Rubenerd

I reminisced with a client recently about my first network kit, and I realised I hadn’t ever really talked about it here. Nor do I have a network page on my Retro Corner. Let’s begin to rectify this egregious oversight with a new series of long-winded posts about early childhood networking (mis)adventures and nostalgia!

☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎

My first network experience wasn’t with a device per se, but a cable. For several years my dad used INTERLNK and INTERSRV on MS-DOS to transfer files between his work laptop, and the home 486. I remember him demonstrating by plugging one end of the serial cable into his work machine, and the other end into the family computer. Then with one command, I watched with childhood awe at the files from one machine suddenly appearing on the other. Okay, it wasn’t “suddenly”, it took an age. Still, I remember thinking it’s like the computers were talking! I think back to that day a lot, especially when I’m feeling cynical and need to remind myself why I do all this stuff.

This “Melbourne i486”, as I’ve come to call it, it is in the process of being rebuilt. Those original serial signals would have been sent over an identical MIO card to the one pictured below, though I expect their internal ribbon cables weren’t quite as colourful :).

A few years after this we were living in Singapore for what my parents understood to be a “temporary” work assignment… that lasted two decades. As an aside, living in Southeast Asia during the late 1990s and early 2000s where so much of this stuff was being designed, built, and talked about was awesome. The local newspaper had an entire fold-out for the “Computer Times”.

My primary school had computer labs with all manner of DIY PC towers of various vintages before they standardised on Dell towers like this, but they all had one thing in common: 10BASE2 Ethernet NICs. The school had a few computer labs, which consisted of rows of tables pushed against the wall, all of which had computers and thinnet coax cables strung between them using BNC T connectors. The last machine in the chain was then connected via a long cable to the adjoining lab via a plug in the wall. Given how easy it’d be to split the network by merely unplugging a cable, I’m surprised more childhood shenanigans didn’t take place!

This photo below shows a couple of my 3Com EtherLink III and XL cards with their DB-15, AUI transceiver, and BNC T connectors. I didn’t have these at the time, but they’re useful to illustrate:

10BASET over twisted pair was already long established by the late 1990s, but as I recall my teacher Mr Napier at the time saying, this stuff “worked” so there was little reason to upgrade. It’s also worth remembering most of our assignments were still being handed in with 3.5-inch floppy disks and early burned CDs, so it’s not like we were smashing those links :). Our school moved campuses a few times (it’s something that happens over there), but by the Ulu Pandan era it was using twisted pair and wall jacks.

We didn’t get home Internet until the late 1990s, in part because Internet and LAN cafes were so ubiquitous, and we had access at school. We ended up with an external K56Flex modem with our Pacific Internet dialup plan. This introduced me to the wonders of loud dialup sounds, tying up phone lines, and being able to talk with friends after school over instant messaging. The cool thing about that software is you’d choose to show as “online” only when you wanted to, then you’d close it and live your life. In other words, you used the Web on your terms. It was great.

This photo below shows some of the original Pacific Internet promotional material I kept from back in the day, alongside that very tired K56Flex modem! Years ago the label on the front began to curl up; maybe I need to use some strong super glue.

It’s amazing to think that modem transmitted all the first websites we ever visited at home, and was the springboard for me to upload my first websites to GeoCities, Tripod, Angelfire, and my first shared hosting account. Yes, they looked much like this, for better or worse!

But that modem’s real trick was the ability to… wait for it… send faxes. I was surprised how often this got used, especially for things like motorbike and vehicle registration with the LTA, and application forms. For all Singapore’s ultra modern progress at the time, most of it still ran on faxes (Japan would like a word). It would be a few years until my dad got ISDN, then we upgraded to SingTel Magix ADSL, then later SCV/StarHub Cable which used those monstrous Motorola Surfboards.

Admittedly I still didn’t know that much about networking; as far as I knew Ethernet operated no different from those serial cables my dad used to transfer those files on DOS. In part two I’ll reminisce about the first network kit I bought for myself, and all the ensuing fun :).

