• I published this post.

Thank you.

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-05-01.

Auntea Jenny is a bubble/boba tea chain that first opened in Shanghai, and has recently been expanding internationally. According to Wikipedia, they’re open in London, New York City, and Kuala Lumpur… and now Sydney :).

It proved difficult to take pictures in the packed store to demonstrate, but the whole place is done out in this stunning art deco design, right down to the titular character who serves her namesake beverage. It’s bright, airy, cheerful, and yet has that classic 1940s appeal. The patterns on the tables, walls, and floors look like they’re right out of my beloved Chrysler Building lobby in NYC, or a lounge on the SS Normandie. If there’s an award given out to retailers in Australia, I nominate this one.

The menu was extensive, because of course it was, but my own hat nearly flew away with surprise when I saw Da Hong Pao listed. This is a rarer oolong tea from China that’s exquisite, even if you’re weird and don’t like oolong tea generally. It has a subtle, almost sweet flavour by itself. My late mum and I used to get it from a hole-in-the-wall tea shop in—surprising nobody—Chinatown in Singapore. We even brought some home a couple of times, but we could never make it as well as the store. I expect it has stringent temperature requirements.

I ordered one hot, and Clara got one cold (both without sugar), and it was just as sublime as I remember; not bad for a mass-market tea store. It might be my single favourite tea I’ve ever ordered from one of these places.

I’ve walked past at other times of the day when it isn’t so packed, and even noticed people on laptops having tea. I’ve done this at coffee shops, but the idea of chilling in the early afternoon with a hot brew in autumn sounds mighty civilised. I might need to try.

Anyway, Auntea Jenny! I still have a soft spot for Mixue, but it might be my new favourite Chinese boba shop. I came for the design, and stayed for the drinks. I’d better remember to bring my reusable boba glass.

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-05-01.

Before testing though, a few of you asked for a better comparison between the longboard and newer shortboard variants of the Commodore 64 motherboard. Here’s a (slighly!) better top-down view with my “new” longboard above, and the newer 252311 below:

The case of the Commodore 64C might be playing a visual trick here, but both boards are the same length, and have ports in the same places. Generally the longboards were found in the classic breadbin cases, and the shortboards in the later wedge-shaped 64C, but there was also a degree of overlap. Note that the 64C case in the photo above has unused mounting holes for the larger board. This was the same with the later breadbins as well (such as the “Aldi 64 and 64G), with mounting holes for both motherboard type.

As I mentioned in that first post, what makes this final longboard so intriguing to me was its consolidated RAM chips. The original Commodore 64, and every motherboard variant prior to this longboard, included eight 4164 8 KiB RAM chips, similar to those used in the Amstrad CPC line. The 250466, and the later shortboards, used only two 41464 32 KiB RAM chips, thanks to the steady march of Moore’s Law. While the later shortboard would capitalise on this space saving, the 250466 includes a large gap where the original memory ICs would have been.

This gets me to the first interesting observation for this specific post: all the ICs on this board have a very narrow range of date codes. ICs of the era include a four digit number in the form of WWYY or YYWW, where YY is the year, and WW is the week number of manufacture. I originally misread the copyright on the ROM chips and assumed they were original 1982 stock, but no, all the ICs were made between the 33rd and 44th week of 1986. The PLA, SID, RAM chips, and the second (but not the first!) CIA controller are socketed, and the rest are soldered to the board. This is the view of the top-left:

You can never be completely sure of Commodore board history, given the company was legendary for swapping and using whatever components were available during manufacture. I’ve read that Commodore would even partially assemble boards, then put them to the side while they waited for the remaining components to come back into stock. But the narrow date range, and the number of chips not in sockets, suggests that many (if not all) the ICs on this board are original and not replacements. The back of the board also doesn’t have the telltale signs of rework, indicating chips that aren’t in sockets were placed there at the factory.

