### What's been happening We've been lazy. But I'll get to that a bit later. I thought I'd get last week's post out early but I got too busy with work. I spent the past week in Bellevue, meeting up with my teammates and talking about what we'll be working on the next few weeks/months. I was hoping to meet Reetesh but as luck would have it, he'll be out of town just as I am flying in and will be back as I fly out. But first - after many months of classes, many frustrating moments and a few times when I almost gave up - I'm happy that I've cleared my assessment at swimming class. This means I have "graduated" from the beginners' level and now qualify to progress into the development level. The assessment consisted of me demonstrating: * push and glide from the wall about 5m * float on my back unassisted * swim from the glide point back to the start of the lane, unassisted and unbroken. As with anything that involves a 'test' I was nervous as hell and managed to mess this up but a repeat showed that I could do it so they were happy to let me through. I still can't swim unbroken for the entire length of the 25m lap - something for me to practice, and that's why I won't be enrolling for the next level until I can do a lap and back unbroken. That said, as I mentioned at the start, we were both lazy and didn't go to our gym workouts. We were both pretty exhausted and Jo had hurt her shoulder and was advised to take it easy. We did a pool day instead of the workouts, but we noted that we shouldn't be repeating this gym cancellation, otherwise it would become a habit. With spring in full flow, the weed situation has gotten out of control. Jo pulled out some of the weeds by hand, and I mowed the yard, but that didn't do much and a few days later, the weeds were back more aggressively than ever. Our next-door neighbours recommended that we apply some Weed and Feed - a lawn care product that is meant to kill the broadleaf weeds and fertilizes grass at the same time. The catch is that these are generally not good for buffalo grass. After a lot of squinting, started checking with a fellow gardener, emini-G to see if we had any buffalo grass, and then looking again at the weeds, I said, screw it, and sprayed the weed-and-feed. It'll take a few weeks before we see the results. As mentioned above, I spent the week in Bellevue. My flight to Bellevue from Sydney was via LAX, landing in Seattle and then taking an Uber to my hotel. Unlike my past few flights, however, this one was pretty smooth. I arrived in Seattle at 9 p.m. and took an Uber to my hotel - I was staying at the W Bellevue this time around and was greeted by a fabulous room, complete with a transparent shower bang in the middle of the room. I knew W hotels are _funky_ but this is quite something else _._ Sights of/from the W Bellevue. Most of the week was quite busy with meetings in the office, but before that, I spent Sunday visiting Bainbridge Island. I took the ferry from Seattle to Bainbridge Island. It was nice, but as someone who's used to Sydney Ferries, this felt a bit plain. Bainbridge Island That evening, I met up with Karthik, who took me to a Ganapati pandal near Redmond as it was Ganesh Chaturthi time. Towards the end of the week, I also managed to meet up with Kajal after all our previous attempts were unsuccessful because we weren't available when the other was around. And for a change, I had a smooth return flight too. During my layover in Los Angeles, I met fellow Aussie AWS Hero Aidan Steele - which was a nice coincidence! We spent a couple of hours talking about different matters—mainly work and AWS. * * * Most people entering Australia would know the ritual of filling in the Incoming Passenger Declaration card. I noticed on my last trip that a digital version of it was being trialled and on this trip, I was able to fill in the digital version on the Qantas app - finally! This made the entry process a bit more seamless. After clearing immigration and biosecurity, I took an Uber home. Jo had gone for a swim, so I drove over to pick her up and we went to a nearby cafe - The Borrowed Table Cafe - for brunch. Brunch at The Borrowed Table Cafe Blacktown City Council had tied up with Blacktown Animal Rehoming Centre for the annual Blacktown City Pet Festival which was taking place that day, so Jo suggested we head there. There were a few stalls with pet treats and such, but the highlight was a few dogs running around an agility course - great to see the dogs zooming about. From there, we went inside the Blacktown Animal Rehoming Centre to check out the pets up for adoption. We aren't adopting yet - that might change later. For now, it was a bittersweet moment to see all the kitties and doggos waiting for their forever homes. Unknown to me, Jo had made a surprise purchase of Codenames Duet board game, so we spent Sunday evening playing a few rounds of it, listening to some music. Busy thinking of the next clude ### What we watched The Grand Tour - Season 6 features a new line of hosts - all of whom I had never heard before because apparently they are all YouTubers/TikTokers (I'm old, clearly). I was skeptical, but I must admit - they are refreshingly different and don't try to imitate Clarkson/Hammond/May and go about things in their own unique style, which is very much appreciated. I couldn't watch all the episodes but highly recommend watching them. ### Music of the Week Khruangbin's So We Won't Forget is very uplifting. just don't watch the video below unless you want to cry nonstop. ### Thanks for reading. Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

### What's been happening With the events of last week, the mood in the office was pretty sombre. Literally every single conversation started with "Who from your team was let go?" Pretty depressing stuff. But work continues. I'll get to that later. First, swimming — I have been making lots of good progress here. I was able to swim about a third of the length of our pool without stopping, so that's a good confidence booster. I am getting better at floating on my back, and I can swim on my back through the length of our 25m pool, so that's cool. Hoping that with some more practice, I can improve on my freestyle. For a change, my instructor asked me to do something different - she threw this thing which sinks to the bottom of the pool and got me to try to fetch it by diving head-first in from the surface of the pool, pick it up, and keep throwing it to the end of the pool. The pool gets deeper (1.2m to 1.5m) the further away you go, so this was a fun exercise. Also, I realized how hard it is to do this — many times it seemed so close, yet so far away. I tried until about halfway across the pool before we ran out of time. Gym sessions have been going pretty well. With the CrossFit classes running for an hour, the workouts are not only longer but they also have an equal mix of conditioning and strength training, while my previous PT focused more on strength training. The CrossFit classes also focus more on some of the advanced Olympic lifts such as snatches, cleans, and jerks which I'm not used to, so the classes have left me with a few sore muscles and I skipped the third class for the last couple of weeks and did only two. Those two went pretty well - I'm getting better on my front squat, especially with the barbell coming off the squat rack and I hit a PB. Friday's conditioning was a rather heavy partner workout of * 60 deadlifts * 70 pull-ups * 80 box jumps * 90 wall balls My partner & I decided to split these evenly, with me substituting the box step-ups for box jumps and ring rows for pull-ups as I'm not confident doing them. All of this with a 14-minute cap and I'm pretty happy we were able to get through most of it (I couldn't complete the wall balls in time). Onto work, dejected faces aside, it's been going pretty ok. I've been chosen as the point of contact for infrastructure and auditing for an upcoming project, so I've been reading the requirements and documenting what we can do to meet the requirements. I've also been trying the open-weight models at work - namely GLM 5.3 Flash and Kimi K3 with OpenCode as the harness and I've been pleasantly surprised how fast and capable they are. Anthropic's Sonnet/Opus models have been notoriously slow and to see lightning fast responses from GLM/Kimi is quite refreshing. At home, I'd been meaning to set up HomeAssistant for quite some time but didn't find the inclination to do so. This week, I finally carved some time and got to do this. With Hermes and GPT-5.6 Luna's help, I was able to carve out a VM from my home server, spinning it up using QEMU and libvirt. I added all my smart bulbs and added my inverter/battery system so I can see all my devices in one place. I'm not too happy with the current dashboard layout but we can work on it. I just wanted this to be done. On Saturday, we went over to The Gables to meet up with our friends Amrita & Sathya. It'd been some time since we last met, and we wanted to catch up. We went over to Bobby's Bakehouse per their recommendation and had the pies and coffee. The pie was not too bad - the steak and onion pie was a bit on the sweeter side than what I expected, but I've been told the butter chicken pie is good. We spent the next few hours sitting in the open area, just talking about life, upcoming travels and more. On Sunday, we went over to Fagan Park, Galston to celebrate our friends' son's third birthday. Fagan Park was pretty massive and had quite a bit of open space. We had a good time at the party. From there, we went over to their house in Berowra - the route there took us through some fabulous, twisty, windy roads that were a blast to drive through. Certainly brought a big smile on my face. Galston Gorge ### What I've been playing Path of Exile 2 - With the new Forbidden Rites event having kicked off a couple of weeks ago, I've been playing the event starting with a new character - Disciple of Varashta sorceress. The Disciple of Varashta ascendancy is a minion-focused build where you have three different djinns - invulnerable minions that stay by your side. Unlike other minion builds which are often quite passive, this is an active build and the minions act on your command and have been a lot of fun. I'll be playing this for a bit. ### What we watched Ted Lasso - Completed the first season of Ted Lasso. I enjoyed the first season. Though some of the plot items were predictable, many others caught me by surprise, and I must admit I totally didn't see them coming. I'm hoping to complete the whole series by next week, especially given that I have travel coming up. ### Music of the Week Growing up, Santana & Michelle Branch's Game of Love was a repeat on the music channels (MTV/Channel V) and watching the video after coming home from school was a given. I found out Michelle Branch did a re-recording with the original writer (one half of New Radicals) and it's a nice version - though I do miss Santana's guitars on it. ### Link of the week When I moved to Australia, Hubbl was all the rage. Here's a nice short video on what went wrong with it.. ### Thanks for reading. Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

### What's been happening What a week. Spring's officially here, or should I say summer? It's been the first week of spring and already we've had temperatures above thirty degrees, and a massive storm with gusts of more than 110 km/h. I cannot imagine how it will be come summer time. A couple of weeks ago, Jo went for a swim and I went with her. She gave me some tips on how to improve my swimming, and that has yielded some benefits: I'm now able to swim a lot longer (but still not quite an entire lap unbroken). The gym workouts are going okay. The CrossFit classes are more intense than the PT sessions I was used to, and feature more technical and difficult movements—the result is that I'm still getting used to them and haven't been able to attend Wednesday's sessions because I was still sore from Monday. I'm hoping once I get used to the structure and movements, I should be able to head in for the third session. Last week, Monday's session featured back squats, while Friday's featured deadlifts. Both movements were things I hadn't done in a few weeks, so I didn't go heavy. For the deadlifts, I was trying to do the hook grip which is pretty new to me. It'll take a while for me to get used to it, but hopefully it will help in the future. On Friday, we stepped out for lunch, heading to Mitra Da Dhaba. Jo got the thali for herself, while I ordered the Nalli Nawabi Ghost with Choor Choor Naan. The food was really awesome; the thali was great, and the naan was impeccably crunchy. We also took takeaway Malabar prawns, which were amazing. Lunch at Mitran Da Dhaba * * * We reached home, and just as I was about to head back to work, I saw a message on Slack that said "did you see the layoffs"? I was like WTF? And yes, I found out my company had laid off about 15% of its employees—about 560 people. On the positive side, my role wasn't affected. On the negative side, some of the people I worked with closely, including a teammate of mine in San Francisco, were affected. I don't really have any words to say. And needless to say, I really couldn't focus much on work that afternoon. I wish my colleagues the best. * * * On Saturday, we decided to head to Blue Mountains Botanic Garden in Mount Tomah. I found out that the Blue Mountains Botanic Garden Mount Tomah is the highest Botanic Garden in the southern hemisphere and is the only Botanic Garden in Australia located in a UNESCO World Heritage Area. Mount Tomah also falls on the other side of the Blue Mountains, not towards Katoomba, so the road there via Bells Line of Road was an amazing driver's road. I enjoyed driving along the twisty bends, hairpin turns and the Geely also performed admirably. We spent a couple of hours in the Botanic Garden, exploring the various themed gardens. With the wind, it was really nice to sit by the plants and disconnect. Blue Mountains Botanic Garden While returning, we stopped by Tutti Frutti, a cafe known for their real-fruit ice creams in Bilpin. Bilpin is also known for their pies, so we ordered a quiche and a chicken pie along with an apple crumble. Again, the food was amazing and we had a really good time. Quiche, Chicken Pie, Apple Crumble, and ice cream. After the stop at Tutti Frutti, we started for home, making a detour at a fruit market to pick up fruit and vegetables, including this humongous watermelon weighing more than 12 kilos. Not sure what I was thinking there, but it shall be devoured over the week. The watermelon with hand (and background microwave) for scale 😂 On Sunday, we had initially planned to do the Geebung Walk in Fred Caterson Reserve, but 10 minutes into the walk, we found signs indicating that the trail is closed. So we went to another nearby reserve, the Castle Hill Heritage Park Trail loop and really enjoyed it. The trail had reasonable elevation gains that made the walk interesting. The Castle Hill Heritage Park is one of the earliest known Government Farms dating back to 1801. The farm was the staging point for the first-ever convict rebellion on Australian soil in 1804. There are various boards across the park which explain different aspects of the lives of the people there during the early days and provide an interesting, if sad, history lesson. 0:00 /0:10 1× While returning, we stopped by a nursery and bought a few indoor plants as well as a dwarf mandarin plant. We're still trying to figure out where to plant them, which is a task for the week! ### What I watched Ted Lasso, Season 1 - I completed watching the first season of Ted Lasso and liked it. There's some really good character development, and the stories progressed well. I'm hoping the second season continues in the same way. ### Music of the Week It's been an Eagles week and I loved the guitars on Lyin' Eyes. ### Link of the week I was searching for some Olympic lifting videos to improve my gym performance and came across this really nicely done video with lovely drawings. ### Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

### What's been happening Winter seems to be winding down. While the minimums are still in the high single digits, the daytime temperatures are getting into the mid-twenties. And with spring in sight, as mentioned last week, we planted a few camellia plants. I didn't get pictures in time for the last post, so here it is. Camellia plants This week was also the first week we did three CrossFit sessions per week. We've been doing 2x PT for a while, and I've occasionally done 2x PT + 1x group class, but this is new. The Monday classes focused on front squats for strength and box jumps for conditioning. My front rack position and mobility are still pretty weak, so I stuck to low weights and swapped to box step-ups instead of jumps. Wednesday's class focused more on Olympic movements: clean and split jerk, while the conditioning was focused on power cleans/thrusters. Friday's class focused on push press for strength and dumbbell deadlift + echo bikes (partnered for time). Not being familiar with the Olympic lifts has been a problem, and I'm not able to clearly distinguish between the various movements. As with everything else, it will take time. The rest of the week went by pretty quickly. Jo went for swimming on Thursday, so we missed our usual Thursday evening drive. We made up for that by making the drive on Friday to Rooty Hill. As is customary, we went to a dessert place and bought a gelato - specifically, a mix of mango sorbet and wild berry gelato, which was pretty good. Mango Sorbet & Wild berry gelato The weekend was lazy - we pretty much stayed in. Jo wanted to have the thali on Saturday, but when we got to the restaurant, the kitchen had closed, so the thali pangs remained unanswered. We went over to Dosahut and had their bhelpuri and the Chicken 65 biryani instead, which was pretty good. Bhelpuri, Chicken 65 Biryani We stopped by Aldi on the way back to pick up some groceries. On Sunday, we went over to Star Chettinad to buy some Indian snacks. Their snacks are always good, so we bought banana chips, kara sev and ribbon pakoda. We went when it was close to lunchtime, so ended up having dosas for lunch. I had the rava onion dosa, while Jo had the rava masala dosa. Of course, we had to add a vada to the mix. The dosas were pretty good and Jo said she'd finally found a place to satisfy her dosa cravings. Vada, rava dosa, kaapi & the snacks We also spent some time during the week finalizing our Christmas and plans for our visit to India - the flight costs back home during Christmas were astronomical, so we decided to make the visit in mid-March and spend the Christmas break in Fiji - we're looking forward to the break! ### What I've been playing Wolcen 2 Playtest - A while back, I tried Wolcen and while it showed promise, it was a buggy piece of crap and soon was abandoned by its devs. I got to try out Wolcen 2 at Gamescom. The playtest was a short, roughly 90-minute slice of one quest. I got to play one character and after trying the melee sword (which I found to be clunky), I realized I could switch to dual pistols and that was a lot more fun. The graphics are pretty nice, and the score and audio sound good. The game itself is in a pretty rough state - the minimap is near useless, the movement is pretty floaty and the character got boxed in and stuck in several places. I'll be keeping an eye on this - if the pistol gameplay carries through to the entire game, I think it'll be fun to play. ### What I watched Ted Lasso - I started watching Ted Lasso and I liked it. The show follows Ted Lasso, an American football coach who is hired to coach an English football team. Why does an American football coach agree to coach a team for a game he's never played? Why was he selected? How will he do - all these questions and more are answered through the episodes. Ted Lasso's character is an always cheerful, happy persona which may or may not annoy you. He's supported by his friend Coach Beard who seems to be a lot more serious but always supportive. I've watched the first five episodes and I'm pretty hooked. The episodes are quite interesting - there's not much football, but there are a lot of interpersonal dynamics at play. I look forward to watching more of the series. ### Music of the Week Came across Fleetwood Mac's As Long As You Follow when listening to their Greatest Hits vinyl. So good. ### Link of the week A couple of related videos on our favourite topic - AI agents. Both have predictable outcomes, but it is interesting to see how far the harnesses have come along. * Everything AI does when you ask to start a lemonade stand * We let AI run a vending machine ### Thanks for reading. Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

### What's been happening It was a slow start to the week - both Jo and I had taken the Monday and Tuesday off. Jo had worked a couple of weekends and had a day off in lieu, while I had planned to take the Tuesday off as I had electricians coming over to install the EV charger. Since our days off were staggered, we decided to take both days off. Past Sathya would have made the most out of the extra long weekend by playing till 2am and then sleeping in till 11am. Not current day Sathya. We both actually woke up on a Monday, a holiday Monday that too, at 5:15am to get ready to head to the gym. Current Sathya is flabbergasted and proud of this. And yes, we did go in to the new gym on Monday. As luck would have it, it was Front Squat Monday. I can't get my elbows high enough in the front rack position, but somehow I managed to get my 3RM front squat of 50kg. Pretty happy with that. We were meant to go for a workout on Wednesday, but the Cossack squat warm-up, front squats and then the 15-minute metcon of dumbbell hang snatch, burpee over dumbbell and dumbbell run made a mincemeat of my quads and my legs were so sore, it was almost jelly. I even had a couple of people in the office ask me if I was ok because my legs were so stiff. This stiffness continued till Wednesday so we both decided to skip the Wednesday class and go in on Friday instead. Which brings us to the EV charger installation - yes, we finally got that done on Tuesday. We had a couple of electricians come in for the install. They confirmed where we'd like it done, and then set it up in the garage, drawing the wires all the way across the house to the switchboard. EV Charger being installed. I've used it a couple of times and was able to charge the car all the way to 100% for the first time ever. This also seems to have recalibrated my car's range as well as the energy use as that's now showing as an average of 13.5kWh/100km, which is lower than what it was previously showing, i.e. 16kWh/100km. I'm guessing this is because of the long drive we did on the weekend rather than the battery charge, but something to look out for. With the long weekend, we also got to do some chores - we went over to Costco to pick up some pantry supplies and meat. While we rely pretty heavily on local butchers, Costco's meats have been pretty good and we get a bunch of them. Jo portions them and then we freeze them in our freezer and take them out when required. The freezer section in the fridge is pretty limited, we do have plans to get a separate chest or vertical freezer but that's for the future. Our front yard had also overgrown quite a bit (by weeds more than lawn) and Jo wanted to use the mower but wasn't quite sure how to use it, so I showed her and then she did the whole front yard. I also received a message from our next door neighbour asking if I could help him with his laptop being slow. I went over to his house to check it out - I was expecting a malware infested, bloatware loaded laptop - what I saw actually surprised me. The laptop was pristine. But for whatever reason, the processor was running at a blazing fast 0.2 GHz. I tried a bunch of things including changing the power profile, the usual reboots and such but unfortunately nothing worked. I had to give up at that point because I had to head out to pick up Jo. Work was pretty ok. I added some observability - metrics and traces for the MCP that I had built. I've seen a few people use it, so that's good to see. Barely back from Seattle for the Hero Summit, I'll be flying back to Seattle next month for work meetup. With two days of holidays, the rest of the week went by fast. On Thursday evening, we went for a nice drive to Wetherill Park. The goal was to get churros, but when we reached the destination it was this massive shopping center, so we parked the car and went for a walk and then had some Korean for dinner. Post dinner, we picked up churros and then went home. Bibimbap for Dinner & Churros for dessert During my last weekend call with friends, they were asking me about Greater Sydney's water source, and doing some research I found our water is provided for by a dam called the Warragamba Dam and made a note to visit the place for the weekend. And that's what we did on the Saturday. Warragamba is a tiny township about an hour away from home. Warragamba Dam The dam has a nice visitor center with plenty of information and historical details about the dam, how it was built, the dam workings, catchments, purification and a lot more. Visitor Center at Warragamba Dam was very informative The place was pretty empty as well so it was a good visit. We could also walk on the dam walls, so that was pretty cool. We spent about an hour and a half exploring the visitor center, reading up all the different kiosks there and then the dam wall walk itself. Driving back, Jo had spotted a book store in a nearby town, but when we went there, it seemed like the store didn't exist (anymore?). So we went over to a nearby restaurant called The Rustic Secret Garden for lunch. We drove back and then had a nice relaxing Saturday evening. Come Sunday, Jo wanted to head to Bunnings to pick up some more gardening stuff as they wanted to plant some Camellia plants on the front yard as the first step toward having a hedge. With winter coming to an end and the temperatures slowly creeping up, this was the best time to plant them, so we bought some potting mix, garden soil, weed block mulch, and cardboard to cover some of the front lawn much like how we did the side strip. I helped Jo out in some of the digging, potting and watering and we've now planted the plants. It will take a few years before they grow pretty well, so now we wait. ### What we ate The Rustic Secret Garden, Mulgoa - As mentioned above, we stopped here for lunch. This is a nice Italian restaurant with a pretty decent open space. When we were there, there was an ongoing event but that didn't hamper the service to us. We had arancini, garlic chicken pizza and the cannoli for dessert. The arancini was pretty good, didn't like that it was dipped in a lot of tomato sauce, but the sauce was really good. The pizza was pretty generous and it was a bit too much for us, so we took two slices home. The cannoli was a bit of a letdown - it was just meh. But overall, it was a pretty good meal! ### Link of the week Came across this long post on why Ollama isn't what it used to be. Bit of a long read, but worth it. Friends Don’t Let Friends Use Ollama | Sleeping RobotsOllama gained traction by being the first easy llama.cpp wrapper, then spent years dodging attribution, misleading users, and pivoting to cloud, all while riding VC money earned on someone else’s engine. Here’s the full history, and why the alternatives are better.Sleeping RobotsZetaphor ### Thanks for reading. Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

