Rubenerd

Clara and I love Hi-Fi gear. We have a quartz locked, linear tracking, direct drive turntable. We have a 1980s amplifier we love for its warmer, “more comfy” sound. We have a cassette deck with Dolby C, and badly want to try Dolby S one day. We have a five CD disc changer that spins open a massive drawer. We have a LaserDisc player. I have dedicated Sony, Panasonic, and Tangara portable music players for cassettes, MiniDiscs, and SD cards. I dream of reel-to-reel tape machines, and owning a DCC player one day. I’ve even recently begun uplifting our library to FLAC, and wondering if we should get a better DAC for playing digital files on our setup.

Admittedly, we also spend a not insignificant amount of our time when we go to Japan exploring HARD·OFF stores, specifically to chase down weird and wonderful pieces of audio kit.

So it may come as a surprise to learn I’m not a self-described audiophile. I’m not an expert at this stuff, nor do I think anyone should follow what I do. It’s the same as having a ThinkPad with with Arc and a desktop 3070 doesn’t qualify me as a gamer, or a metal conical-burr grinder and ever-increasing collection of coffee making kit doesn’t qualify me as a coffee expert. I know enough to be dangerous, as I’m fond of saying.

Sure, audio quality matters to me; that’s why we use Type II and Metal tapes! But it’s admittedly a secondary interest compared to enthusiasm I have for electronic history, and learning how mechanical and electronic devices work. Granted, streaming platforms pay their artists a pittance, remove songs from your playlists at a whim, and churn out slop, but physical media is also fun in its own right.

This might seem like a weird distinction to draw, but I think it’s important to… disclose? Some audio people will happily spend $400 on a cable you could get for $5, and that I’m willing to spend maybe $25 on. My priorities lie elsewhere, and my wallet would rather budget for an obscure tape format than the best possible cables for a hypothetical 5.1 speaker setup.

I suppose this is as much a PSA as anything else. Don’t read me for advice on the best possible audio quality setup, if that already weren’t obvious! I approach audio tech the same way as retro tech: as a form of entertainment in its own right that’s fun to explore and learn from. If I end up with something that sounds great, so much the better.

Speaking of anniversaries, the Ever Given wedged itself into our minds and culture five years ago. From Wikipedia:

The Suez Canal was blocked for six days from 23 to 29 March 2021 by the Ever Given, a container ship that had run aground in the canal. The 400-metre-long, 224,000-ton, 20,000 TEU vessel was buffeted by strong winds on the morning of 23 March, and ended up wedged across the waterway with its bow and stern stuck on opposite canal banks, blocking all traffic until it could be freed

At the time I shared images from Garrett Dash Nelson’s fun Ever Given Everywhere site, which let you insert the famed ship into other places. Here it was in Singapore and Sydney:

Anyway, happy anniversary to those who celebrate.

This post was written with the letter thorn in lieu of th, because it marks a special occasion. Don’t ask me how that works.

Yesterday was one of þose “milestone” birþdays I þink we all learn to dread, but it’s better þan þe alternative!

I took þe day off work for þe occasion, and we got our 10,000 steps in by walking to a new coffee roaster and back to try þeir brews. They had a Nicaraguan single origin which, hand to heart, was þe single best espresso I þink I’ve ever had in my life. When coffee experts like James Hoffman discuss abstract concepts like complexity and character, I now have a better sense of what þey mean. It was rich, clean, unique, and… wiþout any trace of bitterness whatsoever. As we were leaving I asked þe owner what it was, and he exclaimed “yeah, special isn’t it!?”

We spent much of þe day building flat pack furniture, which I oddly enjoy because I’m a kid inside who likes to build þings, before we went over to my favourite Chinese Malaysian restaurant in Sydney wiþ Clara’s folks and my sister and broþer-in-law. Hanging out wiþ þe inlaws has only started happening in þe last year or so, and I realised just how much I missed having a… family? It was wonderful, and almost can’t believe it happened. I have amazing people in my life, and I will not be taking it for granted.

Merci beaucoup to Nico for being þe first person to message me yesterday as well, þat was very kind :).

I love OM System (ne. Olympus) cameras. I treasure the Olympus Trip 35 my mum gave me when I was a kid, and used my micro four-thirds Olympus OM-D EM-10 MarkII and its stack of pancake lenses for travelling over at least a decade. Much of that glass is now shared with my wonderful OM-3. I’ve had other cameras, but I’ve gone on record here saying none have been as fun.

