By Ruben Schade in Eora/Sydney, Australia.
I was holding off on discussing this until I had all my machines upgraded, but I think the news is worthy enough to mention in the interim. Everyone’s favourite OS hit version 11 at the end of July, and it’s an awesome release. These are the highlights from the release notes , emphasis added: New port to the RISC-V processor architecture. NetBSD 11.0 is the first stable release to…
Clara and I were back in Sydney’s best suburb yesterday, stocking up on our various Japanese, Chinese, and Korean homewares, food, and other life essentials. I do sorely miss living there, but then I see the apartment prices are more than double what we bought ours for barely twenty minutes away by train. Damn our desire to want to travel and… eat! Anyway, while she went to get a…
This is one of those philosophical posts that’s as much a reminder for myself as it is for all you lovely people who read my ramblings. I mean, I’ve always written this blog assuming I’m the only person who reads it, partly because I think I very much should be the only person reading this. But I digress. So much of modern consumer culture comes down to curating a sense of the…
I know right, sacrilege! The Americanos made with their “blond roast” could best be described as… inoffensive. But occasionally I do make the trip over with the laptop or a book. There’s something about the experience. The wooden tables, that specific pastry smell, the music they play, the whirring sound of the blenders, the hushed Mandarin and Japanese being spoken. It’s…
This is the fifth client I work with this week who’s auto-replied to an email I sent with this: I am currently on leave returning on the 17th of August. I don’t think I’ve ever had two clients from disparate companies share leave, at least outside popular holidays like Lunar New Year or Xmas. And now five people have? MAMBO NO. 5!? What’s going on? Is there some awesome…
I was talking with Clara about the new Anthony Bourdain movie coming out, and it… Wait, hold on a moment, Vim is telling me I misspelled the word “movie”. Really? Yeah, look at that, “movie” has a red box around it. Huh. Who’d have thunk it? Wait, Vim has “thunk” but not “movie”? Anyway, I digress. I was talking with Clara about the new…
Donezo. uBlock Origin also reported blocking 311 requests, which I found rather amusing. Perhaps the Australian Bureau of Statistics were attempting to perform a census of my browser as well. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-08-12.
I read another post recently that took it as given that the BSD operating systems were corporate friendly , with the implication that this was bad. They claimed that companies can lift code and lock it away in their proprietary software. That’s true, they can. From a permissive perspective though, the GPL does the same thing. Importing permissive code into a GPL’d repository is a…
On Monday I wrote about why I preferred light modes over dark ones . Light modes are bright, cheerful, and easy to read for me, whereas most dark modes dilate my pupils and “burn” text into my eyes that persist even after I turn away. Not fun! But that leads to two questions. First, is a word with five letters. And second, are there any industry attempts to improve readability for all…
For the last few years I’ve been trying to source an IIɢꜱ, Apple’s last major hurrah for the Apple II platform, and the only 16-bit model in the lineup. I know I say this about every retrocomputer, but this was a fascinating machine. Here’s the motherboard for my 1986 ROM1 unit, in all its dusty glory: I’m missing more than a few components, as you can see. It doesn’t…