### What's been happening As I've been getting older, I'm realising how much travel is starting to affect me. I returned from my Seattle trip last Sunday, but through half the week I was still so exhausted from the effects of the trip. I'm beginning to realise how much impact a good, restful sleep has on me. This week marked the last week of PT with Daniel. We had a round of different movements that we hadn't done before including power cleans and snatches. After the workout, we went for dinner with Daniel at the nearby pub and had a nice chat with him. We'll miss Daniel as our trainer and wish him the best! However, this doesn't mean my gym sessions will stop - we're joining a new gym - one closer to home. With Daniel & Luke Cauchi We're also switching from PT to group Crossfit classes and increasing to 3x a week. I've previously done 2x PT and 1x Group CrossFit, having it all group sessions will be a new challenge. Looking forward to it! Back to work, I've been tasked on taking on some interviews for product managers. Was reminded how much time interview takes out of you - not only as a candidate but as an interviewer. I've had to do some prep work on what & how I should do the interview, do some reading into the candidate's CV, understand what they have been doing and tailor some questions to them. After the interview, I'm also supposed to provide feedback and I've been doing it immediately after the interview so that I don't forget anything. I had one every day for the last 4 days. Nothing's planned next week, so we'll see how that goes. We also had some visitors from the compliance team who were here for another meetup, on Thursday, we met with them for dinner and good conversations. A few weeks back, I received my EV fast charger as part of my car's purchase. Till now, I'd been charging my Geely EX5 with the "level 1" charger - the charger plugs into an ordinary wall socket but charges pretty slowly - at a maximum rate of about 1.6kW. With a 68kWh battery, this obviously takes a very long time to charge completely. The fast charger is a 7kW charger but requires installation by a licensed electrician. Having received the quotes from Revcharge, I've proceeded with the installation and that's scheduled for next Tuesday. On Friday evening, Jo had a hankering for Kimchi Pancake so we went over to BT Korean BBQ over in Blacktown. We had Kimchi Pancake, and Spicy Pork Bone soup. After I got home, I had some ground nuts... which clearly wasn't my best plan as that didn't go well and I was sick all day, the next day. We had also plans to donate plasma and there was a Retro Vinyl Fair in the city of Parramatta and I missed it :( Feel so bad, but hopefully it will be back soon. I slept through all of Saturday and by evening, I was feeling much better. Not for long, after a couple of hours, I was again feeling very sleepy and exhausted so I went to sleep again by 8pm. Next thing I know, it's 6:45 in the morning. But at least I'm feeling better! The rest of the day was spent on chores - grocery shopping, getting some meat and veggies. ### What we ate BT Korean BBQ, Blacktown - Nice little Korean BBQ place set in Blacktown CBD. Though known for their BBQ, we didn't have any BBQ and ordered the Kimchi Pancake and the Spicy Pork Bone Soup. The Kimchi pancake was very nice but pretty oily as expected from few other Korean places we had been to. The Spicy Pork Bone soup was pretty nice but not that spicy. The place has good reviews for the BBQ so I suppose that's for the next visit. Kimchi Pancake & Spicy Pork Bone Soup ### Music of the Week An epic instrumental cover of Gotye's Somebody that I used to Know. Get your headphones out because those tones are just sublime ### Link of the week Good reminder from Prady on why should be data informed, not data obsessed > I still think these devices are good, provided we use them not to get obsessed with the numbers they throw up, but if instead we use those numbers to guide our training, our nutrition, and our daily activities. Data informed, not data obsessed.Smarter Sundays - #273.Smarter SundaysPradyum ### Thanks for reading. Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

### What's been happening Every now and then, when you've been struggling to do a task and failing repeatedly, sleeping on it activates something in your brain and enables you to do it successfully. This week's swimming was one such case - I'd been writing my failures in trying to regulate my breathing while swimming and how I'd been failing it. This Monday, I started swimming class with my usual set of moves (glide, use board to practice arm movement), and when I started swimming without any support, I was able to swim properly for longer than ever. Not sure how or why that happened - it just did. That felt good. This week, we also decided to cancel our membership at our North Sydney gym. Last week and this week, we did two drop-in sessions at a gym close to home - and they went well. We were happy with the reception we got, with the help that we received during the workouts and the overall vibe. With North Sydney being 50km+ from home, it was getting difficult to manage the gym visits. We'd been doing it as a post-office routine, but there have been a few times when I had to do a long commute just to keep up with the gym sessions, while working from home. We also wanted to increase our frequency. With all these things in mind, we found a gym close to home. We will definitely miss the first gym - Daniel, my trainer, is a gem of a person, and I really enjoyed my sessions with him. It's clear how much of a difference having him train us has had on us - during last week's session where we had to do barbell bench press, I was doing it with ease and a few of the people there were amazed at how smooth and stable I was while lifting. Daniel's emphasis on technique has really helped us here. Daniel was also very understanding when we mentioned we were cancelling, and he switched from our usual programming to some more fundamental movements that are suited for the new gym. I also got to do some pike pushups and half-a-handstand (and nearly gave Daniel a heart attack while trying to do so). 0:00 /0:14 1× 0:00 /0:23 1× The rest of the week went by pretty fast. Jo had found a nice side table/chest of drawers on Facebook Marketplace - but the pickup was in Penrith. So the trip there to pick up the drawers became our Thursday evening drive. On Saturday, Jo wanted to head over to the Salvos & Save the Children Thrift store in McGraths Hill and from there we went over to Windsor and had ice cream, then went for a quick walk. I'm flying over to Seattle come Monday, so Sunday was spent getting some groceries and then packing for the trip. ### Music of the Week Such an awesome acoustic version of Avenged Sevenfold's So Far Away! Really well done. ### Link of the week I want to try out Lambda MicroVMs, and this post from Eric is a really good use case for it. ### Thanks for reading. Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

### What's been happening It's been another quiet week. Having got our car last week, this week has been take-the-car-everywhere. We've been fully sub-urbanised. The week started with my swimming classes - and of course, I drove over to the swimming center. They have a rather large parking lot and it's nice to be able to leave for swimming just 10 minutes before rather than 45 minutes before to take the bus. Swimming's been going pretty well. I'm still struggling to swim freestyle, especially trying to get my breathing right. While on my back, I'm so much better and more comfortable. Feels good to float on my back and then move your arms back to swim. Hopefully, the freestyle will improve. Over the weekend, Jo had seen a armchair at Salvos and was very keen to get it, so on Monday evening I drove over to Salvos and bought it. It was too big to fit into the car, so I asked for it to be delivered to home. For the days we have to be in the office, generally we take a direct bus to the office. While coming home, we take the Metro to the gym. Post workout, we take the Metro and then bus back home. This generally has been working well - except in cases when we get late, or have to switch to class instead of PT. The group classes run for 60 minutes instead of our usual 45-minute PT and then has a domino effect of running late for our metro (Sydney Metro runs at a frequency of a train every 3.5 minutes during weekday peak hours, so this isn't that much of a big deal). The bus home though, runs at a 45-minute frequency, which means any delay and we have to sit at the bus stop for a long time. Now with the car, I don't have to worry about this and just get off at the Metro station and drive home. The Metro Station has an attached parking garage which gives you 18 hours of free parking as long as you take public transport after parking, so we don't have to worry about the parking fees. On the gym sessions itself - this week was the first where I had to tell my trainer to swap out the movements. We were doing our usual metcon of kettlebell swing/dumbbell push press/lateral hops and towards the second set of the push press my shoulders were so fatigued that I just couldn't do it. Not sure what happened, the next day it was ok, no pains - probably not enough warm up. Apart from that, the week went by pretty ok. Workwise, I've been continuing to refine the Cost MCP that I've been working on. * * * On Thursday evening, I felt like going for a drive so asked Jo if she feels the same. Jo nodded in agreement, and I thought of driving to Tallawong, but Jo said she wanted to go further, so we drove all the way to Windsor. We had previously done a day trip to Windsor, it was nice to do a drive this time. I pulled a Reetesh and found an ice cream shop to go to. We had a scoop of "Stairway to Heaven" which was absolutely smashing. Come weekend, we figured we'll drive to a nearby reserve to do a morning walk. While returning, we had to do some errands - pick up a griddle, stop by Ikea & Costco for some groceries and decided to combine them all. We went over to Bungarribee Reserve for a morning walk in the Heart Crossing Loop on Saturday. The day was also very foggy/misty and that made these spiderwebs even more visible. After getting almost lost in the reserve, we made our way to a nearby coffee shop called Harvey's Social. We had a coffee and banana bread and went about on finishing our errands. On Sunday, we thought of going for a walk at Peel Reserve/Jonas Bradley Oval and asked our friends Amrita & Sathya if they would like to join in, and they did. It was a nice catch up over a walk and we went over to Rosebank Heritage Cafe for a coffee post walk. Brunch at Rosebank Heritage Cafe ### What I've been playing Path of Exile 2 - I mentioned last week that I wanted to defeat the Arbiter of Divinity and I'm glad I was able to get it done! And it was live on stream in one try. Pretty happy with that. Defeating the Arbiter of Divinity ### Music of the Week South Summit cover's The Police's Roxanne and it's very nicely done! ### Link of the week Hard to imagine Viva La Dirt League has been around for a decade! Here's a nice clip on how they make their skits. ### Thanks for reading. Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

### What's been happening Another week, another late post - this time because I wanted to publish the Berrima Travelogue out. It's the week we'd been waiting for since the time we had booked our car. The week started with a call from the dealer that our car, the Geely EX5, is ready to pick up couple of days earlier than what was initially told to us. As excited as we were, we had to be in the city for work and had gym later on in the evening, so I told the dealer we'd pick it up later on in the week. Come Thursday, we went over to the dealer where the salesperson was waiting for us. After finishing off some sign-off formalities and handing us over the keys, manuals and other paperwork, he gave us a rundown of the various features of the car. He also told us how to charge the car. Say hi to Ophelia The car comes with a Level 1 charger (aka "granny charger") - this basically lets you plug in to a standard socket for an extremely slow charge. Good enough for weekday runs. He told us that the faster 7 kWh charger will be dispatched soon. We'll need to get it installed but that's for later. * * * We spent about an hour at the dealership, finishing off the paperwork, the demos, the photoshoots (lol). And once all that was done, it was time to head off with our car. By this time it was close to 2pm and Jo was running late for her meeting, and we hadn't eaten yet - so we did something we had never done ever in our life - drive-through McDonalds! 🤣🤣 We got back home and it was back to work. We wanted to do a _Vaahan Pooja_ so we went over to Sydney Murugan temple as this temple didn't require a prior booking. At the temple office, the person told us they can only do the pooja after the evening aarti function was done and that would take about 45 minutes - so we said that's ok and we sat in the temple and watched the aarti and then got the _vaahan pooja_ done. Sydney Murugan Temple The temple itself was pretty nice - fairly quiet though - that might be the Thursday lull though. By the time the pooja etc was done, it was close to 8pm so we went over to Laung Lachee for dinner. Funny, the last time we went to Laung Lachee was prior to our (current) house viewing and next has been after the car purchase. * * * The rest of the week went by pretty fast. Of course, we had to do a long drive to test the EX5 out. We decided to head down towards the Southern Highlands, to check out Fitzroy Falls & Berrima. There's a separate post on that. Sunday was rest day. The front yard had overgrown quite a bit with weeds so I got my whipper-snipper and lawn mower out and cleaned it up a bit. Jo was helping putting some more mulch to cover some of the open spots that had come on the side strip. Sights of Berrima & Fitzroy Falls ### What I've been playing Path of Exile 2 - I've been having a blast with the current league of Path of Exile. My choice of the Permafrost Witchhunter ensured that even on Tier 15 maps it's a smooth sailing. I also defeated two of the Pinnacle bosses - the Arbiter of Ash and Xesht. It took like 10 times or so to understand and defeat the Arbiter of Ash (thanks to some bullet hell mechanics) and in comparison, Xesht only took 3 attempts. The Arbiter of Divinity is the next target! ### What I've been reading I noticed Questionable Content's archives were restored, so been having a good time reading that. Still on the lookout for decent webcomics, so if you know let me know in the comments. ### Music of the Week YUNGBLUD's cover of Black Sabbath's Changes is awesome. ### Thanks for reading. Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

Having picked up our new car, we were quite eager to go on a day trip to put the car through its paces over a reasonably long distance. There's no shortage of lovely places to visit around Sydney, we chose the Southern Highlands as a good first stop since we're fairly close to the motorway heading down south. Fitzroy falls was the chosen destination. * * * Originally known as Yarrunga, Fitzroy Falls is a village in the Wingecarribee Shire, located within the Southern Highlands region of New South Wales, Australia. The village was renamed after the 81-foot waterfall. we also decided to head over to Berrima to check it out. Entering our planned stops into A Better Route Planner indicated that we would require charging the car, so I figured we'd stop by Mittagong. * * * But of course, first was breakfast. I prepared some toast and eggs. We packed some protein bars, fruits, and a water bottle for the ride and drove away. The lack of caffeine was a conscious choice - we decided to stop by Two by Four coffee shop in Blacktown. Jo picks up the coffee, the place has great to sit down with a cuppa and chill. Our usual large cappuccino for me and almond flat white for Jo was picked, and thus we started for Fitzroy Falls. We took the route of M7 joining into M31 and then and it was a pretty smooth drive. There wasn't much traffic and the Geely behaved quite well over the motorway, making the journey go by quite fast. We reached Fitzroy Falls in about 2 hours and parked the car. We weren't really dressed for long hikes, so we decided to head to the Fitzroy Falls viewing platform. There were lots of display boards about different species of plants and animals found around that were quite informative. We saw that the Jersey lookout wasn't too far away so walked over to there to see spectacular sights of the waterfall. Some great views of Fitzroy Falls 0:00 /0:18 1× It was really nice to be here. We are definitely planning to return during Spring time for some of the longer walking trails. From here, we decided to head to Berrima. Berrima is a historic village in the Southern Highlands. Once we reached Berrima, we parked our car and went for a walk. First, we went over to Berrima Court House. Berrima Court House was built in the 1830s as a sandstone building and is now a museum. The court house now features a sound and light tour that simulates two different trials, complete with lights, actors taking up roles as well as realistic mannequins portraying the jurors & the accused. The tour also talks about the history of the town, how it was built and how the railways changed the course of the town. Sights of Berrima Court House After the tour, we walked around the Berrima town and found a very interesting lolly shop named Lolly Swagman! Yes, that's the name alright. They had a huge amount of sweets, chocolates, fudges and more. Lollies, lollies and more lollies - we kept it down 🙃 We bought some lollies and then started our trip back. I initially thought of stopping the car at Highlands Hub, Mittagong to charge the car and then head to Gumnut Patisserie for lunch, but realised the car would have charged by the time we walked over to the patisserie. So we stopped at Highlands Hub to charge the car. While it was being charged, I stayed in the car while Jo went over to Priceline just across the road to pick up some supplements. By the time she was back, the car had charged enough, so we went over to Eden Brewery for lunch. Eden Brewery is an independent craft brewer located in Mittagong. While they don't have a restaurant, there is a food truck attached. We ordered couple of chicken burgers and sweet potato fries for food. Since I was driving, I opted for the simple ginger ale while Jo tried Eden's IPA which she tells me was phenomenal. The food was pretty decent - nothing great but not terrible either. Gumnut Patisserie is well known for their pastries and pies, and given they were right across the road, we walked over to pick up a pepper steak pie along with a caramel mousse cake. The caramel mousse cake was very rich and decadent, though the cake-y bits of the dessert were fairly average. I also picked up a large cappuccino for the drive back home. We covered about 294 kms in 4hrs 45 minutes, and it was a comfortable drive. Looking forward to more drives!

