Weekly notes 41/2025
Table of Contents
Thumbnail image: The Department of Education building is a heritage-listed state government building located in Bridge Street in Sydney CBD.
What’s been happening #
It’s been a relatively relaxed week for me. I was back to work after the Amsterdam trip but only for couple of days. We had a holiday on Monday as it was Labour Day here in New South Wales.
I also had a concert on Monday evening - Lucky Ali was performing at the Sydney Opera House. Jo was in Brisbane visiting her sister, so she ended up missing this concert. I also took this time to meet up with Umesh and Bala pre-concert. I’d met Umesh previously but trying to meet Bala had been a mission impossible. Finally, we managed to meet.
We had dinner at Chat Thai, had some really amazing conversations before heading off to the Opera House. For the concert, we had Bukhu & Nosh kicking off with some heavenly music on the keys and Mongolian throat singing, setting the stage perfectly for Lucky Ali. Lucky Ali was accompanied by an 8-piece band comprising electric & acoustic guitars, bass guitar, drums & percussion and flute. Lucky Ali sang a wide variety of songs from his newer album to some of his oldest ones, but it was the band that elevated the performance to the next level. The flautist for example was constantly switching between the 5 or so different types of flutes around and was exceptional. The concert ran for about 2.5 hours and was really good, it was a good start to the week!
I had taken Thursday/Friday off as I was scheduled to have a colonoscopy on Thursday. The preparation for the procedure was quite involved. I had to change my diet two days prior to the procedure to a complete white diet (lean meats like chicken, no high fiber stuff, peeled fruit, no milk etc). And I couldn’t eat anything after 6pm of the previous day and the last I could drink liquids was 2 hours prior to the admission.
The procedure itself was pretty uneventful. After getting admitted, I changed to hospital robes and lay on the bed. They gave me a very nice heated towel that was quite comforting. I met the attending doctor and the anesthetist who told me about the procedure. I was wheeled into the procedure room while lying on the bed. It was a weird experience to be wheeled in on the bed like that - reminded me a lot of the POV that is shown in TV shows/movies when someone is being taken into the OT.
The last I remember was the anesthetist putting on the oxygen mask on me and asking me to breathe in/out and after that I was out. It was like the best nap I ever had. The procedure would have been for about half hour, I woke up very groggy about 50 mins after falling asleep.
Jo was there sitting in the waiting room. After I woke up, I was asked if I had any food/beverage preferences. I ate a sandwich and drank a lemonade. Just after this, I met with the attending doctor who gave me a quick summary of the results and mentioned that everything was good. So that’s a relief. The hospital was half a km away from the house but I was in no shape to walk home and we took an Uber home.
Rest of the day went pretty okay and I recovered well. I had already taken the Friday off, and decided to go with the day off and take it easy. I realized my portfolio page was no longer accessible since polywork shutdown. I had setup GitHub pages with Jekyll long back, but didn’t feel it was worth working on yet another static site generator. Instead I exported my profile PDF from LinkedIn, sent it to Claude and asked it to build a profile page. I didn’t like the first option it did, so after a few different prompts, I got it to offer three different themes and I picked the terminal which I liked the most and goes well with my usual work. Tip: The curl command works 😉
Apart from this, I worked on my new home server. I moved Silverbullet from the NAS to the server. I have also installed Dokploy and will experiment with it and have a detailed write up on my tech blog. I installed Plex on the home server and have stopped it on the NAS. Moving forward, I will use the home server for all compute while NAS will be used for its original purpose - just storage. The NAS drives are mounted to the home server via NFS, and since both are connected via wired ethernet cable, Wi-Fi related dropouts aren’t a problem. So far, it’s been behaving well. I will move more apps from the NAS to the home server over the span of next few days/weeks (whenever I get the time/inclination).
