Rubenerd

I tragically ran out of fresh decaf coffee beans from our favourite roaster this side of the Bridge last night, as well as those surprisingly decent Muji decaf coffee bags. It’s tough being me. So I went for a walk to the local shopping centre in the evening to see what they had for my nightcap. My track record with supermarket decaf is poor to mediocre, but maybe by some fluke I could get something great.

The supermarket in question did have some decent(ish) decaf coffee beans, but they’re more than twice the price than the far superior beans I can get fresh from my local roaster. In the Australian vernacular, yeah, nah. That left the regular pre-ground options from the usual suspects.

Or so I thought. Not to get all turns out on you, but Lavazza sell a 3/10 “intensity” decaf in this rather fetching bag:

Intensity in supermarket parlance refers to roast level. Higher intensity correlates with darker roasts and bitter coffee, which I’d rather avoid. Seeing one at the other end of the scale was pleasant surprise.

I took it home and used my regular 250 g of boiling water to 16 g of grounds in the Clever Dripper, and let it steep for 02:30, agitating it a bit at the 02:00 mark. If that sounds like a Hoffman recipe, it’s probably because it is. Immediately I noticed the drawdown took a long time, more than twice that of the coffee I grind fresh myself. That indicates a finer grind optimised more for espresso, though the packaging does show a filter brewer, French Press, and a Moka Pot. Hey, maybe I should try the latter again with these beans.

As for the taste? I was pleasantly surprised. It was smooth and not particularly bitter, though it also lacked any outstanding flavours. It’s not as good as the Muji coffee, and a far cry from the fresh Colombian decaf I’m lucky to get from the local roaster, but as an evening drink with a bikkie? It was delightful.

I don’t rank coffees I dislike, so on my weird coffee scale this gets a 1/5. It’s what I’d consider baseline tasty. Which honestly for pre-ground supermarket decaf is high praise. I might keep a bag of this in the freezer for emergencies.

Marco Arment wrote about a world in which he didn’t know the politics of his neighbours. He just knew they were friendly people who helped him out, and he responded in kind.

It sounds profound, at least superficially. I smile at strangers on the street, open doors for everyone, and help parents with their prams onto trains, all without knowing what their personal politics are. I greet my neighbours in the morning on the way to work, wave at the postie, and tip my hat to the guy who makes my morning coffee. Some may agree with me, some may disagree, but we all get along.

Right? I mean, right?

But here’s where I think he lost me:

While privilege and power dynamics play a complex and unavoidable role in this, I don’t want to associate with any community that would insist on either of those.

I’m going to be more candid here than usual. Bothsidesism doesn’t work on me. Quite the opposite.

Marco and I get along easily with people in our respective countries because we’re middle-aged white guys. We’re automatically granted respect based on what we are. We’re able to engage in this civility because our right to exist isn’t being questioned. It’s grim how quickly the veneer of mutual respect disappears when, say, a trans friend of mine walks with me, or when I go into client meetings with female engineers. To quote David Morrison, the standard you walk past is the standard you accept.

I’m not proud to say this is something I had to learn. I never experienced racism until I started dating Clara, for example. “Get one of your own”, “she’s a spy”, “yellow fever”, and such nonsense. Rather than responding with civility, I call them out. Naturally, they immediately back away, because racism is a key predictor of cowardice.

Anyway! For most of my life I agreed that politics “had a time and a place”. It wasn’t until I spent more time with marginalised people that I realised that for them, turning off politics isn’t a choice. They have to live it, every second of every day. I felt guilty for what I’d previously advocated, but I’ve tried to channel this into being an ally, defender, and friend. I still get this wrong sometimes, and people rightly call me out.

I get it. When confronted with this reality, retreating to the familiar and defending yourself is natural and instinctive. But it’s not how we grow. Ignorance is bliss, but it’s not a virtue. That’s why his post falls short for me, irrespective of intentions.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

32:30 – Who’s Peter, and why does he live in Kensington? Also Muji coffee, my favourite places in the world to travel, Chatswood’s Japanese stores, cheesecake, subscribing to feeds at a coffee shop in 2003, Singapore changing beyond recognition, and Frank Nora being the last one standing after the demise of Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders.

Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released September 2026 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts; this one notwithstanding. Hosted graciously by the Internet Archive.

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I’m feeling a bit scared and anxious. Why not go for a walk? It’s the perfect day for it. The sun is shining, but it’s not too hot. There’s a cool Pacific breeze, the trees are heavy with spring leaves. It’s just about perfect.

Maybe I’ll go get a coffee, relax with a book, and collect my thoughts for a bit to…

Hey, wait a minute. That’s another VGA LCD monitor. What a find! Someone else clearly didn’t care, but I’ll take you home, old friend.

☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎

Phew, we’re home now. You’re heavier than I expected, my arms hurt. Is it clear that I don’t lift? Anyway, time to test if you work. I’d better plug you in, and…

Huh. People tend to cut power cables to indicate devices are no longer operative. That’s somewhat redundant here, because the cable can be swapped out. But maybe I carried this all the way home for no reason. That would have been a bit silly.

Maybe it’ll work? We haven’t had rain recently, and I don’t see any obvious damage. I’ll plug it into the surge-protected connector and give it a try.

Huzzah! Another VGA LCD is always a good thing, especially when the majority of your machines look like these. The VGA picture appears almost instantly, and the menu is also surprisingly responsive. I’m so used to modern external monitors that take an age to power on, let alone detect a signal. This feels as snappy as the internal monitor on a ARM MacBook.

What an excellent day this turned out to be.

Let’s go on a trip together! The year is 1997, and you’re an Australian kid who’s family has moved again, this time to Singapore. Your hobbies, interests, and vocation revolve around these upcoming things called computers which are expensive and still kind of slow, but you’re fascinated by how they work and what they represent. Future planet-boiling grifts are still a ways away, so you’re still full of optimism and joy.

A few times a week, your primary school has computer classes in one of the three labs downstairs in your building. These classrooms have tables along the walls, and a few running down the middle of the room, upon which desktop computers sit for lessons. The school will standardise upon a fleet of beige Dell Dimension desktops within a year or two, but for now they consist of a smattering of various baby AT machines, all built by the head of IT out of whatever parts and cases were available at the time at Sim Lim Square or Funan Centre. They each have their own character and history, not to mention installed software, which only adds to their mystique.

It’s now Friday after lunch, so you file downstairs with your classmates, then make a beeline for a specific desk by the window. It has a gorgeous view of Emerald Hill, and the computer sitting on the desk is your favourite. Its Pentium 1 isn’t as fast as the AMD K6-2s found elsewhere, but location, location, location. You fire it up, then get to work learning HTML, uploading your first GeoCities site, logging into your first SunOS box, copying data from your first Zip disk, writing some of your first code, or even helping the teacher troubleshoot the thinnet coax cables for the lab’s Ethernet network. Don’t forget to terminate those cables, or all the frames will leak out and stain the carpet.

This generic beigebox is build into a case that bares a striking resemblance to the one you used to build your first PC, with its oblong, teal power button and mixture of drives. Only this one has a 7-segment display that reads 133, and a subtle wavy flourish on the bottom which you take to calling The Beige Wave off Kanagawa. You swear this is funny and clever, though nobody else seems to share in your enthusiasm.

I wish I could show you what this looked like. Something like this perhaps?

Hey, wait a minute. That’s my lab desk. It’s almost as though I found someone in Latvia of all places (because my life always ends up involving Latvia!) selling just the bezel for this machine for reasons you can’t fathom, and now having waited a month it’s now it’s in my possession. I’m struck by how subdued that wave pattern really was, which only proves I wasn’t half as witty with my name for this case as I thought.

It’s a good thing I only found one of these bezels, because I was…

Oh, huh. It’s a party!

I have grand plans for these, but for now I’m just chuffed that I’m able to preserve another piece of my computer history. People are so excited to find the original plastic moulds for computers like the Commodore 64C, but I doubt there would have been much love for boring beige boxes like this. But they were my boring beige boxes.

From Wikimedia Commons:

Southern Peru Copper Corporation train hauled by three EMD GP22ECO on its way from Ilo to the mines of Toquepala and Cuajone, Peru.

I haven’t been able to stop looking at this. It looks like a different planet.

Some highlights from the week:

• Design Theory analysed why nothing looks cool anymore in a new video. I don’t care about cars, but it’s an interesting lens with which to look through the current bland landscape of design.

• Retronaut discussed the massive impact ProDOS had on the Apple II, as well as a primer on how it worked. I’m shocked he has so few subscribers, his videos are so well researched and presented.

• The NetBSD Guide. Once more I found myself quoting and referring to sections of it when building a Linux system! I wonder if LLMs would be half as popular as they are now if other projects and software had such comprehensive, approachable documentation?

• Wouter asks how we feel when we see video game remakes. I tend to side with him here: I have the HD remasters of games, but I keep old machines around to play the originals as well. I have a long overdue post about my thoughts on the Atelier remakes I’ll get to eventually.

• Reconcilable Differences. It’s a show with Merlin Mann and John Siracuca I completely forgot existed. It’s great! Easily half my mannerisms over the past two decades can be attributed to these gents.

• The chair at this coffee shop is oddly comfortable as I write this. If I knew what it was, I’d link to it. Let’s pretend I have here, for the sake of continuity.

• An Australian conservative news channel ran a parody video as fact. I suppose when you’ve been drip fed a steady diet of “red pill” dross, it’s easy to be played like a fiddle. Other political actors around the world use this fact for far less benign reasons (cough AfD).

