I booked a couple of weeks off work for September a while ago. The original plans evaporated leaving me with two delightfully free weeks. Of course I am going to take my bicycle and ride The Mawson Trail , a popular ride which is relatively local to me which I have wanted to ride for yonks. My bike is long overdue...

1 Anatomy of the Espresso There are dozens of methods of brewing coffee, from the humble filter, plunger, aeropress and cold brew. But here in Australia, when we hear "coffee", we think espresso. There is a lot of mysticism around coffee culture and the espresso, so as a coffee enthusiast and a nerd, I figure it is...

Setting Up Pi-Hole with Eero on Starlink 2024-07-24 A couple years ago I wrote about setting up a standard pi-hole server with eero WiFi but since that time I have swapped out my “cell tower” internet for Starlink. The speed improvement has been incredible and there is no looking back at regular, rural internet....

Git provides a rich set of options for customising its behaviour via the .gitconfig file. I present here some of the more interesting options. For more comprehensive information on each and every option, you had better peruse the official documentation. Basics Depending on your preferences, the global gitconfig file...

As I was walking around The Computer History Museum in Mountain View yesterday I couldn’t shake this one quote that I’d read earlier that morning: “The computer is a feeling,” says Tim Hwang and Omar Rizwan in their blog post manifesto, “not a device.” Instinctively, intuitively, I know what that computer-feeling...

Nothing major this month, but I do want to note two things. First, I wrote a post on the fediverse that must have hit a nerve. It's about corporations selling off academic work to AI companies. Second, I presented research to a panel at the IETF, talking about the development of ActivityPub by the W3C's Social Web...

If you’re a regular visitor of my /photos page, you might have noticed that I uploaded some new photos on there. The past week, I was in Belgium, together with my girlfriend. We had an Airbnb in the northern part of Ghent, but since Belgium is compact and public transport is excellent (kinda like here in...