I gave the board a bit more of a clean with some IPA, then connected my modern power supply, display cable, and RetroTINK. I was hoping it’d work, though my experience with receiving and sending 8-bit machines in the post suggests even functional machines often arrive with problems. They’re more like us than I first thought (cough).

I… yay! The 5 V line on the cassette port is registering a 4.82 which is lower than my 64C, but the machine otherwise appears fully functional. The lack of contrast is down to my camera; in person it’s clear and sharp. Even with the default Commodore RF can installed, I’m frankly shocked at the quality of the VIC-II on this board. The “jailbar” effect is far less pronounced than either the PAL or NTSC longboards I’ve seen people repair on YouTube.

I’m chuffed! In the next post, we’ll put this into the Aldi 64 case, and fire up some proper software.

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-30.

FOAF was a machine-readable RDF schema that let you define your “social graph”, aka the people in your life with whom you have connections. Think family, friends, partners, colleagues, idols, and the like. You would publish your FOAF linking to people, they would publish theirs with links back to you, and presto, the Semantic Web would take care of the rest. It was open, distributed, and not beholden to any one social network or site.

Being XML, FOAF was also infinitely flexible. You could define links to other profiles, details about your interests, the area where you live, and whatever contact information you felt comfortable sharing. Want to encode something else? No worries, just import a new namespace.

The FOAF specification is still online at the time of writing this post, and I still publish my own FOAF profile. Anyone can still create a new FOAF file, upload it to their server, and define themselves and their relationships. There’s no centralised authority from whom you have to seek permission, and no specific service to which you have to upload.

Living in good intentions

So why didn’t FOAF take off, at least among a critical mass of the general public (assuming that was the intention)? I don’t know for sure—I expect nobody does—but I have theories based on seeing how other formats, tools, and software have been used (or not) over the years.

In short, I think it came down to the lack of a “killer app”. FOAF specified the data format, but not an interactive presentation layer that would have made it ubiquitous and convenient. At the same time, commercial social networks were successfully convincing people that they could take care of the plumbing while you focus on what you care about: viewing ads that are relevant to you. Oh yeah, and talking with your friends.

I don’t think the design of FOAF was faulty, it was just the project itself was too limited in scope. RSS wasn’t (only) successful because it was an open format for data exchange, it was also seamlessly built into browsers, blog software, and podcast clients. It was the essential and required glue that made everything work, but its worth remembering that without surfaces upon which to adhere, it would have never left the tube. That was a weird metaphor even by my standards.

Et tu, human.json?

This brings me to human.json, the latest in a string of attempts at a similar idea. human.json doesn’t seek to replicate an entire social graph, but rather to vouch for people being… well, people. This has taken on new urgency and importance during our brave, wondrous era of generative “AI”, where entire blogs and sites can be slopped into existence after their models pilfered our data and had us pay the bandwidth costs for the privilege.

The use of JSON aside (I know, I know, I should just resign myself!), I’m not against the idea in principle. A few of you have emailed and DM’d telling me you’ve added me to your human.json files which is rather touching :). I may even create one as well.

But this wouldn’t be a Rubenerd post if I didn’t overthink things, and I can already see where human.json may run into the same problems that FOAF and similar efforts faced. Being a specification without a compelling interface will limit its accessibility and appeal to those technical enough to understand, write, and publish JSON; at least initially. Much like those Written By Humans buttons, human.json files would also be trivial for “AI”-generated sites to fake, and would also inadvertently signal that the site is a high-quality source of entropy for scrapers. Hey, maybe these will cancel each other out!

Occasionally I do still see a FOAF file, and a humans.txt file, and a page with Microformat attributes, and they make me smile. human.json isn’t perfect, but then, neither were those other formats. Anything that helps communicate a human-centric web is a win.

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-30.

Peri Fractic and his relaunched Commodore team has just announced an Utimate Commodore 64C, and it even uses the same moulds as the original! It will come in RGB and Gold versions like the relaunched breadbins, along with this faithful FPGA-based reproduction of the original that feels too good to be true. Yes I know it’s only a render for now, but just look at this beautiful thing!

