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I was knocked out hard by something this week. It wasn’t a flu or COVID thankfully, but it turned my head to mush and my sinuses into fire ants, which among other things made sleep all but impossible. I did in fact do a bunch of work on the blog yesterday, but it was all backend plumbing stuff. It is interesting how different parts of the brain work, and how it recovers at different speeds? I tend to find my ability to write code (at least of the rote, boiler-plate kind) and tinker at a server console requires very different attention to writing. While I felt I was capable of doing the former yesterday (and even found it fun), I stared at the blinking cursor to write a post, and nothing happened. Brains! The highlight was getting confused when Vim inserted a tab into a YAML file, and an Ansible playbook wouldn’t fire. It’s trivial for me to spot now, but it genuinely stymied me on Wednesday. Anyway! My voice still sounds like Phoebe from that episode of Friends when she discovered she liked the timbre the illness gave her singing voice. That’s a 1990s reference! But I’ll take it :). Unrelated entirely to the reboot of which I only just discovered, but Clara and I are in a massive Bergerac obsession currently, which was also lovely to watch while recovering. It’s worth its own post, but who would have known a British TV series from 1980 would make us want to go to Jersey. We’ll tack it on after Warsaw, Riga, Lviv, and Cork! By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-04.
The Sound of Music and Tony Bennett might have been eager to sing about their favourite things. I’d like to start Monday by sharing with you two satisfying things. First, this long black coffee I’m drinking at a coffee shop now is lovely. It was a light roast with just the right amount of crema. I also love how the colour of the cup and saucer looks against the rustic woodgrain table at this coffee shop. On the theme of colour, I’d also like to share this satisfying stack of face towels we bought yesterday. They’re so perfectly interleaved, and both the colours and their ordering just tickle me. It almost seems a shame to use these; I almost want to keep them as they are. That concludes this post regarding a pair of satisfying things. Thank you. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-03-02.
I finally got around to watching Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech from January. Wow. This shouldn’t need to be said in the context of a politician, but I don’t agree with everything he said. For one, I thought his attempt to rebrand the curtailing of environmental protections as “improving interstate commerce” was a tad crass. Here comes the proverbial posterior prognostication: but… I do agree with the broad thrust (heavens) of his comments. We are living in a post-US world, and those of us living outside America need to be honest and come to terms with it. It resonated especially in Australia and New Zealand, because we’ve yet to hear anything said with such clarity and candour from our leaders outside the small parties. And because, truthfully, we see a lot of ourselves when we look at Canada. Australia and Canada are both federal parliamentary democracies with British colonial history, governors general, prime ministers, state premiers, and territories. We share a monarch, mostly the same language, sensible temperature scales, universal(ish) healthcare, and even our exports and GDPs look similar. We’re big countries with similarly small populations that have become cosmopolitan melting pots, most of which are clustered around a few large cities. We even have rubbish intercity trains! We also, for better or worse, spent much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries hitching our economic and military security to that of the United States. We share intelligence, we host military bases, we buy their military equipment, and as Mark Carney pointed out, we’ve pretended it’s been a mutually-beneficial arrangement. If or where that was true, it no longer is. The US is now, once again, chaired by a dim orange gas bag who thinks (well, “thinks”) he’s above the law, and might equals right. I’ve watched and read the same media claiming he may have dementia, or some other mental health issue that explains why he can’t form cohesive sentences or keep his attention for more than a few minutes. While it might be interesting in an academic sense, the outcome is the same as someone malicious. This is compounded by the incompetent US institutions that are supposed to act as a check and balance against an overzealous executive. For the rest of us, there are two outcomes: Being allied with the US is now, nakedly, a political liability. It threatens to make us look, in the words of the former Malaysian prime minister, “America’s sheriff” in the Pacific, if it hasn’t already. Placation is a losing strategy. Bullies and arseholes understand one thing: dripping sarcasm. Wait no, I meant to say pushback. The Australian Government need to drink some stiff maple syrup, stand before a camera, and say Mark Carney had a point. Maybe if enough of us tell that dipstick, he and his cackling cadre of sycophants will get the message. The current Australian administration have already done a decent job repairing our standing among our Pacific neighbours, but far more needs to be done. We need to build alliances around the world, so we’re not fighting this individually. In other words, we need to do what the rest of the world have already been doing for years. Also, an EU-style Australia/New Zealand/Canada agreement, let’s make it happen. We could call it CAN! The names for the bills in our respective parliaments write themselves. Canada can teach us how to curl and play hockey, and we can teach them how to make coffee and pavlova. We all win! Corrections: An earlier version of this post referred to the current US executive as a bloated “gasbag”. Technically this should be two words. I apologise for this over sight. Wait. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-02-02.