Let’s get something out of the way: there’s no such thing as great supermarket instant coffee. Scratch that; there isn’t even such a thing as good supermarket instant coffee. You drink instant coffee for one reason and one reason alone: to have a cup of coffee. That sounds like a tautology, but when you’re too tired, stressed, or time deprived to make something with your proper burr grinder and coffee drippers, instant coffee delivers you coffee. Nothing more, nothing less.

With that glowing endorsement, today I’m reviewing Moccona’s French Style instant coffee. Dare I say, as far as supermarket instant coffee goes, it might be the best one! You may be able to figure out why I think this based on a simple bit of text on the label.

To understand why this might be the best instant coffee I’ve ever had, it’s useful to discuss how different vendors sell coffee. When you go to an independent or batch roaster, or even a coffee chain selling beans, you’re likely to be sold coffee based on a couple of key criteria:

• Where the beans were grown. It may be a single origin, or a blend from a specific region.

• The “notes” one are expected to taste, similar to how people may describe a wine.

• The coffee roast level, if not light.

Most coffees you buy from such stores will assume you’re there for lightly roasted single origin, and will differentiate their coffees based on those flavour notes and regions. Even Starbucks will sell you a “blond” roast which is an indirect way of saying a lighter roast compared to the pulverised charcoal they usually sell.

With the surprising exception of Aldi, supermarkets in Australia don’t do this. Instead, they tend to sell their coffee based on “strength”. This is an undefined, seemingly arbitrary scale that varies from vendor to vendor, but from my experience this (mostly) correlates with roast level. A “strong” coffee almost always means “extremely dark”, and a “mild” coffee usually means “medium” to “medium dark” (with rare exception, supermarkets don’t sell light roasts).

I don’t know why they do this, but I have some theories:

• In their eyes, coffee snobs aren’t buying coffee from supermarkets! They’re probably right.

• Novices may not understand what a roast level is, let alone how that translates to taste.

• I expect most supermarket coffee is drunk with milk and/or sugar as well, based on how I see these jars get used in offices. Coffee is a caffeine delivery system for motivation and energy, not something to be enjoyed in its own right.

Introducing a “strength” scale, and erring on the side of darker roasts, would make coffee easier to understand and nicer to drink if prepared in those ways.

☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎

Which gets us—finally!—to that Moccona French Style instant coffee. Moccona’s instant coffee range seemingly employs a strength scale of 5 to 12, with 11 reserved for their “intense” instant, and 12 for their “ristretto”. I tried their “intense” at a client site once, and my face fell off.

I’d never seen a jar advertised with anything less than a 5, which they advertise as a “medium” roast. Yet I was wandering through our local supermarket recently and came across their French Style which was advertised as a 3, the lowest level I’d ever seen. I bought a jar out of curiosity and it was… surprisingly palatable, even without milk or sugar. Again, I must stress, that’s high praise for instant!

Dare I say… we may be seeing more lightly roasted instant on the horizon? That’d be great.

I had insomnia last night, and thought it’d be fun to compile this list. Thank you.

• awk(1)
• bhyve
• Call for Testing
• Dragonfly BSD
• ee(1)
• FreeBSD
• got(1)
• httpd(1)
• illumos (I know, technically not…)
• Jails
• ksh(1)
• libressl
• meta-pkgs
• NetBSD
• OpenBSD
• pkgsrc
• quota
• rubenerd.com/tag/bsd/
• sparc
• tcsh(1)
• ufs2
• Vinyl Cache
• Wine
• Xfce
• who(1) are you… who who?
• ZFS

I will expand on my inclusion of Wine at some point, because it’s found surprising utility in a few places.

With apologies to His Majesty and his other realms, but Australia makes the best biscuits in the Commonwealth, and the wider world. Such is Australia’s undisputed position in baked goods, even heavyweights like New Zealand with their superior peanut butter, dairy products, and cakes can’t hold a candle to our crumbly concoctions.

