2025-08-13 14:08:40
This is an expanded thought from a Mastodon post, and a bit rantier than I normally get here. But for personal reasons, I have Thoughts™ on the issue of street safety, and the roll cyclists play. Here we go!
Every month or so, an Australian media outlet—or three!—works itself up into a moral panic about bicycles, e-scooters, or other personal mobility devices. They’re a plague on our streets, they slow down traffic, they’re dangerous to pedestrians, their riders are entitled, and they attend Satanic rituals where they throw handlebars and disc brakes at honest, hard working motorists. There’s this palpable sense of righteous anger in their critiques, as though the mere existence of cyclists in urban environments is an affront to common decency and safety.
These articles are usually precipitated by a report of an injury or death sustained by a cyclist, or the pedestrian they hit. They’ll be accompanied by loud, scary graphics on TV claiming these riders are “out of control”, with curated quotes from the Common Man on the street claiming these riders “should be, like, banned, y’know?"
Their veneer of concern is as insincere as it is transparent.
If pundits cared about street safety, they’d also cite the number of people who’ve been maimed or killed by cars within the same time period. Failing to do so is sloppy, one-sided rage-bait that deliberately misses the bigger picture; and with it, any meaningful chance to improve street safety for everyone, irrespective of their mode of transport.
Cars are what make streets unsafe. Period. Cars are large, smelly, loud, insulated metal boxes that kill in the thousands even at low speeds, but that we’ve been conditioned to accept as inevitable and necessary. Worse, they’re getting bigger, and therefore even more dangerous to those outside. It’s an automotive arms race that started when “jaywalking” was coined and defined as a crime, and has continued into our world of ubiquitous urban 4WDs, SUVs, wankpanzers, and emotional support “light” trucks that would still be offensive even if the were useful in a work capacity.
When faced with the prospect of riding in mixed traffic with these death machines so often piloted by inattentive and distracted halfwits (ask me how I know!), cyclists in places like Australia take the defensible—if not ideal—position of riding on footpaths. This is, inevitably, where they come into conflict with other people who use the footpath, such as pedestrians walking to the train station like me, parents pushing prams, wheelchair pilots, buskers, and commuters who manage more than one of these in an impressive feat of human-powered locomotion.
And yes, this does result in injuries. I’ve been hit by several cyclists, one of whom in the Sydney suburb of Alexandria smashed my phone and called me a dickhead for the privilege. It’s a horrible experience! Then again, so was being hit by a car in Earlwood two years earlier who, surprise surprise, was half asleep and on his phone.
The solution here is painfully obvious to anyone who isn’t a car-brained apologist for the status quo: separated cycling infrastructure.
There are people who (a) can’t or (2) choose not to drive. If they have to accept the negative externalities imposed by the people who do drive, they need to be protected. Anything less is an assertion that motorists are more important than cyclists, pedestrians, and everyone else (though like all privileges afforded to specific groups, it can be difficult to even confront, let alone address).
Improving cycling infrastructure reduces traffic, freeing up the street for the people and emergency services who do need vehicles. It reduces maintenance costs. It reduces emissions and improves localised air quality; cars are disgusting, and we don’t talk about it nearly enough when discussing urban transport. It shifts the perception of cycling from a daredevil leisure activity to one more accessible and healthy for everyone. It is a net positive in ways cars can’t be.
Oh yeah, and it helps pedestrians like me too!
So the next time a pundit complains that an urban cyclist was rude to them, or that their chosen (or required) form of transport is somehow unsafe, ask them to put it into context. If they refuse, they’re lying by omission.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-08-13.
2025-08-13 07:10:34
I’ve held off long enough, but I think it has to happen.
I adore my old Japanese Let’s Note machines for on-call laptops, but I’d love an older ThinkPad for some distraction-free writing. Throw NetBSD on it, use that wonderful keyboard, and focus.
For some context, is a phrase with three words. I grew up on second-hand ThinkPads. I had a 600E inherited from my dad when I was a kid, and an X40 and X61e got me through my first and second stints at university. All of these were stolen/lost during a move never to be seen again, which still makes me angry thinking about now. I hope whomever ended up with that box of machines got what was coming to them. Specifically, some old ThinkPads.
Which one to get though?