### What's been happening I wanted to send this note earlier, but the travels and my work meetings kept me occupied and decided to club Week 24 & 25 notes in one chunky post. More about the travel later on. Last week started okay. Sydney winter has been getting colder but we had some reprieve mid-week. We went to our usual gym PT sessions and have been focusing on improving our bench press workouts. The second workout has been focused on front squats. I was struggling a lot to get my front squat posture right and I was more or less squatting with the barbell on my biceps rather than with the barbell on my shoulders. My trainer decided it was better for me to stick to back squat so that's that. This trip broke my 72-week streak of heading to the gym every week. Slightly bummed about it, but it's not the end of the world! The new router is working well as expected, no major issues. With the new router comes a new SSID and I didn't want to sit and reconfigure all my devices. I also have a lot of IoT devices, and having to reconfigure them all would have been a pain, especially my solar and the battery systems. I just set the new router's SSID to the old one and it was all set. * * * A big part of last weekend was our travel to Bellevue - I was heading there for some meetings and asked Jo if she'd like to join in. Since she had some leaves open, she joined in. The original flight was supposed to be Sydney to Seattle via Los Angeles. Jo was supposed to spend some time with her sister in San Francisco so she decided to book her flights from Seattle to SF for the next day, which is on a Sunday. As luck would have it, our Saturday started _great_ when I saw the message from Qantas that our flight had been delayed. Now, if a flight is delayed by a few minutes or a few tens of minutes, that's okay - we had a five-hour layover in LA. That should be enough to complete immigration, pick up bags, and do a bag drop. And of course, it was only fitting that Qantas had announced the flight departure from Sydney was delayed by five hours! I think that was the first time that I've ever seen a departure flight from my first leg delayed for so long. The five-hour delay basically meant that there was no way in hell we could make the connection but of course we couldn't do anything till the flight had actually taken off. I spoke with the Qantas agent when we were checking in and they assured us we'd be re-booked once the flight was in the air and closer to the destination. With the boarding pass in our hand, flight delayed by the 5 hours, we had nothing to do so went over to the Qantas lounge and chilled there till it was time to board. I didn't travel a lot last year, but my travels from the year before helped me retain Qantas Gold Status (OneWorld Sapphire equivalent). This meant that I had access to the Qantas Business Lounge. Of course it would be better if the lounge was actually functional, which it wasn't. Qantas is doing some lounge upgrades so we had to use the other lounge, which was not that great. Plane spotting in the lounge, and all set to fly out. The flight itself was pretty okay. The good thing about leaving late meant that we were pretty exhausted by the time we boarded. I had the dinner service and then after that I just fell asleep. Next thing you know we are like three hours away from landing and all I thought that would be the end of our pain. I was hoping that once we would land in L.A., get the details of the new flight and have enough time to complete immigration and bag claim before boarding for the onward flight. Unfortunately Mr Murphy had more tricks up his sleeve and even though we landed about 30 minutes ahead of scheduled arrival, problems with the aerobridge meant that the plane was on the tarmac for about an hour and killed any chances of making the original flight which took off just as we landed. No worries, we had the rebooked flight which was scheduled for two and a half hours after the scheduled arrival time. We finally got off the plane, and for a change, we completed immigration in about 5 minutes. Mr Murphy, not letting us be content with the immigration success, threw another curve ball at us - at baggage claim and drop, we were informed that we couldn't do the baggage drop-off the regular way as we'd been rebooked and had to check in with United to do the bag drop. That meant having to exit the terminal, find our departure terminal (which was halfway across the airport), go to the United desk and recheck in the bags because the tags on the bags weren't valid anymore. After a long spirited walk, having reached the terminal, we couldn't check in from the kiosk and had to wait for agent assistance - effectively killing any last hope of making the rebooked flight. Phew. Thankfully, the United agent was very helpful and got us rebooked again. Jo's travel plans of flying back from Seattle to San Francisco had to be changed as the new flights would mean that she would not have been able to make it, so the agent changed our booking so that Jo would fly directly from Los Angeles to San Francisco while I would go directly to Seattle. I also asked her if it was going to be a problem since the flight from Seattle to SFO is a round trip and if there would be any problem if she would miss the first hop. We were assured that that's not going to be a problem because the return flight is a completely different thing so it should be all good. Here we were thinking everything would be okay (_you'll see later why I mention this_). With our new flights now set to depart the next day, we were stuck in Los Angeles overnight. This brought in lot of memories from two years ago where I was stuck in Los Angeles for 3 days, again due to flight departures but on the return to Sydney. I decided to book at room at the nearby hotel, and thankfully I didn't have any problems. We took the Los Angeles Airport shuttle to the hotel, checked into our room, and went downstairs to the bar just in time to catch Australia play against Turkey and actually score (and later go on to win the game) as our food and drinks arrived. Watching the FIFA World Cup match Having had dinner, extremely tired from the events of the evening and with Jo having an early morning flight, we decided to sleep in early. Jo was able to catch the flight to San Francisco early next day, while my flight to Seattle went smoothly as well. After checking into my hotel in Bellevue, I met up with my product manager for dinner. * * * The rest of the week went by pretty fast. Jo had a great time meeting her sister, their dog Benny, and explored a bit of San Francisco, sending me plenty of pictures. She spent only two days in San Francisco, returning to Bellevue on Tuesday night and spent Wednesday/Thursday exploring Seattle, Fremont, Bainbridge Island sending me plenty of photos while I was in meetings all day with AWS and my extended team. And of course, the return to Bellevue wasn't without problems for Jo - when she tried to check in for her flight to Bellevue, she got an error message that the journey couldn't be found. Evidently, the change in flights when rebooking meant that Jo's return flight to Bellevue got _cancelled. Jeez, I wondered if we could get a break with the travel at all._ Thankfully, this again was sorted with a call to United customer care _._ With the week being short thanks to the Juneteenth holiday, Karthik made some plans to stay near Mount Rainier and explore the area. We started to our Airbnb in Ashford on Thursday evening, spending the night there and returning back to Bellevue the next evening. I'll have a separate travelogue post on that. The Saturday morning, Jo wanted to check out an American diner so we went over to Chace's Pancake Corral to get our fill of pancakes, biscuits and gravy and then returned to our hotel to check out and head to the airport. Sights of Bellevue and Mount Rainier * * * At the airport, we thought everything would be smooth - but of course, Mr Murphy had one last laugh. While I was able to check in and get my boarding pass fine - we had to wait for a really long time (I think close to an hour?) before Jo's boarding pass was printed. Evidently, something United did while rebooking wasn't reflected and they had to wait for _something to be done_ before she could get her boarding pass. I'm being so vague here because the Alaska Airlines agent wasn't being clear on what was happening. But after a tense wait, we got our boarding pass - but only for the first half of the journey from Seattle to Los Angeles. Thankfully, when we landed in Los Angeles, Qantas app showed the digital boarding pass for the Los Angeles - Sydney leg and we finally got back home. Phew what a series of events! ### Music of the Week Thornhill covers Muse's Supermassive Black Hole and boy, what a cover. It starts off pretty average but then they just ramp it up so much, especially on the vocals. Fabulous stuff. ### Link of the week I indexed 669 GB of my GoPro videos using my M1 Max computer and local ML models > TLDR: I had 2,207 GoPro videos, and I need to rewatch them to find interesting moments from my cycling journey. I built a project to index them locally on my M1 Max using open-source ML models, search for those moments, and send the best clips straight to my DaVinci Resolve timeline. I indexed 628 videos (668.68 GB, 15h 13m 18s of footage duration), more details in the metrics table in the last section of this article. Cool post, I might consider doing something like this with the videos from my Insta360 NYC's Smallest Pizzeria: Making Pizza in a Smart Car > Bradley Alvelo makes pizza right from his tiny smart car, on the street in NYC. ### Thanks for reading. Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

### What's been happening The descent into cold Sydney winter continues. It was getting cold enough that our sheets were extremely cold to get into, so last weekend Jo and I went over and bought a new fitted sheet of flannelette and a chenille blanket. The top sheet ensures that the bed is not ice-cold to get into and the blanket material keeps us warm throughout the night without the itchiness that comes from woolen blankets. Though the house has aircons, they only cover the living and the kitchen-diner - none of the bedrooms. We've thought a couple of times over to remove the split aircons and set up ducted aircons through the entire house but the cost is quite enormous and not worth setting up - at least not when we have this working setup. I did think of getting a small portable heater but for now the blanket and top sheet are keeping us warm and cosy. A little _too_ cosy though - getting up in the morning is a pain! You can see how the temperature has dropped in the past two weeks And then come Monday, my WiFi router finally died. I'd been having issues with it for a while now - it would frequently drop connections, not renew DHCP requests and on more than one occasion, remain on a multi-hour bootloop. But seemingly, every time it'd recover and work as normal - till this Monday when it just stopped working. I ended up ordering the router I'd previously ordered and cancelled - the TP-Link Archer AX1800. I bought this router because it was priced pretty decently (cost me about $110) and supported WiFi 6 and 1 Gbps ports. The timing is a bit unfortunate because I wanted to rehaul the entire networking set up in the house but will have to make do with this now and have the networking rejig done later. Another house update - I switched over from AGL's Solar Savers plan to their Battery Rewards plan. This plan gives me a higher feed-in tariff - 29c/kWh for energy exports between 5pm to 9pm. I've been making good use of the Fox ESS exporter and Grafana dashboard I had created and do a daily review of how much solar has been generated, the current battery state of charge and the next day's forecast to update the forced discharge setting on my battery. I'll work on automating this next. Something like a Telegram bot that will message me with the details and ask for approval to enable this - if no approval was given then do nothing. This week also marks 4 years of us deciding to leave Romania. I don't know why that country has left such an amazing mark on me, despite most of my time being spent in relative misery(COVID times, away from Jo etc). I really wish to revisit back in a couple of years - for now, Australia has my heart. (L) Leaving for airport (R) The Bucharest Fountain Show * * * It's a long weekend here on account of King's Birthday. Jo very nicely asked me (some puppy dog faces were made) if we could rent a car so we can do another Bunnings and Ikea run and of course I couldn't say no. I did say no at first and then felt guilty, so we did our usual home to Blacktown routine to pick up the car and then drove over to Marsden Park. While in the area, we also picked up the Weber grill cleaner and scraper to make our post-barbeque cleaning easier. We returned the curtain rod that was a bit too short and bought a replacement one at Bunnings. And finally managed to grab a sausage sizzle after previous multiple failed attempts. Sausage Sizzle at Bunnings On Sunday, we invited Umesh and his wife Tej over for a nice quiet Sunday barbeque. We had good fun, good chat, some good food (if I say so myself) and dropped into food coma, which explains this week's late newsletter. ### What I've been playing **Civilization VII** - I lost my first ever game in Civ VII (wow! what an update Firaxis - I need revise the post!). I was playing as Hatshepsut, taking on Egypt for the antiquity era and then the Abbasids for the Exploration era. In Modern era, I continued with the Abbasids to try out the new Syncretism features - they're pretty good. However, in my pursuit of peace and science and economic victory, I completely ignore the Military side and was oblivious to AI Pachacuti racking up territory after territory and completely blindsided me, scoring a military victory. I even declared a late war to see if I can counter the victory only to be notified Culture defeat was few turns away as well. And to make matters worse, I hamstrung myself by not planning properly and realised I had no place to put a railway station in the capital, thus no way to setup factories at all so had to do a late science pivot which pre-update would have lead to a victory but clearly Firaxis has done some good changes to the AI behaviour to pursue victory more aggressively. My glorious defeat in Civilization VII **Path of Exile 2 -** The new league of Path of Exile 2 is out, and of course I was going to play it. I've been slowly making my way through the campaign, just getting into the interludes. For this league, I decided to go with the Permafrost bolts build. It is very fun. The gameplay loop is very simple - freeze using permafrost bolt, shatter with fragmentation bolt and then that triggers Herald of Ice to do some AoE. The build is clunky initially because of reload times but later notables make it very fun. The freeze effect also negates a lot of enemy attacks, making leveling pretty easy and even against bosses that I’ve struggled a breeze to defeat. Path of Exile 2 has some gorgeous locations. ### Music of the Week I came across this amazing cover of Blondie's "Call Me" by The Last Dinner Party and was just floored by the performance. What an amazing stage presence by the lead vocalist. Been listening non-stop this week! ### Thanks for reading. Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

### What's been happening It's been a very wet and rainy week. My swimming classes have been going pretty okay. I'm still struggling to sustain my swim beyond three strokes - after two or three strokes, I end up folding my knee a bit, and that pushes my head over the water and then I lose momentum. I haven't been able to improve on this. It's been supremely frustrating, but I guess I have to keep at it. Jo has been sick on and off through the week - on Tuesday she was sick enough that she didn't go to work or come into the gym. She's feeling better now but not quite a 100% - especially mornings have been rough and she's not been sleeping well. Hopefully, she will get better. Because of her sickness, Jo couldn't join in for Tuesday's PT but she did join on Wednesday (and promptly regretted that after the workout). The work's been pretty okay. I focused on getting my performance test built out and was fixing some bugs that I discovered that was causing the performance test to exit out earlier than expected. On Friday, I was working from home and Jo had to go into the city since she had some tests that were scheduled. After about two weeks of cloudy, rainy weather, the sun also came out. By evening, the backyard lawn, which had overgrown quite a bit, had also dried up completely so I decided to get the whipper snipper and the lawn mower out and got the backyard all nice and clean. Overgrown lawn, and how the backyard looks like now after the mow. On Saturday, Amrita & Sathya invited us over to their house for lunch and we went over. It was good to catch up after a few months. They'd been to New Zealand recently and I was keen to hear about how the experience was - particularly since they did a road trip from Queenstown up North. And of course - some yummy food was had. Lovely views from Amrita & Sathya's house Saturday night was probably the coldest we'd felt yet and Jo woke up again with a blocked nose. The cold has been particularly painful with the sheets which makes it even colder than it is, so we decided to head over to Rouse Hill shopping centre and have brunch and then do some follow-up shopping and got some flannel fitted sheets and a nice warm blanket. While returning, Jo went over to the market and got some fruits while I had a long overdue haircut - not particularly a good one at that. Ah well, it will grow back soon. After we returned home, I told Jo we should do the front yard (meaning just mow the front yard lawn and trim the sides) and somehow she interpreted this as doing our side strip makeover, which had been pending for a while. Thus, we spent a few hours trimming the lawn on the side with the whipper snipper (can't use the mower here as we have some plants growing). Once the lawn was trimmed, Jo put cardboard on it, watered it to set it down. Jo then layered it with some soil, compost, and weed block mulch to stop grass from growing. It looks a lot neater now. ### What I've been playing Civilization VII - With the new update out this past week, I have been playing it for a bit and wrote a post about it. ### What I watched 30 Rock - I started watching 30 Rock during my morning commute and was reminded how good it is. ### What we ate Moss Bros Cafe, Rouse Hill - We stopped by here for brunch. I ordered the Chilli Chorizo Croissant while Jo ordered the Corn Fritters. I was pretty surprised by the portion size of my croissant - it was a lot bigger than I thought. Thankfully it wasn't just the size that was good - the food was really good too. Jo said her corn fritters were ok - she didn't expect them to be deep fried. That said, the coffees were good as well. Milana Pizzeria, Stanhope Gardens - We had been to this pizzeria a month ago and revisited this place last Thursday. And like last time, we had a great pizza. This time we ordered a half-and-half - half of Giuliano (_tomato base, chicken, garlic, pineapple, BBQ sauce, cheese_) and half of Tandoori. I was expecting to like the Tandoori better than Giuliano but it was the other way around. ### Music of the Week Franz Ferdinand does a live play of their song Take Me Out. Shoutout to the drummer Audrey Tait for the fabulous work on the drums. ### Link of the week > AI is [...] going to revolutionize the way we work [...] Everything getting faster and easier would be an extraordinary boon to all of our lives. Can we have a day off then? Can we have the day off?So, apparently we are at the cusp of the entire world’s white collar workforce (and, by extension, much of the US workforce) undergoing a revolution in productivity. AI is the technology that is going to revolutionize the way we work, the way we interact with the world, the way we learn, the way we socialize, and all of this. This sounds great. Really, it does. Everything getting faster and easier would be an extraordinary boon to all of our lives. ### Thanks for reading. Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

Firaxis releasd the much anticipated Test of Time update earlier in the week. This update introduces a rather fundamental change to the game - allowing you to play with the same Civilization for all three ages. You can still continue with changing Civilization at the end of the era, but you're no longer limited to picking a civilization specific to their age. Given that the entire premise of Civilization 7 is civ-switching, I can only imagine the kind of rework that would have gone in to support this. Civs were locked to specific ages, and they work around this by recommending apex Civs and should you choose to pick a non-Apex civ, a new feature called syncretism__ lets you pick and choose unique perks (infrastructure, units) from across other civilizations _._ The patch also brings in some new music and a bunch of other updates. The feature is interesting and has the potential to open up the game quite a bit. Practically though, I didn't find it to be quite that impactful. Once the new update was done, I fired up Civilization, picking Hatshepsut as my leadering, picking up the Egyptian and Abbasid civilizations for my antiquity and exploration ages. I picked the respective civilizations as apex civilizations, taking the Abbasid civilization for the modern age as time-tested civ. There are indeed some nice updates - the triumphs for example give you a bunch of different goal posts as the previous legacies were ripped out. The triumphs can also be tracked giving you checklist items. Should you not track it however, once you complete it, you get a nice popup informing you of your _triumph_ which is a nice touch and reminds you of Civ 6's quests. Unlike Civ 6 however, you don't get a boost. You do get a dedication that you can apply to your subsequent agent. The AI, however, is still pretty braindead at the default settings so it gets pretty boring by mid-exploration age and you're drudging along. There are a few new ambient music(including alternative versions of existing music) but that's still not enough and repetition kicks in. Civilization 7 has richer music but Civilization 6 has a larger/better music collection. My take on the update is that it'll get people interested to play a game or two but over the longer run, it still suffers from the same problems that Civilization 7 when launched. Antiquity is too limiting - especially given that you can't navigate into deep ocean, in this game I was limited to this tiny island that I couldn't go beyond. At the same time, antiquity also is often the most fun due to AI getting good headstart from the difficulty bias. The exploration age is too boring and by the time you're in exploration age, you're likely to have a decent lead and there's not much to do except go through the turns. By the Modern age, you're mostly done and just waiting for things to finish. The UI has improved quite a bit since launch but still lacks a whole bunch of important things - swapping tiles is behind some arbitrary conditions, you still can't figure out what policy cards do unless you install a mod, and there's no list of units. I'm not sure where Civilization VII will go from here - to get this out, they clearly had to put a lot of planned (read paid) content on pause. Going back to releasing the paid content is something I don't think will get a good reception. I can only wait and watch. For now, I'll play the odd game or two and revisit once the next update is out.

### What's been happening It's been a quiet, rainy week. I mentioned having given my Apple Watch for repairs last week - I got an email stating that they can't service my Watch in time and would offer a replacement of the same model - but in a different colour. (L) the new watch (R) the old one I wasn't keen on the band colour but then again I was reminded that I still have my old band and the main unit's colour is barely perceptible so I agreed to the replacement. I received it towards the end of the week and it's going well. I restored from backup and all my apps and Watch configuration - including the complications — were preserved. Happy to have my Watch back - Apple Health though seemed to believe that I was slacking around persistently reminding me that my activity was much lower than usual. The PT went pretty well. We started working towards 1RM for bench press. Right now, we're still building up towards our working weights. Last I recall, the max I'd done on the barbell bench press was 50kg. Would be nice to get to 70kg - probably that's what my target would be as our trainer had told us to have a target in mind and he'll let us know if it's close to what he's thinking. On the work front, I started working on a new project to deliver a benchmark/stress testing harness so teams can request for a benchmark across a variety of instance types and the harness will orchestrate it. I'm using Temporal as the provisioner and orchestrator for the harness. I have an initial proof-of-concept ready and looking to hear feedback from the requesting team. I've also booked tickets for my first work trip in a few months - I will be heading to Bellevue, Washington for a meeting with my colleagues. I asked Jo if she'd be interested in joining and after thinking about it - she said yes. We won't be there for long (only for a week) and Jo hopes to spend a couple of days in San Francisco to meet her sister before coming back to Bellevue and explore a bit of Seattle. I probably will have a second trip to Seattle in August for the AWS Hero Summit - I haven't figured out yet if I will make the trip or not. Something to decide soon. With the rainy week, we stayed indoors this weekend. On Thursday, we got the barbeque out. We applied some tandoori marinade to the chicken drumsticks and grilled them via indirect heat on the barbeque - and they came out well. Jo had pre-cooked some veggies - I heated them on the grill. Grilling moments, and listening to some mixes by Jo's cousin Jo also got a notification that the stocks for blood of her group were in low quantity, so we went over to a nearby mobile blood donation bank and donated some blood. After that, we went over to The Ettamogah to grab some lunch and were so full that we ended up skipping dinner. As a bonus, I got to see this pretty cool Nissan GT-R near the blood bank. ### What we ate The Ettamogah, Kellyville Ridge - The Ettamogah is a cartoon pub created by cartoonist Ken Maynard, and built as a real pub just outside of Albury at Table Top, New South Wales. This is now a chain of four pubs and we'd always see this on our commute back home and we'd been planning to visit here since we first saw it. While the facade remains a faithful recreation, the entry isn't from there but from the back, leading to a pretty large open area consisting of beer garden, sports bar, arcade and a dining section. Jo got the beer battered fish and chips while I got the smash burger with us sharing a plate of cauliflower arancini. The batter of the fish and chips was really good - only to be let down by the fish itself. My smashburger was really good. Overall a decent place to visit but you're not really missing out much if you skip. ### Music of the Week Not quite the Robert Plant songs that I was expecting but great Tiny Desk Concert nonetheless ### Links of the week Nisarga posts about how he found vulnerabilities in the CBSE scoring portal. Exposing Critical Vulnerabilities in CBSE’s On-Screen Marking Portal: From Authentication Bypass to Full Account Takeover — ni5argathoughts about programming, security & lifeni5argaNisarga Adhikary Simon Willison has a cool preso/post recapping the past 6 months in LLMs. Good wrap-up on what's been happening The last six months in LLMs in five minutesI put together these annotated slides from my five minute lightning talk at PyCon US 2026, using the latest iteration of my annotated presentation tool. # I presented this lightning …Simon Willison’s WeblogSimon Willison > This blog describes the build, some of the issues I faced, and answers the question “was it worth it to build the server myself, or should I have rented cloud GPUs?” tldr: probably yes if you can run them 100% of the time and have the required capital not only to buy the hardware, but also invest in supporting stuff (for example electrical work required to support it). If you ask me, for a casual person, I don't think the investment in local inference is worth it especially at current consumer hardware levels & cost. Also related: this is a good read. Was my $48K GPU server worth it?In 2024 I quit my FAANG job to become an independent researcher. To do this I needed GPUs, so I built “grumbl”, a 6x 6000 Ada GPU server. This blog describes the build, some of the issu…Rosmine ML BlogFixing LLM writing with Distribution Fine TuningApple Silicon costs more than OpenRouterLocal LLMs can be very very cheap ### Thanks for reading. Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

