It starts as an indeterminate sound, I don’t even know how to describe it. But shortly after you get the high frequencies and you know it’s a plane. As it gets closer you hear the air start to tear apart, the echo all around the concrete canyons of the apartment complexes. Until finally, the bass rumble in your chest.
As it passes overhead, or even as it passes a suburb across, I can look out my window and see the planes. My bedroom window.
Then, as soon as it’s arrived, it’s gone again. Fading out into the distance and you’re left wondering, when will the next one come? Is that it, can I hear it? Or is it my imagination?
Sometimes, the next one will arrive immediately. You’ll have plane after plane after plane, a constant roar like the other morning starting at 6am. Sometimes there’s only a couple, like tonight.
A couple at midnight.
Again at 1am.
The 01:55 flight to Dubai.
No rhyme or reason.
I’m laying here trying to get to sleep, but my chest is just filled with anxiety. It’s a terrible sound. It’s a terrible thing to live with these machines flying across your home at all hours.
It’s terrible that someone made the decision to deliberately change the flight path.
There are tens of thousands of people living in this suburb, let alone all the others.
And I wonder how much the noise pollution is taking its toll on them. As it is me.
I took this week off to unwind. What better way than out in the bush, adjacent a creek, sitting next to a campfire watching satellites spin past?
I’ve wanted to get back into camping for a while now. I figure it’s a good way to get some downtime without spending a fortune on accommodation. The national parks in Queensland are seven bucks a night, which is a cheap weekend away these days, and there’s plenty of them.
The Qld Government has a website listing all their campgrounds, and you can filter by things like toilet availability, whether or not you need a four wheel drive to access.
I was originally planning to drive north but after checking the forecast figured south had less likelihood of wet and I landed on a little campground called Spicers Gap Campground.
It feels like a lot of things went wrong, but I figure the best way to approach them is with a sort of zen mindset. The first omen, I ordered a V2L cable for my EV so I could power my cooktop and assorted bits. It was sent express post last week but Australia Post managed to lose it somewhere in Melbourne. So I picked up a small gas stove instead.
Then I forgot to bring my water bottle AND the 15l tank of water, both sitting on my kitchen bench. So I had to stop in and get some bottled water.
One cool thing was finding an EV charger on the way at the Queensland Raceway, and it’s completely freeeee. It’s advertised as some ridiculously high speed charger, but I only got about 80 kilowatts, enough to charge the EV up while I ate a sandwich (ham cheese & tomato, stale, from the same fuel station I got the water).
Once I’d topped up to 80% I drove the hour or so south to the campground, only to hit a dirt road up a steep hill with a sign saying “4×4 ONLY”.
I checked the website and yeah, it says it’s only accessible by four wheel drive. But it’s also listed as a regular 2WD accessible camp. So I checked to see if there were any other access roads (there weren’t), then had a look to see if there were any other campgrounds nearby (kinda), before practising my calm and driving off.
Manna Gum, the nearby camp was only 13 km away, but the drive up through the Great Diving Range and looping back on a long and windy road was 85 km.
I arrived about an hour later and un-thworped my pop-up tent in a little spot the furthest away from the only other people at the camp.
Some observations:
There’s no mobile signal (Spicer’s Gap would have been on the cusp of service, so I bought a Telstra SIM specially for the occasion)
There are cows! Lots of them, just chilling around the place.
It’s really nice, it’s a eucalypt rainforesty looking place, and I can hear the creek flowing nearby. Can’t wait to check it out.
It was also much further away than I thought. I went from 80% to 43% battery after the little detour. I know that the cooktop doesn’t use THAT much power, but I’d still feel a bit of that range anxiety getting back.
Especially because there’s no signal I can’t look up nearby chargers hahahahaaaaa oh no.
It was at this time I realised I forgot to bring the ropes for my tarp, and the eggs for breakfast. Almost like I should have a checklist for this stuff.
It was a nice afternoon though. I didn’t really do anything other than set up the campsite and sit around watching cows while trying to get the fire going. It took a little bit of coaxing, because I didn’t really have any kindling. But I got one of the thinner logs to catch fire eventually and it kept itself mostly going all night.