Forgive me for this disjointed post, but let me take a step back for a moment. I’ve had a draft saved for months now where I attempt to express the joy I felt when Peri and his team were able to purchase the Commodore brand, and apply it officially to their new kit. His videos on the topic felt like history in the making, and a slight but meaningful correction in a timeline that has felt like it’s been skidding off the rails for years. But every time I approached that draft, I never felt like I was doing the topic justice.

Huh, I’ve now written more here than I did in that original post, and I didn’t even do any planning for it. There’s probably something to that.

“The future we were promised”

Last July I wrote about how sorely I missed being optimistic about technology. Much of that post talked about the joy and excitement I felt as a kid for all the wondrous things we could build, problems we could solve, and art we could create with technology, and how I wanted nothing else as a kid than to be a part of making that happen. I’d read computer and science magazines and would feel heady about the possibilities. Everyone has their calling in life, and I’d found mine at the age of 5.

A big part of Peri’s pitch for the relaunched Commodore was for “the future we were promised” which… if you’ll let me be a sentimental fool for a moment, resonated hard. I choked up. Someone gets it. Someone fscking gets it.

The funny thing is, I didn’t grow up with Commodore kit. I was born too late to have used them in their heyday, so I can’t speak about childhood wonder looking at sprites and hearing that stunning SID music chirping through a set of speakers. Our first family machine was a basic 486 SX clone, and a well-worn Apple IIe at school was my first and only foray into the world of 8-bit machines. My childhood nostalgia trips are back to the DOS port of Lemmings, Commander Keen, SimCity 2000, Carmen Sandiego, and SkiFree.

It wasn’t until I fell hard for digital history in late high school in the 2000s that I began learning about home and microcomputers of the 1980s, and this mysterious Commodore brand that no longer existed (at least, not meaningfully). My first C64, C16, Plus/4, datasette, and 1541 disk drive came in a bundle from eBay when I turned 18, back when people were flogging off old computers for peanuts because they were “old” and “nobody would want them”. It’s humbling to think I’ve likely had them for longer than their original owners.

There was… something about those machines though. For someone who considered an 80-column MS-DOS screen with VGA colour to be antiquated and old fashioned, the 40-columns on those Commodores felt practically prehistoric. What kinda chip you got in there, a Dorito!? If you got that reference, you’re an older millennial too, and my kind of people.

I’ve talked here before how I oddly gravitated to the Commodore 16 of all of them; the much-maligned member of the 264/TED line. Maybe it was its superior colour palette and better BASIC. I certainly didn’t have any software for it, so I only ever experimented and tinkered. It wasn’t until years later that I began to understand the Commodore 64’s unique hardware capabilities, and what made it such a special piece of history. Even my recent acquisition of an Apple //e Platinum, as much as I adore the platform, has given me a renewed appreciation for what the C64 was able to achieve at the time.

Back to the Commodore 64C

Hey, remember when this post was about the Commodore 64C Ultimate, that FPGA-based reproduction that’s compatibile with almost all the original software and peripherals, and uses the same moulds, and looks almost exactly the same?

Well see, here’s the thing. Having not grown up with these machines, the breadbin of the original Commodore 64 didn’t imprint on me as it did so many of my Gen X and older friends. I absolutely adore my beige-and-coffee Aldi 64 that I’m restoring right now, but I specifically fell in love with the 64C from the moment I saw it in a retrospective magazine. It was sleek, beige, and had that achingly gorgeous keycap font. Yes, I know the keys were a far cry from the double-shot caps of earlier machines, and I’m also rather partial to the PET and “Eurostile” fonts, but the later 64C was peak Commodore design as far as I’m concerned. I was to learn soon after that these were largely borrowed from the Commodore 128, a fscking awesome machine in its own right, and likely the most capable 8-bit computer of all time.

I finally bought a 64C in 2022, and it’s been one of my favourite computers ever since. It’s my small slab of beige, 8-bit goodness, and I love love love it.

