I was in a waiting room last week when I saw a highlight reel play on breakfast TV of Chinese American skater Eileen Gu at the Milano Cortina Olympics. Wow, she was spectacular!
She also chose to compete for the PRC, instead of her birth country of the United States. Her mother is Chinese, so it sounds reasonable to me. But it’s also been a point of contention for certain people.
The thing is, her circumstances are hardly unique, and are only becoming more common. Millions of people live outside the birth countries, were born into mixed families, or grew up as third culture kids. Heck, I was all three, and now I’m marrying into a Cantonese family, so that’s strike four! Countries are a bit of an anachronism to us; an arbitrary system of invisible borders to be worked around.
My gymnastics days are long over, but it makes me wonder who I’d have “represented” if I’d kept up with it and gone professional (as remote and unlikely as that would have been)! I’d probably say Singapore. I was born in Australia (to a German father), but I spent most of my formative years, and nearly all my school life, in the Little Red Dot. Same if I were being fitted for an astronaut suit, or garb for a multinational construction project. Heck, I only lived in Malaysia for a couple of years but that country and its people really rubbed off on me too.
Thesedays, I’d want both a Singaporean and Australian patch, either separate ones or integrated somehow. Or maybe a stylised image of that Earthrise. We are one, but we are many, and all that. 🌏
Whenever a beautiful bird is the Featured Picture on the English Wikipedia, I feel compelled to share it. This is the masked trogon, photographed Charles J. Sharp:
The masked trogon (Trogon personatus) is a species of bird in the family Trogonidae, the trogons. Fairly common in humid highland forests in South America, mainly in the Andes and on tepuis, it is resident in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru and Venezuela.
That’s some of the most intricate and stunning plumage I’ve ever seen. Uh oh, I’m giving away that I’d also be a bird watcher if I didn’t already have a million other hobbies.
Or: promoting what I’ve used for years to be my primary machine.
Computers are tools
Computers are tools for most people. They’re means to an end; a way to Get Things Done. It was true when accountants were listening to Genesis while entering numbers into VisiCalc on their Apple II, and when an author used WordPerfect on their XT clone to write a manuscript. Today, people get much of their lives done on these machines, and occasionally vendors even make this easier for people.
I use computers to Get Things Done. I also happen to have made a career out of doing so. I flip bits on a screen, explain to clients how they can flip bits on a screen, and architect systems that facilitate the flipping of screen bits for others. Turns out we’re in the midst of another bubble where a lot of people think flipping bits in a profoundly less efficient and more destructive way is somehow an improvement or inevitable; but then, that’s why people like me exist to explain otherwise. It’s thankless work, but someone has to do it :).
I also happen to be an enthusiast. Computers aren’t just a means to an end for me; they’re fascinating pieces of engineering in their own right. They’re fun to explore, tinker with, build, program, fix, and learn how they work. They’ve brought me joy since I first walked past that glowing DOS prompt on a CRT in my dad’s study. I dedicate a not insignificant amount of my personal life learning about the history of these machines, and advocate for alternatives that make the world better, not worse. I’m a hopeless optimist, despite how my words may sometimes read here.
Just as a motorhead has their “daily driver” and their weekend special, so too do I have a personal machine that’s decoupled from work obligations. Well, almost, I still use personal machines as a way to Get Things Done. But I can justify experimenting with personal kit in a way I can’t on a “prod” laptop that has to present a Visio diagram to a client at their office at 09:00 on their dodgy HDMI projector, without fail.
My personal machines
My personal machines has been Apple laptops since I entered high school. I started with a PowerPC iBook G3, then a few MacBook Pros and Airs. Mac OS X was a pleasant graphical environment for Getting Things Done, but also had the UNIX underpinnings that made tinkering with an ever-expanding world of open source software easy. It wouldn’t be a stretch to give Mac OS X partial credit for getting me into BSD, and Terminal.app was my primary gateway to remote FreeBSD, NetBSD, illumos, and Linux servers for many years.
But in the words of moral philosopher Eagle-Eye Cherry on his 2000 album Living in the Present Future:
Are you still having fun?
Turns out, no, I’m increasingly not. I’ve had my reservations about Apple software for a few years now (and I’m hardly alone in this regard), but Liquid (Gl)ass was the final straw. If I’m not having fun on my personal machine, I don’t see the point.
Alongside my Macs, I’ve always had a second-hand ThinkPad of some sort for further tinkering. This started with my dad’s old 600E from work, then expanded with a steady march of X and E series kit; whatever I could get for cheap at the time. An X230 was my most recent addition, which I use as a distraction-free writing environment with my beloved NetBSD. They’re the sorts of machines I’m happy to mess with.
People joke ThinkPad fans are part of a cult. I can’t speak to that, but I’ve always been a fan of the hardware. I love the understated design language, even if it has evolved over time. The keyboards have always been such a joy to type on. The TrackPoint is the best pointing device ever devised. Many of them can still be easily opened up, cleaned, tinkered with, and upgraded.
