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#breadposting: the story so far

A loaf of delicious golden milk bread, with a freshly made ham cheese and tomato sandwich in the foreground. It looks succulent.

Lately I’ve been making bread.

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!

Empty shelves at Woolies: Our only baker will be absent until the 23rd of October. There will be limited range. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.
Another store: Dear customer, due to unforeseen circumstances the bakehouse will not have a full range of bakery items available. We apologies for any inconvenience. Thank you for understanding. Woolworths West Village Bakery Team.

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.

A loaf of perfect bread. It's got three domes, and is perfectly golden brown.

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.

A very thick cut sandwich, with chicken, tomato, cheese and greens.
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:

  1. 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.
  2. It’s summer, and we’ve been in a heatwave so the temperature has been pretty high and they may have proved too fast.
  3. 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 bread is maybe 5cm high, if that. It looks dense, and unappealing. Looks a bit like it could knock you out.

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.

It didn’t really rise much in the fridge overnight, I thought it was supposed to? But it’s currently warming up again on the bench. I’m determined to make this work.

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:

  1. Ran the dough through the food processor several times. It came out a much better, springy consistency.
  2. Didn’t fuck around while proofing. I let it go for 30 minutes the first time, and another 40 minutes the second time.
  3. 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.
  4. Got overly excited and underbaked the damn thing again lol.
Peering into the oven, we can see the bread rising and forming a crust.
When the bread didn’t sink, and started to crust up on top I was ecstatic.
It's a very light loaf, but it's a loaf!
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.

Two slices of bread are cut off. It's a fairly good crumb, with an even texture. It's about 70 cm high, and there's peanut butter and jam in the background.

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.

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Gonna try Vodafone this year & I got a ticket

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.

Things are alright.

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First weekend of spring

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.

The crows on the Kurilpa Bridge. Someone brought a picnic mat, but quickly abandoned it to stand by the railing.
There was a small contingent of folks on the balcony at GOMA.
The William Jolly Bridge lit up in rainbow colours.
Fireworks over a smoky Brisbane City, with the Victoria Bridge lit up Brisbane Festival Pink.

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.

Sunday funday with these idiots

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.

Mrs Crunchy with a fried egg and salad on a plate

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.

A brightly coloured pot with a couple of grean leafies inside.
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We spent the long weekend in Coffs Harbour

Shawn stayed at my place the night before, so we could wake up and leave first thing. The sun came up as we drove across the border to NSW, spreading sunbeams across the farmland and leaving misty gulleys where the light didn’t reach. The mountains were beautiful, but truth be told there wasn’t much to see from the highway.

We arrived in Coffs at about 9AM and made a beeline to what turned out to be the greasiest, fingerprint-covered Maccas I’ve ever been in. We got McMuffins and headed down the road to the closest beach we could find.

Overcast with patches of blue sky over Park Beach. Muttonbird Island in the distance.

I didn’t bring swimwear or a towel because the forecast was for overcast and rain all weekend. To be fair, there was a little bit of cloud when we arrived, but it cleared out soon enough to reveal blue skies and a high UV index that continued for the entire trip.

After McMuffins, sunscreen, going back to the car to fetch hats, and sitting on the beach watching the crabs for 53 minutes (according to my Google location history), we set off on a walk.

Coffs surprised me with the amount of walkways and free things to do. I’d only ever passed it from the train. It looked like a nice beach and a handful of banana plantations and that’s it. But the coastline is full of parkland and beaches, and all linked together with a nice wide path that extended further than we were willing to walk.

A concrete and steel bridge spans a tea stained creek, the beach in the distance.
This is the rail bridge where you see the coast for the first time, on the Brisbane to Sydney train. It’s ugly but I like it a lot.

We managed a couple of kilometres to the marina, and poked around the artificial breakwater before reaching Muttonbird Island

The island is attached to the mainland by the marina these days, but is still an important nesting ground for the little birds to dig holes in the ground and raise their chicks. There’s a designated walkway from one end of the island to the other, and signs warning you not to stray, lest you step on a sleepy bird. Or break an ankle.