When the sun started to go down, a big swarm of cockatoos tore open the sky with their screeching. A couple of wallabies came out of the trees to snack on the grass, and a big fat possum jumped on the ground right behind me which gave me a fright. Can’t get away from them it seems.
So it was only myself and the campers up the hill at the campgrounds. At the other campsite it was only going to be ME all by myself. Shawn asked if I’d get scaredy out in the wilderness on my own, but there’s not really any wildlife to cause troubles here. Maybe overinquisitive cows?
Though when I went to book the original booking the site told me there were a certain number of campsites at the camp, and also that the same number of campsites were available to book, and I realised that anyone could just scrape that data and find campsites with 1 person staying by themselves. And go steal their nickels or whatever tech savvy criminals might do. So probably not great opsec there, so I booked for two people instead of one because I figured it’s not that much more expensive and it might give said crimbinals pause. I’m thinking about mailing the department behind it to suggest they don’t do that any more.
But overall it was fine, and I’m happy to say that my first night was tranquil AF watching the animals, the stars, the fire. Brain off, relaxation.
Dinner was sausage gnocci.
Around 8 o’clock the fire sort of gave up firing and I decided to go to bed to write some blog.
It was that point I realised the tent I bought is too small. It looked alright by the specs. It’s longer than I am, therefore all good? Turns out nah, I can’t lay down and type without both the laptop and my feet brushing the canvas. I think it’ll be alright to sleep in. A bit squishy, but alright. But I think I’m gonna have to upgrade at some point in the future.
So I’m laying here, finishing up, listening to the creek running down the hill and I’m pretty happy.
Also I forgot to bring a pillow.
The next day I woke up to the sound of a strange bird calling and warbling outside my tent. There were a few of them, and I heard them crashing around outside. Or maybe that was the wallabies.
I didn’t look because it was 6 o’clock and I desperately wanted to sleep. Also it was raining and I desperately didn’t want to get wet.
My choice in tent didn’t help there. It’s the Pavillo Cool Mount 2, another cheapy after my last one leaked. This one also leaked, with droplets beading in where the drizzle was pooling, and also where the front zip just wasn’t sealed at all. Also because it’s smaller, I couldn’t get dressed properly without rubbing all over the wet canvas and getting even wetter. I don’t rate this tent highly, I’m just waiting for it to dry out before I take it back and complain. If you have a favourite small tent for big people that can withstand a light drizzle, let me know!
But ultimately the rain was more than I expected and I wasn’t going to do any hiking or exploring in that weather so I packed up and headed back, considering it a very wet dry run for a proper camping trip another time.
The EV made it back to the free charger with 20% battery to spare. I think it ate up a lot of power defrosting the windows, but it also regenerated 3 kilowatts driving down the Great Dividing Range, so I was pretty stoked.
All up, I had a great trip even though it was a bit chaotic. I’m looking forward to doing the next one properly. Let me know your favourite camping spots!
This weekend has been a blast. It’s the Brisbane Comedy Festival so on Friday I went to see Josh Thomas’ Lets Tidy Up.
Comedian, gay, neurodiverse, and ex Brisbane kid. I loved his TV stuff and I just find him endearing, so I booked two tickets and couldn’t find anyone other than Ben who would go with me.
This is a show where Josh tidies up. Tidying up is not normally the stuff of gripping drama, it wouldn’t be a propulsive narrative for most people, but for Josh it’s Everest, a fundamentally impossible task, like trying to defy the moon and control the tides.
Brisbane Comedy Festival Program
We had Korean for dinner, then decided to drive because the Powerhouse is not well connected to public transit (the CityCat takes AGES) and it was threatening to rain.
We couldn’t get parking so we ended up driving around and taking scooters the rest of the way anyway. But it was a fun night.
The next day I was going to have breakfast with another friend and I’m actually kind of glad it was cancelled because I was not prepared to wake up that morning. Thankfully neither was she, so I had a bit of a sleep in and sat around doing not much until the afternoon.
Then I caught up with Dan who was in the area for the grand opening of a new local queer bar Come To Daddy. Hilarious name, puns abound.