There are certain books within technical communities where even an indirect reference (a pointer, you could say) will conjure wonderful memories of first learning to program in anyone who hears it (these are distinct from Clojure memories). The Pickaxe Book. K&R. Chunky Bacon. You don’t need to mention the title, the year of release, the full name of the writers, the publisher, or anything else about it for people to know exactly what you’re talking about. So integral are they to the success of a language (or framework, or operating system), that it’s impossible to think of their subject matter without thinking of the book itself. They may have helped to popularise it, or introduced an entire generation to it. Oftentimes they’re written by the people who designed the language (or had a say in its development), which offers additional insight and wisdom into why as much as how. Remembering your “first” programming book is a deeply personal experience. A pile of paper and ink was the way so many of us learned to program. At the risk of getting philosophical, they helped to demystify this metal and silicon that ran other people’s ideas, into ones that ran our own. I can’t speak for everyone, but computers took on a whole new life when they were doing things that I had programmed them to do. It still feels a bit like magic, even now. (This experience of personal growth and learning from an expert are more ideas upon which gen-“AI” takes a massive shit. If you disagree, I hope your own soul searching bears fruit one day. But I digress). I quoted Eskild Hustvedt in November talking about his joy rediscovering Perl, and shared his memory of the same book that transformed my life and way of thinking, emphasis added: It’s not the same language I learned from the llama many years ago. It has improved immensely, while never losing any of the things that made it great in the first place. A few of you emailed and direct messaged to correct Eskild and I, because the seminal tome for Perl 5 was The Camel Book, known to the rest of the world as Programming Perl. They’re right. The Camel Book is up there with The Pickaxe and K&R for introducing a generation of system administrators and developers to the then-nascent Perl language. The wood cut graphic of a camel (long a mainstay of O’Reilly books) has found its way into broader Perl lore, becoming a mascot of the language as a whole. Some graphics like the Programming Republic of Perl use that exact artwork. The Camel Book is arguably the book for Perl, but it wasn’t ours. Eskild and I learned from the Llama Book, or Learning Perl, another O’Reilly classic that’s held in equally high regard, if not reverence: I’d had programming books before, and had taught myself enough Pascal, BASIC, Java, and Delphi to be dangerous. But the Llama Book was “my” programming book. It was the first I read cover to cover, absorbed, and referred back to. It was written in an approachable style that clicked in a way no book has in the same way before, or even since if I’m being honest (always a dangerous thing to be online). It wouldn’t be a stretch to say I’m a lifelong Perl writer because of this book. Actually, I just remembered Perl in a Nutshell too, another O’Reilly classic that was my introduction to DBI and CGI programming. I remember that one being among the most practical books I’d ever read. The urge to find these online and buy them again is strong. So many great feelings are tied up in their pages. Anyway, that’s the story of Learning Perl. When we say we learned from The Llama Book, that’s the tome to which we refer. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-12-03.
More in life
When you get a cold, the virus hijacks your cells and uses them to make copies of itself, destroying the cells in the process. The virus does not care about you. And yet, if you get a cold, your body doesn’t dissolve into a pile of virus-enriched goo as a result of all your cells disregarding survival to focus on virus manufacturing. Why? Well, you have an immune system. But also, if that did happen, other people would say, “Oh no, Alice has dissolved into a pile of virus-enriched goo; we should stay away lest we also become goo piles.” Better to just hijack some of your cells, so you can walk around and spread the virus to other people. Thus, the theory of optimal virulence says that a more laid-back cold virus will be more successful in the long run, which is why the cold viruses that thrive today are the non-goo-pile-converting kind. Anyway. Most people reading this have paid Apple $400-$1600 for a phone on which you can’t do anything without Apple’s permission and monitoring. That was a strange decision, but on Android phones you can run whatever you want. For example, I noticed a couple of months ago that all RSS apps were terrible, so I spent 15 long minutes having AI make me a non-terrible one. I copied the file to my phone, installed it, and entered RSS nirvana, no registration, no app store, no nothing. It seems ludicrous that I wouldn’t be able to do that. And yet, Google plans to change things. Soon, you won’t be able to run any app on an Android phone unless the person who made it bends the knee by paying a fee, giving Google their government ID, listing all apps they’ve ever made, etc. There will be an “escape hatch” for users to install other apps, but it involves secret menus and scary warnings and a 24-hour waiting period. Google says they’re doing this for security reasons, to prevent people from installing malware that does things like steal financial information. Three things that any credible analysis of this situation must acknowledge The security issue is real, and this change will help. Lots of people are in fact getting tricked into installing malware on their phones, and common sense says that this will accelerate with AI. Common sense