2026-08-02 05:51:29
Snow Leopard was a version of Mac OS X released in 2010. It was billed by Apple as having “0 new features”, with a focus on refining the system, improving efficiency, and fixing bugs. Those of us using Macs at the time welcomed the news after living with updates that seemingly broke as many things as they introduced with each release.
This idea is so powerful—and so longed for—that it’s escaped containment among the Apple crowd. I’ve seen everything from Linux distro to phone updates referred to as Snow Leopard releases, when their vendors cite stability and bug fixes over new features. Likewise, people plead with their vendors for a Snow Leopard release when they feel quality has slipped.
The reality was a bit different. As I wrote at the time:
This could be the first time I’ve ever downgraded an Apple OS.
As we speak I’m downgrading the Snow Leopard partition on my trusty old Core Duo 2006 MacBook Pro back to Leopard (and while I’m at it, I’m finally getting around to upgrading the FreeBSD partition to 8.0!). I kept waiting for updates to fix the severe stability problems in the Finder, my FireWire 800 ExpressCard and my iMovie HD plugins, but I’ve decided to give up for now.
This was putting it mildly. When I tried it again a few months later, I still had so many problems that I downgraded again, then leapfrogged it for Lion when it was released in 2011. Jeff Johnson has a great post discussing all the problems Snow Leopard introduced and had to have patched. It was a mess.
Still, whether Snow Leopard really was this bastion of stability and polish, the myth surrounding its development and stated purpose obviously resonates today. People invoke its memory because they’re broadly craving stability and quality of life improvements, something almost everyone has wilfully discarded as they chase the next rung of enshittification.
Apple’s marketing team hit on something so popular that it has staying power sixteen years later.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-08-02.
2026-07-31 12:09:19
We had weird issues on our home network over the last month or so:
Large files being transferred over Samba and NFS would time out midway through, and rsync transfers would also fail with “Resource temporary unavailable” messages.
Clara would be dropped off our Minecraft server after an indeterminate amount of time playing.
KDE on Fedora would constantly spam me with “Connection established” alerts multiple times an hour.
Our Apple TV would pause a video with a spinning wheel of death for a moment, before resuming.
Now I’m no fancy pants network engineer, but something was wrong. It wasn’t wrong enough for me to seriously investigate though; the cobbler’s child walks barefoot, and I have enough stuff to do at work. The issues also seemed to resolve themselves as well, something I chalked up to the Heinzelmännchen doing their thing whenever something failed.
But eventually last night, the final straw was invoked to break the camel’s back. I was transferring a large repository with thousands of small files, and the damned network kept stymieing my efforts. Exasperated, I disconnected the network cable out of my ThinkPad, and… the transfer finished. Granted it was much slower, but it did the entire rest of the transfer without issues whatsoever.
It was at that point I made a critical—and some may say blindingly obvious—observation: I was now on one of the Wi-Fi networks. So were our issues confined to our wired Ethernet network?
The home office in our flat is in the corner of our loungeroom area, and underneath our tables sat a TPLink 16-port Gigabit Easy Smart Switch. This is connected with an uplink cable to our little ex-Sophos NetBSD npf router in the study via a wall conduit. We originally bought this switch for our old apartment when we didn’t have a separate room for hobbies, so all my retro PCs were connected to the switch along with our regular desktops and laptop port expanders. To say it was a rat’s nest of cables at the time would be an understatement.
The switch looked… fine? It had all the Das Blinkin Lights one would expect, and observing it for a few minutes didn’t show any dropped ports. I unplugged and reconnected every Cat6 cable, connected them to different ports, and even swapped out every cable from the switch to see if it was just a loose connection or an errant cable. I then tried a large transfer, and the issues persisted.
Out of curiosity, I rummaged around my parts boxes and found an classic Belkin 8-port Gigabit switch I’d bought to match my Power Mac G4 QuickSilver:
I unplugged the TP-Link from power, disconnected all the Cat6 cables, and connected them into the Belkin. As mentioned above, the number of ports on the Belkin were more than sufficient in our new home office arrangement, now that the old computers are in the study.