### What's been happening It's been a busy week. As usual, the week started with my swimming class on Monday. I've been getting better at swimming but still finding it hard to have a consistent swim. I can start fine, but after a couple of strokes I'm out tired, I stop kicking and then that's that. On the bright side, I managed to float on my back pretty well - so happy about that progress. On the flip side, after I returned home, my Apple Watch started acting up. It was detecting that the crown was fully pressed in all the time, invoking Siri or taking screenshots of the watch, depending on what I was trying to do. After a few restarts did not help, I let it sit aside and drain the battery completely. After it charged up, I turned it on and the behaviour continued. A quick search indicated this is pretty common if there's some debris in the crown, with most people saying a repair is the way to go. I scheduled a repair with Apple Sydney. Later on at night, I was about to pack away the Watch into my bad and I saw that it was working like nothing happened before.. 😒anyway the Watch needed a battery replacement so I decided to keep the appointment and thus I've been watch-free the past week. It was also AWS Summit Week time in Sydney. I didn't go to the main Summit event, I did get an invite to a private AWS Community Leaders meet with Dr Werner Vogels being the guest. With Werner at the event, I wasn't going to miss it, and it was good to meet the various other AWS Heroes and User Group leaders. This meet meant that I missed my Tuesday PT session. I did go to Wednesday where we had a new metcon programmed by Daniel, our instructor. The metcon was 3 sets of * 20 reps of kettlebell swings * 10 reps of jump onto plates * 10 reps of dumbbell push press. The goal was to finish these 3 sets of these without any breaks but the push press got to me and I had to stop for a bit to get some breath in. The rest of the week went by pretty ok. On the work front, we finally managed to tear down all the Windows nodes that were serving as the Tableau Bridge and it's now 100% Linux containers running on Kubernetes. It's also one of my first (and major) projects which involved migrating an existing service across different hosting styles and Operating Systems, adding Kubernetes specific features, custom exporters for metrics and dashboards entirely driven by AI (Claude Code with Opus). I think that deserves a separate post on it its own, someday when I get some time, I'll publish it - if it doesn't get outdated by the current pace of coding agents. I'm pleasantly surprised by how well it came to, and also annoyed by how many papercuts I discovered which required lot of steering. I also finished writing my post on our EV test drive from last week and what we bought as our new car - check it out below. We test drove four small/mid-size EV SUVs.We spent a day test driving four electric vehicles - the GAC Aion V, BYD Atto 3, Geely EX5, and MG S5. Here are my thoughts on each, and which one we ultimately chose.Sathyajith BhatSathyajith Bhat * * * My colleague told me that Sydney Metro had an open community day today where you could walk into the service tunnels. It wasn't opportunity to be missed, so we went over to Rosehill to check it out. It wasn't too long of a walk - about couple of kilometers of walk into the tunnel and back. And there was free gelato too! All in all a good day. Sydney Metro West Tunnel Walk I also made a short clip from my Insta360 video captures * * * I've always been interested in attending a medieval fair, but never had a chance to. A few weeks back, I saw that Blacktown City Medieval Fayre was coming soon and told Jo about it. She reminded me this Sunday morning that the fair was today. The tickets were still on sale, so we bought a couple of tickets and attended the fair. The fair was located in Nurragingy Reserve which looks like a really good place to visit. We made a mental note to revisit here after we've got our car. The fair itself was pretty interesting. There were a lot of people, many of them in costumes. I believe there was a best dressed costume contest as well. There were a few different acts going on. The one that caught our eye was jousting - so yes there was actual jousting between a group of four knights or dames. There was also a re-enactment of the Vikings versus the Saxons fight so that was pretty interesting. All the play acting, their weapons were fairly real and you could see some of the shields had actually broken off. I'm sure there were prop shields. We also had some food and we came back signing off for a really good Sunday afternoon. As with the Tunnel Walk, I collected a few clips on my Insta 360 and made a small video out of it ### What I read For reasons.. unknown, I was suddenly reminded of Questionable Content and started reading it from the first comic.. which was going well till the website got hacked and all the comics were deleted :/ The author mentions he's got backups and is working on restoring it. If you have recommendations for web comics, let me know. ### Music of the Week The Foo Fighters do a NPR Tiny Desk concert. Pretty awesome ### Thanks for reading. Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

Having passed my driving license test, Jo and I decided it was time to look at buying a new car. Prior to moving into my house, I debated if I should get a plug-in hybrid (PHEV) or a simple hybrid - EVs were not at all on my radar. ### Why EV? After I moved to my new home, I was still skeptical if I should get an EV — range anxiety being the primary reason. Not having a nearly independent energy setup was another - a comparative analysis indicated that running costs for an electric vehicle when not having access to a home charging setup would be similar, if not slightly higher than petrol cars. The below is an annual running cost breakdown that I did for three different car categories. Some assumptions: * Home Charging Cost: $0 (utilizing my 42kWh battery + solar). * Public DC Charging: $0.75/kWh (for long-distance top-ups). * Fuel: $1.75/L * Total Annual Distance: ~18,720 km based on: * average of 60 kms a week in city driving * smaller road trip of 300km once a month - _assumes this falls within the Geely's range_ * semi-long 1000km road trip once a month - _assumes_ _we start with 100% solar charge and pay for public charging for the remaining 600-700km of the 1,000km trip._ The cost comparison was quite interesting to say the least - below tables indicate the running costs for home charging setup vs. public/grid charging Feature | Toyota RAV4 Hybrid | Geely EX5 (EV) | BYD Sealion 6 (PHEV) ---|---|---|--- City Driving (3,120 km) | $262 (Petrol) | $0 (Solar) | $0 (Solar) Small Trip (3,600 km) | $302 (Petrol) | $0 (Solar) | $300 (Petrol) Long Trip (12,000 km) | $1,008 (Petrol) | $972 (Public DC) | $1,255 (Petrol) Total Annual Cost | $1,572 | $972 | $1,555 Feature | Toyota RAV4 Hybrid | Geely EX5 (EV) | BYD Sealion 6 (PHEV) ---|---|---|--- City Driving (3,120 km) | $262 (Petrol) | $157 (Grid) | $157 (Grid) Small Trips (3,600 km) | $302 (Petrol) | $181 (Grid) | $297 (Grid + Petrol) Long Trips (12,000 km) | $1,008 (Petrol) | $1,183 (Grid + Public DC) | $1,105 (Grid + Petrol) Total Annual Cost | $1,572 | $1,521 | $1,559 I almost considered getting a PHEV but it didn't make a lot of sense given that the short range of the batteries would mean I'd be carrying dead weight during the larger road trips. * * * We booked test drives for four cars on the same day - the GAC Aion V, the BYD Atto 3, the Geely EX5, and the MG S5. Here's what we found. ### GAC Aion V GAC Aion V The GAC was the first car we tested, and I have to say, first impressions were pretty good. The driving position felt a bit lower than what I expected, or rather, the hood felt higher, so it felt like I was looking straight on rather than having a commanding view of the road. Initially, this annoyed me, but I quickly realized the seat height was adjustable, and once I sorted that out, the position became a lot better. One of the first things I noticed was the regenerative braking - it automatically slows down a bit when you lift off the accelerator, unlike standard petrol cars where you have to explicitly press the brake. It's not a dramatic slowdown, but it's noticeable and something you'd get used to quickly. The car was impressively quiet - I could actually hear the music clearly, even with the volume reduced. CarPlay connected quickly, and the car has traffic speed detection systems that automatically announce when the speed limit changes. Pretty handy feature. As with most systems, it wasn't able to accurately detect school zone hours or not, and in no time, the pretty handy feature became annoying. **The Interior Experience** The seats are pretty comfortable - very soft and supportive. The lumbar support is excellent; I haven't felt the need to constantly adjust my sitting position like I usually do. It's got a really good hugging position, which I think would be great for longer drives. There's wireless charging for your phone (it's CarPlay plus wireless charging), decent cupholders, and plenty of storage space. The back seat has lots of room - Jo said her feet weren't even touching the front seat, and that's with me in a comfortable driving position. There's no sunroof, but there is a moonroof (a moonroof doesn't open, for those wondering). The 360-degree cameras are excellent, especially for reversing - really useful when parking. The turning angle is pretty good too; I was able to get out of a tight spot without much fuss. The most glaring omission, however, was a lack of a glovebox. You just get two hooks - I’m not quite sure what the designers were thinking when they did this. **The Drive** The steering is light and quite comfortable. I've heard complaints about it being floaty, but I didn't find that to be the case. It felt responsive and easy to handle. The car is incredibly smooth - whether I was going at low speed or medium speed, I couldn't feel any bumps. The sound system could use some work though - it lacks a bit of bass and feels a bit flat. The mids and treble could use a boost as well, but it's not overpowering with bass, which I actually appreciate. There's a small driver dash screen showing the driver information, including tire pressure monitoring, map display (though it doesn't show turn-by-turn instructions), and what song is playing. **Pricing & Verdict** The GAC Aion V Premium is priced around $42,000 AUD. It's a solid car with plenty of room, good comfort, and impressive smoothness on the road. The back seat was a bit bumpier than the front when we were on internal roads, but overall, it's a very comfortable vehicle. There is a Luxury variant which comes with leather seats and an in-built fridge in the center console. While we didn't get to test drive this, we sat briefly in the Luxury variant and didn't feel any difference in the seats. * * * ### BYD Atto 3 BYD Atto 3 Next up was the BYD Atto 3. Right off the bat, the seating position felt too low with no proper under-thigh support - this was my main complaint. The visibility is slightly better than the GAC, probably because the windscreen has a different slope. **Power and Handling** The Atto 3 doesn't have as much power as the GAC - it feels a lot slower and more laggy to respond. When I pressed the accelerator, it felt like the car was deciding whether it wanted to respond or not. It's bumpier compared to the GAC, not as smooth, though I'm not sure if that's because we were going through a lot of roundabouts at the time. After switching to sports mode (using the voice command "Hey BYD, switch drive mode to sport"), things improved but not a lot. The car felt a bit more responsive, but even then, it didn't feel as refined as the GAC. In eco mode, the power delivery felt quite sluggish. **Interior and Features** The seats are decent but not as plush as the GAC. The headrest is not adjustable, which could be a problem for some people. The back seat has decent leg space, but not as much as the GAC. There is a sunroof though, which can be opened with a voice command. The driver display dash is more in-your-face and easier to read compared to the GAC because of the better background contrast. However, the map display isn't as intuitive. The regenerative braking can be adjusted between standard and strong modes, which gives you more control. One last party trick was being able to rotate the display to portrait mode, but not while in Apple CarPlay/Android Auto mode, which defeats the purpose as I expect most people to use them. **Voice Commands** The voice commands are... interesting. "Hey BYD" works for some commands like opening the sunroof and switching drive modes, but it's not as reliable as I'd like. We tried "Hey BYD, close the sunroof" multiple times, and it didn't recognize the command consistently. **Verdict** The BYD Atto 3 is a decent car but falls short when compared directly to the GAC. The main factors that would influence the decision are the brand name, dealership network, and the sunroof feature. The sunroof is nice but not a must-have - when you're driving on the motorway, you can't really use it because of the wind noise. In the city, you're more likely to keep the windows up anyway. The moonroof on the GAC gives you brightness without the noise factor. Price-wise, I think the BYD is slightly cheaper than the GAC (it's also a slightly smaller car), but I don't see any compelling driving reasons to choose it over the GAC. If the price difference is significant, it might be worth considering, but otherwise, the GAC feels like the better package. ### Geely EX5 Geely EX5 The third car we tested was the Geely EX5, and honestly, this one impressed me the most. The Geely was also the first car that I was interested in, but when we went to the Castlehill dealership, we were told there was no stock and there was a minimum wait time of 2 months. However, at the Blacktown dealership - the sales rep was far more personable and was really great to chat with. **Seating and Comfort** The seating position is excellent - probably the best of the three. I liked how high the seat position is; it gives you a really good view of the road. Good visibility, good space, and comfortable seating. The steering wheel is not circular (it's slightly flattened), which some people might find weird, but I got used to it pretty quickly. The steering feel is similar to the GAC - responsive and comfortable. The build quality feels pretty good, and the driving position is very natural. Unlike both the BYD and the GAC, I didn't feel like I was sitting in an awkward position. Both the GAC and BYD seats felt a bit high on the sides, so I had to sit in a slightly hunched position, but the Geely let me sit normally and comfortably. **Performance** The power delivery is excellent. I could feel the regenerative braking working effectively, but it wasn't very strong. The acceleration is good and responsive without feeling sluggish. One thing that's slightly annoying (or it's supposed to be a feature) is that there are speakers inside the headrest, so you feel the navigation directions coming from the back of your head, which makes you want to turn your head. It's a bit distracting at first, but something you'd get used to easily. **Interior Features** There's a proper glove box (which Jo was very happy about - apparently, this is important for storing stuff!), a wireless charging pad, two cupholders, and decent storage. The music system is supposedly one of the best in its class, and I have to agree - it's got good punchy bass and clear sound quality. Definitely better than both the GAC and the BYD. The car is very silent inside. The suspension feels good - I didn't feel anything bad about it, at least on these roads. The back seat is smooth too - Jo said she couldn't see much difference between the back and front in terms of comfort, even on narrow roads. **Comparison to Others** The styling feels similar to the GAC in terms of interiors and positioning. The car is a bit smaller than the GAC but feels just as roomy for four adults (five can fit). The turning radius is pretty good - I did a tight turn without much fuss, and it felt very easy. I didn't feel much difference between eco mode and sports mode in the Geely - the car felt good in both modes. In the BYD, eco mode was pretty much unusable, and even sports mode didn't feel great. **Heads-Up Display** One minor issue: the heads-up display is barely visible with polarized sunglasses (the polarization cancels out the display). Without the sunglasses or in low sun conditions, it's visible, but in bright sun with polarized glasses, you can't see anything. **The Final Test** The Geely handled everything with ease - smooth acceleration, good braking, comfortable ride. Jo tested the back seat on all and confirmed that the Geely's back seat is the smoothest of the lot. ### MG S5 MG S5 EV The fourth car we tested was the MG S5, and this was an interesting comparison, especially since it's a rear-wheel drive unlike the other three. **Interior and Build** The interior feels very similar to the Geely EX5. There's a proper glove box (always appreciated!), two cupholders, and wireless charging. The styling and positioning are quite similar to the Geely - I didn't feel any significant difference between the two in terms of interior layout. The sitting position is actually pretty good - I felt like I was sitting a lot straighter and taller, at a really good height. I could see a lot further ahead compared to the EX5. The visibility is excellent, comparable to the Geely. **Driving Experience** The steering feel is similar to the other cars we tested, and the build quality feels pretty good. However, the power delivery is a bit lacking - it's not as bad as the BYD Atto 3, but it's not as good as the EX5 either. In sport mode, I could feel the power coming in a bit more, but the steering became a lot heavier - it was harder to turn, requiring more effort. The sport mode also makes the suspension a lot stiffer, which means less bouncing around but you actually feel the bumps harder because the stiffer suspension requires more force to absorb impacts completely. One thing I noticed is that the start is a bit jerky - the power delivery isn't as smooth as the Geely. It's more noticeable in sport mode. This was kind of surprising because everyone praises the MG as a nice driver's car, but I found the jerkiness a bit off-putting. **Rear-Wheel Drive - Any Difference?** The MG S5 is rear-wheel drive, which I was curious to try. Honestly? I don't feel any difference whatsoever compared to the front-wheel drive cars we tested. I think rear-wheel drive advantages might be more noticeable on wet roads or in risky driving conditions, but for normal day-to-day driving, I couldn't tell the difference. **Other Observations** The 360-degree camera doesn't come on automatically - it only pops up when you're stationary, which sort of defeats the purpose. I remember seeing a YouTuber mentioning the same complaint. The turning radius is noticeably wider than the Geely - I couldn't do a full U-turn as easily as I could in the EX5. The back seat is pretty decent with good space, though probably not as much as the Geely. It's slightly narrower in the back. Jo mentioned feeling a little bit more thrown about during turns, and I'm not sure if it's the rear-wheel drive setup or just the suspension tuning. The sound system is pretty okay - nothing great. I think the Geely's sound system was much better. It feels like the sound is coming from somewhere far away rather than being immersive. The wireless charger had trouble charging my iPhone 14 with a silicone cover on. After I removed the cover, it started charging, albeit very slowly. There's no heads-up display on the MG, but they have a display panel that's positioned a bit lower. **Pricing and Verdict** The MG S5 is priced in the mid-40s, around $48,000 AUD. The speed limit detection is pretty bad - it keeps picking up school zones and you hear the ping-pong sound constantly. However, there's a button to customize and disable it, so it's not a dealbreaker. The back seat is fairly comfortable, and as smooth as the EX5 in terms of handling. The brakes are smooth and not annoying. Overall, it's a pretty decent car with no major complaints. That said, when it comes down to the EX5 versus the MG, I'd still go for the EX5 even if it's 2-3K more expensive because it feels a lot nicer. The smoother power delivery, better sound system, and overall refinement make the Geely worth the extra money. If there's a 5-6K price difference, the MG would be worth considering purely from a value-for-money perspective, but given they're similarly priced, the EX5 is the better choice. ### Final Thoughts and Our Decision After a full day of test driving, here's how I'd rank them: 1. **Geely EX5** - The clear winner. Best driving position, most responsive, great sound system, and smooth ride overall. The power delivery is smooth and refined, and the overall package just feels right. 2. **GAC Aion V** - A very solid second choice. Incredibly smooth, comfortable seats, good tech features, and plenty of room. The only downsides are the sound system, the slightly lower driving position (though adjustable), and the lack of a glovebox. This was a close second. 3. **MG S5** - Good value for money and decent overall. The rear-wheel drive didn't make a noticeable difference in daily driving, and the jerky power delivery was a bit disappointing. The wider turning radius and lack of refinement compared to the Geely put it in third place. 4. **BYD Atto 3** - Decent but doesn't stand out. The sluggish power delivery (even in sports mode) and the seating position issues make it hard to recommend unless there's a significant price advantage. **Our Final Pick: Geely EX5** After weighing all the factors - driving experience, comfort, features, and pricing - we decided to go with the Geely EX5. While all four cars had their strengths, the EX5 simply felt like the best of the lot. The combination of excellent driving position, smooth and responsive power delivery, superior sound system, and overall refinement made it stand out from the competition. The deciding factors for us were: * **Driving experience** : The EX5 felt the most refined and enjoyable to drive * **Comfort** : Both front and back seats were comfortable without compromises * **Build quality** : Felt solid and well-put-together * **Value** : Even at a slightly higher price point, it felt worth the extra money We've booked the car in Jungle Green colour and the car has an approximate delivery time of end of June. Had we opted for the light interior trim, it would have been available earlier but we felt it would have gotten dirty pretty easily and would be hard to keep it clean.

