Today’s Music Monday is a goodie from one of my sister’s and my favourite childhood albums, Jack Johnson’s In Between Dreams: It’s very pretty and quite short, and includes the line “Je ne comprend pas Français”, which I assumed meant he didn’t understand French. If so, his pronounciation is better than mine. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-10-20.| Rubenerd
This started as a train of thought on Mastodon last week, but it was one that I thought was worth mentioning here. I was surprised to realise recently that I have and maintain more installs of NetBSD than FreeBSD. I know, shocking right? Admittedly this is as much the fault of FreeBSD’s useful features than NetBSD’s utility. I had a project in the last year to consolidate as many disparate services into a single FreeBSD bhyve and jail host at home, and a couple of cloud VMs for backup and...| Rubenerd
I was walking down the street on the way to work yesterday, like a gentleman, when I walked past a tired looking Rubik’s Cube sitting abandoned atop a temporary fence overlooking a construction site. It looked like a scene from that Superliminal game, only it got smaller the further I walked away. This morning it was still there. Plastic stuff like this ends up getting washed away into drains, so I thought I’d do my civic duty and give it a new home. Turns out, aside from some scratches o...| Rubenerd
We’re into the best week of the year, if you’re into Hitchhikers of the Galaxy lore. These are some of the things I read this week that I found interesting: Noel Rappin: Ruby and its Neighbours: An ode to one of the two languages that inspired Ruby. I’m still a Perl writer today, so I somewhat bristled at the opening that it had “vanished completely”… but I also get where they’re coming from. A fun read. Radicale: This looks like a great self-hosted option for CalDAV and CardDAV...| Rubenerd
As an aside, I empathise once again with people learning English as a second language. Why is it twelfth and not twelve-ty? This time last year Clara and I were celebrating finally buying our own apartment together. Fast forward to today, and I reconciled our twelfth mortgage payment and calculated our monthly offset in our budget spreadsheets. The anniversary came and went without us even noticing. I suppose those monthly payments just feel like rent now, though with building strata instead ...| Rubenerd
I’ve started putting the www back into the addresses of new sites I’m building for myself and family, such as Clara’s and my wiki. The www subdomain used to be important when you’d be delivering something other than HTML over HTTP on a server; it’s likely why so many infrastructure domains retain it to this day. It was also a bit of a branding exercise for the fledgling World Wide Web, though with the well-known and hilarious side effect of taking longer to pronounce as an initialis...| Rubenerd
When I’m feeling blue about the current state of the web, tech vendors, and enshittification, I go onto sites like Tindie to renew my faith in humanity. This is the BlinkHAT, the latest piece of hardware from Jurrasic Computing out of France. They make some of the highest-quality and most fun retrocomputer hardware I’ve ever seen, including the ZuluSCSI-based SCSIKnife, internal battery holders with Happy Macs, DIMMs, and other purple PCB wonders. But this may top them all: From the listi...| Rubenerd
On Monday night Clara and I celebrated half a decade on our shared Minecraft server! This was the first map either of us ever played, and we’re still going five years later. What started as a fun distraction during COVID lockdowns has become a little world we join together a few nights a week to unwind, explore, and build stuff. This is the current state of Dynmap on our server, which one day I’ll get around to proxying again: We have a few different towns now, but our spawnpoint is still...| Rubenerd
Forgive the Betteridge’s Law of Headlines title, but it’s posed as a question because it’s a case of it depends. When you’ve been blogging for a few years like me, you get regular questions from people asking how they can get started. Which is great! Some of the more intrepid or curious among you also note that my HTML source credits Hugo as the site generator, and naturally want to know if they should use it too. My answer is always the same: think about the writing first, and the to...| Rubenerd
It’s manifested on different machines, cards, card readers, card reader interfaces, cameras, file systems, times of day, and whether it’s a blue moon.| Rubenerd
Checking out and buying a scattering of stars from a local community college art exhibition.| Rubenerd
A primer on what they are, how we deal with them, and how they pertain to so much modern tech.| Rubenerd
You don’t need to generate stuff, you can make it yourself.| Rubenerd
Riffing off a post Julien Voisin wrote about sounds| Rubenerd
Entering Microsoft Bob on my 486 to take a look at some classic software I love.| Rubenerd
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, Australia. 🌻| rubenerd.com
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, Australia. 🌻| rubenerd.com
Not detailing how to do it, but justifying why you'd want to.| rubenerd.com