I was curious why the pound sterling was called such.
Turns out it’s from Latin, lībra pondō (“a pound by weight”), as in a pound of silver. Has the same roots as the lira.
The “£” symbol is a blackletter “L” for “libra”, similar to the imperial weight “lb”. 🤯
Occasionally when I’m converting currencies I’ll “convert 100 lbs to aud” for a laugh. Google understands I mean “gbp” and that’s always amused me. Now it feels more connected.
I wasn’t sure if this is one of those things Europeans know that was never taught in Australia, but it does seem pretty esoteric. And Shawn hadn’t heard it before so maybe not.
After a cold snap in Brisbane, we’re back to our usual summer programming. It was only 34 today, but it’s still uncomfortable to be amongst so I’ve been trying to optimise my ventilation.
It has reached the point of the day where outside is cooler than inside so now I get to open up the house.
HOWEVER the little portable aircon I bought is still running in the office. Even though it can only ever bring it down about 3 degrees, it’s still much more comfortable than sweating into my seat. I’ve been trying not to use it too often, but a little climate control is invaluable while I’m working.
I remember the old days pelting down Elizabeth Street on my bike (and probably breaking the speed limit) so I could make it up the hill on the other side and keep up with traffic. The citylink separated bikeway is way better 🥰
It was a bit of a surprise to wake up this morning and find we’re heading into lockdown.
After developing a case of the sniffles and going for a test the night before, I’d preemptively cancelled all my weekend plans already. But it’s different when it’s official, you know?
I always joked that moving into a proper house with a yard was a reaction to living isolated in a shoe box in Amsterdam. That the next lockdown I would be stocked and ready. Turns out despite the physical preparation I still wasn’t there, mentally at least.
At work in between tickets I would check the ABC News live blog for updates. It’s a bad habit, of course there aren’t any, but in a time when we don’t know anything, even the smallest scrap of insight seemingly means something.
Part of me just wants to jump forward a couple of weeks when we know the outcome of the outbreak. Skip to the end of the book and read the last page. Do things turn out ok?
But I’m doing fine. It’s been raining, so I’m very cosy on the couch under the doona. I have a naan dough and some curry ready to go tomorrow and we’re making pizza for date night on Sunday. Everyone on Twitter is talking about the Star Trek finale, so maybe I’ll put that on now and tune out for a bit.
Over Christmas while we were packing stuff up to move it around, my mum confided that she doesn’t use the hifi system in her office. It doesn’t get any radio signal and she doesn’t have any CDs to play in it any more, so it just sits there doing nothing.
Since my living room only has the tiny Google Home speaker, I offered to take it off her hands to hook up as an aux device to my living room TV to improve the sound. And it’s delightful.
I love a bit of a retro nostalgia trip, this website is proof enough of that, and this hifi system is really doing it for me. It harks back to a time when things were simple enough to plug together and screw around with. A good time for a kid like me.
This thing is a little beast. It’s an AM/FM CD/DVD player from back when these sorts of things were common. The year 2003 to be exact, just a year before HDMI was first released in consumer gear, so it’s the absolute peak of analog tech before digital signals fully took over.
Hooking up to my TV was a simple affair, I grabbed a 3.5mm audio to RCA cable to connect the TV straight to the hifi system. I could have bought an optical DAC (digital audio converter) for better quality, or even a HDMI audio splitter so I can play audio without the TV on, but this was the most straightforward solution and it sounds flawless.
It also happens that my TV is a hand-me-down old enough to support composite video directly (thanks Ben!) so I hooked it up in reverse to (theoretically) play DVDs. Why? Cos why the heck not.
The early and kinda disappointing days of digital video
Around the time this thing was made I was browsing an electronics store in Singapore and stumbled upon a VCD of the 2002 film Resident Evil with a gorgeous holographic cover (Video CD being the precursor to DVD icymi).
I needed to have it! In part because it the cover was cool, but also because I didn’t have a DVD player at home so I’d be able to watch this with the CD drive on my computer.
It was a pretty bad, but fascinating technical choice. Turns out VCDs have exactly half the resolution of VHS tape, and only fit about 80 minutes of MPEG-1 video per disc, so the movie was terrible quality and chopped in half to fit over two discs. Not only that, but the censors also cut out a bunch of good bits.
