I heard Bob Marley’s voice as I wrote that.

I was sure I wasn’t the first person to notice that devices reach a certain level of complexity and sophistication before they start becoming more integrated. Douglas writes:

The bit about computers integrating everything into one chip reminds me of the term The Cycle of Reincarnation that was coined by Ivan Sutherland. There’s actually a cycle where computers get more integrated, then add functionality in outboard hardware which is then integrated again. It happened all the way back to the mainframe days and it’ll probably happen again. Retrocomputing can be so educational :)

One of these days I’ll buy a PDP-11 kit with a SOC chip! If we need to ink out more performance by making our devices more like sealed appliances, may as well get something good out of it too. I need all the blinking lights!

Douglas quotes FOLDOC on The Cycle of Reincarnation:

A term coined by Ivan Sutherland ca. 1970 to refer to a well-known effect whereby function in a computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evolves toward more computing power as it does its job, then somebody notices that it is inefficient to support two asymmetrical processors in the architecture and folds the function back into the main CPU, at which point the cycle begins again.

Several iterations of this cycle have been observed in graphics-processor (blitter) design, and at least one or two in communications and floating-point processors. Also known as “the Wheel of Life”, “the Wheel of Samsara” and other variations of the basic Hindu/Buddhist theological idea.

I haven’t been as excited for a FreeBSD release for a while. We get OpenZFS 2 in base, and it’s more polished out of the box for desktop use as well with better wireless support and prettier terminal graphics. Little touches of polish like that make a huge difference.

I installed it on my tiny Panasonic CF-RZ6 I got during AsiaBSDCon 2019—remember travel?—and set to grab the latest packages:

# mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/
# cp /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/
# sed -i '' -e 's/quarterly/latest/' /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf
# pkg bootstrap
# pkg update

Then did a search for the latest graphics for its integrated Intel GPU:

# pkg search drm-fbsd
==> drm-fbsd13.0-kmod-5.4.92.g20210202

And installed, as per the package’s instructions:

# pkg install fbsd-13
# sysrc kld_list="i915kms"

Rebooted, and startx(1) for xorg worked!

Who was your first concert? Mine was Chick Corea and Gary Burton when we lived briefly in Malaysia in 2007. They were heading down to a jazz festival in Singapore, but stopped by Kuala Lumpur to do a one night show at the Dewan Filharmonik at the base of the twin towers. My dad and I almost missed them; I think we were driving back from the supermarket and heard an ad on the radio.

It’s still my favourite performance I’ve ever been to; only Bebel Gilberto and Sonny Rollins have came close. The audience was predominantly a mix of caucasian and Japanese expats, but they clearly had a local Malaysian fanbase too. I heard a few Singaporeans during intermission talking about how they’d driven up just to see them.

They did a mix of their extensive repertoires with such flair, energy, and even a little cheekiness. I’d memorised so many of their recordings, so it was a thrill to hear their reinterpretation perfuming together with Gary’s vibes and Chick’s unique piano style, in acoustic form this time.

I had the ticket stub stuck to the lid of my laptop for years, still in disbelief that I heard them perform. I ended up taking it off and putting in a folder of my treasured memories when the ink started to fade. It’s still there.

I grew up with Chick’s music, and his circle of musical inspirations and associate acts. My dad especially got me into jazz fusion, so our Return to Forever records and CDs were in regular rotation. They were in all our family mixtapes we took on trips.

Few musical acts have had as much of an impact on my life as Chick. His music was one of the few bright lights in my teens, and got me through difficult times. Heck, I even wrote some of his Wikipedia articles!

Henry Rasussen wrote the best eulogy I’ve read. Chick was one of the greats. I’m humbled that I got to see him.

This was a silly mistake I made. In sharing it, maybe you’ll avoid being as silly. Read up on my introduction to FreeBSD jails featuring Gawr Gura if you need context.