Choosing a favourite Australian biscuit is a daunting task, on account of there being so many good ones. I’m rather partial to the humble Lemon Crisp, but if I ask anyone what their favourite is, I’ll invariably agree that they’re wonderful. The Nice is so simple and lovely with tea. Kingstons are a treat. Scotch Fingers are more decadent than you first realise. Monte Carlos have an irresistible mouth feel. Iced Vovos are so much fun. Milk Arrowroots absorb a mid-morning coffee like nothing else. Even the Tim Tam, which I’d argue is overrated, is still good. The list goes on.

And yet, I had forgotten all about the humble Venetian. These were my mum’s favourites, and we’d share a couple with a hot choccy after I’d come home from primary school. I swear I hadn’t seen her as excited when the Australian Pavilion store began stocking them in Singapore.

Venetians are dense, crumbly biscuits that feature a thin layer of white chocolate, and a modest smattering of dried currents. Clara and I saw them on the shelf recently, and I insisted we bring some home to try. They were every bit as wonderful as I remembered.

Sorry Lemon Crisp, but I think the Venetian takes the crown.

I recently talked about using Thunderbird for reading RSS. In this I said:

It’s not immediately obvious from the UI, but you can also assign feeds to folders. If you create a “Feeds” account, then create the folders you want under this, you can then assign feeds to those folders.

Andreas of 82 MHz fame, and long-time contributor Rebecca asked how this is done. I really should have described this in more detail, given I said it wasn’t “immediately obvious”. Score one for bad blogging.

If you haven’t configured Thunderbird for RSS yet, you need to create a “Feed Account”, which acts and looks like a regular email inbox. Go to Account Settings, and click New Account. From the dropdown, click Feed Account. Go through the wizard, though there really isn’t much to configure:

You should now have an “account” in your sidebar for Feeds. Right click this and click New Folder. This is the same as creating a folder under an email account.

Now we can assign RSS feeds to folders! Or more specifically, entries from RSS feeds can now be delivered to a different folder.

Click Feeds in the sidebar and click Manage Feed Subscriptions. Click the folder you want to put a feed into, then add the feed details:

The only thing to keep in mind is that Thunderbird treats RSS like email, so if you move your feed to a different folder in this window, you’ll also need to move the feed entries you’ve already downloaded as well.

I didn’t mention this in my earlier Thunderbird post, but I’m so glad this Mozilla-affiliated project still treats RSS as something that’s worth using. Firefox, like every other browser, dropped RSS feed support years ago.

Back in January I introduced my LLM Licence. For the cost of a donation to one of a few different technical foundations in which I harbour a keen interest and admiration, the licence would grant you permission to use an LLM trained on my works for a query.

It was tongue-in-cheek, but it did generate a surprising amount of feedback. This was among the most common responses:

How would you enforce it?

It’s a fascinating question; not for what it’s asking per se, but what it reveals about how we approach everything in this brave new world. The tl;dr is: it’s an honour system built on trust. And it should sound familiar.

☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎

I don’t want to get into a debate over the merits of permissive, copyleft, and commercial software licences here, not least because I’ll have my head chewed off, and I’m rather attached to it. Haiyo.

But licences dictate the terms under which you can purchase, distribute, and/or modify the software, and how to acknowledge and grant sufficient credit to the source. Unless a program and its source have been released into the public domain (which may not always be feasible or possible depending on the jurisdiction), it almost certainly has a licence attached.

Commercial software often requires digital restrictions management (DRM), “activation”, serial numbers, licencing servers, indentured servitude, and other infrastructure to register, maintain, and enforce licencing terms. Ask me how I know! Even some freeware still requires this, because while they may not cost any money to buy, the owners of software prefer to be like those people crowding around the mustard dispenser at IKEA and keep the source to themselves. I joke, but people have every right to release their own creative works as they see fit.

Open software, by comparison, rarely has such distribution enforcement. Some hat-based software houses may inject their own trademarks or copyright in other ways to limit wholesale distribution, but otherwise most such software comes with the source, and perhaps even some pre-compiled binaries for our joy and convenience. It’s up to you to be responsible and to enact what’s required in exchange for the goods.

Taking responsibility… wait, what!?