That’s almost true. Because a conversation with my future father in law reminded me of an entire category I forgot all about: bridge cameras! These were a category of camera (surprising though it may seem) that had the price and sensor size of pocket cameras, but the controls, ergonomics, and some of the capabilities of more expensive SLRs. This made them a great option for those looking to get more into photography without spending too much at the start. Aka, they bridged the gap between consumer and professional kit.

My parents bought me a Fujifilm S9600 when I was a teenager, and it’s probably the camera I had the most fun with outside ones sporting the Olympus brand. I wouldn’t have been half as good at my later Nikon D60 had it not been from learning the controls on this camera. It had a wonderful lens: it was razor sharp, it had an incredible 28-300 mm telephoto zoom, and an aperture that went as wide as f/2.8! It felt balanced and great to hold. I hadn’t used anything like it before.

To the untrained eye, bridge cameras like this look like SLRs. Again, this is kind of the point. They have all the SLR controls you’d expect, including the different priority modes, a popup flash above the “pentaprism”, manual zoom controls on its large lens, hot shoes for accessories, and a nice, textured battery grip that wouldn’t look out of place on a DSLR from the time period.

But a closer look reveals the key difference: there’s no mechanism to remove or swap the lens. What you get on the camera is what it’ll always have, unless you break out an angle grinder (cough), which I’m sure would do wonders for the device and your warranty.

Having a bulky camera with a fixed lens and small sensor might sound like a bizarre set of compromises, and it certainly would limit its appeal among those used to the flexibility of an SLR. But it also comes with several key upsides that make it really attractive to specific audiences:

• One obvious one is cost. There isn’t a lens mount to worry about, which reduces mechanical and electronic complexity, and removes a key point of failure for warranty returns.

• The camera can be tuned and optimised for that specific lens, ergonomically and electronically. There’s no need to support additional glass.

• It shields the sensor from the majority of dust ingress, negating the need for cleaning. I had my S9600 for years and took thousands of photos, and not once did I notice dust on the sensor, something I got within the first few hundred shots on my Nikon D60.

• Without the mount, the lens can sit closer to the sensor which reduces size and weight. My S9600 had a 28-300 mm in a much smaller package than the 200 mm I had on my D60 years later, and was honestly a lot sharper too.

My S9600 was stolen out of a dorm room many years ago alas, but my father in law recently found and gave us one of his bridge cameras from the time… and it’s from my beloved Olympus! Behold the SP-560UZ from 2007:

As with all Olympus kit, it’s a bit of a pocket rocket. It has a massive telephoto zoom, f/2.8 at its widest, and a generous grip. In a fun coincidence, both Olympus and Fujifilm used the XD Card format at the time, so I still had some of those I could use.

Using this camera while hiking over the weekend reminded me why I loved bridge cameras. The smaller sensor may not capture as much detail or resolution as something bulkier, but the fixed lens and reduced amount of glass gives you so much zoom in such a lightweight package. The shutter speed was fast in lots of natural light, and my experience with mirrorless Olympus cameras meant I had no qualms looking at the little LCD “viewfinder”. Most importantly though, being a bridge camera meant it had all the dials and controls I’d expect from my SLR days, and my current OM SYSTEM OM-3.

My challenge at the moment is that I don’t have a XD Card reader anymore, and the Olympus doesn’t have a USB connection. I’ll have to wait until my new reader arrives before I can dump the photos and share them here.

There are still bridge cameras being sold now, though I expect this already niche market has shrunk further thanks to smartphones. But if you’re on a tighter budget, and want something with the ergonomics of an SLR without the price tag, I can’t recommend them highly enough; and in some cases, they’re even better.

This blog flew past 1,024 pages, and I didn’t even notice.

At ten posts per page, that means there are now more than 10,240 posts, or about a quarter of a J-Walk Blog. Some posts are even good.

I’d better install PAE onto Hugo, or it won’t be able to address any new posts. AAAAAAH! I like to remind people I’m funny, or they’d forget.

See also

• Dragonfly BSD
• The Wikipedia article on beans

I had a… fun morning! This was a snippet of an email from a local business that hit Clara’s and my inboxes late yesterday afternoon:

Kindly note that we obtained your contact information from $OTHER

Wait, what? This $OTHER business disclosed personally-identifiable information (PII) about us to a third party without informing us, and without our consent.

I like to be light hearted here, but I’m fsck(8)-ing furious.