• Joel Carnat wrote on TuM’Fatig about running BSD on a AOOSTAR WTR Pro, a four bay NAS enclosure. The CPU wattage differences were surprising to me! Also, I really need to look into NAS enclosures again.

• James is an Internet treasure. Earlier this week he found a red leaf. It was rather pretty, as was his post.

• I’ve been reading The Shortest History of Australia by Mark McKenna. Save for a bizarre comment about Covid, it’s easily the best I’ve read on the topic. I’ll save the full review for when I’m done.

This surprised me last week, so I’m passing it on for what it’s worth. I used my standard FreeBSD Ansible playbook to define a new zpool on a Linux host, and in the process inadvertently set the acltype to nfsv4, which Linux doesn’t support.

At least, I thought? I checked the pool:

# uname
==> Linux
# zfs get acltype
==> acltype nfsv4

But according to the docs, emphasis added:

Setting a type the platform does not support does not produce an error. On Linux, acltype=nfsv4 is handled identically to off — but zfs get acltype still reports nfsv4. A dataset can therefore look as though it has ACLs enabled while silently having none.

I’m not a fan of silent failures in system software, but that’s a separate issue. Not having this defined correctly can cause problems on NFS, among other places.

Thus, you’ll want to create your pools with the following on Linux. POSIX ACLs are stored as extended attributes:

-O acltype=posix \
-O xattr=sa

Again, the OpenZFS documentation is your friend here.

I spent a few years here blogging about my decluttering process. A post I wrote in December 2016 titled goodbye junk is illustrative. I grew up in households where things played an oversized role, so to be able to be more ruthless with junk in my own life felt liberating.

Well it’s been a decade, and I have some Thoughts™ about the whole thing.

Not extending this to digital decluttering

I didn’t directly address this in those old posts, though I hinted at it the FAQ section of that 2016 goodbye junk post:

Anything flat (photos, cards, papers) can be scanned and thrown away. I now think scans are superior to originals: they can be backed up, they won’t degrade, and they can be put into albums alongside digital photos to make a complete timeline of my life. It’s pretty cool.

Around the same time minimalism was in vogue, people were also talking about “digital decluttering”. This was the idea that we all pay for these cloud hosting services to archive all our digital lives, when the majority of it is junk. There’s a financial cost to this, admin overhead in maintaining these piles of digital dust, and potential privacy concerns to boot.

There may be something to this, but I figured it didn’t apply to me on account of self-hosting. Sure, there’s still admin, but I’m still a computer enthusiast at heart, and FreeBSD with ZFS is fun. Having piles of personal data is a way to learn about concepts and tooling that has later come in handy at work, among other places.

One thing I have done since is be a bit smarter about what I store. I realised last year that I was storing MP3 versions of FLAC files, when really I could just keep and use the latter. I also actively use more ZFS-specific features because they save space and time.

But who knows? If hardware prices remain stubbornly high thanks to slop fondlers, I may need to revise this when the drives fill up. Fingers crossed we can keep using what we currently have for a while yet.

Decluttering is a privilege

This is something I didn’t adequately explore; but in my defence, neither did any of the people who’s books about minimalism I read at the time.

Being able to repurchase something is an implicit assumption underlying much of minimalism. You shouldn’t hold onto something “just in case”, they argued, because you likely won’t need it. Except, that “likely” is load bearing. If you don’t have the disposable income to repurchase something, of course you’re going to hold onto it. One needs a degree of financial security to be as blasé about letting go of things.

It makes me wonder if minimalism would resonate as much now in our current economic climate as it did in the 2010s. I think part of it still would: buying crap you don’t need is an easy sell to people facing cost of living pressure. But telling the same people they can recycle, gift, or otherwise dispose of stuff because they can always repurchase it later may not be as… compelling as it once was.

This was a massive, obvious blind spot on my part.

Was it the right thing for me to do?

I agree with what I did, mostly. The feeling of being boxed in and surrounded by clutter wasn’t making me feel good. Quite the opposite: I’m one of those people who needs everything to be neat and tidy, and that’s made more difficult when you have stuff overflowing off shelves.

I was reminded of that George Carlin routine where he talks about taking off in a plane, and musing that every house he saw out the window was full of “piles of stuff”. I read and listened to All the Great Shows about minimalism and decluttering at the time, but trust George to cut through the nonsense and make something obvious.

I only regret getting rid of a few things. For example, I ewasted some cables and boards that I think I could repair now. Maybe. But would I? Now that I type this out, I almost certainly wouldn’t, given the veritable pile of other stuff I have waiting. Good call, past Ruben.

10/10, no notes again from one of my favourite thinkers in this space:

Think about a person who works on developing chemicals basically saying: “Yeah we’re just throwing random stuff together. There’s at least a 10% chance that – since we don’t really do any security – we might poison everyone, but please give me all the money you had planned to give to hospitals. KTHXBYE.” The world we currently live in is the one where we respond with “Sure Mr. Altman. Here’s also all the money we wanted to spend on schools.”