### What's been happening This week's weekly notes was delayed because Jo decided she wanted to barbeque.. more on that in a bit. As with the past few weeks, it was another cold week. This week, though, it felt like someone turned up the heat just a bit and then a day later dumped some huge ice bricks on us - and my temperature sensors agree! You can see the spike to over 25°C then the plunge to single digits. I've started using the heater more regularly now and being able to turn it on and off without having to worry about power bills is truly amazing. The gym sessions were pretty decent. On Tuesday, both of us were mentally drained and were in no mood to get some serious workout, so our trainer took it easy on us and decided to skip the metcon, which was pushed to the next day. And that paid dividends - the next day we ate properly and smashed the metcon, finishing a partnered workout of 3 sets of: * 12 calories on the spinning bike * 10 synchro reverse lunges * 5 burpees in under our target of 9 minutes. Pretty happy with that! The rest of the week went by pretty fast. Over the week, I'd been planning for scheduling test drives of various EVs that I was interested in and that were in our budget - Jo had a suggestion to schedule it all in the same day so we can compare it against each other. So that's what we did for Saturday - scheduled 4 different test drives through the day. And as with the house purchase, the Insta 360 came to good use, with us recording our initial impressions, driving and passenger experiences and overall thoughts on the car. I'll have a detailed post on that soon. And once we got back home, Jo, excited by the weather and the empty backyard pushed to get a barbeque ("barbie in 'strayan, mate). And that's what we did on Sunday. Buoyed with my new found freedom thanks to passing the driving license test, we rented out a GoGet and started on our Barbeque shopping spree.. First was to get some lunch in. Then, we went over to the Weber store and bought the Weber Family Q 3200N+. Jo did extensive research on which to get and finalized on this. The Weber store also had the gas cylinder, so we picked that up as well. Jo wanted to head to Bunnings and get an outdoor table and couple of chairs.. and of course there was no space in the hatchback we rented. So we switched to plan B - drive to Costco nearby to pick up some meat, head home, drop by everything and then head to Bunnings in Seven Hills which is a bit closer to pick up the furniture. At Bunnings, we picked up the coffee table, two chairs, some BBQ accessories and the mulch and as expected it was too much to stuff in the car. So we had to do a lot of car and furniture tetris to fit in the table, mulch and the BBQ accessories and of course, the chair wouldn't fit in. So I went on another trip to drop them off at house while Jo was at Bunnings. And then once I returned, we had to do more tetris to fit the chair in as the seat was a lot rounder than the car opening.. somehow we managed to stuff it in. Once we got back home, Jo was pumped to build the BBQ and thus she did, with me helping a little. We also assembled the table, unwrapped the chairs and voila, the backyard is open for grilling business. From our Costco haul, we grilled the beef bulgogi, spicy pork sausages and some onions and potatoes. And it came out to be amazing. The beef had amazing char on it. Look forward to some more "shrimp on the barbie, mate!" ### What I've been playing Diablo IV - Lord of Hatred: I completed the campaign of the new expansion pack - and I'm a bit disappointed. "Fan service" is a good way to describe the campaign. I don't get the gushing that's being put forward for the story. I thought the writing was extremely cliched and boring. But unlike the previous expansion, you do get closure, so I guess that's a positive. I started the campaign with the Warlock which was introduced in this patch. The warlock is a fun class whose archetype is taking demons and smashing them to the ground to deal damage. I tried a home brew build when playing the campaign and it was pretty fun. I tried a couple of other builds as well - apocalypse and dread claws. Apocalypse is the screen clearer but is clunky to play because you have to wait till apocalypse charges up, which takes some time. So the gameplay is like throw some chains, which start spinning up and charges apocalypse, and then detonate Apocalypse. It is really fun and gives a huge dopamine boost to see screenwide destruction but the charge up detracts from the experience - if you don't charge up, then you barely deal any damage.. Dread Claws has decent area of effect - not quite screen clearing material, but is quite fluid. I'll continue with dread claws build for now. Meanwhile, Grinding Gear Games revealed what's coming up in the next patch end of month and it's going to be amazing. It's a good time to be an ARPG gamer. ### Music of the Week Limp Bizkit's Take a Look Around is super high octane (and introduced me to the Mission Impossible series of movies, but this cover is flamin' hot. ### Links of the week Interesting video on Polymarket and the prediction market. * * * > Two guys who go by the name Taste Buds came up with the most enjoyable (to produce) YouTube series imaginable (via Kris) * * * > Experience the real-world sounds of AI with this interactive audio generator. Check out DataCenter.fm ### Thanks for reading. Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

### What's been happening It’s been a good, busy week - even though the week started with a holiday. Anzac Day falling on the weekend meant that we had a day off on Monday. We just chilled at home. Last week of the month is generally a busy week at work for me - especially as a scrum master as we do monthly sprints and end of month is when we do a sprint review and planning for the next sprint. We have a new product manager who’s stepping in as our previous product manager left the org. I was expecting some feedback from him on our sprint planning and processes and how I run things but was pleasantly surprised when he had only good things to say. That’s what you get for having an imposter syndrome I guess. The gym sessions went well too. On Tuesday we improved our metcon timings for the partnered workout of 20 cals bike, 10 synchro reverse lunges and 10 burpees - beating our previous time by a minute. Pretty happy with that. On Wednesday, our PT session had to be cancelled as our trainer had to run the group class. The group class runs at the same time as our PT, so we decided to join the group class which went well too. Workouts of the week. Through the week, I was preoccupied with my NSW Driving Test. I'm glad that I passed the test. The test experience, however, left a very poor taste in my mouth - I've written more about it on a separate post. The Saturday was packed - I had booked a plasma donation for Lifeblood at Town Hall in the morning. Plasma Donation at Lifeblood Given my driving lessons were over, I'd also booked tickets to Anastasia The Musical for the afternoon. The couple of hours break in between the two meant that we could grab some lunch. After the musical, we went back home but not before stopping by at a coffee shop for a Mocha and a cookie. For Sunday, Jo had grand plans to head to Costco & Bunnings to stock up on groceries and get some more soil - a plan that was dashed by me because I wanted to chill at home 😂 I've promised her we'll do it next Saturday. Having secured my licence, I plan to do some test drives for some cars and finally decide on what car to buy. That said, we did end up going to Parklea Markets to get some fruits and get an idly & vada before we came back. ### What I've been playing Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred - The new expansion of Diablo IV came out earlier in the week. I haven't completed the campaign yet so no reviews yet, but compared to the other regions, the new region of Skovos is absolutely gorgeous looking and very picturesque. If the art was not beautiful enough, the soundtrack is just phenomenal and puts you in the right mood. Ted Reedy has done a fantastic job in nailing the soundtrack. ### What we watched Anastasia The Musical - Jo was looking forward to watching this musical since quite some time and I booked the tickets for this for the weekend. Anastasia is an adaptation of the 1997 movie of the same name. The story follows the legend of the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia, who was rumored to have escaped and survived the execution of the Russian Imperial family. The runtime of the musical was about two and a half hours with a twenty minute break in between. I enjoyed the musical - the songs were choreographed well, the live orchestra was fabulous, and the live lights and stage effects were amazing. While I felt there were at times the musical could have been trimmed down a bit, I can't really fault it and had a good time watching it. ### What we ate Jiggle Korean BBQ, Pyrmont - Jo was looking to have kimchi pancake after our plasma donation and we saw this place was listed on Eat Club and nearby Lyric Theatre, so we decided to go here. We ordered a kimchi pancake, LA Galbi and the marinated pork ribs. The food was really good - the kimchi pancake was really nice and crispy and not very thick. The meats were very good - quite juicy and not at all dry. The place was a bit more expensive compared to a few other places we've been to, so something to be aware of. Korean BBQ lunch ### Music of the Week Continuing with last week's metal touch, Five Finger Death Punch's Wash It All Away is another great song And as mentioned above, the absolutely amazing Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred soundtrack ### Links of the week > Tiny Tool Town - A place for stupid-delightful tools made with love. Free, fun & open source. Made for an audience of one. Tiny Tool Town 🏘️A delightful showcase for free, fun & open source tiny tools. Stupid-delightful software made with love.Tiny Tool TownScott Hanselman ShakTV absolutely smashing it out of the park with another awesome skit. Great throwback to the Indian cars of the 90s I had no idea the creators of Goat Simulator were the developers of Satisfactory. Really good doco Want to listen to some sounds of datacenter? Datacenter.fm has you covered.. DataCenter.FM 🤖🔊 The sound of AIExperience the real-world sounds of AI with this interactive audio generator.DataCenter.FM ### Thanks for reading. Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

I have been driving in India for over 20 years. When I first moved to Sydney as a temporary visitor, I was eligible to drive using my Indian licence until I became a permanent resident. At the time, there was very little incentive to take the NSW driving test; if I failed, I would have lost my eligibility to drive on my Indian licence, too. Last March, due to regulation changes, I could no longer continue driving with my Indian licence. Soon after, we got our Australian Permanent Residence and I'd been meaning to get my licence done but we focused on our house hunt and purchase, that meant most of our weekends were spent on house inspections. After moving in to our new house, I couldn't put off getting the licence done anymore - while we were in the city, public transport was easy and frequent so even get by most of our daily routines, or grocery shopping without any hassles. Now that we're in the outer suburbs - it was a lot harder. Even though our suburbs are reasonably well connected, it was harder to move around. For example, even a 3 km journey would take a really long time because of bus timetables, or that the bus route was long. There's no shortage of driving schools and instructors in Sydney. Every person I asked gave a different contact. One evening, when Jo & I were going on a walk, I noticed a driving school close to our house. I reached out to them since I figured it'd be easier to coordinate lessons. After a couple of emails exchanged with my instructor, she confirmed she'd be able to take me on. ### The Driving Lessons I started my driving lessons in early March, a few weeks before my test date. While I'd been driving for years back in India, I wanted to make sure I wasn't carrying over bad habits and that's what I told her as my objective. My instructor started the first session by getting me to just drive while she observed quietly. After a few minutes she asked me to pull over. Two things jumped out at her immediately. The first was how I held the steering wheel. I'd been doing the hand-over-hand technique and that meant I was crossing my arms over quite a bit - this was an absolute no-no. My instructor got to be familiar with the push-pull technique. Muscle memory is a stubborn thing, so this needed deliberate unlearning and took a couple of "hands" checks from her before I stopped doing this. The second was blind spot checks. She stepped out of the car, stood at a spot where I could see her in the mirror, then slowly walked back until she disappeared from my view entirely. "That's why you turn your head," she said. It was a simple demonstration but it stuck with me in a way that just being told "check your blind spots" never would have. Over the following weeks, she took me around in/around Blacktown where my test would be held to get familiar with the roads. There were couple of tricky places where I had to remember positioning. The highlight, if you can call it that, was what she cheerfully called "the roundabout of doom": a multilane roundabout with pedestrian-activated signals on both the entry and the exit. It was exactly as chaotic as it sounds. By the penultimate session, my instructor said she was happy with the progress, but had one last note — my blinker-mirror-blind spot-turn sequence was technically right but mechanically rough. I was yanking the wheel a fraction too early and with too much force, which meant I'd have to correct mid-turn. She wanted it smoother. "Make it one fluid motion," she said. So that's what I worked on heading into the final session, and then the test itself. * * * ### Test Day and the "Examiner from Hell" My instructor booked my test for midday on a Friday to take advantage of lighter traffic. On the day, we did one last warm-up session to calm my nerves. We headed into Service NSW, filled out the forms, and met my testing officer. I knew instantly I was in for a rough time. My test officer was extremely rude. She saw me and greeted with "oh you people" and I was taken aback immediately. She kept making exasperated sounds and we hadn't even started our test. There was not a single ounce of friendliness within her. She was always upset that I was going too cautious. There were a couple of moments where I felt with her reactions and expressions that she was setting me up for failure by making me more anxious than ever and making me even more cautious. An example is when we're reaching this round this intersection and slow down I looked to the left to see if there were any cars coming and her reaction was, "Oh are you going to do this every single time that you're driving?" I'm like, "Yeah." She's like, "No of course you're not." When approaching roundabouts, I would slow down to look to the sides and there she was getting annoyed that I was slowing down. Whenever I slowed down to approach a roundabout, she would huff with annoyance. The whole test took about 30 minutes, covering a three-point turn and a kerbside stop. As luck would have it, she directed me straight through the "Roundabout of Doom." I even encountered a red light there - something that had never happened during my lessons. I had to do a quick stop-start because a car came barreling down from the right, but otherwise, I held my nerve. ### The Results Back in the Service NSW center after the test, I told my instructor all that had happened she was also very surprised by how the test officer was behaving. She actually sat and argued with her, saying, "Would you rather be driving with someone who's a bit on the conscious side or would you want to be sitting with someone who would make you sit at the edge of your seat, holding onto dear life?" And while all of that was happening - my instructor told me I had passed the test, much to the chagrin of the officer who was still making faces about me passing. * * * I got Gemini to take a look at the road test results and give a brief summary here. > Your examiner rated your performance across 25 different "zones" or tasks. You achieved a total score of **99 out of 106** , which is a very strong result (approximately **93%**). > The letters in the grid represent specific driving skills: > **S (Speed Management):** You scored **22/25**. You lost 3 points here, likely for minor fluctuations in speed or not adjusting quickly enough to a new limit. > **P (Positioning):** You scored **24/25**. You lost only 1 point here, meaning your road positioning and buffing were almost perfect. > **D (Decision Making):** You scored **22/25**. You lost 3 points here, which usually relates to choosing safe gaps at intersections or when merging. > **H & R (Hazards and Response):** You scored a perfect **6/6**. This shows you were excellent at identifying potential dangers and reacting to them correctly. > **C (Control):** You scored **23/25**. You lost 2 points here, which relates to the physical operation of the car (e.g., smooth braking or steering). * * * > **Specific Notes** > The examiner made a few shorthand notes in the "Notes" column: > **Zone 10 (D):** There is a circle around "D" with a note **"(M)"**. This likely refers to a minor decision-making error during a **Manoeuvre** (like a reverse parallel park or three-point turn). > **Zone 13 (C):** There is a circle around "C" with a note **"(KB)"**. This usually stands for **Kerb** , suggesting a minor control issue while parking or pulling over to the kerb (perhaps a slight bump or being a bit too far away). * * * ### Final Thoughts I'm happy to have passed the test but also pretty disappointed with the staff's overall behavior. I wonder how a 17‑year‑old would feel during their first interaction with the staff. To add a final twist of bureaucracy, I realized after the test that I didn't have my passport with me, so they couldn't verify my residency status to lift condition Q on the spot. I had to go home, have lunch, and return later with my documents. But now, it’s official: I have an unrestricted NSW licence. I’m just waiting for the plastic card to arrive in the mail, and then I’m looking forward to some proper Australian road trips!

### What's been happening It's been another cold week, but we're slowly beginning to get used to the cold. My swimming classes are going pretty well. I'm now 100% focused on building my muscle memory so that I can use my arms when swimming. At the moment, I can either glide forward, glide forward a bit and then start kicking, or glide and use my arms, but not all three. I need more practice and I'm confident I'll get there in due time. My gym sessions went pretty well. With the intensity toned down a bit especially after the heavy squats, we've been working on our shoulders and aerobic capacity and it's pretty cool to see the heart rate go up steadily as we get closer to the end of the metcon. Stats from Tuesday Workout I'm not the one to order merch t-shirts from YouTubers/streamers but I made an exception when I saw Path of Exile streamer Zizaran's Gauntlet collection and bought a Rapture Gauntlet T-shirt. Pretty happy with the quality and was delivered in a few days! Me with the Gauntlet t-shirt On Friday, I had my penultimate driving class - the driving test is scheduled for next week and I'm hoping I can pass. My instructor's pretty happy with my progress, but she did ask me to work on doing the blinker-mirror-blindspot check and then the turn a bit more smoothly - right now, I'm yanking the steering wheel a little too early before completing the blindspot check as well as with a bit more force, requiring me to do an exaggerated correction. Need to make it smoother. She got me to do some of these before ending the session. So I'll have one last session just before the test - hopefully, that will go oj. On Saturday morning, we did a small morning walk over to Little Corner Cafe in Quakers Hill. Generally when we walk, both Jo & I would have our airpods on and listening to our own music, this time for reasons... we didn't and were talking to each other - admiring the different houses in the neighbourhood, the plants that they have and chatting about walking down that lane when we did a house inspection, talking about what we'd like to do on the yards next. After we came back, because it wasn't quite as hot and our front yard had overgrown a little bit, so we decided to clean up the yard. Jo did the edge cuts which made it easier for me to do a deeper line trim and then the overall mowing. The cold certainly has slowed down the growth of the lawn, there was barely any clippings in the bag when I was done and usually the bag's quite full. Gardening work - before/after. With the Monday being a holiday for Anzac day, we did a day trip to Leura, Blue Mountains. Leura's a lovely place to visit especially mid to late-Autumn to see the autumn colours. We took a train to Leura, had some breakfast once there, and did a nice hike to part of the Leura Cascades Circuit, and then returned back to home. ### What we ate Milana Pizzeria, Stanhope Gardens - Jo was in the mood for a pizza and since this was nearby, we went here. This place actually blew our mind - fabulous place with really good pizza. Unlike many places which have flimsy cardboard like bases Milana’s had amazing super soft dough and healthy chunks of veggies and meat. Good friendly service as well. Many repeat visits are planned! Dinner at Milana Pizzeria Naughty Krishna, Blacktown - A small little North Indian restaurant by the Westfield Shopping center. Jo had visited their Seven Hills branch and suggested trying this place out after we returned from Leura. I ordered a Gobi Paratha for myself, Jo got the roti-curry set plate and we also ordered a Bombay Bhel to share. The food was pretty good. My gobi paratha was a bit bland by itself but changed tuned when I paired it with the pickle/raita. Jo mentioned her roti was quite fluffy, and the curries were good too. Would definitely return again. Lunch at Naughty Krishna - Bombay Bhel, Gobi Paratha, Roti with curries ### Music of the Week Trivium's "Until The World Goes Cold" is a surprisingly catchy metal song with the usual metal riffs, and some amazing drums & bassline. ### Links of the week The new expansion of Diablo IV launches next week and the reviews as well as changes look promising. I look forward to playing it. I didn't know Eurotrip didn't do quite well during its initial run. I enjoyed the movie - was quite fun. I don't agree to a lot of the (AI) influencer crap but Karpthy's "A pattern for building personal knowledge bases using LLMs" has been doing pretty well since I started using it since the past couple of weeks. I've started adding all the things I've working on, my meetings and to see the AI do a great job of transcribing, linking, updating my repo has been quite interesting. I can finally say at the end of a Claude code session - "summarize all that we did, the problems we ran into" into my Wiki and it gets added there. So if someone asks what was the pain with that project I don't have scratch my head on the problems I ran into and have a ready reference. Teacher's Tech has a nice quite 15-minute non-fluff guide on how to use this, good reference if you prefer a video guide. Saikiran takes us through our childhood really well. ### Thanks for reading. Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

### What's been happening The cold days continue and we've switched to winter mode. We've switched to the winter sheets and duvet so it retains the heat a bit more. I'm also wearing jeans while going to work, and carrying a hoodie around. It's only going to get colder. Speaking of cold - the swimming center where I go to learn swimming has heated interiors and pools, so that's been nice. The swimming lesson went well, and I'm slowly focussing on using my arms to propel forward. I've also got hang of floating on my back - it's still not quite 100% but better than ever before. With us hitting our 1RM on squat last week - this week was a bit lower on intensity. On Tuesday, we did a dumbbell shoulder press with the metcon of three sets of bodyweight squat, dumbbell snatch, and jack knife sit ups. These metcons have been great to improve my aerobic endurance and this was clear after I had a follow-up with my GP on the bloodwork results. On Wednesday, we did the incline dumbbell bench press, with single leg glute bridges which, for some reason, I struggled a lot. Something to improve on over the next few weeks. Work's been going on pretty ok. This week I continued on the work of moving Tableau Bridge away from Windows server to Linux, running on Kubernetes. The Tableau Bridge is a piece of software that is clearly not built for running as ephemeral workloads and it shows, with some really bizarre restrictions such as being forced to use a dedicated service account token per client, and this really kills reasonable ways of getting autoscaling to work without hacks. The other piece of work - visibility into prefix-level metrics for S3 buckets is almost ready with my team mate picking up my design and working on implementing it. We should see the benefits of that soon. * * * It's been about 10 days since we have had the batteries installed, and apart from the trickle handshake, we've not bought electricity from the grid at all. 1. Electricity usage prior to battery install which coincided with our billing cycle. 2. Usage after battery install (see blue bars almost nil 3,4: Solar generation and battery usage dashboard from the foxess-exporter. The batteries kick in just before sunset and has been powering all our appliances pretty well. I'm yet to use the aircon for heating for extended times - for the couple of times that I ran it, the dishwasher and the washing machine was running in parallel and the consumption wasn't too high. I also built an exporter that gets the metrics from FoxESS's API and publishes the data to an InfluxDB. The weekend was pretty quiet. Jo went about thrifting on Saturday and got these two cute frames. Thrifted frames Meanwhile, I went on my driving class and did a mock test - which I failed. The fails were a result of not doing blind spot checks and a few decision errors. Early on into the test, I signalled way too early. This guy in front of me thought I was going into the lane he was coming out of so he just barreled out. That was a bit of a jolt, and sort of set an early negative mindset. This is one of the areas that I should be careful, which is not to signal too early and get into the lane before that. I have one more class so hopefully for that and for the actual test, I will do better. On Sunday, we went to Bunnings to pick up some potting mix, compost, picture hanging nails and I picked up a garden hose trigger - the garden hose trigger at the front yard wasn't working and needed a replacement. I need to replace the entire hose set in the backyard as that is leaking more water than it is spraying. I also got this nice snake plant for my office and happy to have that. ### What I've been playing Path of Exile - Continued refining the reap-ignite build. This week, I used a LLM to find avenues to improve my build. A few weeks ago, I built a tool that looks at a Path of Building build code and spits it out in text format the required gear for the build. Path of Ninja lets you import your character build and get a Path of Building build code, so using that I was able to feed my character's details into Gemini and say, this is my problem, this is my build, point out where I'm doing wrong. And amazingly, it was able to provide some suggestions that have made it easier to survive. That's pretty cool. I managed to improve the survivability and damage output with the provided suggestions. ### What we ate Kokoro Mazesoba, Sydney CBD - Mazesoba is a brothless ramen that replaces soup with an umami soy-based sauce. It generally comes with wheat noodles, meat, raw egg and some other sauces that you mix up and eat. This place was Jo's recommendation so we went there for lunch. The Mazesoba was better than what I thought it would be. My order, Mala Mazesoba had good amount of heat so enjoyed it. Well worth a visit again! ### Music of the Week Tash Sultana's Jungle is her breakout song, and this bedroom recording is even more amazing to watch. ### Link of the week Listen to PyPI is a cool project by fellow AWS Hero, Mike Fielder > Listen to PyPI turns the Python Package Index into a live ambient soundscape. Every time a package is published or updated, you hear it as a tone and see it as a glowing circle While on the same _note (heh, see what I did there),_ Train Jazz is also amazing > Every dot is a real subway train. Eight hundred of them, give or take, form a small jazz combo (walking bass, piano, sax, vibes, brushes) that has been playing without pause for over a hundred years. Backblaze has quietly stopped backing up your data > My first troubling discovery was in 2025, when I made several errors then did a `push -f` to GitHub and blew away the git history for a half decade old repo. No data was lost, but the log of changes was. No problem I thought, I’ll just restore this from Backblaze. Sadly it was not to be. At some point Backblaze had started to ignore `.git` folders. [...] A user was surprised to find their Dropbox folder no longer being backed up. Alarmed I logged into Backblaze, and lo and behold, my OneDrive folder was missing. I don't use Backblaze but if a _**backup** _service silently ignores my backup folders, that is bonkers. ### Thanks for reading. Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