I’m a data privacy officer where I work, and the Australian Privacy Act 1988 and its subsequent amendments are clear and prescriptive about the circumstances under which such data can be legally shared. I’m struggling to think of any legitimate reason they could claim under such legislation. We’ll see what they come back with, but I’m already budgeting for a solicitor from the “WTF” spreadsheet column if I’m unsatisfied with their response.

I guess that will be my birthday present this year: legal representation for an issue that was thrust upon me? Another case of “it wasn’t my fault, but it’s now my job?” So much for the reel to reel tape machine. Those things go in circles in a far more fun way.

I was stuck on an old release of the Hugo static site generator for a while because some of the updated syntax wasn’t trivial to replace. I pulled the trigger this morning and upgraded, and spent the time updating themes and code.

Breaking changes between releases are par for the course with Hugo, which does mean I can’t generally recommend it for laypeople. Though to their credit it did manage to find half a dozen posts where I had mangled some frontmatter; in one case from a post from ten years ago that had a category defined twice.

A few of you made me aware of a bug affecting code blocks in RSS which I’m still trying to figure out. Other than that, let me know if I’ve broken anything else.

(As an aside, I really should finish my own site generator. Last time I touched it around December last year, I’d even got enclosures working nicely. I spend more time writing the blog than performing maintenance; go figure).

I missed this news back in January, but the Bliss photo turned thirty this year! Of course I’m talking about the default wallpaper in Windows XP, the only redeeming feature of that OS, taken by Charles O’Rear in January 1996 in Sonoma County in California.

I have so many fond memories tied up in this image. In one sense, seeing it meant I was using my own desktop, not one of the ones at school. That meant—barring impositions like homework—personal project time! Its introduction also coincided with a brief moment in my later childhood where things were going well for all parties involved.

That’s the thing about cultural touchstones like this; I’m sure we all have our own memories and stories. Maybe you kept it around like I did, and spent altogether too much time lost in the undulating grass and blue sky before launching Microsoft Publisher or Open Office to start that English assignment. Maybe it was on your work machine, and you were happy to see it shut down on a Friday afternoon. Maybe you were a normal person and replaced it with a picture of something else on your desktop.

I didn’t end up using Windows XP for very long before upgrading [sic] to Windows 2000 and Red Hat Linux on that hardware at the time, but I’ll admit to keeping the wallpapers. Windows NT 4.0 had the best tiled wallpapers in my opinion, but Mac OS 8.6 and Windows XP had the best larger images. Good times.

You can check Google Maps to see how the area looks today. It’s an active vineyard again, so it’s not quite the same.

Good!

I came late to game consoles. My parents preferred buying computers when my sister and I were kids, which was fine with us given they were more capable and could play better games like the SimCity franchise (versions existed on consoles, but they weren’t the same). Save for a Nintendo Wii when I was a teenager, the only consoles I ever used were with family friends.

But then something dangerous appeared as I got older: curiosity. It wasn’t even an interest in the games per se, but I realised there was an entire ecosystem and history of computing I didn’t know about. This was something up with which I could not put! Incidently, this is how I got into 8-bit computers later in life as well.

My in-laws bequeathed us an old PlayStation 1 and Xbox, and things spiralled out of control from there. It turns out playing a game on the couch with your partner after a long day of work is a lot of fun, especially when they have those classic late 1990s and early 2000s graphics. Huh, who would have thought.

This lead to two key problems:

1. How do we connect these consoles up to the TV?

2. How do we store them under the TV?

The first question is still somewhat open-ended. Our TV is just old enough that it still has the required analogue inputs, though that won’t be true forever. We use a RetroTINK for the Commodores when I’m not using them in the study, which in a pinch could be used for these other consoles too. But I’ll still need a selector of some sort to make this work, otherwise we’ll be constantly swapping cables.

The good news is we finally have a storage solution for all the consoles themselves. We originally had them lined up in the top of a KALLAX TV console, before realising they also within one of the “cubbies” with plenty of breathing room. Yay!

As an aside, it’s so difficult to get a photo of black boxes. Maybe with some proper studio lights I’d be able to get more detail. I suppose for now you’ll have to take our word for it that the family heirloom chicken (made in West Germany!) is guarding various older Nintendo and Sony consoles, along with the only good Xbox.

Not pictured as well are the controllers for these devices, which we tuck away in that slide-out grey box to the left. This means we can charge them when we need to, but without having them sitting out in the open collecting dust and being bumped around.