My first instinct is to get an X-series machine, or an X1 Carbon. These would be the closest to my daily carry MacBook, which means it’d fit my smaller backpack. But I’m also tempted to screw it and get a larger T-series that I briefly had at work back in the day. If this is to be a writing machine that might be taken to a coffee shop, but not necessarily carried around all day, the larger size might be nicer. Having a proper numpad for weekly reconciling/hobbyist accounting (yes, it’s a thing, shut up) would also be awesome, so I’ll keep my eye out for some T5-series machines.
While we’re on the subject of sizes, this leads to what display I’d want. I can’t stand 1.5× scaling, because it shimmers, causes eye strain, wastes GPU cycles, and looks terrible. 2× HiDPI/Retina class is probably too new and not yet widely available, so I’d probably be going for a 1× display instead, which I’m fine with for plain text. I do draw the line at IPS though, so I’ll need to make sure whatever I narrow down on has that. I was surprised how even the higher spec’d machines from the 2010s still had TFTs.
As for keyboards, I do love the pre-chiclet era, but my options open up much further if I’m not hung up about this. ThinkPad chiclet keyboards are also still better than any other modern machine I’ve used.
I guess I’ll go on Grays Online, eBay, Gumtree etc, sort by price, and see what comes up :).
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-08-13.
2025-08-12 13:04:53
No, this isn’t about IPv6! We’re moving up the OSI stack today and talking about the current state of the Web, and whether it needs a similar shakeup.
The gents over on the 2.5 Admins podcast had an interesting discussion this week on the idea of a New Web. Joe discussed the proliferation of spam, scams, and slop, and suggested a path forward could be a new Web of some description; free of the craven and horrible things we’ve all come to expect when we use the Web in its modern form.
I’ll admit, in my darker moments, I’ve been tempted by similar ideas. The modern Web is a technological wonder, but there are times I log in and download a hundred megabytes of HTML and JavaScript to view a line of text, or swat away an invasive ad, or attempt and fail to prove I’m a human with an inscrutable CAPTCHA, or see my server costs spike because some arsehole in the United States or mainland China decided to scrape the ever living hell out of my site for their LLMs on my dime… and it’s enough to make me want to unplug the cord and go back to my 4/16 Token Ring network at home.
But that actually hints at where the real issue is. It’s worth listening to the whole 2.5 Admins episode in full, but ultimately I agree with their consensus: these are all human problems. The financial incentives are there to treat the Web as your personal resource for you to exploit, extract, and scam as much as you want. For every Michał M. Sapka who writes from the heart, there’s a Zuckerberg who’d rather sell his… and yours, to appease his short-term investors who need to see line go up.
Alas, at the risk of broadening this too far in economics, that’s how the systems of incentives work right now. That doesn’t mean they need to work like that; this is all self-inflected. There’s no law of physics that states you must treat people online like this, or organise your economies in such a way. But it’s hard to see a different path when there are well-worn grooves in the one you’re walking on.
Hmm, I mixed my metaphors there. Two roads diverged in a wood… and I wasn’t paying attention and hit the lamp post in the middle.
I also take Allan’s point that this is also a question of scale. Communities that can grow slowly and have people absorb the culture ultimately become sustainable, fun, rewarding places to be. Communities that explode in popularity invariably end up bring the culture to the community, and with that, the endless bad actors and bad faith actions that characterise the web as a whole. It’s tempting to make online communities more closed and exclusive, but then we’re only enforcing our own silos (to use Allan’s words) which we don’t want.
Gemini is an interesting case study in this. I loved my time using this alternative to the Web, with its clean design, easy authoring, and fast clients. But ultimately I stopped using it because I love plain HTML, and I wouldn’t have the same readership or access to people in the real world if my words stayed there. It felt elitist and exclusionary, even if that’s not their stated aim. The underlying tech to make the Web a wonderful place again is all still there, it just needs to be used. Or rediscovered.
I don’t know, I’m rambling now. But I thought it was an interesting discussion. How do we grow the Web into what we want it to be, what we know it can be, when the financial deck is stacked against us? I wish I were smart enough to know the answer.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-08-12.
2025-08-11 06:45:24
I got an email last night from Twitter, or whatever it is Space Karen calls it now, claiming they had “suspended my account”. The reason is even funnier than I could have imagined:
Hello Ruben 🦚🐙🇦🇺🇸🇬 bsd.network/@rubenerd,
Your account, Rubenerd, was detected by our systems and automatically suspended for violating the X Rules.