### What's been happening With Monday being a public holiday thanks to Easter, the lazy long weekend continued. Well, not quite - I didn't have my swimming class because of the holiday, but in the evening we did a bulk meal prep for the week. Jo & I have been experimenting with bulk meal prep for the week. Jo will have a meal plan for the week and work on portioning it out and preparing the various bases. I helped out with some peeling and chopping. 0:00 /0:36 1× Meal prep I was also very excited - for I had taken the extra day off on Tuesday. The batteries were finally being installed! The battery installers arrived in the morning at around 8am. The person introduced himself and going by the name, I knew he was Romanian, but asked him just to be sure. When he nodded affirmatively, I greeted him in Romanian with the usual greeting that I would do when I was in Romania - > Salut, salut! Ce faci? > Hello, how are you doing? The look on his face was priceless - _how in the world is this brown dude in suburban Sydney speaking Romanian?!_ We chatted briefly, then it was onto the work - he told me what the plan was for the day. I showed him where the batteries were to be installed and waited for the rest of the installers to come over. The install took about 6 hours - the installers unloaded the battery to the back of the house, mounted them, while the electrician worked on drawing the wires from the main switch board (which was all the way at the front of the house) to the batteries. And when it was all set and ready to connect, they shut down the power supply to finish the final connections and then turned it on. The installer configured the batteries - for which I had to provide my phone as a hotspot. The batteries need Internet connection to complete the setup, but when the power was shut down and later restored, that seemed to have caused a problem with my router and it went on a bootloop, refusing to start. It was only a few hours after the install was done and configured that the router somehow booted up - but in trying to get this done, I had attempted to factory reset the router many times, so all my WiFi settings, DHCP leases, IP reservations were all lost. So I spent another hour or so re-configuring them. But no problems with the batteries! They've been working well. Batter install being done I had shut down my homeserver and NAS the previous day as I knew the power shutdown was going to happen but didn't want to wait for the whole server shutdown time, so the day after the batteries were installed, I turned them on and left for work. Imagine my surprise when I reached back home in the evening and the homeserver and the NAS were fighting with each other for network connectivity - it turns out the homeserver got a `192.168.0.40` IP via DHCP from the router, but this IP was configured as a static IP on the NAS from the OS level, so these two devices kept fighting to claim the same IP. Untangling this was not fun, particularly when I was losing SSH connection every 30 seconds or so. I finally figured out this problem and got into the terminal and managed to shutdown the homeserver which let the NAS keep the IP. Wednesday was also 1-rep max (1RM) day - we'd been working on our backsquats the past few months and it culminated with the 1RM day. Originally planned for Tuesday, Jo was running late for gym due to her work and thus we had to push it to Wednesday. We started with a couple of minutes of cycling to warm up, and then the lunges and bodyweight squats for some more warm up and preparation for the squats. The barbells were then loaded and we slowly progressed from 20 -> 40 -> 60 -> 80 -> 90 -> 98 -> 100 kg (!!). As someone who's been deathly afraid of the barbell because of my previous back injuries, getting to here has been a major milestone and I'm very happy with this. Jo also hit her 1RM of 60 kg! Incredible work from her as well. We'll be changing the block from the upcoming week, so not sure what's next but will know soon. Here's the 1RM workout from me. > Post by @Sathyabhat@mastodon.social View on Mastodon I also met an old friend on Wednesday. Subhashish "Bhuto" Das had let me know he was visiting Sydney, and we managed to catch up over coffee on Wednesday afternoon. It was nice to meet - I think I'm meeting him after close to a decade. It's pretty incredible how many amazing people I had met over Twitter during its early days. On Thursday, my team went to Bistecca for lunch for my team mate's farewell lunch - he's retiring at the end of the week and we wanted to celebrate. We had some good food, drinks and chatted a bit and wished him the best! After the Easter break, I resumed my driving classes with two sessions. My instructor's been taking me to different places in Blacktown, where I will be having my test, to get me acquainted with the different roads and the little twists each of those roads bring in. This week, I was made familiar with Blacktown's "the roundabout of doom" - a multilane roundabout with pedestrian activated signals on the entry and the exit of the roundabout. Navigating this was a pain. When I returned home, the entertainment unit that Jo had thrifted from Salvo's store had been delivered, so we moved the TV to the new entertainment unit and moved the old one to Jo's office. Our new, old entertainment unit. We did a mini food crawl in Pendle Hill on Saturday morning, and then I went back home while Jo went about searching for armchairs to thrift (she was successful). ### What I've been playing Gravel - Gravel is an arcade off-road racing game that I had bought during the steam sale. I've been playing a bit of this and has been pretty fun. The game is packaged as an action oriented TV program - with many tournaments covering different racing modes such as sprints, time trials, rallycross and rally. The graphics are pretty decent, but the AI is either stupid and you end up with a 20 second+ lead, or rubberbands like crazy and leave you far behind. Thankfully, the game offers "stars" for your race progress and doesn't mandate that you have to win every single race. Path of Exile - I've been working on improving the reap ignite build and it's at a stage where any further upgrades will require a lot of grinding - either to get the required currency to buy or materials to craft. I'll continue trying to get to the higher tier maps, but I think this might be the end of the build. It's pretty fun to make one attack and see screenwide clears - might see if there's other similar builds for next league. ### What we watched While not movies, there have been some cool gaming videos that were published and that I enjoyed this week Forza Horizon 6 trailer __Forza Horizon 6 Trailer__ Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred - The Queen and The Saint __Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred - The Queen and The Saint__ Diablo: Lord of Hatred - First Look __Diablo: Lord of Hatred - First Look__ Diablo IV's Vessel of Hatred campaign was pretty poor, I'm hoping the next expansion - Lord of Hatred would be much better. ### What we ate Bistecca - Sydney CBD - As mentioned above, I went here with my team for a team lunch. Bistecca is a literally hard-to-find place thanks to the secret entry door that is pretty easy to miss. Once you go in, you are requested to deposit your phones into the box and they'll lock it away, so no pictures were taken. Unlike other steakhouses, Bistecca only has one cut - their signature t-bone that is done medium-rare (or your preference) and weighed by the kilo. The steak I had was amongst the best yet, and the sides were pretty good too. Gidley still remains my all-time favourite for Sydney steakhouses, but this is very good. Pendle Hill Food run - See my other post ### Music of the Week Elderbrook's Inner Light is a fantastic track with an even more amazing music video. ### Links of the week The Ingenious Design of the Aluminum Beverage Can - _Such a great video on what does behind the scenes of your favourite drink's can._ Top 20 Australian TV ads_- I don't know top 20 by what measure but these are pretty good._ 20 Years on AWS and Never Not My Job > Colin is the creator of Tarsnap and a fellow AWS Hero. This is such a great read from Colin on his experiences with working on, and with, AWS services. ### Thanks for reading. Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

Jo woke up on the Saturday morning with a hankering for hoppers. The eating kind, that is. Hoppers (or _appam_ as I've known them) are a staple Sri Lankan/South Indian dish consisting of a thin, crispy, bowl-shaped pancake made from fermented rice flour and coconut milk. Pendle Hill and Toongabbie have a pretty sizeable Sri Lankan population and of the two Jo decided we’d go to Pendle Hill. Heading to Pendle Hill from Acacia Gardens was pretty easy. We walked over to the nearby bus stop to catch a bus to Blacktown. From Blacktown station we took the train to Pendle Hill. Pendle Hill Way Pendle Hill was only three stations away so it didn't take long, probably would have been like 10 minutes to get there. Once we reached Pendle Hill, we got off and we started walking towards our first stop - Lathu's Pure Vegetarian takeaway. We had our first food stop here and despite the name, they did have a few tables to sit at. Lathu’s is a vegetarian place and among all the choices, we had sambar Vada each. The Vada was pretty good. Being dipped in sambar, I couldn’t say if they were crispy or not. The sambar had a unique flavour, quite different from the Bangalore or Chennai sambars that I’m used to. Sambar Vada & a display of the available food Slightly fueled up on the vadas, we went walking down the road aptly titled Pendle Way. Walking down the Pendle Way was like walking through market street back home as a kid - lots of folks walking about, some huddled talking to each other. A few places were blasting some music and in the midst of all of that I even heard a Suprabhatam being played somewhere. We entered a small bakery and picked up a loaf of whole grain bread to take home. From here, we crossed the road and went over to have the main dish - hoppers at Cinnamon Leaf. Much like Lathu's - Cinnamon Leaf is also a small, unassuming restaurant with a few tables and display of the available items. They had a wide variety of items - hoppers, rice, biriyani, roti and more. We ordered the hoppers pack which got us one egg hopper, three plain hoppers with a meat curry (we opted for lamb) and a sambol. The hoppers were amazing - soft, crispy and done right. The egg hoppers were even better, and after having the lamb curry, I told Jo we should take home the string hoppers (_idiyappams_) and the lamb curry so we can have it for dinner! Hoppers at Cinnamon Leaf We'd been eating for a while but I still hadn't had coffee yet. We saw Sree Flavours, a Kerala restaurant which had _pazhampori_(banana fritters) and south Indian filter coffee, so we walked in. I noticed they also had egg puffs, so another item we picked up to take home. Pazhampori and Egg puffs All in all, a good day's eat (quite calorific, I might add).

### What's been happening It's been another cold week! And with the cold persisting, our socks have come out. Won't be long before we have to get the jacket, hoodies and winter duvets/sheets out. This week's swimming class was probably one the best that I've felt since starting. I'm getting better at breathing out through my nose, and was able to push myself from the starting wall and glide till the first flag, which is a great milestone to be at. There's a couple that have started taking lessons just before my slot and they're pretty much at the same spot as I was when I started a few weeks ago, so to see my progress from there to where I am now is really encouraging. Good progress on the gym front as well - I hit my PB of being able to do two reps of 90 kg on the back squat. A year ago, I'd be very cautious of going beyond 50kg due to my back issues, now I don't even think about it. I'm glad that I finally started doing strength training, it's been a huge boost to my health. 0:00 /0:27 1× Getting my 90 kg reps in Over the week, I also had a brief meet with Thej over coffee. Thej's visiting Sydney for a holiday and it was good to stop by and chat, and get to know Anju and Uma in person. I'd been researching on Amazon S3 Storage Lens and Amazon Athena for a new proposal at work. I worked on refining the proposal, converting it into a RFC to be worked on after the Easter break. I also got a draft blog post on it done, I'll clean it up and publish it next. I've been working with LLMs and coding agents such as Claude Code, codex, OpenCode since quite some time now and it's pretty amazing to see how far they have progressed. I've gone from having to double and triple check the output and ensure nothing's been hallucinated to now not worrying about hallucinations any more. They're still far from perfect, and require quite a bit of handholding to ensure everything is as expected, but it's been a pretty big boost to me, especially in terms of getting some minor, nifty tools that I'd have not been able to complete without spending way too much time into it. Some of the things I built this week are * pob-gear-cli: A CLI tool that decodes a Path of Exile build code and prints the gear required in a clean, easy to read format. Prior to this, I'd have to hover on every item and have to remember every single affix that is required/priority. With this, I have a easy reference in text that I can overlay on my left monitor, that makes it handy especially when I'm crafting/trading for new gear/builds. * tuya-exporter: I had bought a few Tuya based temperature and humidity Sensors and installed them across various rooms in our house. I'd been meaning to publish the data from Tuya into InfluxDB in my home server but never could find the time to finish. I used OpenCode to finish off this, and also got it to write a Grafana dashboard. It's cool to see temperature variations from night to morning, or mid-day, and how much temperature varies from one room to another. There's a few more that I use on a regular basis, they're all published on my GitHub. With the long weekend, Friday was spent on gardening and yard work. The backyard lawn had really overgrown thanks to the rain and and sun from the past week and was in need of a trim. Jo trimmed out the hedges that were a bit too long as well and once she was done trimming the hedges, I used the mower to trim the lawn as well as clean out the cut hedges that had fallen on the lawn. Jo had also bought a leafblower that I made good use of to clean up the fallen leaves, grass and dust on the backyard. On Saturday, Jo wanted to head over to Salvos Stores in Minchinbury. Since Penrith was enroute to Minchinbury, we made a trip out of it, stopping by a cafe in Emu Plains and walking across the Yandhai Nepean Bridge. We had planned a Bunnings Visit on Sunday to pick up some soil and other gardening equipment but didn't realise it was closed, so stayed at home and relaxed. ### What I've been playing Path of Exile - I switched over from my minion build to a reap ignite build that's pretty fun. There's a nice satisfaction of walking over, herding a big mob of demons and then setting them on fire and watching them explode! The build however doesn't do that well for single target damage/bosses so have mixed feelings. ### Music of the Week Lounge House has been on my playlist this week and Jones Meadow's Paint is just amazing. ### Links of the week Some fun space-themed links for the week > I Recreated Project Hail Mary in KSP! | Mission to Adrian & Kau Ceti > Star Trek but the Computer is Australian > Spin Gravity compared > Artemis II crew now halfway to Moon as they take 'spectacular' image of Earth Artemis II crew now halfway to Moon as they take ‘spectacular’ image of EarthThe snap was taken aboard the Orion capsule by its commander, Reid Wiseman, as the crew head towards the Moon.BBC News ### Thanks for reading. Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

We didn't have any travel plans for the long Easter Weekend but wanted to get our steps in. Jo had been meaning to go to the Salvos Store in Minchinbury which isn't too far from Penrith, so we decided to make a trip out of it. We started off from our house to Blacktown via the bus. Once at Blacktown station, we took the train to Penrith. L: Us in the train, R: Tracks at Penrith Once in Penrith, we had initially planned to walk to and across the Yandhai Nepean Crossing but it started raining. So we took another bus to Emu Plains, just across the Yandhai Nepean Crossing. Emu Plains is the westernmost residential suburb in the outskirts of the Greater Western Sydney area. We stopped by the Laughing Boy Cafe to grab some brunch and coffee. I ordered the hash brown mountain for myself while Jo had the breakkie burrito. Brunch at Laughin' Boy We ordered the large coffee as well, and the coffee was a little light on strength and was more milky. The food was pretty good but with the public holiday surcharge, it cost us a fair bit ($75 for the two). Once we were done with brunch, the rains had stopped as well so we decided to walk over the bridge and walk back to the station. The **Yandhai Nepean Crossing** is a pedestrian bridge. It is also the longest single clear-span footbridge in Australia. There's space for pedestrians and cyclists though we didn't see too many cyclists. The bridge spans the Nepean river which supplies potable water for Sydney and flows downstream to eventually form the Hawkesbury River. On the river, we could see a bunch of people practicing rowing. The crossing is also a part of the Penrith Great River walk, an 8km walk offering views of the Nepean River and Blue Mountains. The walk looks pretty straightforward and is something we'd like to do in the near future. For now, we crossed the bridge, walked over to the Explorers' Memorial - a monument to the explorers who discovered a route across the Blue Mountains to the Bathurst Plains. We head back to Penrith, taking a bus to Minchinbury and then to home.

### What's been happening After an early start to last weekend, this week has been back to business as usual. I'm getting better at swimming - I'm now able to breathe out through my nose without panicking now. I need to get better at breathing in and to co-ordinate my hands to propel forward. Our gym sessions have been good as well. We've been consistently hitting and improving our personal bests in both back squats and benchpress. All that weight lifting hasn't changed my weight much though. Both Jo & I have been working on getting our step count to our previous levels. I need to re-start my post-lunch walks again. This week also has been a week of scheduling - I have my driving test scheduled for the first of May. I hope it goes well - I still have a few more classes to get comfortable with, and so far it's been going pretty well. I also heard back from my battery installers to schedule a date for my battery install - and that's set for the week post the Easter break. And with how cold Sydney became with the storm, it's coming at the right time. Looking forward to cutting down my energy bills some more, even with the heating kicking in. I'll have a separate post for my battery setup soon. For the weekend, on Saturday we decided to do a trip to Windsor, NSW. Windsor is a historic town in north-western Sydney and sits on the Hawkesbury River. Many of the oldest surviving European buildings in Australia are located at Windsor. We visited an art gallery, walked around the town, had some delicious fish-n-chips and came back home mid-day. I'll have a separate post on Windsor. Sights of Windsor Once we got home, we watched the Formula 1 qualifying followed by Rugby - the NRL season has started and I've been watching a few games and slowly beginning to enjoy them. Sunday was largely gardening and lawn care day. Over the week, Sydney had some really crazy storms which cleared out by Saturday. The heat and the rain meant that the lawn had really overgrown. I got my lawnmower and line trimmer out. I've been getting more comfortable with the line trimmer and got some nice edges with it. I was particularly trying to cut the overgrown edges and some bits of the line got cut and flew towards me. Thankfully, I was wearing my gardening gloves (as I wanted to pick up some of the overgrown plants as well) and that reduced a nasty hit. Jo went over to Bunnings and picked up a leaf blower as well as some tubestock plants and planted them. Looking forward to seeing how they grow! ### What I've been playing I treated myself to a few games that were on sale as part of Steam Spring Sale. These had been on my wishlist for a while and since they were going on deep discount, I picked them up: * Gravel * CarX Drift Racing Online * Megabonk I've played a few hours of all three games and they have been fun. I look forward to diving deeper into them! ### What we ate Macquarie Park Boathouse Cafe, Windsor - We went here after Jo suggested it as she found many reviews suggesting this place is good for seafood. When we arrived, the place was packed as there was a large party there. We ordered their fish-n-chips along with prawn tempura for myself (Jo's allergic to crustaceans, so she can't eat 'em). It took a while for them to get our food but after about a half hour wait, we finally got our food. The tempura batter was really light and fluffy and was really good. The batter on the fish-n-chips wasn't mixed well so I had some bland portions while Jo's side had some salty bits. The fish itself was quite fresh. Overall a good place to visit. ### Music of the Week Another great chill house song that I found while listening to my usual chill house mixes, Cold Light (6am Remix) by KC Lights (feat. Leo Stannard) is a great listen whether you want to start your day or want something to relax to. ### Links of the week The Overview Effekt has a fantastic video on visualising Time Dilation - also showing where Project Hail Mary gets it wrong The dude pulls out one video per year but when he does, Rocket Powered Mohawk is amazing in his satiric and sharp takes on Formula 1. In this video, he compares the first two races - Australian and Chinese Grand Prix of this and last year. ### Thanks for reading. Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