I had defined an fstab for my jail called ina, with some nullfs mounts. This lets you pass in a mounted device or volume into the jail. In this case I’m using ro to use as read-only; you can just as easily do this with rw for rewriteable:

# cat /etc/fstab.ina   
    
==> # Device  Mountpoint        FStype  Options  Dump  Pass#
==> /zpoolx   /jail/ina/zpoolx  nullfs  ro       0     0

So imagine my surprise when I booted ina and there was nothing there:

# service jail start ina
# jexec ina /bin/sh
# ls /zpoolx
# ==> *crickets*

Turns out that I hadn’t added the appropriate fstab option to the jail-specific config in my jail.conf file.

ina {
    ip4.addr="10.8.8.88"
    mount.fstab="/etc/fstab.ina"
}

Ruby on Rails was the first place where I read convention over configuration, and I’ve held it near and dear since. As much of my jail.conf is consistent with the name of the jail for things like its path and hostname:

path="/jail/${name}";
host.hostname="${name}.lan";

But while I use a convention of /etc/fstab.${name} for each jail, I define it manually within each jail’s config. Not all jails have extra mountpoints.

Maybe I could define a generic mountpoint line as I did for path and host, and use empty fstab files in those cases. Those are still valid, even if it does feel a bit like a hack.

I can’t remember who tweeted this, and I’m paraphrasing, but they said it’s great to revel in hobbies and fandoms as an adult, because there’s so much less judgement than being a kid. I’m glad there’s an upside to all the extra responsibilities and burdens we have while we pretend to be grown up!

(I use the royal we above, because my sister and I had far more responsibilities as teenagers than we do now, for family reasons. And I’m sure we weren’t alone. Wow, this got dark fast, back to liking things).

Case in point, I tended to like shoujo anime series and manga over shounen, or even Western superhero comics. I felt like I could relate to the characters more than the latter’s bombastic antics, and shoujo art is gorgeous. But admitting I liked Card Captor Sakura and Sailor Moon in school would have placed a sparkly flower-shaped target on my back.

On the other side, I liked collecting model cars, but most of the traditionally male toys targeted at me didn’t interest me at all. Lego had their spectacular misstep with targeting specific sets at girls, but their toys were gender neutral when my sister and I were kids.

(Computers were great for similar reasons; I could tell people I was getting them in lieu of gaming consoles to play first-person shooters, but in reality I was driving trains through scenic landscapes and writing silly little programs. I openly talk about these now, but again, would have made my even more of a social outcast as a kid)!

My teenage self would have scarcely believed that I’d now be fanning with my girlfriend over new Hololive, Fate/Grand Order, or Atelier Ryza costumes for our favourite characters. Granted their “summer” transformations are primarily targeted at guys (cough), but the general idea that it’s permissible for boys to be interested in what’s basically dress up of electronic dolls is a monumental step forward in breaking down these gender stereotypes. I don’t think that gets enough credit.

Danny Choo’s Smart Dolls are another great example. Ball-jointed dolls (BJD’s) have existed in Japan for years, but had yet to make meaningful inroads internationally. They’re relatively expensive, and Clara and I definitely don’t need them, but that hasn’t stopped me figuring out which pants and top I want for my hypothetical one, cough. I’ve sure been coughing a lot on this post.

I still feel like I self-censor, but those walls are coming down. I think it’s still one of the great things about the Internet; someone out there has similar interests to you.

I needed this Music Monday! I can’t even this.

What has Hololive done to me? Don’t answer that, either.

I took some time this afternoon once I realised I’d entered a grumpyness spiral. It begins with a couple of niggling problems, then as they pile up they begin to seem worse, then insurmountable. And distractions, don’t get me started on context-switching and distractions!

Certain philosophers to self-help gurus place the blame on us for feeling this way. External factors influence our mood, but it’s our choice to internalise them and brew them into frustration; or so it’s argued. It sounds helpful, before you realise that emotions aren’t rational. That’s what makes them emotions and not decisions. They’re visceral signals in our lizard brains, not a calculated assessment of our circumstances.

They say admitting something is the first step to overcoming it. I’m fully aware I’m grumpy now, but knowing that I could turn that frown upside down and be on my way to overcoming it… that just sounds irritating. I suppose they’d argue that I’ve talked myself into being grumpy then. They’re probably right.