Specifically, for:
Violating our rules against inauthentic accounts. Specifically, our rule against impersonation.
You may not misappropriate the identity of individuals, groups, or organizations or use a fake identity to deceive others.
Pardon me, let me just put my morning coffee down. AHAHAHAHA! HAHAHAHA!!! AAAAAAAAAAH!
That’s obviously a load of horseshit; I had one of the oldest accounts on the platform. No, I suspect the real reason was they didn’t like the URLs to Mastodon and Bluesky in my name and profile. So much for being a “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk, you absolute bellend.
I had stopped using Apartheid Man’s site ages ago, but I guess now I don’t need to go through the formal process of deactivation now. I did download an archive of my tweets last year though, which I might upload here for posterity somewhere.
I do genuinely miss Twitter. As I’ve said here numerous times, it was the only social network I ever really grokked at the time. It’s where I met most of my friends when I moved to unfamiliar cities, and eventually landed me my first full-time job back in Australia. Most importantly, it’s where I got to know Clara.
I still know so many people who haven’t made the switch to something else, which means they’ve been functionally out of my friend circle for a year or more. I really wish Cover would also move the Hololive and Holostars characters too, it sucks that it’s yet another fan community I’ve been shut out of. I guess The Network Effect is a powerful thing.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-08-11.
2025-08-10 21:55:59
In late July I talked about the challenge of sourcing and installing new power supplies in AT-class hardware. Some of those machines are well over thirty years old, and I’d prefer to replace their power supplies with modern alternatives. Adaptors that let you use modern ATX power supplies exist, but they lack the requisite power rails for certain older cards.
I needed a new power supply for my i486 build anyway, so I thought I’d try something new and install a PicoRC! These cards by the illustrious dekuNukem take a modern ATX power connector, and injects the required power rails directly into the ISA bus. Here it is installed:
The PicoRC has a bunch of useful features in addition to power delivery. It has a stateful power switch and indicator light, which is helpful if you’re testing a motherboard outside a case. If you’re installing inside a case, you can buy optional clips to attach the board to the power switch on the case. The board even has a PWM header for a cooling fan; presumably for the power supply, but could be useful as a general-purpose fan for older machines that lack this header.
The PicoRC can be used with any modern ATX power supply, but it shines when paired with a PicoPSU, shown with that yellow connector above. These tiny power supplies work off a 12 V power brick, and connect inline with the PicoRC for a power supply that fits within an ISA slot. I knew conceptually how this works, but it was another thing entirely to see it all connected up.
I installed into my Lucky Star i486 board, then used one of those generic POST cards to show all the power rails are detected and available (the four top red LEDs). Ignore the POST code itself, the SIMMs for this build have yet to arrive or be installed:
This worked so well, and is so compact, I’d be tempted to do this with all my smaller retro PC builds. There’s no need for a bulky power supply anywhere, which works well with a tiny machine like this.
Alas, while it’s the neatest solution I know, it’s also the most expensive. The PicoRC was about $50, the PicoPSU was another $90, and a 65 W power brick from the local electronics store was another $40. Including shipping and import costs—because Australia is a continent floating in the middle of nowhere—I ended up spending more than AU $200. To be clear, the build quality and parts were well worth it, but it’s not something I can rush out and replicate half a dozen times without cutting into the budget for other things.
I’m glad I tried this out. It’s absolutely perfect for this specific “bench” build, and I might envetually source another for general retrocomputer testing. But for replacing the aging power supplies in my other machines, I might go down the ATX and Voltage Blaster route, which would be a quarter of the price. It’d sure be tempting to use this everywhere though, it’s extremely nice.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-08-10.
2025-08-09 07:41:59
There was a bit of a car theme this week.
“I am this close to driving backwards off a cliff with that guy.”
“Do you reckon they just call French toast “toast” in France? Le toast?”
“They all kinda suck, but I love most of it.”
“I came back from Los Angeles last week. The GPS said it was 10 miles away, but it took me an hour! Maybe their time is Imperial too.”
Person 1: “Hey mate, do you need a Mustang? It’s awesome [indecipherable] killer horsepower!” Person 2: “No, I need fewer problems!”
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-08-09.