When New Commodore released the Ultimate 64 Breadbin, I was sorely tempted. But while I understood why they relaunched the brand with them, I secretly hoped that one day they’d approach a 64C with the same love and care. They now have, and I’m giving it serious consideration. Having a modern version of one of my now favourite machines of all time sounds awesome; a word I’ve far overused in this post. Something with that familiar design paired with modern conveniences: a blending of the good bits of 2026 with 1986.

I guess… I’m just happy this exists again. Another small thing has been made right in the world.

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-28.

xD-Picture Cards, as they were officially named, were sold from 2002 to 2009. The format was developed by Fujifilm and Olympus for their digital camera lines, and manufactured by Samsung and Toshiba. They were sold with capacities between 16 MB and 2 GB, though I never saw anything with less than 1 GB in the wild. They were faster than first generation MMC and SD cards, but just like Sony’s MemoryStick they couldn’t compete with their economies of scale, rapid development, and wide industry adoption.

I didn’t realise they were based on the original SmartMedia card, according to a link on Wikipedia. They didn’t include a controller, delegating error detections and wear levelling to the host device.

I liked the form factor of xD, though I only ever used it on my FujiFilm bridge camera at the time. Even tracking down ones to use with my 2007 Olympus bridge camera today is proving more challenging than I thought. At least I still have my original card :).

Trying to read a card

Now that I had a reader and my two xD cards, it was time to see if I could mount them. I plugged the adaptor into my FreeBSD machine with my original FujiFilm xD card, and saw the following in dmesg(8):

ugen0.3: <816820090226 816820090226> at usbus0
umass0 on uhub1
umass0: <816820090226 816820090226, class 0/0, rev 2.00/1.00, addr 3> on 	usbus0
umass0:  SCSI over Bulk-Only; quirks = 0x0
umass0:11:0: Attached to scbus11
da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 scbus11 target 0 lun 0
da0: <FNK TECH USB CARD READER 1.00> Removable Direct Access SCSI device
da0: Serial Number 816820090226
da0: 40.000MB/s transfers
da0: Attempt to query device size failed: NOT READY, Medium not present
da0: quirks=0x2<NO_6_BYTE>
(da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): MODE SENSE for CACHE page command failed.
(da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): CACHE PAGE TOO SHORT data len 3 desc len 0
(da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Mode page 8 missing, disabling SYNCHRONIZE CACHE

That didn’t look too good. I tried a mount_msdos(8), but without success. Just in case that card was toast, I tried again with the Olympus card:

da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 scbus11 target 0 lun 0
da0: <FNK TECH USB CARD READER 1.00>  s/n 816820090226 detached
(da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Periph destroyed
umass0: detached
ugen1.2: <816820090226 816820090226> at usbus1
umass0 on uhub0
umass0: <816820090226 816820090226, class 0/0, rev 2.00/1.00, addr 1> on usbus1
umass0:  SCSI over Bulk-Only; quirks = 0x0
umass0:11:0: Attached to scbus11
(da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): got CAM status 0x444
(da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): fatal error, failed to attach to device
(da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): MODE SENSE for CACHE page command failed.
(da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Mode page 8 missing, disabling SYNCHRONIZE CACHE

Hmm, that also doesn’t look good.

I went for broke and rebooted into Fedora, just on the off chance it was a weird driver issue. Fortunately, this worked:

usb 3-3: new high-speed USB device number 6 using xhci_hcd
usb 3-3: New USB device found, idVendor=3207, idProduct=0300, bcdDevice= 1.00
usb 3-3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 3-3: Product: 816820090226
usb 3-3: Manufacturer: 816820090226
usb 3-3: SerialNumber: 816820090226
usb-storage 3-3:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
scsi host0: usb-storage 3-3:1.0
scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access     FNK TECH USB CARD READER  1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 4096000 512-byte logical blocks: (2.10 GB/1.95 GiB)
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] No Caching mode page found
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Assuming drive cache: write through
sda: sda1
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI removable disk

I now have a way to attach and pull files off xD cards. Almost makes me wish I’d used the Olympus bridge camera to take those photos above. That would have been fun.