Panoramic view from Muttonbird Island, over the harbour and mountains beyond

We didn’t see any birds, I think we were a bit late in the season. But I appreciated the cliffs, and sat mesmerised by the overwhelming power of the ocean smashing against the rocks. And there was a pretty cool ocean bird hovering in the air for most of the time we were climbing the island again to get back to dry land. (Black wingtips, not sure what it was.)

Our inappropriate choice of clothes made for an uncomfortable walk, so we started back to the car to check into the hotel. But we stopped at the surf lifesaving club for lunch first. I had a parmi and Shawn had a chowder.

I saw they had Schweppes behind the bar so I asked if they had Pepsi Max, and the man said no, but the other girl said she prefers Pepsi Max, and the man asked if there’s a difference and we both said YES! and he said maybe they should switch from Coke No Sugar.

This conversation continued every time I went to the bar, and also when he came around at closing time (2:30) to pack up the tables. We had a rapport.

Check-in was easy enough. The place was 90s vintage, but pretty clean and had an amazing view of the ocean, islands, heritage lighthouse etc. The lighthouse came to be my main wayfinding point throughout the trip.

The window between the bedroom and the toilet was an unusual choice, but we devised a roster system to prevent surprises.

That afternoon we sat on the balcony and ate far too much, watching the myriad of bird life screech and warble and do its thing. There were two tourist planes as best I could tell; one dropping off paragliders, and the other one just hanging around in the sky soaking up the sights.

The view from the hotel balcony, there are some other holiday units, but we're up high and can see the ocean over the top of them. There are two islands jutting out of the water.

The main gotcha was the lack of wi-fi. Despite the blinking modem on the counter, the lady at the front counter said it stopped working and they removed it from the listing. And lo, turns out I’d booked a place without internet.

That night we tethered to my one bar of Telstra and watched Miriam Margolyes reluctantly trudge around Australia and be grumpy in standard definition.

We decided we didn’t need to spend a whole bunch of money on holiday, so we stocked up on supplies and made sausage & egg muffins again for brekky.

We took them to Moonee Beach and grabbed hot chocolates from the cute coffee shack by the beach called I Bean There, and sat watching the surfers, dogs, and hilariously the kids trying to ride their bikes through the sandy creek.

I spilled chocolate all down my nice white shirt, but it mostly came out with wet wipes.

A disposable coffee cup printed with "Bean There" and a love heart. A pink marshmallow on top, and the beach in the distance.
Derpy man with derpy expression with brown drops all down his white tee.

After brekky we drove up to Korora Lookout. It’s a public access lookout with indigenous significance. There’s a little pedestal to read aloud the story of the area, and a cunty next door neighbour who’s planted bamboo along the edge of their property to stop people enjoying the view.

This was where I saw my first leech: a little inchworm-looking thing attached to the sole of my shoe. I knocked it off, and we both hiked our socks.

We walked to the second lookout, with a purpose built suspension deck that some dude thought would be funny to make swing while we were all standing on it. The views were amazing and I tried (but failed) to spot the train line into town.

A viewing suspension viewing platform juts out over the raingforest, with views of the town and the ocean beyond.

We stayed for a moment before setting off on a bushwalk into what I refer to as leech gully (side note, that’s what Indooroopilly means. It’s a corruption of the Yuggera language.)

We started trekking down the hill in a nice moist rainforest setting. We were planning to take the trail a couple of kilometres out, but as we descended and the path got thicker with foliage. The sunlight disappeared. Fern fronds brushed past our legs.

That’s when we saw them.

Mother and two kids making their way out of the forest, looking stricken.

“Turn back!” she said, with fear in her voice.

“The leeches have leeches!”

One of the kids had blood streaming down his leg.