This is a critical difference to understand. There is no licencing server phoning home to make sure my use of NetBSD is compliant with the 2-clause BSD licence. Alpine Linux doesn’t require me to install Client Access Licences for every SSH connection to my Xen host. At least, I hope not. And when even the whiff of passive telemetry is introduced into an open source package, let alone an overt rug pull, it causes such an uproar as to result in a hard fork.

☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎

This is what makes the discussion around liability language models (LLMs) contributions to open software so surreal. Having spent decades teaching the industry about how permissive and copyleft licencing works, everyone seemingly forgot as soon as their stochastic parrots enter the picture. Maybe they used a chatbot to do their assignments.

The reason this is coming up now is due to more projects restricting or banning LLM-derived contributions. If they deem slop doesn’t meet their quality, authenticity, or licencing requirements, or they introduce legal liability, or they increase the workload for already tired reviewers, project maintainers have every right to deny such code. If you don’t like it, fork it.

(As an aside, they should absolutely do that! A forked project with LLM or “vibed” contributions that overtakes the original in performance, features, and security would surely present quantitative, irrefutable validation of the hype).

But this leads to that question people asked me at the start:

How would you enforce it?

The same way every other requirement is enforced: with a social contract. Projects have terms and policies in place under which they’ll accept contributions. LLM restrictions are another of these, with the same “enforcement” mechanism.

That’s it. There’s no silver bullet here. You can hoard changes to your GPL’d code and not submit them upstream. You can lift and submit code from somewhere you’re not allowed. You can also contribute slop that you’ve attempted to pass off as your own. I don’t know how else to say this, but maliciously working around contribution requirements is on you. I almost wrote that as ewe for some reason, so have this emoji of a sheep. 🐑

Licences are, sadly, only worth the amount people are willing to enforce them. But broadly speaking, that’s how open source software communities work. There’s a degree of trust that you’ll take responsibility and do the right thing. I know right, what a concept!

Clara and I like going to charity/op shops around Sydney looking for books and music. CDs are great because they can be shucked and put in folders, so they don’t take up additional space. Books can also be read, and then put in those street libraries for others to enjoy.

Last weekend I managed to find all these, for less than $5 total. We have Motocross Madness from 1998, Dangerous Creatures from 1994, and a blank DVD-RW in its original shrinkwrap.

I originally thought Motocross Madness came on two discs, but no, I just managed to buy two identical copies in the one CD sleeve. Huh! For someone who doesn’t drive iRL, it’s funny how racing games are my favourite. There’s also something about late 1990s CD-ROM games with DirectX that I absolutely love; the graphics do the same thing to me that Voodoo cards do for early DOS 3D fans.

Dangerous Creatures was one of Microsoft Home’s multimedia CD-ROMs, in a similar vain to Encarta, Bookshelf, and Explorapedia. It was ostensibly a reference guide for wildlife, but it had minigames and a surprisingly engaging design that my cousins and I loved exploring when we’d visit my grandad in northern New South Wales. I do have a copy of this already, but it was such a fun memory I’m glad to have a backup. That deserves its own post at some point.

As for the DVD-RW, this could be the first one I’ve ever owned? Our family was firmly in the DVD+R/RW camp, despite our Pioneer DVD burner supporting both. We had been told the + variant was “better”, and the media was usually the same price at Sim Lim Square and Funan Centre in Singapore, so we opted for it over DVD-R/RW. It was such a strange format war which, unlike something like Betamax/VHS/V2000, ended in stalemate.

That’s it for today. Well, last Sunday. I wonder what other random treasures are lurking around this area?

This is another inside baseball post, as my American friends say. But despite outward appearances, I didn’t write four posts on Monday, and none on Tuesday. I used to write half a dozen posts a day at uni, but I got more than a few comments from people at the time saying I was spamming their RSS reader. Then again, I’ll bet John Walkenbach had a similar issue with the late J-Walk Blog, a site I miss every day.

I wish I had a more exciting reason. I tend to have very busy Tuesdays, so I’ll often write posts for that in advance. I guess I forgot to update the timestamps. My deception was unveiled!