It’s been just over a full day now, and… zero issues. Devices connect instantly. My KDE Fedora desktop has stopped spamming me. Minecraft and other games run uninterrupted. But most importantly of all from a quality of life perspective: I can transfer files across the network without timeouts or dropped connections. Yay!
Yes, this is blindingly obvious stuff, but it’s incredible to me how much I’ll live with an inconvenience when I’m busy or otherwise occupied, when the solution is literally a hardware swap. It also amuses me that the all-metal TP-Link box was SOHO kit, where I suspect the Belkin was made for residential use.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-07-31.
2026-07-31 09:42:07
Josh of Espresso Tonic, and Joel of JoelChrono, are excellent bloggers you should read. They’ve both written recently not just about portable devices, but of their form factors. Their discussions on how such design has impacted their use, enjoyment, and productivity with such devices got me thinking how it’s impacted me as well.
There are so many places I could go with this, but today I’ll focus on three types of devices. I sense a series.
Josh spends much of his post talking about how much the form factor of the Nintendo 3DS brings him enjoyment. If you’re not familiar, the 3DS was a handheld console released prior to the Nintendo Switch, and came in a clamshell form factor. It’s received renewed attention of late, thanks to Nintendo’s regressive decisions in the Switch 2, and an expanded modding community that’s pushed the hardware well beyond its initial capabilities.
I can relate to this. I haven’t posted about before, but Clara and I bought Ayn Thor handhelds recently, after my sister and brother in law convinced us. Naturally I got the one with the beige case and rainbow buttons, because I’m a gentleman (cough).
I’ve had a Switch Lite, and I’ve tried similar “slab” style handheld game devices, but they’ve never gelled for me. I suspect it’s for a similar reason why I love the idea of tablet computers and touch screen laptops more than actually using them. I don’t just reach for smaller laptops because of their keyboards, it’s a fundamental difference in their design that makes them more enjoyable and pleasant for me to use.
Regarding game devices, there’s something awkward to me about using controls on the same plane as a display. Positioning the display for optimal viewing results in the controls being at odd angles to use comfortably. With a hinge, I can independently orient the input and output devices exactly as I need them. This is especially important when on aeroplanes and trains, where I may be constrained for space on all sides. I’m a tall lanky person with arms that stretch from here to Sunday, so being able to keep my arms folded while holding a smaller device with a hinge just works better than a wider, narrower one with buttons on each side.
There’s also something… fun about foldable devices like that. It’s as though I have a little book in which all these adventures are awaiting. The folding position also protects the screen(s) from damage when the console inevitably gets thrown into a backpack, shoulder bag, or well-proportioned chino trouser pockets.
People love their iPads, ROG Ally consoles, and Steam decks, so clearly the limitation is with me. But I hadn’t appreciated until recently just how much the form factor plays a role in whether I’ll be catching up on my Japanese RPGs on the train, or doing something else. I get the feeling this will be a theme on this post.
I love OM System (ne. Olympus) cameras. I’ve talked here at length about the Olympus Trip cameras my parents gave me when I was a kid, and how the Olympus OM-D E-M10 MarkII was among my favourite electronics purchases of all time. So much so, that when OM System came out with their OM-3, I deliberately saved and bought it when we last went to Japan.
Those who know their cameras understand that OM System hardly have the best specifications for the price (the bang for the buck, as PC Magazine reviewers used to say). You can get a full-frame kit from the likes of Pentax, Nikon, or Canon for less money than an OM System camera with a much smaller Micro Four Thirds sensor (albeit one with stacking). Likewise, the pancake lenses I insist on using are sharp, but only manage f/2.8 at their widest. A tourist with their Sony Alpha and a Zeiss lens will almost certainly run circles around me, especially in lower light and at greater distances.
