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Weekly notes 01/2024

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Life Sydney Weekly notes weekly-notes gaming Diablo IV
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Thumbnail image: The W Hotel in Darling Harbour, Sydney has a funky design.

Welcome to the first weekly notes of 2024! For those who read my weekly notes on my blog, I made a small change to my blog URL and dropped the date and month from the URL. I’m not making changes to the older posts. If I do consider making the change to the old posts, I’ll ensure not to break the old URLs as I link back to my old posts quite frequently.

What’s been happening #

  • It’s been a slow week. It seems like much of Sydney is still in vacation mode as seen by empty roads. Many cafes/restaurants have holiday notices. Many of my teammates are on holiday and are expected to return to work on Jan 8th.

  • We resumed our house hunt, given that our house lease expires in Feb. We’ve been looking at North Sydney as a potential suburb to live in, and after a few house inspections, we liked a house and have submitted an application for a rental. We’ll have to wait for a response to see how it goes.

  • I completed another long pending item I had been putting off - I’ve finally booked a slot for my Driver Knowledge Test (DKT) - the first step towards getting my NSW Drivers' License. I’ve been learning the Drivers' Handbook and doing some mock tests to prepare for the DKT.

  • I bought a new processor - an AMD Ryzen 7 5700x as an upgrade over my existing Ryzen 5 3600. I did some benchmarks and found the processor’s running a lot cooler, and seems to consume lesser power based on my smart plug measurements. This processor should give a pretty decent boost to my computer and I should be able to run this platform for my gaming/other work for another couple of years at least, without needing an upgrade. I posted a thread on Twitter on how I removed the old CPU, cleaned up the thermal compound, and installed the new processor. You can read about my setup here.

    The new Ryzen 5 5700x

    The new Ryzen 5 5700x

    Cleaning up the old heatsink

    Ryzen 5 5700x installed and thermal compound applied in the cross fashion

    Computer back in action again

  • After much procrastination, I published an album of some of my better photos taken in/around Sydney on my pictures site. They look nothing quite like Jo’s amazing pictures though.

  • Finally, after a lot of struggles, I managed to defeat Uber Lilith. I think the Uber Lilith fight is one of the most difficult and poorly designed fights in the 20+ years that I have been gaming. Despite cheesing with the Ball Lightning sorcerer, I couldn’t deal enough damage to skip her first phase waves consistently, and those killed me the most as touching the wave just a bit is an insta-death scenario.
    After about 200 or so attempts, I finally understood the patterns, the ways to cheese the waves (Flame Shield immunity FTW) and force generation of the waves at places where it’s easier for me to move around, and after another 50 or so attempts of phase two, I finally managed to defeat Uber Lilith and complete the season journey. Here’s a clip of some of my attempts

Music of the Week #

I came across this video of Michael J Fox joining Coldplay in playing Earth Angel and Johnny B Goode, two of Michael J Fox’s most popular songs from Back to the Future. Amazing to see this, especially since he’s been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

Julio Merino has a series of amazing articles on how we used to monitor Hard Disk LEDs and disk noise to determine if something’s off, a look at IDEs of the long past, and more. Highly recommend the posts whether you want to go on a nostalgia trip or you’re curious about how things used to be done in the not-too-distant past.

Subscribe to my posts #

Till next week. If you enjoyed reading this post, please consider sharing it via the links below and subscribing to the blog. You can subscribe via email using Substack. If you prefer RSS/news readers, you can click here for the feed link. If you prefer to follow only my weekly notes, here’s the RSS feed for the Weekly Notes series.

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