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-28.

It’s a cool space, very modern, and the smells were amazing. They use a similar setup to Chicha and other modern tea stores with machines that look (and sound) more like espresso machines than what you’d expect for tea. Each machine releases a short, sharp plume of steam after each high-pressure tea brew, the smell and sound of which adds to the atmosphere.

Despite it only being “busy” not “absurd”, we still had to wait forty-five minutes for our drinks. In keeping with modern tea shops, an electronic noticeboard on the wall tracks the orders they’re currently brewing, and which are ready for pickup. I generally prefer to order in-store, but I can see why using their online ordering page would be useful: you could order your tea, do all your shopping, write a dissertation, get in an overseas holiday or two, then when you’re done you could walk in and get your drink.

I had the oat matcha latte, and I’d say… it was definitely worth the wait. Despite my regular writings about a specific dark brown caffeinated beverage, Clara and I drink more tea than anything else, and this was good.

I still think BeauTea makes the best in Sydney, and I’ve gone there often enough that they start brewing my order before I even open my mouth. But Tea&Co might have usurped my previous runner-up for the second spot.

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-27.

Clara and I love playing music on our hi-fi setup. We have a Kenwood cassette tape deck (nothing special, only 2 heads), a Sony DVD changer we use for CDs, and a Technics linear tracking, quartz locked, direct drive, track selecting turntable which may be one of the single most wonderful pieces of electronics I’ve ever had the joy and privilege to own. The “tea ceremony” involved in selecting an album, then putting it on the platter, or the cassette mech, or CD drawer, feels deliberate and fun.

Of course, there’s always just one problem with setups like this, and our just one problem here is how to plumb our burgeoning collection of ripped FLAC and MP3 files into it while maintaining that deliberate, tactile experience we have with these other formats.

Now some of you might suggest, quite reasonably, that such a requirement is a folly. A 45 RPM vinyl record, and a Type II chrome cassette are tactile because they’re physical objects. A FLAC file is a sequence of bits not tied to any one storage medium. That’s great for buying and downloading music, but it means there’s a space between it and the physical world that has to be filled with something.

For years, that something was iTunes. Winamp was a lot of fun, but iTunes made larger music collections accessible in a way no program before (or since) has in my eyes. Back when Apple cared about software quality, we’d be able to choose an album on iTunes, and have it play through the Hi-Fi via an Apple TV. By comparison, the “Apple Music” program is so dreadful I’m loathe to use it. We’re also not ever going to buy another Apple TV, so the one we’ve been using for the last decade is likely the end of the line.

This leads me to wonder where to go from here. If you’ll forgive the pun, I can see two tracks:

• A web browser on the TV, upon which we can access a Navidrome install. Navidrome has really grown on me, but for now I’m only using it to access our music collection remotely via our family VPN. That would make the most logical sense, but lacks the “tactile” experience.

• A hardware hi-fi jukebox of some sort. Something with an internal hard drive I can rip out and replace with an SSD when they’re not a billion dollars again.

The advantage of the jukebox is you can select the album right from the device, just as I would walking over and inserting a cassette or CD. Whether that would prove sufficiently “tactile” I guess I’d have to see.

Sony and Pioneer used to make hi-fi jukeboxes, but I’d doubt they still do. Might need to do some more research.

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-27.

Note the somewhat unusual combination of beige keyboard paired with the darker breadbin case. When most people think “Commodore 64”, they likely picture a dark brown keyboard similar to later VIC-20 machines. This unit was sold in Aldi in Germany, and unlike the later 64G, had a double-shot keyboard with PETSCII characters printed on the front. My unit would have originally been a charcoal grey colour, but it’s developed an oddly pleasing Farmers Union Iced Coffee patina which I can’t bring myself to retrobright. I expect South Australians get that reference, and nobody else.

