Weekly Notes 23/2026

What's been happening

The descent into cold Sydney winter continues. It was getting cold enough that our sheets were extremely cold to get into, so last weekend Jo and I went over and bought a new fitted sheet of flannelette and a chenille blanket. The top sheet ensures that the bed is not ice-cold to get into and the blanket material keeps us warm throughout the night without the itchiness that comes from woolen blankets. Though the house has aircons, they only cover the living and the kitchen-diner - none of the bedrooms. We've thought a couple of times over to remove the split aircons and set up ducted aircons through the entire house but the cost is quite enormous and not worth setting up - at least not when we have this working setup. I did think of getting a small portable heater but for now the blanket and top sheet are keeping us warm and cosy. A little too cosy though - getting up in the morning is a pain!

And then come Monday, my WiFi router finally died. I'd been having issues with it for a while now - it would frequently drop connections, not renew DHCP requests and on more than one occasion, remain on a multi-hour bootloop. But seemingly, every time it'd recover and work as normal - till this Monday when it just stopped working. I ended up ordering the router I'd previously ordered and cancelled - the TP-Link Archer AX1800. I bought this router because it was priced pretty decently (cost me about $110) and supported WiFi 6 and 1 Gbps ports. The timing is a bit unfortunate because I wanted to rehaul the entire networking set up in the house but will have to make do with this now and have the networking rejig done later.

Another house update - I switched over from AGL's Solar Savers plan to their Battery Rewards plan. This plan gives me a higher feed-in tariff - 29c/kWh for energy exports between 5pm to 9pm. I've been making good use of the Fox ESS exporter and Grafana dashboard I had created and do a daily review of how much solar has been generated, the current battery state of charge and the next day's forecast to update the forced discharge setting on my battery. I'll work on automating this next. Something like a Telegram bot that will message me with the details and ask for approval to enable this - if no approval was given then do nothing.

This week also marks 4 years of us deciding to leave Romania. I don't know why that country has left such an amazing mark on me, despite most of my time being spent in relative misery(COVID times, away from Jo etc). I really wish to revisit back in a couple of years - for now, Australia has my heart.

It's a long weekend here on account of King's Birthday. Jo very nicely asked me (some puppy dog faces were made) if we could rent a car so we can do another Bunnings and Ikea run and of course I couldn't say no. I did say no at first and then felt guilty, so we did our usual home to Blacktown routine to pick up the car and then drove over to Marsden Park. While in the area, we also picked up the Weber grill cleaner and scraper to make our post-barbeque cleaning easier. We returned the curtain rod that was a bit too short and bought a replacement one at Bunnings. And finally managed to grab a sausage sizzle after previous multiple failed attempts.

On Sunday, we invited Umesh and his wife Tej over for a nice quiet Sunday barbeque. We had good fun, good chat, some good food (if I say so myself) and dropped into food coma, which explains this week's late newsletter.

What I've been playing

Civilization VII - I lost my first ever game in Civ VII (wow! what an update Firaxis - I need revise the post!). I was playing as Hatshepsut, taking on Egypt for the antiquity era and then the Abbasids for the Exploration era. In Modern era, I continued with the Abbasids to try out the new Syncretism features - they're pretty good. However, in my pursuit of peace and science and economic victory, I completely ignore the Military side and was oblivious to AI Pachacuti racking up territory after territory and completely blindsided me, scoring a military victory. I even declared a late war to see if I can counter the victory only to be notified Culture defeat was few turns away as well. And to make matters worse, I hamstrung myself by not planning properly and realised I had no place to put a railway station in the capital, thus no way to setup factories at all so had to do a late science pivot which pre-update would have lead to a victory but clearly Firaxis has done some good changes to the AI behaviour to pursue victory more aggressively.

Path of Exile 2 - The new league of Path of Exile 2 is out, and of course I was going to play it. I've been slowly making my way through the campaign, just getting into the interludes. For this league, I decided to go with the Permafrost bolts build. It is very fun. The gameplay loop is very simple - freeze using permafrost bolt, shatter with fragmentation bolt and then that triggers Herald of Ice to do some AoE. The build is clunky initially because of reload times but later notables make it very fun. The freeze effect also negates a lot of enemy attacks, making leveling pretty easy, and even bosses that I’ve struggled a breeze to defeat.

Music of the Week

I came across this amazing cover of Blondie's "Call Me" by The Last Dinner Party and was just floored by the performance. What an amazing stage presence by the lead vocalist. Been listening non-stop this week!

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.