Weekly Notes 26/2026

What's been happening

We're back in the cold, cold fronts of Sydney... what we'd do to get the warm sun from Seattle back here.. but that will have to wait. To make matters worse, it has been a really cold and wet week. Since switching to AGL's battery plan, I'd been selling a lot more of my battery capacity back to the grid. I generally keep a reserve of about 30-40% - that's enough to power us for a couple of days, assuming we'd have enough sun to top up the battery. With the cold and wet week, we'd been discharging more than we'd been charging and, alas, this Saturday night, my battery drained to the absolute minimum it'd been set to discharge (~10%) and we had to fall back to the grid. No harm done, I'm sure the credits I got from selling will offset this use.

After returning from Seattle, I took Monday off to recover. Tuesday, it was back to usual with work and gym. Having missed training last week, I wasn't looking forward to the workout. Daniel, our trainer, requested Jo and me to join the group class as the usual coach who takes class was out sick and he had to step in - and it wasn't the easiest class to do, especially given the workouts were a lot of movements that I don't do a lot such as dips/pullups. And of course, there was a benchmark test of cycle/dumbbell snatch/jackknife sit ups. I'm surprised and happy we were able to get through them all.

At work, I was able to ship an MCP for our Cloud Costs. Right now, it's pretty barebones but I have another piece of work to integrate with our CUR so that teams and members can do a deeper dive into their costs without having to mess around with custom reports and such.

I also received a call from our car dealer letting us know that our car would be ready for delivery and pickup the upcoming Thursday. We're both pretty excited and look forward to it!

The weekend was pretty quiet as well. Jo wanted to go to Glenbrook Park up in the Blue Mountains but with the rains, we decided against it and just went for a short walk to Quaker Hills to grab some coffee and breakfast. I had the Chorizo Hotpot which was absolutely awesome for the cold weather. We also spotted this happy puppy in the back of a ute who was very happy to see us

With a wet weekend, we pretty much stayed at home, finishing off laundry and listening to some music. Jo picked up some sweet records while she was in Seattle and San Francisco, so Dave Matthews' Band and Def Leppard were on rotation on the turntable.

What I've been playing

Path of Exile 2 has been on heavy rotation the past couple of weeks with the new league that was launched. I've been playing the permafrost Witchhunter build (creatively named "FreezeMaBaker") and it's been pretty fun as the gameplay involves a lot of run-and-gun leading to freeze and explosions. Screenwide clear of frozen monsters is quite satisfying. Using Pohx's build, I've been able to get pretty far in (easily doing Tier 13 maps now) and with the steady stream of currency I'm getting, I've been able to craft a couple of decent items as well as snipe some from the market.

Music of the Week

Only coming across this fabulous piece of music from John Butler today, his Wade in the Water is all sorts of awesome

Link of the week

Tony made the spell checker [...] immediately drew red squiggles under potentially-misspelled words (and later green squiggles under potential grammatical errors).

In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words - The Old New Thing

Starting in Word and expanding to nearly every other word processor, and even things that aren’t word processors.

The Old New ThingRaymond Chen

Om Malik passed away on June 24, 2026, at Stanford Hospital after a long health journey with his heart. He was surrounded by family and friends.

I've been blogging since 2007 and for many who started blogging around that time, Om "GigaOm" Malik posts were amazing to read. Sad to hear he passed away. John Gruber has a great dedication to him.

Om

This is going to sound cornier than a bucket of Jiffy-Pop, but it is a profound irony that a man with such a big and beautiful figurative heart could have such a lousy literal one.

Daring Fireball

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.