This doesn’t even touch on the utility of being grumpy either. Maybe it’s helpful external emotion to express, so people offer you a wide berth to let you get things done. If that sounds like more rationalising, it’s because it probably is.

Grr, the world today, amirite? Don’t answer that.

I’m surprised I haven’t ever talked about Retr0bright here given my fascination with vintage computers! I checked the archives and nada. Surely I would have at least mentioned it in passing.

Retr0bright is a published technique discovered a decade ago to remove yellowing from vintage computer cases. The flame-retardant bromides in specific plastics are susceptible to yellowing over time given the right circumstances. We used to think it was irreversible, but hydrogen peroxide and sunlight or heat yield amazing results. Some of the computers I’ve seen look as good as new.

(I’ve held back doing it to any of my gear, mostly so I could see how the process shook out on other peoples’ hardware over time. I’ve read reports that the effect is temporary, that certain additives can weaken the plastic, and that it can lead to inconsistent blotches when care isn’t taken to apply the peroxide solution evenly. Yet others, including prominent YouTubers with dozens of machines and a perfected process, report no ill effects at all, and only mild subsequent yellowing. My dad is an industrial chemist, and has said it’s almost certainly fine to do).

But Modern Classic also had a beautiful take I hadn’t considered:

#3: All that yellowing is yours, if you’ve owned something for a long time.

My Apple IIc for example has been with me since 1985 when it was new.And all this yellowing you see here? That happened as I owned it, and I actually remember the different stages of it yellowing.

Now I don’t particularly like the yellowing. It’s not that. It does speak to the history of this machine. And I want to keep it that way. I want it to look like the older machine that it is. That I’ve had for my whole adult life, and even much of my childhood.

I’m still considering Retr0brighting some kit, but I think my vintage tower from my childhood will be retaining its yellowing for this reason. I like that I can point to how it yellowed down one side more owing to being near a window in my childhood bedroom, or the bit on the top from when we lived in Malaysia.

This thought is still only half-baked, but I haven’t been able to get it out of my head all week. I’m not sure how else to describe it without launching into an example.

Almost all cars produced since their invention have consisted of the same rough components. They were made bigger to accommodate more people and goods, and their engines became more powerful and more efficient at extracting energy from dinosaur juice in the same physical space.

At some point all the gains that physics would allow had been wrung out, and engineers had to look elsewhere to supplement performance. Turbochargers were early additions that used existing energy in new ways. These days we have hybrid cars, which an engineer from those early Model T’s would look at and not have the foggiest idea how it works. They wouldn’t say it’s a “car” the way they understand it.

The same thing has happened with computers. Journalists attribute it to Moore’s Law, but there’s more to it than that. Computers, like cars, have had the same rough components, even if individually they’d be unrecognisable. Think storage, compute, memory, registers, etc.

When engineers started hitting the limits of silicon, we branched out into multiple cores and multi-threaded software to ink out more performance. Then we started offloading compute to remote clouds, mimicking the mainframes of yore. Apple’s huge performance gains over x86 with their M1 chip came from integrating previously disparate components into the ultimate system on a chip, reducing latency between memory and compute.

(Apple weren’t the first to do a system on a chip. Commodore’s TED incorporated sound, video and IO onto one IC in the 1980s. There were plenty more before and since).

But then we’re left with the same question. Is an Apple M1 chip a computer? It fits the classical definition of Turing completeness, and it’s fit for purpose. But those of us who grew up upgrading and replacing components in our own systems would see it more as an appliance. But if it does the same thing, and objectively better, than what tinkerable systems could do before, does it matter?

I suppose it’s the natural evolution of things. Something is invented, it’s improved to the point it physically can’t be anymore, and then has to evolve in different ways to continue being improved. Then the taxonomy changes.

Adding complexity to overcome physics is necessary, but it definitely is one of the reasons I love retro computing, as I’m sure vintage car buffs like their old machines. There’s a golden period before physics rears its head with these things.