Still, I loved that film and I’ve been trying to burn a VCD with some old vlogs just for a nostalgia trip.
(Side note: Super VCD used MPEG-2 and had a higher resolution, so they’re almost passable quality-wise. But they’re still limited to 4:3 for that old school cool)
I didn’t have much luck creating a VCD in in the year 2020 because it’s all pretty outdated, but I found an all-in-one burner alled Devede which actually managed to take my rips from youtube, crop and convert em, then burn onto an SVCD disc.
Unfortunately the unit didn’t seem to be able to play them. I’ve got a couple of rewritable DVDs coming in the new year so maybe there it will have more luck with those.
Day to day Panasonic SA-DP1
Cool old tech aside, I’m mostly likely to use this as an aux system for the TV with the Chromecast as a source, because any other configurations are really too outdated to want to use on a day to day basis. And for that it’s fantastic.
Amazon is filled with reviews from people who loved this thing fifteen years ago. It wasn’t super expensive, it’s a solid piece of kit, and it sounds great too.
My place seems to have regressed. My desk broke, my outdoor setting broke, and mum bought me a brand new cabinets which lives in the middle of the sitting room. There are boxes everywhere and the place looks like I’ve just moved in.
Again.
Thankfully today marks the start of a week off so I’ll have time to do all of the things I’ve been putting off lately. Starting with my tax, putting my office back together, a trip to Bunnings to sort out my yard, and a couple of nights on straddie. Oh, and I want to catch up on my vlog. Relaxing!
Things have been going well enough but I’m looking forward to having a bit of time to myself. There are plans in motion so I don’t fall so far behind in life again, but that’s fairly new so far.
Right now I should really be sleeping because it’s 2:30 and R invited me to brunch and pebble curation in the morning. Haven’t we done well.
I was escaping the heat in the garden the other day when a strange bird landed on a branch near me.
I sent the picture to mum because she’s good at knowing these sorts of things.
The bird is a female koel also known as the rain bird, they are the ones you here very loud in the early evenings.
My mum, via Google Hangouts
That makes sense. I’ve been noticing a lot of different bird calls lately, but particularly the warbling whistles as I’m heading to bed dinner it’s often at 3 a.m when there’s no other sounds.
So it was nice to spot the bird responsible. There’s one whistling outside my window now.
I’m very happy with how well the yard is coming along, but especially happy with the quality of Wi-Fi. It’s fast enough to stream games when it’s too hot sharing the office with my computer.
Took this photo on the way back from lunch today. The ibis roost in the trees to the right, and fruit bats live out-of shot to the left.
I always thought this was “Breakfast Creek” but my lunch buddy Gav called it differently so I did a little research.
Google Maps and OpenStreetMap both label the entire stretch Enoggera Creek, but I found the following snippet in a local newspaper:
A Department of Natural Mines and Resources spokesman said “significant research” in 1992 confirmed the name changed where the North Coast Railway Line crossed the creek, south of Albion Station and west of Burrows St and Hudson Rd.
A News Corp publication
Apparently there used to be a small tributary creek around the area that was used as the distinction, but it’s always been somewhat of a mystery:
“Confusion over where Enoggera Creek becomes Breakfast Creek dates back to the 1850s when a survey plan labelled the creek at this point as ‘Breakfast Creek or Enoggera Creek’”
Department of Natural Mines and Resources spokesman
I may need to dust off my OpenStreetMap account and make the controversial edit based on this info.
But suffice to say, this segment does appear to be Enoggera Creek after all.
This brightly coloured signal box caught my eye just outside Bunnings so I had to stop for a look. I find it amusing that signal boxes are now something that “interests” me, but here we are.
‘Girl Power-Tool’ illustrates the strong modern confident woman wielding power tools to get the job done. Wo-manual Arts is an empowering thing!
I absolutely love the art style, the strong contrasts and pastel colours. It’s also a really nice bit of representation to inspire young makers, especially being right outside a two-floor hardware superstore.
From the artist:
I think the BCC traffic signal box initiative is one of the best creative projects in Brisbane. It connects the community and is a visual representation of Brisbane’s sense of place.
I know from painting on the street, (literally…sometimes you’re laying down doing the low parts on the actual freaking street) so many people came up to say how much the artwork gives them a high!