also says that during that 24-hour waiting period, some of those people might wonder if it’s really normal for OfficialMicrosoftSupportProfessional021 to contact them on WhatsApp to send totally-safe-virus-scanner.apk. It would be convenient for lockdown opponents if the security issue was fake, but it isn’t. For 95% of people reading this, these restrictions would not be a big deal. You click a few buttons, wait 24 hours once, and then you have the same freedom you have now. That’s still far better than Apple phones where there is no process at all. Oddly, it’s also better than Apple computers, where installing programs from non-verified developers has all sorts of friction that can never be removed. Most people I know use Apple computers anyway and just tolerate the indignity. If Google cared about freedom or privacy, they could have achieved their security goals without as much harm to freedom or privacy. For example, instead instead of making themselves the sole arbiter, they could have allowed for multiple certifying entities, and could have allowed users to add others (perhaps after a 24-hour waiting period). Arguably, that would be more secure: That way, grandma could install my RSS app without leaving herself open to random malware. Or, Google could have used private on-device malware scanning, or lots of other things. Google didn’t do that because they don’t care about freedom and privacy and because they like money.1 I think that’s a fair summary. This change addresses a real issue, but it does so in a self-serving way that needlessly destroys freedom. Even so, it only destroys a bit of freedom. This change, by itself, isn’t really a huge deal. Reading between the lines, I think the real concern is what this might portend. Having made this change, maybe Google will gradually add further restrictions, slowly boiling the frog and moving ever-closer to an Apple-style dictatorship. But will they? Maybe! Still, this whole situation seems under-theorized. There are good reasons to think that a full lockdown would not be in Google’s interest. And if you care about digital freedom, you could argue that a full lockdown would be a good thing. Some other analogies Switching insurance sucks, so some insurers offer a low initial rate and then gradually raise it over time. But they don’t want to raise it too much. Maybe they can charge you $50 more per year than a competitor, because it’s not worth your time to switch to save $50. But if they tried to charge you $5000 more per year, you’d be gone. Or try this: Say it’s 1750 AD and you’re the King of France. You care nothing about your subjects and only want to extract the maximum possible loot for yourself, no offense Louis XV. How high should you set taxes? High, because you want loot. But not too high, because you don’t want your subjects to revolt and kill you. But still pretty high, because revolting is hard, and your subject know that even if they succeed, they might just end up with another ruler that’s just as rapacious as you. Or: Say you put a frog in a pot of water and slowly heat it up. What do you think actually happens? Back to phones Why are there no Linux phones? OK, technically there are Linux phones. There are various Linux phone operating systems (PureOS, postmarketOS, Mobian, Manjaro Mobile, Fedora Mobility, openSUSE Mobile) as well as sorta-Linux-sorta-Android operating systems (Ubtuntu touch, Droidian, FuriOS, Sailfish OS) and manufacturers who support them (Purism, Pine, Fairphone, Shift, FuriLabs, {J,V}olla). While I love and support these (♡), the general consensus is that they don’t currently offer an experience that’s remotely comparable to stock Android or iOS, especially for the price. (Even more technically, Android is itself a kind of Linux, but you know what I mean.) Obviously, the laws of physics do not forbid Linux phones from being just as good and cheap as an Android phone. They currently aren’t because: Making cheap phones requires huge economies of scale. Making a good operating system requires a huge amount of work. For a phone to be useful it needs good apps, which requires a huge amount of work. Linux phones don’t have those economies of scale because few people buy them. So, there isn’t enough money to pay people to perfect the operating systems, and most companies don’t bother making apps, and so few people buy those phones. Meanwhile, there are also various Android-except-de-Googled phone operating systems (LineageOS, GrapheneOS, /e/OS, CalyxOS), and the consensus is that these do come reasonably close to the experience of stock Android or iOS. Personally, I used Android for a long time while trying to disable as much of Google’s apps and telemetry as I could. A while ago, I got fed up with this and switched to Graphene, one of the most popular Android-except-de-Googled variants. I don’t enjoy tech support bullshit, so I expected some pain, but I was willing to tolerate it for freedom/privacy/whatever. In practice, I found that everything was easy and worked flawlessly and there was no pain at all. Using Graphene made me realize that I had forgotten what it feels like to be “respected” by technology. So, on a personal level, I recommend that you use Graphene. But this whole situation is full of weird tensions. For one thing, the Graphene project depends on Google for the base of their operating system, and only really survives because of Google’s tolerance. And, at the moment, the only way to use Graphene is to… buy a phone made by Google. And while I recommend you use Graphene, what I’d prefer you do is switch to a true Linux phone. That would mean that you pay a lot of money for a poor phone experience. But it would help grow the Linux phone ecosystem. If enough people did that, then Linux phones might become become good enough that selfish people like me would switch, further