2025-11-15 15:57:33
Earlier this month I eluded to being humbled by an offer to contribute to something meaningful. My first episode is now out, so I can now share that I’m one of the new co-hosts for BSD Now!
/etc/hosts - Time to update our /etc/hosts file…
I’ve mentioned BSD Now here many times, but for those unitiated, it’s a podcast where a revolving panel of hosts discuss BSD and related news. I’m taking over from Benedict Reuschling whom I had the pleasure of meeting a few times at various AsiaBSDCon events.
This episode was a bit of an interview between me and Jason Tubnor who hails just south of me here in Melbourne. It was a lot of fun talking about our shared experiences with BSD, how I got started, and why I use and prefer NetBSD and FreeBSD over almost anything else thesedays.
BSD Now comes out each week, and you’ll likely be hearing from me a couple of times a month. Check them out, and don’t forget to support the show as well if you can. Cheers!
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-11-15.
2025-11-15 13:45:27
I feel for Mozilla. Legitimately. They haven’t been having an easy go of it for years. None of their attempts to diversify their finances away from Google have panned out. They’ve bought services and shuttered them, rebranded, and replaced their management team multiple times. Actions speak louder than words, and their actions belie a lack of direction and purpose.
This is concerning for the health of the Web, given Mozilla write the only meaningful browser engine that competes with WebKit/Blink. But it also makes me sad on a personal level, because I was such a fan of their work, and a believer in the open Web and principles of choice and empowerment that they stood for. I wore the shirts, I spruiked them at events, I’ve blogged about them for twenty years. Heck, I’m one of the 5% of people on the Web who still uses Firefox as their daily driver, and still remembers the names Phoenix and Firebird.
This is why takes like this one from Anil Dash feel… off, emphasis his:
One of the top stories on Hacker News today was a post arguing that Mozilla shouldn’t accommodate any usage of AI in Firefox because (understandably) people were mad at Big AI companies for all the horrible things they’ve done to users and the internet and society. But I think people are ignoring the reality that *hundreds of millions of users* are using LLMs today, and they need to have tools from platforms that will look out for their interests.
“Hundreds of millions of users” out of… billions of Internet users? Who’s looking out for the interests of the majority who don’t use “AI”, or who actively don’t want to? Or to put it another way, why is Firefox configured to make it easy to opt in, but not to opt out?
As a reminder, this is what you have to do if you want to disable “AI” features in the current version of Firefox:
about:config
user_pref("browser.ml.enable", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.sidebar", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.menu", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page", false);
user_pref("extensions.ml.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled", false);
user_pref("pdfjs.enableAltTextModelDownload", false);
user_pref("pdfjs.enableGuessAltText", false);
To use the word people overseas think Australians say all the time but don’t: strewth! No, wait:
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.strewth", yeahnah);
I’d be willing to entertain Anil’s point if Firefox didn’t obfuscate these settings. But they do. This is hostile design, and it’s why Mozilla’s AI pivot has landed like a lead balloon among their supporters. Again, it’s not a good-faith choice if a person has to beware of the leopard. Someone in the valley will eventually figure out consent, but evidently not today.
∗ ∗ ∗
Mozilla used to be above this sort of behavior. It might be hard to believe for my younger readers, but Mozilla took on Internet Explorer that was just as entrenched as Chrome is now, and they kicked proverbial posterior! They did because they offered a better browser that respected the people who used it, and gave them agency in their browsing experience. This is why their latest moves feel so hostile.
Mozilla team: hand to heart, you can do it again. But it starts with not alienating your remaining evangelists; the people who actively choose and recommend you over alternatives. If you think switching costs for new people are high, wait till you hear about how difficult it is once they’ve churned.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-11-15.
2025-11-14 20:14:26
I mentioned on Mastodon recently that our second-hand Aruba access point had the option of using Power Over Ethernet. We use this extensively at work, but I’ve never had a pressing need for it at home. Still, I thought it might be fun to try PoE out for the homelab, in lieu of getting a power brick for this Aruba.
I still hear The Beach Boys in my head whenever I say Aruba.
I went to eBay to search for local second-hand units, and found a 16-port Netgear device in Sydney that had PoE. This would work out great, because I also needed a switch with a lot of ports for the study anyway. This switch could do double duty.
It arrived well packaged and… without a power brick. I shook the empty postage satchel expecting a heavy extra component to fall out, but nothing. Who knows, maybe I was hoping the satchel was a Tardis or something.
I stood there dumbfounded. A power over Ethernet switch was sold and delivered without a means of powering it. Amazing! Worse, power bricks with its odd voltage and current requirements were twice as expensive than the switch was. Whatever cost benefit was gained from buying second hand evaporated in a puff of dropped Ethernet frames.