My personal MacBook Air is more than five years old now, and starting to have issues. So I figured now was as good a time as any to promote those “side” machines to centre stage.
The ThinkPad E14 Gen 7
Researching which ThinkPad to get was way more fun than it should have been. Apple hardware is easy: click either an Air or a Pro, and you’re done. Lenovo (ne. IBM) segments their laptops into a complex (and at times overlapping) ranges of devices, from the E and L-series on the low end, the “canonical ThinkPad” T-series in the middle, and the high end P-series workstations and svelte X1 Carbons. Each come with their own pros and cons, which can all be put into a spreadsheet along with the multitude of upgrade options, features, and pricing.
I’d only bought whatever was available second hand before, so to build a matrix for researching a new device made this data nerd unreasonably happy. Perhaps don’t read too much into that.
I originally narrowed down my choices to three machines: the X1 Carbon Gen 13 for its featherweight form factor, the T14s for its expandability and robustness, and the E14 Gen 7 for its features and price. In the end, the E14’s screen won out, and I put the order in for a new ThinkPad for the first time.
Choosing the E14 may come as a surprise, especially for ThinkPad aficionados. Lenovo have offered HiDPI options for a few years now, but almost all have since been replaced with OLEDs with PWM, which render them unusable for people like me. Ironically enough, being the budget option means the E14 still offers HiDPI IPS on their 14-inch models. I’ve seen the company’s HiDPI IPS panels featured in retail stores, and it looked just as good to my eyes as my MacBook Air sat next to it.
I used the money I saved to bump the CPU up to the mid-tier Lunar Lake offering with Arc, and maxed out to 32 GiB of memory and 1 TB of storage for surprisingly little extra. I expect these prices to only climb with the current shortages. I also got their Essential 13-14-inch Slim Topload (Eco) bag in the bundle for less than the price of lunch. I’m a massive nerd and secretly loved these business style bags.
For now the plan is to probably throw Fedora on it, as this machine also needs to be used to Get Things Done. But eventually I’d love to dual-boot it with FreeBSD and/or NetBSD as well, once the hardware support becomes available.
This is the first non-retrocomputer I’ve been excited for in a long time. Feels weird!
My tongue-in-cheek post about not needing a 3D printer got me thinking of other things I definitely don’t need.
An all-flash homelab server. Goodbye seek times, massive inflow current on power up, and large, heavy cases! But I also have those aforementioned hard drives and they work just fine with the appropriate ZFS tuning and an SSD L2ARC.
A jar of flags. Clara and I started collecting those little flags you get from tourist trap shops in places we visit, but it’s currently incomplete.
A flat burr coffee grinder. I love my Baratza ESP, but I’ve heard enough people say that flat burrs offer a “cleaner” taste that I want to try them. The devices equipped with such burrs are sufficiently expensive that I haven’t even bothered to investigate.
A server rack. I definitely don’t need one of these, because none of my homelab servers or prod family machines are rack mountable; especially since SilverStone made me buy these incredible towers. But it’d still be nice, especially for network kit.
An LTO drive of some sort. We’d barely have enough data to fill a few tapes, even at LTO7.
An IKEA lamp in the shape of a doughnut. It’s delightful, and I’d have absolutely no use for it.
A large café picture for our balcony nook. My late mum painted a mural for one of the places we lived in Malaysia for a local family balcony “café”, where we’d hang out. That picture is long gone (sadly), but another massive one for our new little balcony would be fun.
An external ThinkPad keyboard. I like my linear switches and thocky Topré boards, but sometimes I long for that ThinkPad experience on the desktop.
A Panasonic bread maker. Not least because I’m trying to eat fewer carb-heavy foods, and because I bake with my hands anyway. But still.
It’s a good thing I’m definitely not interested in any of this stuff.
Left on their own, my parents may be seeing ads popping up constantly in OneUI, as well as browsing the web without an adblocker, they would be using default applications that don’t work as reliably, that track whatever they do to a certain degree.
And of course, all of those AI assistants would be listening in in the background. It really is a nightmare out there, and it’s not only affecting my parents, it affects all of those unaware of the dangers that these practices bring. It’s a mess all around.
I’ll bet you’ve had a similar experience, if you’re the kind of person who reads blogs like ours. There’s a reason why holiday periods each yeah become de facto tech support workshops for our families.
At the risk of sounding cynical, it does feel increasingly like tech companies are taking advantage of that knowledge gap. You shouldn’t have to spend your life working in IT, or have a hobby tinkering with such tools, to have a private and secure experience with a new device. Everyone deserves this.
Fresh from having my latest tetanus shot (cough), I walked past a pile of stuff by the side of the road for a designated council bulk rubbish pick up. I didn’t think much of it, but then I noticed a black PC tower between a pile of books and an old chair, which naturally I had to bring back.
