2025-12-29 06:57:36
Clara and I would like to replace our current Brother laser with a new printer setup. It’s served us dutifully over the last decade, and will be going to a good home where I’m sure they’ll be as impressed as we’ve been.
But our list of needs and wants has changed:
We want to be able to print double-sided. Technically we can achieve the same thing with the current unit by printing odd pages, then flipping them back into the paper try, and printing even pages. But life is too short.
We want to print colour. Monochrome lasers are the best for documents and travel stuff, but Clara especially would love to print more photos.
Something with an internal paper tray would be a bonus, to keep the desk uncluttered and to prevent dust ingress.
Faxes. Yes, the idea of publishing a fax number tickles me in an exceptionally silly way. It would also come in handy for the one time out of a million where I do need to send one. I’d also be known as “the guy” among family and friends who can send/receive faxes. The cachet. The prestige! Yes HN readers, that’s sarcasm. Or… is it!?
Our scanner is also on its last legs, having valiantly scanned thousands of pages of stuff during Covid lockdowns when we were desperately trying to get rid of stuff. I could repair it, or I could upgrade.
If only there was a common solution to all these problems.
Turns out… there isn’t. You need an inkjet if you want to print photos, and you need a laser if you want a laser for documents. I know, shocking. This means we’ll be looking at a minimum of two devices, barring some mythical hybrid printer that merges the two technologies.
But here’s the thing, one of them can be a multifunction device. I have fond memories of my HP multifunction printer/scanner/fax/copier I took with me to uni back in the day, before their print division became enshittified. I’ve also been impressed (unsurprisingly) with the Brother multifunction colour lasers at work. The conventional wisdom is that individual devices will always perform their job better than an all-in-one, but my personal experience runs contrary to this.
So the options are:
A multifunction monochrome laser printer, with a separate inkjet.
A multifunction inkjet, with a separate monochrome laser.
Both have their pros and cons. Standalone lasers tend to be smaller, so it’d save space compared to a dedicated inkjet. Integrating a colour scanner with a colour inkjet make sense for copying, but realistically we won’t be doing that. Having a separate inkjet could even perhaps allow us to get a larger one for A3 prints. But wait, didn’t I just say I’m concerned about space? 99% of the time we’d be printing black and white laser prints anyway, so we could get that first with all the integrated goodies, and get the inkjet later. If that paragraph sounded convoluted, welcome to how my brain works.
We agree with the Mastodon poll, and are leaning towards the first. We always had EPSON inkjets growing up, so many it’d be an opportunity to check in with what they’re doing.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-12-29.
2025-12-28 07:41:25
The pkgsrc developers are proud to announce pkgsrc-2025Q4, the 89th quarterly release of pkgsrc, the cross-platform packaging system. pkgsrc contains over 29,000 packages. More information on pkgsrc is available at https://www.pkgsrc.org/.
Since the last release (2025Q3), 112 packages were added, 2326 packages were updated (1472 distinct ones), 2 packages were downgraded, and 20 packages were removed.
The release announcement includes more detail, including updates to PostgreSQL, QEMU, and LXQt. Is it silly to admit that I’m also unreasonably happy to see CDE in these sorts of announcements as well?
A huge thank you to the team for putting this together again, and to all the tireless maintainers. You give me more optimism than I can express.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-12-28.
2025-12-28 06:48:33
Let’s check in on our current industry’s hottest trend, blockchain. The metaverse? NFTs? No, sorry, I’ll get it eventually.
These were some of the stories I’ve read this month.
I found this site (Wayback Machine link) while doing research into another post. Under a headline they included the following:
Disclaimer: Factually can make mistakes. Please verify important information or breaking news. Learn more.
I clicked learn more:
Factually is an AI-powered research tool/fact-checker. It searches the web for users’ queries and provides a balanced, neutral overview of existing coverage, analysing different angles and agendas
The name is “factually”, but facts aren’t guaranteed. Amazing!
I suspect a slopgineer would claim that human writers are no guarantee of facts either. You know you have a winning pitch when you say “use our trusted service, we’re no worse than a person!” I’d ask what the point is, but then I remember it’s money. Carry on.
Friend of the blog Michał Sapka defends AI in a post exploring the valuable uses of machine learning and AI that isn’t gen-“AI”.
I agree, and share in his frustration. But defending “AI” is now untenable. We’ve lost that term to marketers, grifters, and the general public. I was a part of the group that tried (valiantly, I might add) to preserve the term “crypto”. It now means speculative blockchain shenanigans, not cryptography.
Where do we go from here? Maybe we go back to describing useful tools as ML, though machine learning is also laden with a lot of hot air and empty promises. Remember when Big Data and ML on large data lakes were pitched as solving all the world’s problems? Data that was indiscriminately collected, and with dubious ethics and legality? Huh, I’m sensing a pattern here.
Jamie Zawinski shared a great post of his from three years ago.
This is why “AI” is always bullshit: once you understand it, it’s not AI any more, it’s something else.
Another friend of the blog Stefano Marinelli had the charge put forward that he writes his blog with “AI”:
I write technical articles on my blog. AIs show up in large numbers to read them, crawl them, learn from them. Time passes. I publish a new post.
And right on schedule, someone comments: “This was clearly written by an AI”.
It’s a bit silly if you take the time to read what he posted. He has his own writing style and communicates novel ideas. But then I suspect most people aren’t reading his posts, they’re using “summarising” tools (that only shorten, but I won’t get started again).
He takes the accusation in his stride; an attitude I strive to attain. I’ve only been accused of using AI to write this blog twice, but it’s among the worst (if still lazy) insults I’ve ever received. “That was a great meal you cooked for us, you must have got takeaway!”
☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎
That’s it for now. Have I said how much I’m looking forward to not having to think about this stuff again? Now that would be an Xmas present!
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-12-28.
2025-12-27 05:51:17
I had a meeting with a prospective client earlier this year that started with the regular small talk to break the ice. He mentioned he was relieved and happy to have finally bought a place, to which I said my partner and I also had. He asked what sort of house and where, and I said we’d bought an apartment.
As the words left my mouth… I braced for impact. Because as anyone who’s managed to buy a place knows, people have Opinions™ about it. But wait… what does that have to do with Haneda?
The Haneda Problem is a silly term I coined after Clara and I first went to Tōkyō. It describes the phenomena where you express having made a decision, and you receive unsolicited advice regarding the other viable alternative. It’s an unwinnable position, because you’re wrong irrespective of what you chose.
In the case of Japanese airports, the conversation usually cleaves into one of two outcomes:
You flew into Narita Airport? Why? Handea is way closer to the centre of town, and more convenient.
Or:
You flew into Haneda Airport? Why? Narita has cheaper flights, and faster express trains.
The easiest way to avoid The Haneda Problem is to introduce strategic ambiguity. We say we “flew into Tōkyō” instead of a specific airport, which lets the receiving party fill in the blank regarding which airport they prefer and consider logical. If they ask specifically (which a surprising number of people do), I say “oh, we flew to the right one”, which gives everyone a bit of a laugh and lets us avoid answering.
That gets us back to the conversation about apartments. Having mentioned that we just bought one, to someone who just bought a house, I was expecting the usual spiel. Something like this:
Ew, why would you buy an apartment? You’ll be sharing the space with neighbours, you’re beholden to body corporate, you’ll have to pay strata fees indefinitely, you can’t modify the space as easily, you don’t have a private yard. You should have bought a freestanding house, for the reasons I’m about to detail for you despite it being useless information given you already bought it.
But instead, The Haneda Problem was flipped on its head, emphasis added:
We bought a house because we wanted a yard and a bit more space. But I can see why you would buy an apartment too. You get to live closer to amenities and stations, your mortgage is way less for the same number of rooms, someone else does the maintenance for you, you get facilities, and you might get a nice view.
It’s a vanishingly rare turn of phrase, but wow is it a relief when I hear it. It also made me realise that the family and friends I spend the most time with are also, unsurprisingly, the kind of people who think like this.
As an aside, I now want to go back to Tōkyō (cough). Clara and I have plans to hopefully go further south next year, but we’ll see.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-12-27.
2025-12-27 05:04:08
I made a coffee this morning—no, really?!—and I realised something that’s so painfully obvious that I’m willing to endure the accusation that this was “AI” generated on account of the em dashes. I’m tired of always using brackets, damn it!
I have a refined process the mornings for making my balcony coffee, which involves grinding the beans to a specific size, boiling water, measuring both out down to the gram, steeping for a certain time, and drawing down. The delightful James Hoffman has been instrumental in improving my game here.
There are three key ways his advice has improved how I make coffee. First, is something that precedes the second. The taste has also been elevated. And lastly, it’s the consistency of brews that has seen the biggest improvement. It’s taken a lot of the guesswork and “eyeballing it” that I used to do, and given me a process whereby I can make something delicious in the morning to wake up to, even if I slept badly the night before. Not to toot my own horn, but our pour-overs are now either just as good, or maybe even slightly better, than some of the “batch brews” I have at local coffee shops.
Anyway, turns out, those recipes, ratios, and knowledge are also applicable for the cheaper stuff, not just lightly-roasted single origin Colombian beans of joy. Shocking, am I right!?
I have a few bags of Japanese UCC coffee that I get from one of the many Asian grocery stores in Chatswood and Rhodes, which are… okay, but are nostalgic in a specific way that makes me happy. And I’m not even drinking it on ANA! To make it this time, I:
Measured there was 10 g of ground coffee in one of the bags
I calculated about 160 g of water to maintain the same ratio as what I use for my Clever Coffee Dripper and V60, and poured it in. This was instead of, again, eye-balling it or guessing how much I’d need.
I also took the water off the boil slightly earlier, because the rule of thumb is to brew darker-roasted coffee less hot. We have a kettle with a temperature dial on our wish list, partly also so we can brew different teas at the right temperatures.
Just doing these three things made this basic, imported, darkly roasted UCC coffee taste significantly better than what I’d been able to make before. Again, it’s almost as though controlling and optimising variables makes a difference.
My Omake page has an expandable section under Coffee for Recipes if you’re interested.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-12-27.
2025-12-26 06:29:02
We have Christmas in summer down south here, but it was still a huge relief to have a cooler break after a week of very hot days. We even had a white one this year, on account of some very overcast weather. Does that count?
This was always the most important day of the year for us as kids, so this year my sister and brother-in-law made the trip up to our neck of the woods to exchange gifts and have fun. He’s also an exceptional cook, so the roast veggies may have been the best I’d ever had. They even let me beat them in Nintendo Sport Bowling which I thought was incredibly gracious.
We’d spent some time preparing the place for their arrival (including finally building some furniture that had been in the “too hard” pile for months), which lead me to feel like this was the first day where we’d truly moved into our new place as well. Only took a year!
Each year I tell all of you that I hope you had a good break, or that if its not your thing, that you had a good break from us. Christmas isn’t a religious festivity for most of us, just as I wasn’t Chinese when I celebrated Lunar New Year in Southeast Asia. But is a word with three letters. I’m sure I was going somewhere pithy with that.
Happy holidays. 🎄
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-12-26.