It’s a 5 minute walk from my place but I hadn’t heard anything about it! It’s not really in Google and it seems like they’re only on Instagram. And even so, only barely ¯_(ツ)_/¯
But we wandered down shortly after opening, grabbed a drink and a seat, and people filtered in until it was standing room only. Then there was an amusing welcome to country to christen the bar (yarma!), and I saw my first ever drag queen pianist (playing “Daddies Everywhere” to the tune of “Love is in the Air”).
The queue for the bar was super long so we only had a couple of drinks before calling it a night. But I’m keen to head back soon.
The next morning I went to the little “health food store” and bought some “health food” (chocolate coated freeze dried strawberries and ginger), then headed down to Amanda and Colin’s place in my new EV.
I got the MG4 EV because I’ve been doing a lot of travel back and forth to my parents place in Maryborough, which emits about 70 kilos of CO2 round trip. Apparently when you burn fuel in an engine it doesn’t just disappear, who knew! Also it’s a lot more comfortable than the Hyundai Getz I was borrowing from my folks, with all the mod cons like cruise control and headlamps that actually illuminate the road.
I arrived a bit early so when I took a wrong turn I was happy to just meander around the streets admiring how much the suburbs of the Gold Coast look kinda just like the suburbs where I grew up north of Brisbane. I also went up a hill and cruised right back down, excitedly watching the regenerative braking put a bunch of power back into the batteries.
I said I would bring “some sausage rolls or something”, but Amanda really wanted to put on a Scottish lunch. So we had scotch pies with mash and beans, and Irn Bru as a palate cleanser. It was amazing and I felt very special.
I don’t have any pics, other than this one where I found the cap for the charger had been flapping around where I forgot to replace it for the past week.
By the time I got home it was already kinda late so I made dinner (I got the tastiest turkish bread from Coles yesterday after visiting Daddy), then started faffing around with my web site.
I wanted a place to share links to stories I’ve enjoyed reading, or would like to refer back to. So a few weeks back I set up a bookmarks page, as well as an RSS feed that you can subscribe to wherever you get your feeds.
But as I was testing the RSS feed I had to go digging around in my subscriptions, and it was kind of nice to go back and see all the feeds from various people I’ve subscribed to over the years. If I stumble on an interesting looking personal site I try to subscribe, and keep that small web spirit alive.
Some people post once every few years. Some people never post again. And long story short that’s why I took a moment to write about my weekend. Also it’s #WeblogPoMo2024 (HT rachsmith.com).
The TLDR is that it’s chock full of plants and critters that maintain the water quality without needing to do lots of cleaning, water changes, or filtering. And it’s cute!
First the plants went in the bucketthen when the gravel arrived they went in the tank
Sometime last year I was admiring the betta fish at Mappins and Ben encouraged me to get one. But I wanted to read up on them first, and it turns out bettas prefer larger tanks, lots of space, things to do. Don’t we all?
So instead of getting a betta I decided to set up a planted aquarium because it seemed like a cool hobby.
Given it’s full of soil and some people haven’t had luck setting up this style of tank, I was cautious about the potential for the water quality go weird and gross. But it was perfect from the moment I set it up. There was a tiny nitrite spike at the start, but it settled down and I haven’t even registered any nitrates. It’s been a pretty steady PH around 7.6 which is about what the tap water is. So all the numbers have been super stable, presumably because of the plant load!
I did a 50% water change maybe a month in. Not because I needed to, but because I wanted to give it a try. It did improve the colour of the water, but it’s been fine since.
A bladder snail floats on top of the waterSeed shrimp and snails demolish a piece of broccolini stem
One of the coolest things were the critters that hitched a ride along with the plants.
I had a population of bladder snails (they can float!!!) and seed shrimp (so cute!!!) explode in the tank. This was a great way to start off the ecosystem, because the snails and shrimp were a great cleanup crew. I can’t stress enough how much detritus used to be on the bottom of the tank, but now it’s perfectly clean.
After I was sure the water quality was stable, I picked up some shrimp. They’re yellow cherry shrimp (neocaridinas), and I also accidentally picked up a transparent one which I didn’t realise until it was in the bag.
The shrimp are great. They scrounge around the looking for tasty treats, and clean up lots of dead stuff. They swim and crawl around the tank, and sometimes make me think they’re dead when they stop moving in weird positions. They’ve got a lot of personality.