I didn’t think to take a picture of the tower before I removed all the components and took it downstairs to the ewaste pile, but inside I was able to extract a near immaculate 550 W power supply, an Asus DVD writer, some screws, and a few ports, switches, and LEDs.
I haven’t had a chance to test yet, but they’re on the Retro Corner :).
We deform the world according to our expectations. When this happens, we call it a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. The world is more deeply filled with self-fulfilling prophecies than we recognize, so we should be very careful about our ‘prophecies’, lest they crowd out visions of the future we want.
The future is less certain than we realize, and a wise course of action involves acknowledging both our uncertainty but also the way that narrative power can shape outcomes. Be wary the oracle bearing the message that their technology is inevitable.
Today was a hard day for $reasons, so it was a tremendous joy to receive a notification from the local Australia Post parcel locker that my latest shipment from Ukraine arrived! I braved the midday Sydney summer sun, walked down to the post office, and scanned the QR code to pop open the appropriate locker.
I reached inside, and retrieved a well packaged cardboard box covered in a printed invoice with a mixture of Ukrainian and English. The shipping label said it was from Lviv, from where I’ve never received items before. Not having a Ukrainian croissant handy, I opted for a celebratory espresso, then took the parcel home to unwrap.
Does this count as an “unboxing” post?
Taking off the bubble wrap and anti-static bag, and we’re left with the board itself:
And here it is with all the other amassed parts so far.
Normally I have no trouble filling a post with meandering silliness, but I’ll admit to being at a loss for words here. I almost can’t believe this is real.
In one sense I’ve been waiting two weeks for this board to arrive. In another, I’ve been waiting almost a year since my search began for this board in earnest. And in a final way, I’ve been waiting since I was a kid in 1998, when the family ewasted the family PC, and I never saw the first computer I ever used ever again.
The board is missing many components, which are also in transit. It also has a bit of that telltale battery damage, though hopefully it’s just superficial. There’s no guarantee this will even start. But at least I now have a base from which I can work.
John Pizzarelli is one of my all-time favourites, and his latest album Dear Mr. Bennett will be out in March. The first video for it just dropped, and I’m stoked!
Picture the scene. I was sitting at a coffee shop yesterday remotely troubleshooting a server—like a gentleman—when I heard the telltale sound of air brakes and a rattling bus. My fight or flight mode activated, requiring me to look up to ascertain the threat. You can never be sure with Sydney bus drivers, you see.
That bus got me good. Well, specifically the advertisers. As I glanced up and saw it flying down the street (metaphorically, thankfully), I witnessed a large advertisement plastered along the side of the chassis, and much of the window. Alongside a photo of a cassette read the tagline: “if you used these, it’s time to get retirement ready”. Then the bus ran a yellow light and sped into the distance; again, as they are want to do.
This sent the gears whirring my head. Set them in motion. Made me think, and so on. What did they mean that if one “used” cassettes, it was time to get “retirement ready”. What does any of that mean?
I was first struck by how silly such an ad was. The effectiveness of advertising is measured based on impressions, but most importantly on conversions. I had no idea who the ad was for, and I tend to actively purchase from brands that don’t cover the windows of buses as a matter of principle, so from that aspect it failed. I’m also not sure how many people are actively purchasing financial advice based on posters on the side of a bus; this isn’t a laundry detergent or lip balm or something. Financial advice strikes me as the sort of thing one would either research properly given the dramatic and long-term implications of getting it wrong… or they don’t care and let their company handle it.
If we’re to assume their newspeak “retirement ready” meant “preparing for one’s retirement”, then I suppose the implication was that if you’re old enough to use cassettes, you must therefore be of a sufficiently ripe age to get “ready” for retirement. That doesn’t make much sense. The best time to save for your retirement is when you’re young, so Einstein’s Ninth Wonder of the World can kick in for longer. Aka, compound interest. It strikes me that if you’re getting “retirement ready” just before you retire, you’ve missed the boat.
But okay, let’s be charitable and assume they only meant the youngest possible cohort of people who used cassettes, and therefore need to start thinking about retirement. I guess that’s Gen X and older Millennials? The problem is even that characterisation misses the mark. Physical media sales are picking up. We’re actually at a fascinating cultural moment here where more people, and especially younger people, are buying physical media to disconnect. They also offer a physical anchor to something, which makes it feel tangible and real. BTS literally released a cassette in 2021, and they’re hardly alone. I wrote about this in more detail a couple of years ago.
The most charitable read of this ad was that they know this cultural shift, and therefore the ad is a subtle ploy to get everyone thinking about retirement. I… very much doubt this. But even if this were the case, it wouldn’t hurt to have a memorable slogan one can tie back specifically to a company as well, otherwise you’ve raised as much awareness for your competitors as well.
I feel like I probably thought about this ad more than they did. Touché.
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