We tried to make it to the next clearing, but I freaked out. Shawn wanted to go ahead, but I couldn’t enjoy a hike when there’s blood sucking parasites waiting to hitch a ride.

We turned back and took the shorter, better maintained path in a little loop back to the lookout.

From there we drove to Sawtell, stopping at a roadside stall to buy bananas, and enjoyed ate them at the lookout.

A friendly family of magpies came to us to beg for food so I threw them bits of banana peel and they seemed to enjoy it. The seagulls that showed up shortly after didn’t care for it at all and were FURIOUS we didn’t have chips.

There was a little path down to the beaches, but we only went about halfway and sat at a cute bench, watching the ocean and avoiding the walk back up the hill to the car.

A man sits by himself at a bench overlooking the ocean, on the side of a steep hill, with a paved path trailing into the distance.

The next day was a public holiday in Queensland, and I was scheduled to leave on the train to Sydney.

Shawn made up the last of our muffins while I showered and went to the jetty for coffee and a bit of sunlight. There were plenty of cute dogs and little regional planes to spot. But eventually it was time to head to the station.

An english muffin with sausage, egg, and greens.
The Coffs Harbour harbour. Is this what it was named after? The jetty stretches out past the beach and into the water.
A propeller plane flies low overhead.
Under the curvy tin roof at Coffs Harbour station, waiting for the train.

I’d booked a first class ticket from Coffs to Sydney. Usually I book two, because I’m large, but I figured for the short journey I’d be fine. But a few hours into the trip one of the rail staff started hovering around, awkwardly looking at me.

I popped out an earbud.

“I don’t think I have to tell you you’re a big guy,” she says sheepishly.

“There’s another passenger getting on who’s seated next to you. So I’ve moved you a few seats back to your own seat.”

“Lol,” I laughed.

I swapped seats and the rest of the journey was pleasant, but uneventful.

The XPT train pulls into Coffs Harbour station, painted in yellow white and blue.

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How I rolled my own vector map tiles

OpenStreetMap is like the Wikipedia of maps. Back in the earlier days I used to love running around gathering data and mapping every neighbourhood I could.

I reckon I contributed a pretty big portion of street names on the north side of Brissie, by riding around on my bike with my Nokia 6120c (great phone!) and a bluetooth GPS dongle, recording all the points of interest like a pro, to upload to the map when I got home.

It was a great hobby at the time, when vast swathes of Australia were completely blank. Now OpenStreetMap is pretty feature complete, it’s used everywhere.

A short history of maps as a web developer

Back in those days the state of the art for web mapping was the tile-based “Slippy Map”.

Everyone used it, even Google Maps. You’d essentially have a Javascript frontend to let visitors zoom and scroll the map like you do today. But on the server a process would convert all the OpenStreetMap geodata into standardised image tiles (raster tiles).

Tiles were commonly created at 256×256 pixels, and were rendered at zoom levels from 0 (the whole world in one tile) down to zoom level 19 where the world would take up 274.9 billion tiles.

A map of Australia and surrounding nations, split into a 256 pixel grid

This was generally an on-demand process as rendering so many tiles would be infeasible. Ridiculous. Absurd. I can tell you this because I tried a couple of times. Not for the whole world, but a few times I’d tried to scrape, render, cache the entire of Brisbane for assorted projects.

Eventually Mapbox came along with an easy-to-use interface on top of the open source data, and reasonable enough pricing to make it worth switching over.

I gave a talk a decade ago about the cool stuff people were doing with maps, and that included plenty of Mapbox evangelism.

Later Mapbox standardised the Mapbox vector tile format which had a lot of benefits over the older raster tiles.While a raster tile could be styled to look however you want on the server, a vector tile could be styled on the client-side. That meant the same tile could power a hundred different map styles, even dynamically on the client-side. In addition, vector data makes things like animating between zoom levels look great. Generally, a huge step forward.

