Back in 2022 I wrote a post about web engagement, and I included this throwaway line: SEO (an abbreviation I’ve long thought a red herring) More than a few people have since asked what I meant by that, so I thought I’d quickly elaborate. There’s a few parts to this, the most impo … | Continue reading

David Mills, inventor of Network Time Protocol, died this week aged 85. When I saw the news first at Ars Technica, I confess I had no idea who this person was and, while I was vaguely aware of the importance of synchronized clocks in computing, I had no full appreciation for the … | Continue reading

Have you checked out my tag archive recently? I wouldn’t; it’s a gigantic mess accumulated from nearly two decades of unstructured rambling. I’ve got a project this year to clean them up, which involves dropping ones that are only used on single posts, correcting spelling miatake … | Continue reading

You know my post last October about why we should use UTF-8 everywhere? Well, Clara and I cheat with Sasara.moe, our retro themed web server. I wanted these pages readable on our retrocomputers, so I deliver them over standard HTTP with ISO-8859-1. Problem is, my nginx reverse-pr … | Continue reading

Work launched a new data centre PoP in Brisbane late last year. Free hosting is a perk of the job, and one I definitely abuse (cough). As a thank you, I thought I’d take the opportunity to move my stuff up there as an eating one’s dog food exercise. My family and I lived up there … | Continue reading

A friend on Mastodon asked what RSS clients I use or recommend on Windows, though he was quick to point out I use Feedland on the web as well. My favourite used to be RSSOwl, and most recently it’s still being maintained as RSSOwlnix. It’s a Java application, which was never a pr … | Continue reading

A new year resolution for Clara and I was to review and cut our number of subscriptions. These recurring bills manage to slip by even with our weekly manual account reconciliations, so we can absolutely empathise with those who only take cursory looks at their accounts. It’s emba … | Continue reading

This was yet another thing I learned from VOGONS this week! The Internet Archive’s view_archive.php function can be used to inspect ISOs, the same way you’d look at any archive. asdf53 mentioned an old disk benchmark was available on an old ISO compilation, and linked to it: The … | Continue reading

TIL: The first ever .com domain Today I learned that the first .com internet domain registered on the internet was https://symbolics.com and belonged to Symbolics, a company that made Lisp machines. It doesn't relate to Lisp any more, of course. It's been sold to someone who "h … | Continue reading

Quote from the hideous movie ”Serendipity”. The hideous Christmas movie Serendipity, that I’m very sorry to have inflicted on both my wife and myself, was released in 2001. It preceded the current enshittification of the web by a couple of decades, and had a single high … | Continue reading

This is a bit Inside Baseball as my American friends would say, but it’s something that happened again that I’m posting about here, rather than responding to the person directly. Over Christmas I received a long email from someone containing an itemised list of introductory quest … | Continue reading

The awkward moment when you take pride in destroying civilian infrastructure and killing 21 thousand people, 70% of which are women and children pic.twitter.com/0EYA7U9ctQ — Double Down News (@DoubleDownNews) December 30, 2023 This post is reposted from a source I do not trust (D … | Continue reading

A post he wrote over Christmas: Nuclear physicists know they are dancing with the devil when they bring fissile material to criticality. They also know that the reaction can be controlled, that it must be, and that the means of control obey well-understood principles. Social site … | Continue reading

I only just noticed an email from Blogger earlier last month: Hi Ruben Schade, This email address has a legacy Blogger account associated with it that hasn’t logged in since 2007. In 60 days it will lose access to the account and associated content; the data will be permanently d … | Continue reading

2023 was the year I changed up how I organise email, so I thought it might be fun to do a bit of a nerdy discussion on how it went. For some context, I’ve been carrying the same Netscape, then Mozilla, then Thunderbird profile since I was in primary school in the late 1990s. It w … | Continue reading