It does raise an important life lesson: it’s not included if it’s not listed. It doesn’t matter if every other item the person sells carries a warning that “power supply not included”, and this one didn’t. It doesn’t matter if the photo shows the device powered up. It doesn’t matter if its listed as being “fully functional”. I expect that I’ll raise this with the seller, and I’ll be told in no uncertain terms that the listing didn’t mention it included a power supply, or functional LEDs, or a real fuse in lieu of a solder blob.
Personally, I think it’s poor form to sell an electronic device without an integral component. It’s one thing to say secondary components aren’t included, but sending a powered Ethernet switch without a power supply renders it functionally deficient. In this case, the seller should have been transparent that the switch didn’t include a power supply in the listing.
We’re always told caveat emptor, but sellers should be bound by a reasonable degree of caution as well.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-11-14.
2025-11-13 11:18:32
This is one of those things you’d think kids would be taught alongside using restrooms and not belching loudly in public, but it still surprises me how often this basic rule of life is willfully ignored by people who should know better.
A bubble tea store in our neighbourhood recently ran a promotion where you could claim a free ice cream if you installed their mobile app (presumably a loyalty programme). I’ve seen people point to the poor workers of this tea shop and demand their free ice cream on several occasions; not “how do I redeem this” but “gimme my free ice cream”. When it was explained they needed to install a mobile app, as the sign clearly stated, they would get angry. One guy called the worker a “little bastard” (with racist undertones) and stormed off in a huff, and another woman wouldn’t let the worker finish explaining the steps to install the app before she’d get angry and say the promotion was a scam.
In another example, I was at a certain coffee shop again when a takeaway customer demanded to know why her sandwich was toasted. The worker, showing an enviable amount of self restraint, asked why she was confused that her toasted sandwich was toasted. The customer continued complaining, after which the worker asked to point to what she ordered on the menu. The customer pointed to the toasted sandwich, and the worker explained that toasted sandwiches are toasted. The customer, seemingly realising they were the ones who fucked up, began a tirade about how not all sandwiches should be toasted, and left in a huff.
We’re all dealing with life as best we can, but there’s no room for a lack of respect… especially if the retail staff are even trying to help you. If you don’t like how thing are being handled, you respond like an adult not a petulant child.
I know I know, nobody who needs to hear this is reading my blog. But sometimes it really gets to me. I guess the silver lining is that when you do treat people well, sometimes they give you a treat just to spite the rude person who came before… not that I’d know anything about that. As an aside, Mixue ice cream is pretty great (cough).
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-11-13.
2025-11-12 17:38:17
This was from the Brewhaha Cafe in Hornsby, in northern Sydney. Wow that was good!
When I switched to black coffee in my twenties, I settled on Americanos in Singapore, and long blacks in Australia. But I’ve come around to espressos and double espressos again recently when we go to coffee shops. We can make great brewed coffee at home, but we don’t have an espresso machine, so why not let the pros make it?
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-11-12.
2025-11-12 17:28:44
NetBSD is one of my favourite operating systems. It runs on almost everything, and skills learned on one architecture are largely transferable. Between that and its modest system requirements (at least when compared to a modern Linux distro) mean I’ve only ever run it on older kit, whether it be a ten-year old ThinkPad, or a 486.
My post yesterday about the incredible SilverStone FLP02 retro-inspired case included this throwaway line at the end:
Right now I can’t decide whether to turn this into my primary workstation, or move my FreeBSD jail and bhyve host into it, or my Alpine Xen box, or live out my dream of building a new NetBSD NVMM test host so I can finally retire the HP Microserver.
This lead me to think… what would a new NetBSD machine look like? Well, new by my standards means “second hand, and released within the last few years”, but you get my point.
I’m thinking something like this:
A new(ish) Ryzen CPU with SVM and a decent core count for running NVMM-accelerated guests, emulated QEMU guests (cough Alpha, cough SPARC), and my various chroot’ed services. Aaah that would be so cool.
ECC memory would be a plus.
Integrated graphics, probably. The proprietary (sigh) Nvidia graphics work easier on FreeBSD than Linux, but we don’t have that on the orange flag side of the fence. I wouldn’t be running games on this anyway, except for the important text-based ones.
NVMe for boot and primary storage with lvm and cgd, and maybe a pair of 2.5-inch SSDs for scratch. I’ve never actually messed with RAIDframe, but I want to give it a try. I’m also not sure what the state of ZFS is on NetBSD, but could be another thing to mess with.
A nice, supported discrete sound card like an Audigy Fx, for no other reason than I miss having discrete sound cards.
A supported 10 GbE (or at least a 2.5 GbE) NIC for testing/tuning, though I’d be unlikely to max this out.
My HP Microserver Gen8 box has been a faithful NetBSD tinkering box for almost ten years now, but even that was kinda old when I first got it. I’m intrigued to see what running NetBSD on newer hardware would be like in 2025.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-11-12.