The new OpenGL map library was released to take advantage of these benefits and it unlocked a lot of really high quality maps for the masses.

By this point high quality maps were par for the course and radical innovation in the space kind of flattened out.

My opinion of Mapbox turned when they went the way of every venture backed startup; got involved in union busting, closed-sourced their tools and started turning the money dial up. 

That’s when I started playing with maps again.

Cycling maps

Since at least 2010 I’ve maintained briscycle.com in some form or another, and always one of the main features has been maps to show safe routes and how infrastructure connects up.

I’ve gone through phases of running my own tile server, using statically rendered tiles, and third party map services including Mapbox (who can’t do very good cycling maps fyi). But recently I figured I’d go back to rendering my own.

I don’t remember where I spotted tilemaker, but it has such a sweet looking website that it inspired me to have a go at building my own vector tiles. It wasn’t as easy as the website led me to believe, but after lots of trial and error, some coding in lua to get the right properties out, I managed to get a decent looking cycling map out of it.

A map of Brisbane. It's fairly desaturated, except for the green cycleways and bike lanes everywhere.

I largely followed the instructions from Wouter van Kleunen’s how-to blog post, then:

  1. extended it by customising the lua processor to pull out more cycling attributes (and skip attributes I wasn’t interested in.
  2. styled the map using a standard json map style, but I also processed that on the client-side to add more repetitive things like road casings. You can check out the code here. (edit 2024: apparently maputnik lets you create style json in a graphical way)
  3. Set up a small Docker machine to serve mbtiles (dockerfile source)

The result is pretty cool.

It’s very fast because it’s hosted in Brisbane for a Brisbane audience, so the map tiles don’t need to transit the globe before being displayed.

The tiles themselves are optimised pretty well and allow me to tweak the styles in almost real time. There’s still a few weird bits, but I reckon it’s a good base layer to add stuff to, like geojson routes (check out the brisbane valley rail trail).

So that’s it from me. You can check out the map at briscycle.com/map or check out some of the cycling trips in Brisbane for more.

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DaVinci Resolve 18 render-cached clips show “Media Offline”

Just a quick one because when I tried searching for the solution I couldn’t find it. DaVinci Resolve is my favourite professional, free video editor.

A DaVinci Resolve timeline showing a half-completed render cache over a clip of me riding a bike.

For a while though I haven’t been able to get render caching working. This weird Resolve bug would churn up my GPU, the red line above the clip would turn blue to indicate it had been render-cached, but any render cached clips were showing up as “media offline”.

Some people online mentioned this can happen if your disk is full and the files can’t be written, but I have lots of space remaining.

I tried changing the render cache directory to a custom folder to no effect. However, when I browsed to the render cache folder manually, it had no video files in it. Just a bunch of empty folders.

After some further googling, I found switching from ProRes to DNxHR HQ (High Quality [8-bit 4:2:2]) fixed it. It seems to be choking on ProRes for some reason. Some folks mentioned it was specifically ProRes 422 HQ, but I didn’t test the theory since I was in a rush.

Changing the format and hitting save was enough to trigger all my “offline” render-cache clips to rerender in the new format and start working again.

Optimised media & render cache settings. I've chosen ormat DNxHR HQ and checked all the caching boxes.

This was on an M1 mac running MacOS Ventura, using Resolve version 18.1.4. But I understand from Stack Overflow that it also happens on other v18 version as well. Given Linux and Windows don’t support ProRes I’m not sure if this tip applies there.

Hope this helps you out, traveller. If you want, chuck me a follow on Youtube. <3

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Coolify out of disk space

Coolify is an open-source & self-hostable Heroku / Netlify alternative (and even more).

I’ve been using Coolify to self-host a lot of my sites, including this one. But it’s not been without its problems.

I’ve noticed a lot of flakiness, including databases disappearing and taking down services seemingly at random. At one point I was unable to log in to any services, including Coolify itself.