My plan had been to use this as a testbed keyboard and case for a modern reproduction board, for which we’re spoiled for choice. I thought it’d be fun to hand solder a faithful reproduction board myself, then source some modern replacement ICs. Alternatively, I could try one of the new FPGA boards that come with all the bells and whistles for connectivity, storage hardware emulation, and display output.

But something gnawed at me, and eventually I decided to see if I could source an original board instead. It seemed… wrong somehow to put a modern board in an old case; even more than doing the opposite. It was screaming out for something of a similar vintage, or at least authentically classic Commodore.

The question was: which one? Spoiler: this one! :D

Comparing Commodore 64 motherboard generations

The Commodore 64 came in many different revisions over its incredible production run from 1982 to 1994. The most well known was the shift from the original breadbin inherited from the VIC-20, to the slimline 64C which matched the Commodore 128. At a passing glance, they look like entirely different machines.

While the difference in design language was striking between these machines, internally there was even more variety. Commodore 64 motherboards can be broadly broken down into three types:

• Original motherboards, retroactively dubbed the longboards. These were included in the original breadbins, and took up the entire width and depth of the case. Not to be confused with longboards of a wheel-based nature, though I’m sure you could write a longboard game on a longboard.

• The later shortboards, which consolidated components on a physically smaller motherboard with fewer ICs and newer manufacturing processes. Not to be confused with… etc.

• Bespoke boards as fitted to the SX-64 luggable, and the later Commodore 64 Games System. I suppose one could classify the MAX Machine here too.

My Commodore 64C has a PAL shortboard as pictured below, and I think it’s beautiful. But I don’t have a longboard, so it seemed fitting to find one to put in the Aldi machine to compare and contrast. Adrian Black notes on his Digital Basement channel that the SID sounds markedly different between the two, for example.

Choosing the 250466

I went searching for an appropriate longboard to pair with this Aldi case and keyboard, and decided on the 250466 from 1986. This was the last longboard Commodore released; some even appeared in early 64Cs. It retained IC compatibility with earlier boards, but consolidated the number of RAM chips down to just two. This likely explains why it’s such a popular choice for people building modern reproductions.

I put in a saved search for this, among the other longboard revisions into the usual auction sites and the like, and waited. A year or so later, and I was pinged by someone selling theirs in reportedly working order. They were also local, which saved massively on postage. Floating on an island continent in the middle of nowhere often leads to shipping costing more than whatever I’ve bought.

And here it is!

The empty space in the lower left looks so weird; I love it:

And here’s the model number and date:

Next steps

I’d already removed most of the dried thermal paste, but I still need to do some proper cleaning. I also need to dig out my C64 power supply and the requisite cables, which weren’t in the location I was sure I put them last. Because of course they weren’t.

When I find them and finish cleaning, I’ll post a part two with some testing, and hopefully installation into the case :).

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-25.

My late mum was a professional calligrapher, and had some of the most beautiful casual handwriting I’ve ever seen.

A couple of people DMd me to ask what such a job entails, though coached in language that suggested they were trolling or attempting to take the piss. If you were sincere, I apologise for mischaracterising your comment. If you really were being a dick, have fun with that. Either way, I thought it might be a fun topic to discuss.

A professional calligrapher is someone who writes for a commission or fee. Unlike a typist or scribe who writes to transcribe ideas into text, calligraphers also approach their craft as art. The style, or way in which the words are written, matter as much as the words themselves.

My mum did classical Western calligraphy, though in Singapore she had also been studying traditional Chinese with ink stones and those beautiful large brushes. She had a few different types of client, but most of her work came from wedding planners. She would receive a couriered list of names, then carefully write onto seating allocation cards for tables, invitations, menus, and signs. While the advent of ubiquitous and affordable desktop publishing and printers made this sort of skill more niche, she was always fielding requests even into the late 1990s. Turns out people like the human touch!

Anyway, professional calligraphy, it’s a thing. I’d share some of my mum’s here, but I couldn’t bare the thought of it being fed into a slop machine. Soz.

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-25.