Maybe a month after the shrimp were settled in I went back to Mappins because I saw they had ember tetras – a teeny tiny fish that I was hoping wouldn’t eat my seed shrimp.
I was wrong, they ate the seed shrimp. But they’re the perfect size for such a small tank at up to 2cm long. And once they’re comfortable they’re quite an outgoing and social fish.
They also never sit still so they’re impossible to get a photo with my phone camera.
Anyway, it’s been three months and the tank has gotten overgrown. So I gave the tank a bit of a trim. I didn’t do all of the plants but took a lot of them down and replanted them to make a thicker forest.
I think I freaked the fish out, because they’re all schooling again, rather than out exploring by themselves.
I also found a bunch of the shrimp that were in hiding. I’ve definitely got at least five in there. A bunch of them were chilling under the pump, I guess they like cleaning out the gunk in there and it’s a good hiding spot 😌
BeforeAfterGood hiding spot
I also threw together a quick Walstad style jar. Partly because I thought it was cute, and partly because I know Ben wants to start a tank and it’s a good way to keep some cuttings alive. I’m very curious if the jar will work out or not, but from everything I’ve read it should be fine.
Cos they sucked me into a free trial and charged my card a year later without my realising. I didn’t even know I was subscribed.
Further, as an Australian there’s no way to contact them because they work on US business hours. So I was up at 2AM the other night hanging off a chat box where Vincent was apologetic, but kept pasting prefabricated blocks of text telling me to get fucked.
It’s enshittification at its best. They’re beholden to investors, and have to invent junk services to get that sweet recurring revenue. And their policy is no refunds, ever. So it’s obviously deliberate.
So basically, fuck em.
Insta360 and DJI both have excellent products in this space that may have their own ideological foibles, but at least won’t brazenly steal money from your card.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the problem of garbage AI generated content on the web. It’s a problem that erodes trust and makes everyone look bad. So how do you combat that?
Web buttons, of course!
I took a minute to make a colourful web button, I hope you like it.
These were popular in the early 2000s as a way of adding pieces of flair to your website, to link to friends, and to show off your W3 validated XHTML and CSS.
And given my web site is of a certain vintage I thought I’d do something up in the style.
I think it worked out really well. The little robot is very cute, and the colours were kind of inspired by the old Amiga button. And as was common at the time I exported it and closed before remembering to save my sources, so this is it now.
If you want to download and use the button on your own website, go for it. It’s all yours. Use it as you wish:
I’ve decided to upscale it here for effect, but the original version is indeed 88×31 pixels.
If you want to upscale it, you can add the css image-rendering:pixelated; to make it render pixel perfect, rather than using a more blurry modern scaling designed for photos.
I have two weeks off so I’m spending the giftmas period with my parents. It’s hot, and I’m sitting on the veranda while Charlie pesters me to throw the ball. There’s a decent breeze, but it looks like we’ve missed the storms.
Dark mode fix: I fixed a bug on the site where it was always defaulting to dark mode. It’s been that way since I first implemented it because I was checking the truthiness of window.matchMedia("(prefers-color-scheme:dark)") instead of the boolean window.matchMedia("(prefers-color-scheme:dark)").matches. It should now respect your system preferences, and you can use the little icon in the bottom right to toggle between them.
Missing images: The backend of this site is running on WordPress, and there was a period of time where I was using it to photoblog. Anyway, some of those posts only contain a featured image and nothing else, and the featured image wasn’t showing up on this frontend site. So now feature images will show unless they’re already elsewhere in the post.
Dessert upgrade: I have acquired my mum’s family trifle recipe. It’s not beautiful, but it is my favourite. We made it together on xmas eve, and I’m so happy with it.
Hardware acquisition: I placed a late night ebay bid on an old Thinkpad and put Arch Linux on it, inspired by Josh‘s recent blogging. It’s a lot of fun and even though it’s a few years old, it’s way faster for day to day tasks than my M1 mac. Obvs not for video work, but I want to use it to get back into vector art. Though I see the Arch community has AURs for DaVinci Resolve which is shockingly difficult to get running on Linux, so I might dust off my desktop and put it on that as well.
