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Weekly notes 27/2023

··481 words·3 mins

What’s been happening #

  • After a three week visit to Boulder, CO and San Francisco, CA, I’m back in Sydney. It’s nice to be back after being away for so long. It seems that as I get older, I prefer less travel. The good thing about the return flight was that there was no one in the middle seat, so I was able to relax and sleep more than I usually would.

  • I got a free GPU upgrade! I had been working with a colleague on a recent project. When I met him in SF, we started talking about games and I showed him pics of the desktop. He saw I had the 1080 and offered me his Gefore RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition. Since then, I have installed the 1080 on Jo’s desktop. The 2080 Ti is performing quite well! I’ve been able to play Diablo IV at 4k Ultra settings, with DLSS set to balanced, yielding over 90 fps.

    The 2080 Ti in the box

    The 2080 Ti slotted in

  • I completed the Diablo IV campaign. ProcrastiTracker tells me I spent about 20 hours or so in the campaign (I deducted a few hours I spent yesterday and today on post-campaign stuff). I found the campaign to be interesting enough - it starts well, devolves into a bit of a drag midway, not to mention 10-min escort quests. Thankfully, the pace and the story picks up in the last hour or so (I was streaming it on Twitch) and the cinematics are truly awesome to watch.

  • It’s tax season! My accountant in India has just finished preparing my tax returns, and I’ve e-verified them. Australia’s financial year runs from July to June, so I have to do tax returns for the fiscal year. I’ll need to find an accountant since I’m not familiar with the system.

  • We’ll also have to start looking for a new house as we’ve received a rent increase notice with a fairly steep hike. I’ve retrieved a previous Notion document I created about Sydney’s suburbs, featuring information like commute times, average and median rents across various areas. I’ll be updating it this week.

I found out that yewtu.be, an Invidious instance (alternate frontend to YouTube) was down thanks to Oracle Cloud shutting it down without notice. It’s not uncommon for Oracle Cloud to do this. Just don’t use it.

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