Coolify uses a lot of disk space, and when you run out of space things stop working.

Coolify no space left on device, write

I noticed recently that my Ghost blog couldn’t connect to the database, and assumed it was just some general flakiness.

Then while trying to build another Node.js project I received this error:

[13:09:49.288] #8 12.84 npm ERR! code ENOSPC
[13:09:49.290] #8 12.84 npm ERR! syscall write
[13:09:49.293] #8 12.84 npm ERR! errno -28
[13:09:49.298] #8 12.84 npm ERR! nospc ENOSPC: no space left on device, write
[13:09:49.303] #8 12.84 npm ERR! nospc There appears to be insufficient space on your system to finish.
[13:09:49.306] #8 12.84 npm ERR! nospc Clear up some disk space and try again.

I had already resized the Coolify disk and filesystem up to 70gb and it was full again! What’s going on?

Cleanup storage in Coolify

There’s an easy way to clean up storage under Servers ➡ Cleanup Storage.

The coolify Servers panel, with an arrow pointing to the Cleanup Storage button.

I hadn’t noticed this button before, but clicking that cleared up 50gb of storage space on my Coolify server and everything started working again.

I don’t know for certain, but I suspect under the hood this is running a docker prune operation to clean up old containers. If you’re unable to log into Coolify and you can’t resize your disk, that might be the next option.

If this doesn’t help, you’ll have to search through, or ask for help on Discord.

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Homemade pesto, the new bike, book recommendations and bne.social – a blog

Tonight for dinner I made pesto pasta. It was made all the more delicious by the fact I grew the basil myself, in my own little urban garden, and made pesto from scratch.

My little garden has grown a lot since spring. With the new tower next door finally being built I don’t think I’m going to get any sun at all over winter. So I’m not sure how everything will go over the newly imposed seasons. But it’s best to remain in the moment and admire the basil, parsley, spinach, and multitude of chillis I’ve managed to grow.

A chilli plant. There are white flowers and little green chillis starting to grow.
My chilli plants have started to flower, and this one has little fruits forming.

So dinner was great and I feel very accomplished even though the pasta was store-bought.

Today was any other day. It’s January 26th and I made the decision to work today and take tomorrow off. Part tokenistic, part wanted the long weekend, and partly because I have a bunch of work on my plate at the moment and wanted a chance to get it done in peace.

But let’s not talk about work.

I wanted to write a little retro because it feels like I haven’t been up to much, but I know I have and wanna get it all down.

Time for a new bike

In big news I broke my bike. Snapped the frame nearly in two.

I faffed around for months before finally getting myself a bike fit and starting the process of building a bike that’s gonna last me the next ten years. Unfortunately we’re in a bit of a supply chain crisis at the moment, so looking at months lead time with no bike I picked myself up a cheaper single-speed to get me by.

It’s been an absolute treat.

A blue bike frame with a crack running horizontally above the bottom bracket. You can see through it.
The scary thing is I rode this home.
A black bike with neon blue rims in front of a garden.
The new bike is SO COOL look at it

Truth be told now I have my single speed I’m not entirely sure what I want from my next bike. I know being a heavier guy I’m gonna destroy this one, which is why I want to build something more solid.

But I’m really loving the simplicity of the single-speed system, as well as how powerful it makes me feel climbing hills in entirely the wrong gear. It’s really good exercise. Follow me on Strava if you’re so inclined.

Reading is what?

Over the new year break I had a week to myself and I was driving myself up the wall. Not because of boredom, but with panic that I couldn’t work out what to do with myself. So I picked up a book.