Beyond that I made rum balls in my parents Thermomix and they came out alright. I blitzed up some almonds for a bit of health, and I think I’m gonna start making protein balls at home as a healthy snack. Do you have any good recipes?
I’ve also booked accommodation for my second week of holiday so I’m gonna take my new bike for a spin out to Bribie Island for a few days. No vlog cos it’s gonna be public holiday and kids everywhere. But I’ll post some bits on Mastodon.
I know people have been on this bandwagon since the start of the panini, but by bread making adventures are more out of necessity.
I like bread. But I’m not a big sourdough man. I want something light and fluffy to put cheese and cold cuts and salad on. Maybe a little peanut butter. But living in a gentrified neighbourhood, the options are stark.
The Aldi down the road is abominable. Bread from Aldi is made off-site before being shipped in, and in my experience it’s stale before it’s even put on the shelves.
The cheap Woolies bread is decent, but the store has staffing issues. Recently the sole baker went on leave. I don’t begrudge them that, but it meant there was no fresh bread on the shelves, and it had a flow-on effect to other supermarkets nearby. Fresh bread became impossible to get!
Then there’s the French patisserie around the corner. I’ve tried their baguette a few times and it’s alright, but it’s crusty enough to cut your teeth on. I don’t like bread that leaves sore bits in your mouth for the rest of the day so it’s really only an occasional thing.
So at my wit’s end I’m making fresh bread.
Japanese Milk Bread
It started with a message from Ben (as it often does):
Milk bread is not the easiest bread, especially to start with, so I’m told. But I was sitting around at my parents’ place with an idle Thermomix and little else to do so I figured I’d give it a shot.
The tricky part of milk bread is the tangzhong, which is a paste of cooked flour and milk. Wikipedia says it improves the texture of the bread, and also “stabilizes the wheat starches in the bread, to prevent recrystallization” which stops it going stale.
The recipe had Thermomix instructions for the first steps. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the Thermie because the recipe paywall stuff is a nuisance when trying to find a recipe, and it’s kinda hard to deviate from a set plan. But this one was a custom, non-wizard affair so it was fairly easy to follow. The trickiest part was finding the “dough” setting — apparently it just spins the blades backwards rather than having a specialised dough hook.
As it was my first time making bread, and it seemed to take forever, because I was hanging on every step of the recipe. Peering at the Thermie waiting for the temperature to get just so. Waiting around for the bread to prove. I didn’t want to leave it, in case it grew legs and ran off.
But the results were great. The bread was true to its tangzhong: soft and fluffy and kind of set my bar high for the rest of my bread making career.
Making bread with a Ninja
At home I don’t have a Thermomix, but I do have a Ninja Foodi Power Blender and Processor System which comes with a dough hook. So I got myself a loaf tin, and tried to recreate the magic.
The Ninja was a bit fiddly on the dough setting. The program runs for exactly one minute and it rattled all over the bench so I needed to hold it down. It seemed super quick for a bread loaf so I ran it again and it went into some kind of shutdown protection mode, presumably because the motor was working too hard.
I later found out you’re supposed to manually break the dough up before running it again, which helps the food processor process it. But even with one and a half runs, the bread came out super impressive for a second attempt.
I don’t know about you, but a thick-cut milk bread grilled chicken burger is exactly the thing I want.
Soft white bread is too hard
Having mastered the milk bread, and truth be told gotten a little sick of it, I turned my attention toward white bread.
And so I set out confidently on my next bake. Little did I know it would be my undoing.
I don’t know exactly what went wrong, but it was probably a combo of:
I got scared of the Ninja dough setting burning the motor out, so I only did one run of the kneading. That’s 60 seconds, which is probably much too short.
It’s summer, and we’ve been in a heatwave so the temperature has been pretty high and they may have proved too fast.
I think I probably let them prove too long, because:
They immediately deflated in the oven. The first attempt came out like a long flat bread brick. It was edible, but highly questionable.
The second time I tried to prove in the fridge to try to account for the heat variable. It didn’t seem to do much.
And to make matters worse, I took it out of the oven too soon so it was still raw in some parts. I’m not even going to show that one because it was a disaster.