growing the Linux phone ecosystem, et cetera. That seems unlikely, because digital freedom weirdos face a collective action problem: Linux phones are bad and people are selfish, so we keep buying Android phones and Linux phones stay bad. There are two ways to solve that collective action problem. Either some entity could invest a ton of money to make Linux phones good, or some entity could do something to make Android worse. The status quo is good for Google You may already see the argument I’m making here. Currently Android is just open enough that weirdos like me can run a variant that gives us most of what we want. But doing that is annoying enough that 99.9% of people don’t. This gives Google almost all the benefits of full control, while also sucking up all the oxygen and preventing a real alternative from emerging. (Apple, incidentally, is laughing. They get to enjoy a full dictatorship while Google does all the hard work.) Suppose that in six months, Google decides to escalate the lockdown and completely removes the ability to run independent apps. What then? In the short-run, not much. Tech freedom weirdos would howl, normies wouldn’t notice, and the world would keep turning. But let’s look at some numbers. A rough estimate is that 3-5 million people currently use private de-Googled Android variants like Lineage or Graphene. That’s a crisp 0.1% of the global Android market. Meanwhile, it’s thought that 300-500 million people install Android apps outside the Google store. (That’s excluding China and things like the Samsung and Epic Games Stores.) The biggest reasons are (i) piracy, (ii) modified YouTube/Spotify/WhatsApp clients, (iii) region-locked games, (iv) forbidden gambling or crypto apps, (v) local sharing to save on mobile data, and (vi; least common) open-source app repositories like F-Droid. In an escalated lockdown, some of this might still be allowed, e.g. local sharing. And many people would simply accept the new restrictions. But I expect that a substantial number would suddenly become interested in de-Googled Android variants that don’t enforce the lockdown. That would be dangerous for Google: If a significant fraction of those 300-500 million people switched, there’s a risk of a vicious/virtuous cycle, where people tell their friends, manufacturers start to cater to those variants, and so on. If that happened, what would Google do? Might they clamp down on those Android variants, too? Again, maybe! Technically, Android is open-source, but if Google really wanted to kill Lineage or Graphene, there are about 200 different ways they could do that. So say they did. What would the people currently using those variants do? Again, many would simply submit. That’s good for Google. Others would decide that if they must have an overlord, they’d prefer Apple. That’s not good for Google, but probably not a huge problem given the numbers. But others would decide to look elsewhere, likely to true Linux phones. Currently, it’s estimated that less than 100 thousand people daily-drive true Linux phones, 30-50 times less than the number of people who use de-Googled Android variants. I’m too lazy and selfish to use a Linux phone now, but Google will take my RSS app from my cold dead hands, so in this scenario, I’d likely switch. If a fraction of people do that—or even get a second Linux phone—it would still represent a huge infusion of money and energy into the Linux phone ecosystem. If this pushed Linux phones from “bad” to “sort of OK”, that could kick off a growth cycle. Eventually, there would be a risk that Europe—eager to decouple from an unreliable US—might embrace them by mandating that government employees use them, or passing a law that popular apps must provide a web-app version that works on Linux phones, or whatever. Would that actually happen? I don’t know, but neither does Google. My point is that the downside risk of losing their phone duopoly seems vastly larger than the upside, so why risk it? The smart move is to crush alternative app stores and fight malicious apps while making the bare minimum concessions to keep the freedom and privacy people onside. That’s exactly what what Google appears to be doing. Of course, they might go for a full lockdown anyway. Corporations do dumb things all the time. But I really don’t see how it would be in their self-interest, and I’m not sure it would be a bad thing if they did. Dynomight: could google achieve the security aims of the android lockdown without so much harm to freedom or privacy Google Gemini 4: Yes. Security experts, privacy advocates, and open-source developers widely agree that Google’s primary security objectives—protecting users from malware, financial fraud, spyware, and social engineering—can be achieved through architectural containment, transparent auditing, and informed consent rather than centralized gatekeeping and surveillance. […] The reason Google chooses centralized lockdown over user-controlled security is largely economic and strategic, not technical: Ecosystem Lock-in: Tying security APIs (like Play Integrity) to Google Play Services makes it nearly impossible for competitors or open-source forks to build a viable alternative Android ecosystem that supports banking and media apps. Advertising Revenue: Features that dramatically improve both security and privacy—like a native network firewall, revocable internet permissions, or frictionless support for system-wide ad blockers—directly threaten Google’s primary revenue stream. Liability & Support Reduction: Treating all users as untrusted and removing root/power-user capabilities reduces the surface area of user error, even if it removes the user’s ownership of their own hardware. ↩
How my 2.5 year-old is training me to speak more confidently, or else.
But anticipated the rise of techno, disco, rap, and fusion before they even had names
