Yuni and I went for an overnight hike in Cathedral Range State Park, about a two hour drive from Melbourne. Two days, a lot of scrambling, and one very cunning raven. Day 1: Southern Loop 8k (+700m), ~5 hours Started clockwise around the Southern Circuit from Cooks Mill campground. Packs at the start, then heading out from Sugarloaf saddle Found two Superb Lyrebirds singing strongly near the top…
National flag SVG collections are widely available online, but few provide any provenance. Where did that particular shade of blue come from — a government specification, a Wikipedia edit, or someone’s best guess? I wanted to find out. Constructible Flags is a Haskell project that generates flag SVGs programmatically from official specifications, using straightedge-and-compass-style geometric…
Any integer can be optimally constructed with a straightedge and compass in $O(\log |x|)$ time. This is a basic result, but I could not find it documented elsewhere. Preliminaries Define a step as the following: given two already-constructed points $m$ and $n$ on a line, construct the point $2n - m$ by intersecting the line through $m$ and $n$ with the circle centred at $n$ passing through $m$.…
My home WiFi network is secured with WPA2, which I got curious about. Here are some things I learned. Cracking a hashed WiFi password WPA2 passwords are hashed with 4096 iterations of WPA-PBKDF2-PMKID+EAPO. Mode 22000 of Hashcat can crack these, but they are tricky to generate outside of capturing packets (though see below for how to do that). For testing we can use mode 12000 , which is generic…
Every year I review my habits, exercise, and projects for the previous year. It’s mostly a list of stuff for my future self will remember. Daily Habits No changes from the last couple of years: Read (part of) a book. Finished 43 in total. Wrote up my top picks for the year. Anki cards. Have added new cards for birds I’ve seen, using an automated script. Gratitude journal. I record both things I…
I read 43 books last year, mostly literature. Many of them were recommended by Booktok. Top picks are below, and you can find the full list over at the index . Ratings 1 0 2 3 3 17 4 15 5 8 Length 100 3 200 4 300 8 400 10 500 7 600 4 700 4 800 0 900 1 1000 2 Histogram of ratings (left) and length in pages (right). Literature All Fours by Miranda July Unhinged. Couldn’t put it down. The First Bad…
Using an unmarked straightedge and a compass, we can draw straight lines connecting any two points and draw circles centered at a point with an arc passing through another point. By applying these two basic operations a finite number of times, we can construct a wide variety of shapes and proofs: triangles, squares, and polygons with different numbers of sides. This has been known since ancient…
I added every new planet mod I could find to Factorio. Fun! I burned out before getting into proper late game and so didn’t experience everything, but still got about 80 hours of enjoyment. Many of these are under active development and will be improved by the time you read this. And many new ones have popped up as well! This is by no means an exhaustive list of new planet mods. If you only try…
Braeside Wetlands is a small state park about forty minutes south east of Melbourne. Today I bought my first pair of binoculars ( GPO Passion ED 8x42 ) and wanted to try them out. I feared it would be too hot, and while the water level was quite low there were still plenty of interesting birds around. Gray Fantail. First bird I found, if you ignore the Noisy Miner grabbing a drink from the…
Jodie, Beccah, Jared and I rented a house in Joshua Tree for a week. Running & Hiking Did a number of short hiking loops: Barker Dam loop in the National Park (2k) Cap Rock circumnavigate and nature trail also in the Park (1.5k) Exploring Desert View (5k) out the back of our house, and again at sunset (2k) Palm Springs Alpine Region at the top of the Aerial Tramway, aborted due to ice (1k) High…
Over Christmas I acquired a Raspberry Pi 5 and an Arduino UNO R3. This cascaded into a sprawling array of projects, mostly unrelated to the initial hardware. Part 1: IoT Initially I thought to set up the Arduino as a remote temperature sensor, reporting back to the Raspberry Pi running InfluxDB and Grafana. First problem: the temperature sensor I bought (BME680 on a Grove board) was designed to be…
I migrated ten domains from DNSimple to Cloudflare. Experimenting with Cloudflare Tunnels was my primary motivation, but also to learn. None of my DNS configuration was previously managed and I wanted to bring it into Terraform. As a cheeky bonus I also saved $A8.50/month, since my usage fits within the Cloudflare free tier. This post is a sketch of the process, with links out to relevant code and…
Every year I review my habits, exercise, and projects for the previous year. Daily Habits This section is pretty much a copy+paste from last year. In a good groove. Read (part of) a book. Finished 36 of them in total. Wrote up my top picks for the year. Anki cards. Another year of the same geography and element cards. This is maybe three cards a day. We crossed Dunbar’s number at work so also…
I read thirty six books last year. Top picks are below, and you can find the full list over at the index . Ratings 1 0 2 1 3 10 4 17 5 8 Length 100 0 200 1 300 8 400 11 500 11 600 2 700 2 800 1 900 0 1000 0 Histogram of ratings (left) and length in pages (right). Literature It was a good year for literature. All four of these are incredibly well written and fresh. Yiddish Policemen’s Union by…
I last played Space Exploration in 2021. It’s an epic overhaul mod for Factorio. Since then version 0.6 was released, including new science chains and space elevators! I also wanted to attempt an alternate victory. Spent about 250 hours working towards it before abandoning. Still got through the vast majority of the mod’s content again though, and it just keeps getting better. All alternate…
Last year I played through Midnight Suns. At the time I said: I’m thinking I’ll take a break to wait for the final DLC to land (4 new heroes with custom side-stories) then try an Ultimate 3 New Game+. That’s exactly what I did, in addition to collecting 100% achievements. DLC adds four new characters, each with their own card pool and mechanic, unique story levels and modifications to the…
I ran 90k through Timor-Leste over five days in August with Tour de Trails and Mad Dog Adventures. Think in miles? Read this report with imperial units. Day 1 12k (+900m, -700m) A couple of hours in the van to our starting point at Asumanu for a half day run to start the tour. Setting off (left) and a local who smashed me down to the river ... and back up again (right) First segment was some…
I last raced a marathon 12 years ago on four weeks of training and no nutrition. It went about as well as you’d expect. Finally got around to having another go. Training ostensibly started sixteen weeks out on 18th March, following a solid month of recovery (some physical, but mostly mental) after DNF’ing Hut 2 Hut , a mountainous 100K. At this point I had no intention of actually racing, but…
I wrote this blueprint for my eight or so teams circa 2017 while leading Payments Engineering at Square, to provide a “strong default.” Not every team followed it exactly, but it gave us common ground to improve delivery across the group. A sprint is the key unit of work for an engineering team. It represents a distinct commitment of business value from a team. This document outlines the best way…
Jodie and I spent a week in the Galapagos islands in April. There were a lot of animals! Day One Fly into Santa Cruz, the biggest populated island. Met by an iguana. Checked out a sinkhole on the way to our accommodation. Lunch at Bahía Mar, where a sea lion had reserved the choicest tables. Excellent vegan ceviche! Walked around the Charles Darwin Research Centre and saw some giant tortoises. Day…