A few, actually. I’ve been really enjoying reading again. This year I’ve gone through:

  • Tom Ballard’s I Millenial – I don’t even know how to summarise this one, other than to say it’s a neat summary of what led to our current day political clusterfuck through a socialist lens. It was a surprise, a joy, and led nicely into the next:
  • The Big Switch by Saul Griffith. It’s a pretty plainly laid out argument that Australia can take action on climate change right now with current technology by replacing all our fossil powered machines with electric ones, putting solar on our roofs, using electric cars to power our houses at night, and save huge amounts of money in the long run. Obviously there’s nuances, but the point is to go all in on the technologies we currently have, while we develop the solutions to the harder climate problems. And the government is listening.
  • I also picked up Stephen Fry’s Mythos which was interesting because I’d never studied greek mythology before, and it was an okay introduction to it. I found it a bit of a slow going, something about milllenia-old stories not having all the hooks of a modern page-turner. But it was interesting connecting the dots on concepts that trace back all the way back.

I think e-ink

After getting excited about it I put in an order for a Kobo reader from JB. The only ones in stock were all the way down on the Gold Coast so I scooted to the train just in time for them to call me to say there’s an error and they don’t have it after all.

A Kobo ereader on the couch showing Tim Richards Heading South book in black & white. there's a bright pink cable coming out the side.

So I sat with the thought and eventually talked myself out of the cheaper device and into the Kobo Elipsa, which finally arrived the other day. And honestly it’s pretty great.

I’ve got three books on the go:

  • Pictured is Heading South by Tim Richards. It’s a travel journal along the second-longest rail journey in Australia, from Queensland to Western Australia. (Fun* fact, the longest is from Queensland to the Northern Territory just due to the inefficient route, but that’s not as exciting)
  • At Tae’s recommendation I’m reading Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club. It’s funny, very easy to read, and I can’t wait to find out whodunnit.
  • I’ve also picked up the latest episode of Meanjin on a whim. I don’t know if it’s my usual style but I’ve been enjoying the short essays and different perspectives, and wanted to see how to transfer an ebook onto the Kobo 😆

The Kobo itself is great. I didn’t think I’d use the notetaking nearly as much as I have been, but it’s very slick. I’ve found myself making little checklists and notes that I’d ordinarily add to my phone, as well as keeping my workday organised. Maybe it’s a write-off!

Then there’s the social network

Josh and I have been running bne.social for coming up on a year now. I haven’t written about it yet even though I’ve been meaning to because I don’t know quite how to sum it up.

It’s basically like Twitter without the nazis and the queerphobia, and it’s run by volunteers around the world rather than being owned by one single billionaire idiot. It’s not without its problems but most people agree it’s a Nice Place where the interactions are genuine and it’s not filled with Brands.

I’d encourage you to hop over and make an account and hang out with us! We’re going to organise a meetup or Brisbane folks at some point, so don’t miss out.

A cartoon of a mastodon in a summer hat at South Bank as an ibis swoops in to steal a chip.

Yeah that’s about it I suppose

I dunno, things are good. There’s more I could write about; my perfection of the banana-blueberry smoothie, the way I’ve optimised the lighting in my apartment to keep my indoor plants alive, the absolute classic CDs I picked up at the lifeline bookfest.

But for now I wanna go read some more The Thursday Murder Club and go to sleep, cos tomorrow the long weekend starts and I have a bike ride to do!

Posted on

Happy new year

It’s 2023.

I like new years. I used to think of it as a sort of atheist christmas. But I think these days I appreciate the opportunity for reflection and realignment.

I haven’t had a lot of energy for introspection lately, which is a nice way of saying I am worn down and tired to my bones. Lately things haven’t been working for me, so the new year is a welcome mental reset. I have resolved to reflect more and be kinder to myself, and taking the first week of the year off work is a nice start.

Other than that I’m entering the year with a few little plans:

  1. I want to go on a holiday. I was hoping to do that over the break, but domestic tourism is hectic and most things are booked out and too expensive.
  2. After my old bike broke in 2022, I want to get my new bike built. Get back into an exercise routine, and take it on trips.
  3. I want to save money and pay down my mortgage.
  4. I want to work out what to do with myself.
  5. And I want to try to blog more.

I think that’s a reasonable place to start.