The irony hasn’t been lost on me that I’ve now spent a few dozen words, and an entire post, explaining why I’ve spammed people. I can’t even write two regular posts today, because one has been taken up by this. I blame it on the fact it’s early in the morning and the first coffee has yet to arrive.

I’ll be having one of those birthdays this year I feel like should be a big deal, but I suspect will feel like any other. That’s the hope, at least. More than anything, I feel lucky (and frankly privileged) to be around.

Around…

And then it hit me. Reel to reel tape machines. Around, and around, and around. On a 7-inch reel, to another 7-inch reel. Or maybe 10-inch. Or something more portable. Mesmerising. High fidelity. A complex piece of kit blending engineering and art.

Uh oh.

My long-running interest in reel to reel tape machines was piqued again in the last few years thanks to people like Mat from Techmoan. Cassettes were my preferred medium for listing to music when I was a kid, even though CDs were infinitely better in every respect, and I even had a damned Panasonic SD-card music player, an iPod, and a CD burner. Tape made absolutely no sense! But it all came down to being able to watch the tiny tape spools spin and gather their ribbons of music in a player. I obsessed over spec sheets, tape formulations, and noise reduction tech. It’s like I have a predilection towards old stuff.

Whoa, I think I just psychoanalysed myself. And I didn’t like it.

Anyway, while music was highly entertaining, the genesis (the Phil Collins, you could say… AAAAAAH!) came much earlier and from a different domain. I’m talking of course of those massive reel to reel tape storage mechanisms you’d see in old mainframe computer systems; the ones pictured alongside hard drives the size of washing machines, operated by smart people with Mary Tyler Moore and James Bond haircuts.

I often lament the fact I was born too late for the 16-bit graphical computer era (let alone 8-bit home computers), but I would have been just as enthralled and interested being around these reel to reel machines too. I know, I’m sure in operation they were far less glamorous and interesting, and almost certainly required frustrating amounts of maintenance. But the aesthetic alone of operating in a room with these reels would have been incredible. Well, until the novelty wore off I suppose.

It’s unlikely I’ll have a DEC reel to reel data tape machine spinning in our apartment any time soon (cough), but I’m fascinated with residential reel to reel audio machines. I wouldn’t even need a 10-inch unit; a smart 7-inch one with dual capstans, beautiful VU meters, and a cabinet with a mix of silver and black would look very smart in our loungeroom. It’d also be older than me, which would help with this crushing feeling of being an old man now.

Right?

…

Wait, where are you going?

As I say, it’s a big year for me. Or it’s supposed to be. Is this the silly midlife crisis device I save up for and buy? It’s safer than a motorbike, though I suppose it’d be capable of making just as much noise. Also tracks. Spin spin! I’d say I’m a lost cause, but I’d know exactly where the tape leader is.

I’m a couple of days late, but I thought it was worth sharing a story where this man (mild gender dysphoria notwithstanding!) learned something.

For a while I’ve had a set of rules and filters on my social media accounts, email, and so on that match on certain key phrases. These include, not exhaustively:

• Actually,
• For what it’s worth,
• In all fairness,
• No offence,
• To be fair,

You would not be surprised to hear this catches a bunch of comment spam from people replying in bad faith, or in a way that indicates they didn’t read what I wrote. The email folder these redirected to had 143 messages since I implemented this back in June last year, and a quick skim confirmed they were all exactly the kind of people you’d expect.

But it could have backfired. Last year I posted this list to Mastodon, and had private replies from two women asking me to reconsider my position. They both, independently, talked about the fragile line they have to walk talking with men online. Too reserved, and they’re walked all over by men eager to explain in patronising detail the comments they made. Too assertive, and they’re immediately branded difficult, “a bitch”, or worse. In their words, qualifying statements like these (besides perhaps “actually”) are a frustrating necessity in online discourse, and that I’d have to be prepared to filter them out if I maintained such a list. For all I know on social media, I may already have.

I got this wrong, apologise, and thought it was worth sharing!