### What's been happening It's my birthday week - I took a couple of days off and chilled at home. But before that, last Sunday was one of the most anticipated days as Linkin Park was playing live in Sydney. As with a lot more folks of my age, I grew up listening to a lot of Linkin Park. Today's youth have probably forgotten the days of music channels which actually played _music_ - Channel V/MTV would play a lot of Linkin Park's hits from Hybrid Theory and Meteora. Apart from that, one of my schoolmates had a CD of Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory album, and he would get it and play it in the gym we used to go to. So to kick off workout listening to Points of Authority was quite the start for a workout. With that background, yeah was really looking forward to listen to them live, and they didn't disappoint. Linkin Park was supported by Polaris, a Sydney-based metalcore band. The crowd appreciated them - but to be honest, metalcore and growling isn't something that gets me going so I don't have any opinions on them. Linkin Park, however, were great. The performance was fabulous. The performance was split into four acts, each act kicking off with a small sample of their songs with a sample of Castle of Glass. They had some spectacular lasers and light shows. Emily was still struggling with her voice (Linkin Park had to cancel their Adelaide gig because of illness) but she delivered when it mattered. One of the most unique songs was when they asked a fan to yell out a number which corresponded to different ways to play a song.. and this ended up being a disco version of... Numb. It was a disco start to Numb, one that was done well. All in all, really good evening, one that we enjoyed. We also ended up buying a tshirt each and this fantastic vinyl of the latest album, From Zero From Zero Vinyl Come next couple of days, we had two different plumber visits - one to inspect the major toilet leak and the other was a scheduled visit from Sydney Water to do water audit. The two visits were because we were kinda worried the toilet leak would have major issues, given we were having troubles with both the toilets. Anyway, with both plumbers coming on different days, they checked out all of our taps, shower heads, toilets and I ended up replacing two taps, four shower mixers (they all had cross-thread issues and were pretty old). The new ones are all quarter-turners, so they do only a quarter of a circle rotation and that eliminates the cross-threading issues. We knew this was to be done, just was hoping to take it up much later as we were budgeting for the battery install. My swimming class went well. For this class, I finally bought the swimming goggles and what a difference those have been. I still can't swim for shit but being able to see underwater meant that it was easier to keep calm and try to reorient myself. I am finding incremental improvements week-by-week so for now, practice continues. The gym sessions were good too. Squats and bench presses continue, with now doing sets of 3 reps of 80kg on the back squat and hitting another new PB of 65kg on the bench press for 1RM. I did try to do 68kg, but that was a fail. That was about it for the week, I took the Thursday and Friday off for my birthday. For my birthday gift, I got the wonderful news of yet another rate increase, which means our mortgage goes up again, twice in less time than we've paid our first two installments. Such is life, I am very grateful to be in the privileged position to write that. I'm not big for birthday celebrations, so for my birthday I just chilled at home doing some chores. On the Friday, Jo took the day off as well and we went out for a breakfast followed by catching Project Hail Mary at IMAX. Here's a small write up on how the day went. Happy birthday to me! On the Saturday, we decided to do a day trip to Blue Mountains. I wrote up separately on that as well. Our video on the day trip to Katoomba Sunday was mostly chores day - we got the clothes dried out, Jo cleared some of the weeds in the garden and I finally got to cataloguing some of the vinyls Jo had thrifted over the past few weeks Some of the thrifted vinyls ### What I've been playing Path of Exile - I finally got to finish off Path of Exile campaign with my minion build and now just starting off with the maps. I'm not enjoying the maps and I might just stop playing the build. The Steam Spring Sale is on as well and I bought some games that have been on my waitlist for long and now discounted * Gravel * CarX Drift Racing Online * Megabonk ### What we watched Project Hail Mary - After I listened to the ebook and found out there was a movie coming, I'd been waiting quite eagerly for this. And happy to report the movie was pretty good. Project Hail Mary is a faithful adaptation of the book. I found that the movie focuses more on the mid-part of the book. The start and especially the end feels pretty rushed. That said, looking back at my initial thoughts of the book, I mentioned I found the start a bit of a drag. Getting the balance of too much vs too little is hard, so I can understand why the decision was done. It didn't affect me much, Jo thought it was a bit weird to see Grace's character stand up and climb ladders a few minutes into the movie when he's just out from coma while the book goes through a few chapters before he is mobile. I also noticed there aren't as many flashbacks compared to what the book had so it can be a bit confusing or unclear on what's happening. About the negatives - I thought Grace's character has more humour injected than the book where he is pretty serious. Ryan Gosling does do a great adaptation as a goofball, seeing the stark contrast as compared to the book is jarring. I think I finally get why book lovers don't like adaptations of their favorite novels. For me, I think the biggest flaw is Stratt and how little time she gets. When I told Jo "Stratt is barely visible" - her reaction she's like who's Stratt. That sums up how little she is shown/introduced. All said, the movie is worthy of a watch and you won't feel the runtime of 2.5 hours is a drag. Just be prepared to turn off your brain when the movie goes from _this is plausible now_ to _yeah no way_.\ ### What we ate Haven, Darling Quarter - For my birthday, prior to watching the movie, we were looking for a place near IMAX. After a quick glance at different options available, we chose Haven Coffee in Darling Quarter to grab breakfast. Haven are known for their coffee and bagels, so no surprise we ordered them. Their Blueberry bagel was sold out, we ordered an Avo & Cucumber bagel (with chimichurri sauce) and Chicken Yuzu Bagel, with Jo getting her traditional almond flat white and me my cappuccino. We split the bagels and went for the avo & cucumber bagel first, assuming the chicken bagel to be the more palatable of the two. Surprise, surprise, the avo & cucumber bagel was the better of the two. The coffees were fabulous and some of the best we had - no wonder it has such a high rating. The Dingo Cafe, Katoomba - After reaching Katoomba, we stopped by The Dingo Cafe to grab something to eat. We ordered the Chicken Pesto for Jo and the Reuben sandwich for me, and cappuccinos to drink. The food was pretty good - the sandwiches came on Turkish bread which were absolutely fluffy. No complaints on the coffee - not the best that we've had but nothing terrible. The place is pretty open and has a lot of tables so it's a good place to come and sit down. ### Music of the Week John Butler's The Way Back is one of my favourites from his PRISM album and now there's a music video of the same. Absolutely smashing lyrics and fabulous instrumental work. ### Link of the week Trucking with CJ has two nice vlogs on driving a road train from Gold Coast to Bathurst as well as a POV on race week of the Bathurst 12 hour race. Good watch! ### Thanks for reading. Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

Since we’ve moved to our new house, we’re on the outer western suburbs of Sydney. This makes trips to places like Katoomba far easier. It'd been a while since we'd done a trip (last one was to Gosford) so we thought we'd try a short trip to Katoomba using Sydney Trains. Transport for NSW runs the Blue Mountains Line (BMT) that is an intercity rail service starting from Central and travels west, covering Leura, Katoomba, Lithgow and in some timetables, going all the way to Bathurst. The closest train station for us to catch the train is Blacktown, so we made our way there taking a bus from our home. The BMT train runs about every hour and the Saturday morning 8am train was pretty full. It took about an hour and a half to get us to Katoomba. We hadn't had our breakfast yet so found a cafe - The Dingo Cafe to grab something to eat. We ordered the Chicken Pesto for Jo and the Reuben sandwich for me, and cappuccinos to drink. The food was pretty good - the sandwiches came on Turkish bread which were absolutely fluffy. No complaints on the coffee - not the best that we've had but nothing terrible. The place is pretty open and has a lot of tables so it's a good place to come and sit down. Breakfast at The Dingo Cafe Breakfast done, we decided to head to Three Sisters. The Three Sisters are about 2.5km from the cafe, but there was a bus stop nearby so we took the bus there. The bus runs every 10 minutes and does a city centre to Three Sisters Echo Point loop so you don't have to wait for long in case you miss it. We noticed there's also a hop-on-hop-off bus that runs every hour and does a longer Blue Mountains tour including the nearby places such as Leura. The **Three Sisters** are a rock formation going by the names of Meehni (922 m), Wimlah (918 m), and Gunnedoo (906 m). The Three Sisters There are a couple of bushwalking trails starting from the Echo point, but with thunderstorm warning looming, we decided not to take up any hikes and head back to the town center to check out some shops. First stop was the Little Lost Bookshop - an indie bookshop that sells new and second hand books. Little Lost Bookshop From here, we went over to Gift Shop Tora. This is one of my favorite places to visit as it is a cat-themed gift store. Last time we were here, we bought a pair of ~~paws~~ mittens for Jo. This time, we bought a t-shirt. Tora by Hiroko From here, we stopped by a couple of op shops. Jo's always on the lookout for new artwork for the house but she didn't find any that she liked, so we stopped by our last place - also the first place that we saw when we walked out of the train station - The Velvet Fog Record Bar. We didn't have too much time to spare as the train was set to depart in 15 minutes so spent a short amount of time, and during that found a great record of Santana to purchase. Record store & Santana's Moonflower record By now, it was about 12:45pm and we decided to head back home. Though it was a short trip, we had a good time and look forward to doing a similar trip to Leura soon. I was capturing various short clips with my Insta360 Go 3s and spliced it into a small video, hope you like it.

Last week, I celebrated my 41st birthday. As with most of my birthdays, it was a pretty low-key affair. I took a couple of days off and made it into an extended long weekend. Jo was working on one day so I just chilled at home, got some house chores done. For the next day, Jo took the day off as well and we made it my birthday celebration day. We went over to the city to start off with some breakkie. After a quick glance at different options available, we chose Haven Coffee in Darling Quarter to grab breakfast. Haven are known for their coffee and bagels, so no surprise we ordered them. Their Blueberry bagel was sold out, we ordered an Avo & Cucumber bagel (with chimichurri sauce) and Chicken Yuzu Bagel, with Jo getting her traditional almond flat white and me my cappuccino. We split the bagels and went for the avo & cucumber bagel first, assuming the chicken bagel to be the more palatable of the two. Surprise, surprise, the avo & cucumber bagel was the better of the two. The coffees were fabulous and some of the best we had - no wonder it has such high rating. Breakfast at Haven Coffee Our movie was soon after this - for my birthday gift, I asked Jo to get us a couple of tickets for Project Hail Mary on IMAX. The theatre was just around the corner, but we still had about 40 minutes to kill so we walked by Darling Harbour and just sat by. The movie had a 2 and a half hour runtime, so we were there till about mid-day. The movie was quite enjoyable and despite some annoying niggles, I enjoyed the movie very much. Jo told me she liked it as well. From here, we decided to head back home as I had to reach in time for my driving class. On the way back, we stopped by QVB where Jo picked up some dark chocolates from Koko. The driving class went pretty well - and after that we had an early dinner and I played some Path of Exile. Like I said, pretty low key day, just as I like it. There were plenty of wishes from friends and family - appreciate them all.

### What's been happening It's been a pretty good week. It started off with my swimming classes, which went better than how it went last week. I didn't panic as much. I was holding my breath in a better way. I used the paddle float to swim from one end to the other end, doing it in staggered approaches, unlike how I was doing last time where I was sinking to the ground and I was kicking myself up from the pool floor. This time when I reached the end I just stopped there. The intention is so that I need to stop the habit of kick-pushing myself in the water and just stop and then hope to continue my floats. I also got more comfortable breathing out with my nose in the water. Breathing in is still a problem but I'll get to it sooner than later. I also realized that when I was doing things in a forced manner, for example, when my instructor asked me to practice breathing out under water, it would mess it up and panic. However, if I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to it, I would naturally do it right. The gym session also went pretty well. It was my instructor's birthday on Tuesday, so we had to move our gym session from Tuesday to Monday. On Monday, we ended up doing the usual warm-up with wall-sits and then a little bit of Romanian deadlifts. The main working session which was back squats. The session's aim was to reach our one-rep max sets, and I got to 70kg on the back squats. I've done 80 kg on the back squat prior but I wasn't feeling up to it, so we stopped at 70. After the back squats, when we were doing the weighted dumbbell lunges, my knee didn't get any better so my instructor decided to swap exercises for me and got me to do box step-ups instead. On Wednesdays we had the shoulder exercises, including bench press. Again, with the session target being to find out our one-rep max, I hit my PB for 65 kg of the bench press. I tried to go beyond that to 68kg but couldn't make it happen. Overall pretty happy with the gym sessions and with the swimming sessions. We'll see how next week goes. The week has been pretty quiet. I was on call through the week but it was pretty quiet. On Friday, we were having lunch when I heard a major gushing sound coming out from the toilet. That's when I realised that we had a major water leak, from the water tank of the toilet. The first thing I did was hit the flush so that the water levels drop down and then I turned off the valve which was feeding water into the tank. I'm just glad that this happened when we were at home - I shudder to think what would have happened if this happened when we were out. Something similar had happened in our Bangalore home when I was in Romania and Jo was at the office. Jo got a call from the building maintenance saying that there's water coming out from the house. Once she got home, the water was so high that they couldn't even open the door - they had to force push and let the water gush out. For now, the water valve still remains closed so we are down on one toilet. Coincidentally, I had a booking with Sydney Water to do a water audit (they do tap/shower inspections and fix minor leaks and make recommendations such as more efficient taps) for next week. And if that was not bad enough we started noticing a little bit of heavier leaks in the ensuite. Now previously I had noticed there were some water leaks from the tap there but it wasn't too bad. It would sort of drip down slowly when there was water filling into the toilet tank. When I saw it this morning, I realised that the water was dripping at a higher frequency. I closed off the water valve for that toilet as well. I reached out to a plumber but unfortunately they were not available for a visit till next week either. Now we've got two toilets which are functional but at risk of causing some major leaks. Hopefully the fixes should be minimal because I think they're just some rubber gasket changes or in our main toilet case fill valve change. After the move to the new house, I had dropped to two workout sessions From the previous three that I used to do. That, along with us doing fewer walks has meant that my weight is slowly creeping back up. Our gym trainer told us to be more active on the weekend. With that in mind, we went for a walk to Quaker Hills and on the way back, we just stopped at a coffee shop, had a coffee and a French toast, and that just destroyed all the gains from the walk 🤣🥲 With Thej visiting Sydney at the end of the month, he mentioned he was going through some of my weekly notes to make a list of cafes to visit. I had been wanting to make a list of all the places we had visited, along with what we ate and a rating. I fired up Claude Code to make a list of cafes/restaurants I visited from my weekly notes. Claude added some context (such as observations based on what I had written) and then when I asked for options on how to expose this data but in a self hosted manner, it pointed me to Simon Wilson's Datasette which generates this simple, but wonderful UI with filtering and I was pretty happy with the results for now. Thus, all my restaurant/cafe visits are now available at eats.sathyabh.at. The data is pretty minimal, so this is hosted on my homeserver with extensive caching from Cloudflare. Over time, I'll add ratings and an easier way to add data - for now, it's a manual edit to the SQLite database that has this data. On Saturday, Jo was out almost all day checking out op shops while I got some more housework done. The lawn had grown back up, so I decided to mow it again. Our next-door neighbour suggested that I use the line trimmer on the edges first before using the mower so that the mower would pick up the cut grass when doing its thing. I’m not sure if that did what he said it would, but it did make for a nice time-lapse. 0:00 /0:15 1× We also had the orange jasmines on our hedgerows bloom over the week and it was amazing to wake up and see the flowers all bloomed and the amazing fragrance that comes with it. I’m looking forward to Sunday as we have Linkin Park playing here live in Sydney. I know it's not the same without Chester, but still - I grew up listening to a lot of Linkin Park, especially Hybrid Theory and Meteora. Those were the teenage angst days and Linkin Park was there to help us all along so really looking forward to it. What I've been playing Path of Exile 1: I've been playing the latest Mirage League. I've been having a lot of fun with it. I decided to go ahead with a Minion build and I'm playing as the Necromancer so I've got a tiny little army of zombies, spectres, sentinels, and golems who are basically mirroring whatever I do. I didn't get a lot of time to play so I've just about finished halfway through the campaign. I'm hoping to get through the second half of the campaign and get into mapping by next weekend. ### What we ate The Corner Shop Cafe, Quakers Hill - Slowly becoming our go-to stop for a cafe, The Corner Shop Cafe is located Quakers Court shopping centre which still retains its old-style vibes. We ordered our usual coffees and shared a french toast. The French toast was absolutely delicious - very fluffy, not too sweet and just right. In my hurry, I took a very blurry photo of the French toast so for now you have to take it from me that it looked as good as it tasted. Worth coming back to the place! ### Music of the Week Death Cab for Cutie has been my earworm for the week and I have been listening to a lot of their songs. I had no idea Death Cab for Cutie has been performing for close to 30 years.. incredible. I found out about them "only" 20 years ago back during my Chennai days when I'd listen to the Narrow Stairs album while commuting. Here's a couple of incredible performances from Ben Gibbard over the years: Ben Gibbard - Live on KEXP Death Cab For Cutie: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert ### Link of the week Kai Lentit's latest video "Shipping a button in 2026" is a masterpiece featuring all his characters from the older videos Chris Wilson dives into why releasing a classic version of your favourite online game is not just "recompile bro" Now that F1 is back for the new season, Conor Moore gets a quick impression of the new season, cars, and regulations from the grid (/s) ### Thanks for reading. Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

### What's been happening It's been a hot and humid week. It feels like I've been transported back to Mangalore with the humidity levels. I figured the pool would be a nice way to beat the heat and humidity, but that wasn't that great either. I struggled in swimming class. The past few weeks we've been using a different pool as there have been various swimming fests and competitions running. This week, the pool was relatively empty, and we went over to the other lane which is a bit deeper than the ones I was learning on the past few weeks. This lane starts off at 1.2m and goes to 1.5m, so as I was getting to the other side of the lane, it got progressively harder. There were a few times where I panicked and flailed my hands, only for the instructor to come give me a hand. So yeah, not the best session. Trying to float on the back didn't give me the best result either. It's kind of frustrating to be stuck in a place where it seems like there's minimal progress but I'm hoping this will change soon. The rest of the week went by pretty well. My gym session was pretty good, I hit my personal best for Bench Press. I was able to do a 60kg bench press which is pretty huge, very happy with the progress. Also had a mini Metcon which also went well. The Metcon was a set of dumbbell clean and jerk followed by box step up. We would do 10 reps of each of them for 4 sets with no break with a target time of being done under 10 minutes. I must admit, when I was doing or starting the 3rd set, I didn't think I would last through it, but my trainer really pushed me hard and gave me the right motivation and encouragement, and I was able to finish off the 4th set. After I was done with the 4th set, I just crashed on the ground and sat there for a few seconds before catching my breath and feeling good about it. The weekend was pretty quiet. I started my driving classes on Friday. The goal is to prepare for the driving test, which I intend to give sometime mid-April. The driving test is pretty strict here and a single failure, especially on the safety rules would lead to an instant fail. While I've been driving for a long time, I wanted to get some tips and things that I need to do right in the test, and, at the same time, be able to drive more safely on Australian roads. We are still relying quite heavily on public transport. While it does a decent job getting from one place to another, it often takes way too long, especially for short distances. So, a 5 km bus ride becomes like an hour long or hour and half long when driving would take us 10 minutes. That's the goal of trying to get my licence done so I can buy a car and not have to rely so much on public transport, especially for these shorter trips. The driving class started with my instructor asking me some information about how long I had been driving, how comfortable I am with my driving. She then got me to drive down the road, navigating where to go, while noticing and observing things that I'm doing right or wrong. She then asked me to pull over to the kerb. Her first observation was on the way I hold the steering wheel - putting my hand through needed to be changed. The driving test instructors are pretty clear that you should always move the steering wheel from left to right and no cutting through (or the push-pull technique). This is a muscle memory thing for me, so I need to correct that. The other observation that she had was on blind spot checks and why it's so important. She stepped out of the car and asked me to look in the mirror and she went and stood in a spot where I could see her in the mirror. Then she went slightly back and see that I could not see her at all, unless I turned my head around looked. This is why blind spot checks are very important, especially in the suburban roads where there's a lot of people coming out of driveways, or walking, or biking around. I thought this was a nice, practical way of demonstrating. Apart from the blind spot check, she also got me to give some tips on how to safely stop, which is came down to: 1. Indicate 2. Look at the mirror 3. Do the blind spot check 4. Slowly come in and stop She also got me to do a three-point turn, giving me a lesson on what you doing when you're doing a three-point turn, which is basically a whole lot of blind spot checks and look in the mirror. I asked her about the legality of using reverse parking cameras during the driving tests to which replied he said the test requires that you have to do the blind spot checks before you get started, but once you have cleared the blind spot checks, you are free to use the reverse camera. I will have another session next week, probably next Friday. She does week-to-week basis classes, so I'll know when the next class is come next week, probably around Monday or Tuesday. The driving tests are all booked out for at least four or five weeks from now, so I'll only be able to get a slot for mid-April. But that's not a bad thing because that's going to be school holidays, which means it's going to be less crowded. Plus, school hours are not going to be in effect. On Saturday afternoon onwards, we had a couple of guests over. My classmate from engineering and his wife joined us. This was our first time that we were hosting anyone in a new house, and it was good to have them. We spent a whole bunch of time just talking about different things and having some good food. Basically a lot of talks. They have a couple of YouTube channels, one on travel (which just crossed 100k subs!) and one on cooking, and we were just talking to them about the future, what they plan to do. And they were asking us for some suggestions, a some survey on how they or how we look for information about travel and such. It was good to have them around. They're traveling to New Zealand next month for the Easter break. I found out that Satya's having his driving test as well next week, so I wish him the best of luck! I published a small write up about my solar panels & solar setup at the new house, give it a read if you're interested. Given how much food we had on Saturday, we felt it was necessary to go for a morning walk on Sunday. Saturday evening and night were pretty heavy with rains, so I wasn't sure if we would be able to go for a walk on Sunday. We woke up and we looked outside. It was pretty cloudy, but it didn't look like it was going to rain, so we decided to go for a walk. Joe saw a small cafe in Glenwood, which is about a kilometre and a half from our house. The cafe was part of a shopping centre, which is fairly common for the suburban areas here, and not a proper cafe as such. Rather, not a standalone cafe, but we figured we'll head over there, grab a coffee, sit for a bit, go to the toilet, and then come back. That's pretty much what we ended up doing. We came across some really nice views and we came across Glenwood Park which had a skate park. It reminded me a lot of the Drumul Taberei park in Bucharest. The weather was pretty nice, and it wasn't as humid. The clouds did a good job of not ensuring that we don't get burned. It was a nice casual walk. While coming back, we decided to take an Uber back because he ended up buying a lot more stuff than what we originally intended to at Woollies, and figured it was just easier to come back via an Uber. Pics from our walk to Glenwood ### What I've been playing I continued my Civ 7 game from last week. I had just started the Modern age with the Siamese empire, and it didn't take me long to win the game with a cultural victory. As you can see, I went all in into the Culture, so was completing the civic tree in record time, giving me a good bonus to science and happiness as well. I was friendly/allied with most other leaders, leading to a peaceful campaign with only Napoleon declaring a war on me towards the end, but by then I was a few turns away from victory so it didn't matter much. Cultural Victory with Himiko **Path of Exile** - The new league of Path of Exile - the Mirage league starts this weekend. In the Mirage League, you came across special Mirage zone, which opens a portal to an altered version of the source area, bringing in all the different features from the source area, but with some additional changes. Unlike the previous Keepers league, the Mirages seem to pretty small and give you a choice on what bonus you'd like to have so you can target farm specific stuff (currencies, for example). I'm running a minion build for this league, we'll see how it goes. ### Music of the Week It's David Gilmour's 80th birthday and to that, here's my most-watched concert of all time, Pink Floyd's Pulse, restored and re-edited. As a bonus, here's them playing Live in Pompeii ### Links of the week > I made an interactive version of xkcd 2347, the dependency comic, where you can drag blocks out of the tower and watch everything above them collapse. xkcd 2347An interactive version of the dependency comic.Andrew NesbittAndrew Nesbitt * * * > 26 years ago this week the Pentium III launched. It was noteworthy for being the CPU that broke the gigahertz barrier, but also for being a better chip than its successor. The Pentium 4 clocked higher, but a Pentium III at 1.13 GHz outperformed a Pentium 4 at 1.5 GHz. It wasn’t really until the Pentium 4 doubled the speed of the Pentium III that the P4 became a good CPU. Pentium III launched Feb 28, 1999Released at the end of February 1999, the Pentium III was a slight improvement over its predecessor. But it was better than its successor.The Silicon UndergroundDave Farquhar * * * This is such a lovely post from Jack > I was nominated to submit a commencement speech for my grad school’s 2026 commencement. [...] Everything is changing: AI, the job market, the world order, our lives. Many of you are rightfully worried about what comes next. [... ] I thought productivity was everything. We hear the word “productivity” mentioned as something society should maximize [...] The most effective strategy I found is to be as curious and genuine as possible Real-Life Superpowers -I was nominated to submit a commencement speech for my grad school’s 2026 commencement. They didn’t select it, so I’m putting it here. Congratulations class of 2026. We are graduating at a very strange time in human history. Everything is changing: AI, the job market, the world order, our lives. Many of you are rightfully worried about what comes next. In addition to our degree, we’re told we need internships, research, side projects, and extra-curriculars. And yet, even that doesn’t feel like enough. We have no idea what’s coming our way or how to brace ourselves.jarbus ### Thanks for reading. Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