Thankfully Shawn was here to help eat the edible bits. And it was tasty! But a fair bit of it went in the bin.
So even though that was only yesterday I thought I’d give it one more try. This time I:
Ran the dough through the food processor several times. It came out a much better, springy consistency.
Didn’t fuck around while proofing. I let it go for 30 minutes the first time, and another 40 minutes the second time.
Gave it a bit of a bash to make sure it wasn’t going to collapse before putting it in the oven. It stayed solid.
Got overly excited and underbaked the damn thing again lol.
When the bread didn’t sink, and started to crust up on top I was ecstatic.It’s golden brown. In places.
So I sit here staring at my still slightly-flat loaf cooling on the rack. Apparently allowing the bread to come to room temperature rather than tucking right in “optimizes texture and flavour, and there are several theories as to why“. So I’m gonna leave it go.
Several hours later
I cut the bread and to my surprise it actually looks like bread.
It’s still a touch heavy, but the texture is about right. One jam and peanut butter sandwich later I’m content.
I still don’t entirely know what went wrong with the others, but the extra kneading and possibly the quicker proving time made a difference. Next time I’ll just have to keep it in long enough for a bit more colour. And I think if I want it to be any taller I might need to multiply the recipe.
I’m not sure how to get it fluffier but apparently there are various types of tangzhong that can help get more moisture in, so I might try that next.
Anyway if you have any ideas, hit me up. I’m keen to hear your tips and tricks. You can reply to this thread on Mastodon or just shoot me an email.
I now have the trifecta of wifi at home, work, and my parents place. So I just ordered the cheapest $100/year Kogan/Vodafone SIM and I’ll activate it when my Telstra prepaid runs out next month. You can’t beat those kinds of dollars.
I’ve been at my parents all week for assorted reasons. Just finished the drive home.
I got pulled over by a police man on a motorcycle on the way back and given a fine because my bike was obscuring the number plate. He didn’t want me to fix it or anything, just a fine. So that’s cool. That’s $125 bucks going towards… I don’t know, what does that even contribute to?
I’m exhausted. It feels like perpetual Sundays afternoon.
Some of my plants are dead, some of them are double the size.
I’ve collapsed on the couch, I fear I may never get up again.
On Saturday I woke up with a vague sense of unease and decided to fix it by cleaning the house. Kitchen, laundry, bedroom, floors. I didn’t have anywhere to be so as I noticed tasks I did them, and it left my place feeling like a great space to be.
It’s been feeling like spring for most of winter, it’s been a very mild one. But nevertheless the sun has swung around and I’m getting more light in my place now. I can leave my doors open (screens closed) to let air circulate, and the plants are having a great time.
It is a time of optimism and, well, occasionally having to put that climate anxiety back on the shelf. But largely optimism.
Riverfire 2023
I didn’t get up to much during the day but in the evening I decided to head out to watch the Riverfire fireworks.
It’s usually packed in South Bank and everywhere really, so I though I’d roll around on my bike and find a spot. Turns out the Kurilpa Bridge was open and you could just hang out and watch from there. I didn’t have an amazing view, but it was a nice $0 activity that took almost no effort on my part.
On the way home I stopped at the William Jolly Bridge because there’s a light installation underneath now. That night it was lit in rainbow colours and looked fetching in the eerie firework smoke.
Ben came over and we went to Banette, the little French bakery.
They revamped their menu and they’re providing table service now so it’s a proper place to dine out. I was really happy to see their sad and crusty Croque Monsieur from the hot box is now freshly made, along with a number of other breakfasty options.
So we had brunch for lunch. It was pretty great. I don’t imagine I’ll get this too often, but it was a decadent but not too heavy option and the greenery really rounded it out. I’m very pleased.
After that we went on a nursery crawl and looked at all the plants.
I’m trying to be a bit frugal since I changed jobs and accidentally went 6 weeks between proper pay cheques, so I only picked up a couple of little friends and a colourful pot because I need to re-pot one of my plants.
But Mappins also has fish and they were very cute and I really wanted to take one home with me. That might be a separate project needing a bit more research, but I reckon it could be a good hobby.