This Saturday marks the first class of a new term of our guitar class. Given that most of our weekend will be occupied with the house inspections, we decided not to enroll for this term. We had a few open house inspections in the Seven Hills and Kings Park area. When I looked up public transport directions on Google Maps, it told me to take the Metro to Tallawong and then a couple of bus transfers to the desired suburb. That seemed like an odd choice because I knew Seven Hills was on the T1 line. Jo & I decided to ignore the maps suggestion and walk to North Sydney train station to take the T1 train. Once we got there, we realised why Google Maps was showing the roundabout route - there was track work along the route and that meant buses replaced trains for the section that the trains were not running. This meant that our one-hour trip to Seven Hills became a two-hour trip and we ended up missing two of the open house inspections. The inspections are for a set time, usually for 30 mins so there’s barely any scope for delays. Oh well, that’s what we get for not doing our research. I do wish it was clearer that the trains were not running. In hindsight, the Transport for NSW Travel Alerts page does mention that buses replace trains but it wasn’t immediately obvious that our trip would be impacted. Wonder if there are better ways to surface that information.
I’ve started taking my Insta 360 Go 3S to the open houses to record a video of the house (after asking for consent, of course). It was getting easy to lose track of what we saw in which house, so now with the recording, we also call out things of interest/need attention so that we can revisit them later. One of the real-estate agents was surprised to see an action camera put to this use - he mentioned that he’s seen a few people record with the Meta RayBans. I think an action camera with its wider field of view and larger storage capacity/battery life would be better suited.
Jo had gym this Sunday. That and our extensive walks along Seven Hills/Kings Park/Kings Langley meant that we didn’t do our usual Sunday morning walk.
What I’ve been playing #
Diablo IV, Season 10 - The new season of Diablo IV started a couple of weeks ago but given my travels, I didn’t get to play. This season brings in a new flavour of temporary powers (called Chaos perks), more chaos rifts (rifts where monsters pour in) and a new-old type of items called chaos items where the existing unique items can now drop in different slots (for example, a glove can now drop as an amulet). The chaos armours are good to shake up things a bit but ultimately, the core game loop is still pretty boring. The difficulty matters only for pits where you can keep going to higher levels which increases the difficulty, but the pit layouts are pretty boring. I created a new Druid character which shapeshifts into a wolf. The gameplay is pretty fast, and shred’s (the skill) attack speed is pretty fast so you’re zipping across the map in no time but there’s nothing new - Path of Exile 2’s abyssal league for example is similar to chaos rifts but in addition to monsters coming out, there’s also you being able to dive deep into the abyss, and not to mention being able to add an extra item roll via abyss-specific materials makes it more engaging.
There’s reportedly some “deep changes” coming especially to endgame in Diablo IV next season, I’ll watch for that but otherwise I think I’m done with playing Diablo for the next few seasons at least. We’ll see how it goes.
What I’ve been watching #
The Amazing Race Season 38 - The new season of the Amazing Race kicked off with a couple of interesting tweaks:
- each team features at least one person who was also a Big Brother houseguest
- the race is mainly is over Europe, which the game ending in the US.
The first leg was set in the Netherlands. It was nice to see the first leg ending in Museumplein, Amsterdam - a park where I spent quite a bit of time last week. Also new was a task to get the express pass and hazard, even before the race officially kicked off which was a bit confusing. So far, it’s looking nice, let’s see how the season goes.
What we ate #
Smoking Gringos - We stopped by here for lunch while exploring Seven Hills for house inspections. Smoking Gringos is a small place that serves Mexican food. Both Jo and I got the burrito bowl with chicken, with Jo opting for the milder sauce while I went for the spicier Habanero sauce. For a change the hot sauce lived up to its name and add a good amount of heat. We also got a side of corn ribs that was pretty delicious as well!
Music of the Week #
Played by Bukhu & Nosh in their opening act to the Lucky Ali concert, I found out the song “Elstein Ganga” is a Mongolian folk song about yaks. Here’s their version with a full description of what it means and how to play it.
Link of the week #
iOS 26 has been out for a few weeks now, and one of the most striking changes with it is their design language called “Liquid Glass”. This article goes into details about why it’s so bad for usability.
Thanks for reading. #
Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.
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