We bought a house recently, and one of the nice things about the house is that it already had solar panels installed. Even before we had completed the purchase of the house, I was already thinking and speculating how many panels it might have (based on satellite images), and how much it could generate and potentially how much we could reduce our electricity bills. From pictures taken during the house inspection, I knew the inverter was Sungrow SGK-5D 5kW inverter. I had also noticed the inverter had a WiFi dongle, which got me all excited. But of course, since we were still in house-is-not-ours-yet mode (waiting for contract exchange), I put my solar ideas aside. Soon enough, the contracts were exchanged which got me even more excited, but of course as the saying goes - _it ain't over till the fat lady sings_. Once we got the keys and moved in, I set up iSolarCloud, Sungrow's web and mobile app for monitoring solar power. Of course as with most shiny new things, the enthusiasm to check how much power is being generated goes away in a few days because you start learning patterns. You see how much the system is generating and then you get used to it, especially with the changing weather conditions. You get a good feel of how much power is being generated. So what did I learn about my solar system? Well it's a Sungrow with a 5kW inverter. That means, it generates up to a maximum of 5kW of power. The inverter also supports MPPT _._ MPPT _(maximum power point tracking)_ is a technique that is used to generate maximum power output from variable power sources. In my case, this means the inverter can generate maximum power from two solar strings - or two separate arrays of solar panels that the inverter is connected to. The panels are east-west facing, which means as the day goes by, and based on cloud cover/tree shades/other reasons, the inverter will try to get the maximum power output from both the arrays. On really good sunny days, iSolarCloud reports generation of about 45 kWh of energy. The inverter, however, does limit the maximum power output because of the 5kW output. The clipping is especially obvious on bright sunny days. Power generation output from the panels. You can see the clipping at 5kW One of the bigger mysteries was trying to figure out how many solar panels I actually had, especially since I don't (yet) have a ladder to climb on to the roof and examine. From Google Maps' satellite view, I could see how many panels were installed. I initially thought we had twice the number of panels we actually had (36 instead of 18). A solar panel has two halves - I thought each half was an individual solar panel, whereas it's two cells on each half which make up one panel. So with 18 panels, and each capable of 370 W power output, my system could generate a maximum of 6.6 kW of power. When I saw the inverter was a 5 kW and, based on ChatGPT overwhelmingly trying to convince me that I had 36 panels, I thought the inverter would be a severe bottleneck for the entire system. Recently, I had been talking to a few solar & battery providers to get a battery setup done and from their report I got confirmation that indeed I had 18 panels generating 6.6 kW of power. At the end of the day 6.6 kW of power isn't too bad. I have no plans to change the solar panels any time soon, let's see how the battery setup goes. I'll post about the batteries at a later time, once I have it ready.

It’s been a weird week, weather-wise. We’re slowly transitioning away from summer. This means that sunrise times been getting more and more delayed. Back when we were in the apartment, it didn’t matter so much - we’d be sleeping in till like 07:30 in the morning. Now that we’re out here, we’re up by 06:15 so that we can be out and take the 07:15 bus. Both Jo & I noticed it was a bit darker when we woke up than the past couple of weeks. And that our motion-sensing auto nightlights lit up when I walk out to the hall certainly makes it even more obvious. The week started with swimming classes - I'm getting more and more comfortable being in water. My instructor got me to get a launch myself into the water by pushing myself away from the pool wall. I also managed (with support) to swim end-to-end, which I was pretty happy with. She also got me to try to float on my back. Again, with the float support I was able to do it - and it was supremely relaxing to just kick back! It's been a fun ride so far and I hope to get getter at it over the next few weeks. The rest of the week went by pretty fast with no drama. I had my "final exam results" - it's performance review season at work and got me a chance to sit down, look back at all the things I've done in the past year and things that I can improve upon. The biggest change has been assuming scrum master responsibilities. We're an infra team, so our problem hasn't been a never-ending backlog - rather, a relatively empty backlog as we try to figure out our team identity and come up with the work we'd like to take on. As we've been focusing on cost efficiency the past year, the backlog has been pretty fluid, and makes my life as a scrum master a bit harder as lot of work are been speculative investigations. That said, it's been a good run and it's good to have a team and manager that supports and appreciates your work. It's always hard to get people to keep their tickets up-to-date, without annoying them too much, but at the end of the day - that's my job. Our gym sessions have been going well. Despite our initial hesitations on whether we'd be able to stick to the schedule, it's been ok. We've settled into a routine - Tuesday/Wednesday evenings are gym evenings. With my weightloss having stalled at around 95kg, it's been kinda frustrating. But my trainer re-did my body fat measurements - first time since I signed up. My lean weight has remained at 74kg, but my body fat has reduced from 113 kg to 95 kg, with a body fat around 25%. My trainer congratulated me on my work and gave a reminder that body weight may have remained stagnant but that's a phase and as long as it doesn't go back up it should be fine. I'll try to get some steps in over the weekends, and with the swimming classes, hopefully it will get me down to my desired weight. On Friday, Jo had a minor procedure. She's doing okay and hasn't stopped her from going to Ikea to pick up some curtain rods, or to op-shops thrifting some nice picture frames and an artwork. We also went to the nursery in Parklea markets and got a stake as support for the the rose plant (a branch of which has been falling on the floor) and a terracotta pot along with curry leaves plant. Left to right: Irises (reprint from Van Gogh museum), thrifted artwork (unknown), curry tree in terracotta pot, stake for roses * * * ### What I've been playing I've been taking a break from the ARPGs for the past week. Civilization VII is due for some big changes as well, but felt like getting a game in so I'm playing a game with Himiko as my leader, starting with the Khmer empire in the Antiquity age, then to Mahapahit in the Expansion age to the Siamese empire in the Modern age. Playing through Civ VII ### Music of the Week Polar Inc's mixes have been part of my "relax" mix since the past few months and I have been very happy to play this whenever I need to turn my brain off. Here's Pastel from Polar Inc. Pastel from Polar Inc ### Links of the week > An interview from 2036 with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman. After the stock market crash of 2026 the economy faltered, 80% of people lost their job and the US tech elite had to find a new way to keep the world moving: Energym. This mockumentary fragment depicts a dystopian world 10 years from now The Matrix, all over again. Energym | aicandytech moguls interview from 2036https://www.aicandy.be/giorgio-1 * * * Veritasium covers the xz backdoor saga including the full history of GNU & ssh and a nice explanation of how various compression algorithms work. Bit of a long watch but worth it. ### Thanks for reading. Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

### What's been happening It's been about a month since we got the keys to our new house. What have we discovered in the first month? The biggest change, of course, has been moving into suburbia. Both Jo & me were worried that moving into suburbia would be a pain. And we both discussed over the week that it hasn't been as bad as painful as we thought it would be. Suburban Sydney can be quite car-heavy with some suburbs more so than the others. We've been living in the city, car-free for over three and half years now - relying pretty heavily on public transport. Over in the suburbs, we've had to change that. The biggest change has been trying to meet the bus schedules - a delay or missed bus can often mean that the next bus is 30 minutes away and that has a domino effect on subsequent trips. Other change has been that we can't make impulse decisions to go to a (new) cafe or restaurant around the corner - it's pretty quiet out here. Sometimes, quiet is nice. That said, we've been keeping ourselves quite busy - I had to mow the lawn again. The backyard lawn had overgrown quite a bit and was tall enough that birds started playing hide-and-seek there 😅 So on the Friday just after a heavy lunch, I was feeling quite sleepy and instead of taking a small power nap, I decided to take the mower out and do the backyard. I've gotten better at moving the mower around - it was running throughout the entire 20+ minute run that I took to clean up the backyard, as opposed to the first time that I ran and it kept turning off every minute or so. The edges are still a bit overgrown- I had to get back to work before I could do the edges with the whipper snipper. That's for another weekend. That wasn’t the only bit of DIY that we did over the week. Our master bedroom didn’t have any curtains and Jo wanted to put the curtains on so we could keep the window open without having the entire world peek into our room. Thankfully, the window sill already had holes drilled into it - seems like the previous owner had the same idea as us. This gave me a chance to bring out Jo’s latest and greatest gift to me Why yes - a handy screws organiser - best thing ever. With the great suitcase opened up, I picked up a few screws, the motorised screwdriver in hand and used it to drive the screws that would hold on the base for the curtain rods. I have no idea why getting to use these (not so power) tools got me so excited. But here we are. Curtains up! I also signed up for driving classes so I can get some tips and hands on just before I can take the test. The classes don’t start till March 6th, so there’s still some time left. And I signed up for these, my learner's license also arrived in the mail. This week’s swimming class also went by pretty well. I am of course still str to stay afloat but was doing much better than last week. In fact, I waded My way through the entire length of the pool. Sure I made generous use of the floats but it was still progress compared to last week! Our gym sessions have been going well too. I'm missing the third session, that is the group class more than I thought I would. Sure, it was always a pain to get up and drag myself to the gym and I would dread the thought of doing the metcons but I realise now how much those helped me improving my aerobic capacity. Over the weekend, Jo went over to a couple of op-shops and got a nice little pot stand with some frames. The frames featured all Beatles photos, but this one below featuring the line drawing of the Sydney Observatory is really pretty. Thrifted picture frames and pot stand We also went over to Parklea markets to get some grocery shopping done. Before we wrapped up, we picked up a few pots so we can transfer the indoor plants to these larger pots from the current tiny ones. We would have loved to get some potting mix but they are only available in 25kg bags - not something we can carry over now having to rely on public transport. That will have to wait for later as well. * * * ### What I've been playing Path of Exile 2 - I made a lot of progress on my druid character. It's now the highest leveled character yet in Path of Exile 2, in probably the quickest time as well. I was comparing the paper stats of my Druid build as compared to my previous Invoker Monk build, and it's kinda amazing how much more "weaker" my Druid/Oracle build is on paper (+ not res capped) while doing 1/3rd damage compared to invoker monk & yet the Druid just flies through maps & trials at the same level. I'm guessing the cast on crit + thunderstorm + constant whips from thrashing vines + slows from entangle make for much more consistent and wide AoE damage compared to te the invoker's Storm Wave. I'm now doing Tier 13 maps pretty easily. And as luck would have it, I got my first Divine orb drop as well. Comparing the two builds(left), divine orb drop (right) ### What we ate Haveli, Stanhope Gardens - Haveli is the closest Indian restaurant around here. We’d been here previously when we were doing house inspections. This visit was because when we retuning from the gym, I was watching a Chef Meherwan Irani video which featured _chaat_ and she craved for some. Thus, we got off at Stanhope Village and went over here for dinner. We had bhelpuri and chicken 65 biryani. The bhelpuri was nice, but the biryani was pretty average and slightly on the bland side. Dinner at Haveli * * * ### Music of the Week John Butler's "The Way Back" lyrics can really hit you right in the gut ### Links of the week I saw this cool project called Knock-Knock.net on Hacker News > I built a honeypot that accepts every connection, records the credentials they try, and displays it all on a live dashboard with a 3D globe. Brilliant piece of writing from Vikram on [his newsletter](https://open.substack.com/pub/vikrchan/p/valentines-day-in-bengaluru ) about Valentine's Day > Love, in Bengaluru, is all about [ … ] someone says … “Hey, I am on my way, I’ll come and pick you up.” Top prank from Misfit Minds that got the entire town bowled out, including the council members > We pranked an entire country town into thinking we were building a 20 storey state of the art McDonalds ### Thanks for reading. Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

### Meta There's a slight change from this week's weekly notes onwards. I have migrated my site from a Hugo-powered static site (and for the email subscribers that was via Substack) to Ghost, running on PikaPods. I'll explain the why & how I did it on a separate post but the TL;DR is that the current setup for writing was too tedious and I wanted it to be more streamlined. I've tried to ensure that most links work and added redirects to the old RSS feeds as well, so if something is broken, let me know. Comments are also enabled now! If this causes your RSS inbox to be flooded, my apologies! * * * ### What's been happening I had my first swimming class on Monday and it was okay. It was a very cloudy, rainy day and while walking to the bus stop, I had a big slide and fell down. Thankfully I didn't hit too hard and apart from a minor cut I was okay. Once I reached the pool, the instructor asked me to get into the water. She then asked me if I had ever done any swimming at all. I told her that being in the pool is basically the max that I've done. From there she asked me to try to kick with my head over the water. My God, that was hard. Never felt anything harder in my life. I was really struggling. She got a couple of floating assists to prop me: * one under my stomach * one as a paddle toward my hands I felt a lot more confident with those but I was relying too much on floats and gave me a false sense of confidence, so I got rid of it. The result was me trying to hold on to the wall with my left arm, with my entire body weight resting on the arm. Yeah, my biceps hurt a lot. It felt really good in the water, though. The class was only for 30 minutes so apart from me trying to kick I really didn't much done. We’ll see how it goes. After much procrastination, on Tuesday I finally went over to Service NSW to submit an application for my Learner's License and got it issued. I need to display this board if I'm driving Some background: I've been driving for over 25 years and have my Indian License. NSW provides an option to transfer overseas licenses - but only citizens of few privileged countries can get them transferred in one shot. For the rest of us plebs, we need to show we can drive but taking a written exam and a practical driving test. I had written the driver knowledge test a few years ago, but never went ahead with the practical test as I could drive with my Indian license. Now that I've become an Australian Permanent Resident, I am no longer allowed to drive with my Indian license and have to get a NSW license, which requires me to pass a practical driving test. You'd remember my previous adventure in the driving test - I couldn't find a licensed driver who could accompany me for the test, so this time I'll reach out to couple of schools and see if I can get some classes in before doing the test. * * * Jo also went over and bought a whipper snipper (aka a line trimmer) from Bunnings. We got the whipper snipper to cut the edges of the lawn as I found out very fast that the edges are very hard to get to. I also tried it out and like the lawnmower, it’s really hard to manoeuvre around. And with the grass being damp, the subsequent clean up was that much harder. I used it after mowing the front yard and now it looks that much nicer. (Left to right) the whipper snipper, overgrown lawn, lawn post mowing On Thursday, the previous house owner dropped by. She’s a lovely lady - I had reached out to her because we had some mail addressed to her and wanted to give it to her. She was really nice, spent some time with us and asked us if we had any questions about the house. We asked about the irrigation pipes we had seen (sadly non-functioning) and just some other things in general. She told us there was this clothesline that was stashed away in the garden shed that can be hung up under the awning - will come in handy as we’ve been seeing waves of sunshine and rain. On Friday, we both took the day off as we wanted to get some house stuff done. There’s a Costco not very far away so we decided to pay a visit there. Costco is a wholesale store so you get lower costs but there’s a membership fee and most of the items are pretty large, to say the least. but we used the opportunity to get some meat so we can freeze off, some pantry staples (milk, snacks etc) and must say the most banger of a purchase was this spicy chilli peanuts. So good. I also got some nice solar lights that I will probably put up on the drive (though after seeing it in action, Jo is more inclined to put it in the backyard) Costco Haul On Saturday morning, we wanted to go for a nice long walk but rain played spoilsport, so we stayed indoors. On Sunday, it was still quite cloudy but we decided to go for a walk nonetheless. We found a nice dog park/reserve about 2km from our house, so that's an ideal walk. We stopped by IGA to pick up some fruits/wraps, had breakfast at The Corner Shop Cafe and then came back home. ### What I've been playing I asked Aman if we could start a game of Factorio that we could play together. The last time I tried to do it by myself I got overwhelmed pretty fast, so I am hoping this gets me a little bit of learning base to get some solo game running. The Druid character from Path of Exile 2 is also shaping up very well - I haven't had any problems with any of the bosses and I'm very close to finishing off the interludes and try to get to mapping. I've been using Rax's Plant Leveling Build and it's been working really well. ### What we watched Jo started watching some more crime procedural drama shows (Bones, Silent Witness) and insisted that I sit by her. I saw a few heads roll off. Brrr. ### What we ate The Corner Shop Cafe, Quakers Hill Being in the suburbs mean that cafes are slim pickings. We found this little cafe as we were walking during our Sunday morning walk. Anyway inside there, it's pretty good. The cafe is mostly empty. It's a nice little place, a little bit of different character compared to the usual cafes that we've seen, which are mostly inside shopping centres. Jo had the Berry smoothie while I had my usual large cappuccino. For food, Joe had the brekkie burger which has bacon, fried eggs, and hash brown while I had the plain simple fried eggs on toast. The food was okay, nothing great. The coffee was really good though. Jo said that the Berry smoothie was also pretty good. Will have to come back to see and try different food. Breakfast at The Corner Shop Cafe ### Music of the Week I didn't know Creed had a version of "With Arms Wide Open" but with strings. Enjoy. ### Link of the week tl;dr: Deedy’s X (fka twitter) account gets phished and compromised. Hacker then does crypto rug pull, then impersonates X appeal account, and then tries to reach out to 157 other prominent accounts to try to phish them. Good post that goes into details of how it happened.

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