But that’s not the point; at least, for me. Olympus and OM System cameras have a specific form factor that I’ve yet to find from any other brand. Their cameras feel crafted in a way that’s difficult to articulate; not unlike a hinged screen (AAAAAAH!). The dials are beautiful and precise, and are just such a joy to use. If you’re a mechanical keyboard fan, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Once you use controls like this, going back to the mushy buttons and dials with play on any other camera feels like a downgrade.
I have taken more photos, and had more fun doing so, because I carry around an OM-3 with a tiny lens. If I had a “better” camera with a “better” lens, it’d likely stay at home.
I mentioned yesterday how I found the size of MicroSD cards troubling, but that’s not the whole of it. They’re also just a pain to use. The raised lip on the edge of those tiny cards is wholly unsuitable for grabbing onto, and the design of the card slots into which they’re placed seemed to regard ergonomics as a mechanical afterthought. And as I said on that post, I have excellent near-sighted vision and dexterity, so imagine how people who don’t must feel.
As an example, the Tangara MP3 player I use only has one major design feature I find frustrating, and it’s entirely down to the MicroSD card slot. Putting the card in is a pain, and pushing on the card to pop it out requires surgical precision and a steady hand. There’s only so much the designers could do with a surface-mount card slot, but it would been awesome if it had a regular SD card slot instead. It would make transferring the latest FLAC album a breeze, rather than something I end up putting off.
I was looking back to see if you were looking back at me, to see me looking back at you. I-I I-I was… I was looking back…
I’ll admit, this is why I loved the Iomega Zip Drive when I was a kid. How’s that for a tangent? There was something oddly fun about carrying around a 100 or 250 MB disk in my school bag, then popping it into the drives of the school’s Dell Dimension towers, and hearing them whir to life with all my stuff on them. Zip disks were bigger enough compared to regular floppies that I could have an entire year’s worth of school work and assignments on them. Then I’d get back home, pop the disk in there, and update that automatic Iomega catalog program.
I actually… miss this more than I expected. That tactile experience of these chonky disks felt satisfying and deliberate in a way other disks didn’t, to say nothing of USB keys or an OpenZFS volume mounted over a VPN with NFS. Would I trust the latter system over a disk that I’m sure Clicked to Death or flipped bits just by looking at them the wrong way? Absolutely! But that’s not what we’re discussing here.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-07-31.
2026-07-30 06:58:23
I had another of those I’m living in the future moments today when I was at an electronics retailer, and I saw a 1 TB MicroSD card. I couldn’t afford it of course, but its mere existence shook me in a way I wasn’t expecting.
One terabyte.
On a thing the size of my thumbnail.
Heck, even this picture of a card from my preferred vendor is likely larger than the card itself, depending on your viewport:
The 486SX tower my dad brought home before I started school had a one hundred megabyte hard drive. This thing had one million megabytes. Yes I know about the whole megabyte/mebibyte thing; don’t spoil my fun. Point is, that MicroSD had about ten thousand of those hard drives in it. Kinda. And rather than filling a shipping container, I could lose it between the lounge cushions.
That’s actually something I’ve worried about a lot lately. More of my devices have switched to MicroSD cards. Leaving aside durability and integrity concerns of data stored on SD and MMC cards, MicroSD cards are… scary. SD cards were about the right size. Even XD, RS‑MMC, and MiniSD cards had enough surface area to comfortably grip. MicroSD cards are easy for me to lose track of, and I have good near vision and dexterity. If you don’t? As my New York friends say: eyy, forget about it!
MicroSD manages to be too big and too small. Imagine burning down the library of Alexandria, only this time you sent it up the vacuum cleaner. It’s the stuff of nightmares.
I suppose people were saying the same thing about my dad’s one hundred megabyte hard drive, having come from punched cards and those unusual 3-inch floppies the Amstrad CPC used. You’re telling me you could fit hundreds of Apollo-era guidance computers on something as small as a paperback book?! That’s nuts!
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-07-30.
2026-07-30 06:01:02
What an incredible production. I was choking up at the end. Our friend Mike and his team should get an award for this.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-07-30.
2026-07-29 14:28:40
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-07-29.
