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Weekly notes 13/2024

·865 words·5 mins
Life Bowral Kiama Jervis Bay Sydney Weekly notes weekly-notes gaming
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Thumbnail image: Callala Beach is a small town on the South Coast with brilliant white sand and aqua-blue waters.

What’s been happening #

It’s a long weekend here thanks to the Easter holidays. Barely back from our Melbourne trip, I was looking forward to this week as it was another long weekend with a road trip!

  • Jo’s cousins and aunt flew in from India/Brisbane over to Sydney on Thursday morning. I took a holiday on Thursday and went exploring a bit of Sydney with our guests. Since we were heading towards Barangaroo Wharf from North Sydney, I decided to give them a tour via Sydney’s ferries.

    • The first stop was McMahon’s Point ferry wharf which we got to via a short bus ride. I love McMahon’s Point Wharf because it has such an awesome view of both the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House.

      Ferry to Barangaroo from McMahon Point
      Ferry to Barangaroo from McMahon Point

    • From there, we went over to Sealife Aquarium. The aquarium’s pretty small in comparison to others and you can cover it in about an hour but is good for a one-time visit. I particularly liked the shark and penguin sections.

      The twisty thingies are shark eggs.
      Shark Tank
      Penguins

    • I’d also planned for a Sunset Dinner Cruise experience via Captain Cook Cruises. You can read my previous post for a review - a year later, the experience still holds up well. However, since we’re in late summer/early autumn, the timeslot we had chosen meant we didn’t get to see the city skyline at night.

      Views from Sunset Cruise
      Views from Sunset Cruise
      Views from Sunset Cruise
      Views from Sunset Cruise
      Views from Sunset Cruise
      Views from Sunset Cruise

    • The cruise has a drop-off point at Circular Quay, so we got down there and went over to catch a glimpse of the Sydney Opera House.

      The Sydney Opera House at Night

  • For the next couple of days, we had a road trip planned to head over to Bowral and nearby places. Over two days, we drove 440 kilometers covering popular spots such as Bowral, Cambewarra Mountain lookout, and Callala Beach at Jervis Bay, returning to Sydney via the scenic Grand Pacific Drive route.

    • We had an overnight halt at an Airbnb at Bowral, where Jo’s cousins made good use of the available firepit and made a nice campfire. We had a nice time chilling by the fire and having a few drinks.

      Our Airbnb at Bowral.
      Our Airbnb at Bowral.
      Starting fire in the firepit at the Airbnb.
      Firewood burning nicely.
      View of Nowra from the lookout.
      View of Nowra from the lookout.
      View of Nowra from the lookout.
      The pristine Callala Beach at Jervis Bay
      The pristine Callala Beach at Jervis Bay
      The pristine Callala Beach at Jervis Bay

    • Given there were 6 of us, I booked a people mover class SUV - a Kia Carnival since most of the regular SUVs were designed for seating 5 people. I’m used to driving hatchbacks and small/medium SUVs but never such a large vehicle. We booked the car via our usual car rental service, GoGet and even though the car was the base spec, it had modern driving aids such as reverse parking cameras and adaptive cruise control which made it quite easy to drive, though reversing was a bit unsettling due to lack of visibility. Overall, I enjoyed our road trip and look forward to revisiting the places, but for a longer period to relax some more. Here’s a map of our road trip

Music of the Week #

I originally heard this song when playing Grand Theft Auto, Oliver Cheatham’s Get Down Saturday Night is a brilliant track to get you dancing. Why am I reminded of a 1983 song? A cover of this popped up in my chill playlist and of course, I had to share the original by Oliver Cheatham as well as the cover by Rules.

It’s the talk of the week, and this story just broke over the weekend. There was an attempt to backdoor xz, a library that is used in many lossless compression utilities. Andres Freund found this exploit when he was benchmarking Postgres changes and found remote access to some machines via ssh was taking about 500ms slower than others. Check out the detailed description in this FAQ here and the original message sent by Andres.

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