😆

Last month it was Julia from the “Square Space Security Team”.

And this week we have “Collins” reaching out from the “Squarespace Security Team” so at least they got the name of the company right. “Collins” was even helpful enough to leave the quotation marks around his name. Good on you “Collins”.

“Passengers on the platform are reminded to stand behind the yellow line until the train comes to a complete stop”

— Repeated pre-recorded announcement made over the public address sytem at all train stations in Melbourne.

I can imagine the discussion the pre-teen and their mother had on platform 10 at Southern Cross railway station just before I took this photo. That’s because, the second the mother looked away, the pre-teen quietly stretched one leg and tapped the forbidden side of the yellow line with their toe before quickly pulling their leg back 😛🙄

Days or Ash is good, but Easter Lily is excellent. And both are a true return to form.

In fact, I think maybe 80% of the music I’ve listened to since Easter Lily was released on 2 April has been this EP played from start to finish!

The post from 21 April 2026 reads:

This Is Just To Say

I have turned off
the AI features
that were in
the update

and which
you were probably
hoping
to monetize

Fuck you
they were stupid
so unnecessary
and so annoying

I took only a handful of photos with it on today’s short walk though. I was having more fun talking with Nadia that I was with taking photos :)

Suburban electricity pole

Statue in a garden

Colourful windmill on a fence

Buying solar panels in Australia is surprisingly straightforward these days. Here’s how I went about getting them.

1. Researched solar power for the home

These were some of the resources I used:

• Introductory webinars from Solar Savers, organised in association with several local councils across Melbourne. If you want to want to watch one of these, here’s the August 2025 webinar on ‘Solar, Batteries, and EV Chargers’ on the Zero Carbon Merri-bek website.

• Solar Hub from Solar Victoria, a program from the Victorian Government.

• Solar 101 from SolarQuotes or, really, their whole YouTube channel.

2. Figured out what we wanted from solar, now and in the future

In our case this was:

• Short term: install as many solar panels as possible.

• Medium term: replace our gas stove with an induction one and our instantaneous gas hot water system with an electric one (either storage or heat pump).

• Long term: add a home battery and, once we buy an electric vehicle (EV), add an EV charger to our solar system.

This meant we didn’t want to get a basic solar system that would serve just our current needs. We wanted to get a system that would support our future electrification plans.

3. Found solar installers and got quotes

Finding good solar system installers can be a challenge but, fortunately, these two services got me free quotes from qualified and vetted installers:

1. SolarQuotes, which is the service recommended by CHOICE. I’ve been a member of CHOICE since 2011 and those folks have never once steered me wrong.

2. Solar Savers, which is a joint local government initiative that helps residents make the switch to solar power.

I ended up requesting two quotes from each service.

I also got a recommendation from a friend who’d had their solar system installed last year.

4. Picked a solar installer and a solar system configuration

Most of the installers got in touch with me pretty quickly and I had good chats with all of them.

Three of the installers submitted formal quotes and we ended up picking the one that recommended the most appropriate system for our house and also had the best customer service.

This wasn’t the cheapest option presented to us, but it was the one that would give us the most bang-for-buck for our type of roof, because it turns out we have a “complex roof”.

Finding an installer who does complex roofs

We have a concrete tile roof but, as you will have seen in the photo at the top of the post, instead of two large, flat surfaces that run the length of the house above the first floor, our roof has lots of smaller segments that are oriented (and, therefore, angled) towards different compass directions. Also, we have roof segments on both the ground and first floor.

Designing and installing a solar system around this type of segmented, multi-level roof takes time, effort, and money, which is something many (if not all) large solar installers don’t want to do. I learned this from the first installer who contacted me about providing a quote.

He was from a large company that (I learned) only does standard installs, which is probably why that company’s pricing is so competitive. After looking at our roof using his web mapping tool, he said he wouldn’t be submitting a quote. He then recommended I find a local, more specialised installer who would take the time to build a personalised and optimised system for us. This would cost us more, he said, but it would get us the best system.

The installer we ended up going with was Specialized Solar & Electrical (aka Spec Solar). Their system designer built us a customised system that, while more expensive than a similar design from another installer, was still within our budget.

Here’s a depiction of the physical layout of our final install, as shown in the SolarEdge smartphone app.

The Spec Solar designer managed to squeeze twelve solar panels onto our complex roof, but:

• only six of these panels are oriented north (ie facing the sun all the time);

• seven had to be installed as single panels on their own little roof segment; and

• four had to be installed on ground-floor roof segments because there wasn’t enough space on our first-floor roof segments.

Complexity limits your choice of technology

Given the way we had to spread the solar panels out across different roof levels and orientations, as well as our plan to add a home battery in the future, our best option was to go with an optimised inverter system from SolarEdge. (The second-best option was a microinverter system from Enphase.)

The benefits of the optimised inverter approach are:

Optimised power: With a power optimiser sitting under each solar panel, our system can maintain the highest overall power output regardless of the output of each individual solar panel. Meaning the system’s overall output isn’t limited by panels that are producing the least amount of power at the time (because they’re in the shade or because they’re facing east or west) which is what would happen with a conventional string inverter system.

Battery ready: All SolarEdge inverters are hybrid inverters, which is the type of inverter you need if you want to add a home battery to your system. Had we gone with one of the cheaper quotes, we would have had to upgrade to a hybrid inverter once we were ready to install a battery. (And if we’d swapped to a hybrid inverter in that cheaper quote, its updated price would have been close to the quote we did end up going with.)

Future proofing: Even though our solar panels can produce a maximum of 5.7kW from the sun, we went with a 10kW inverter to convert all this DC current in to useable AC current. We wanted that extra capacity so that our future battery wouldn’t be constrained by the limits of our solar panels. EV chargers, for example, run at 7kW minimum. So to be able to use our (future) battery to charge our (future) EV, or to power the whole house at night off the battery, we’d need an inverter that could handle this higher load.

There is one downside to picking the optimised inverter system we did, and that is being locked into the SolarEdge ecosystem. I’m okay with that though. SolarEdge is more expensive than its (relatively new) optimised-inverter competition, but its current line of products are reliable and they come with a good warranty.

In case you’re interested in the details, these are the components we got installed:

• a SolarEdge SE10000H single-phase hybrid inverter and

• twelve AIKO NEOSTAR 3S+54 dual-glass 480W solar panels (with SolarEdge optimisers under each one).

SpecSolar had actually quoted us for AIKO’s 475kW solar panels but those were out of stock at the time of installation, so they upgraded us to the 480kW panels without an extra charge.

5. Got the installation and inspection done

Once we agreed to proceed with SpecSolar, everything moved pretty quickly.

On 2 February the solar system designer came over to do a site inspection, after which he tweaked the design and sent us a final quote. We signed the quote that same day.

On 10 February the team from SpecSolar came over and did the installation. That took several hours, from 7am to around 3pm.

They don’t switch on your solar system the day they install it, by the way. The electrical part of this installation (the bit installed in our garage) needs to be inspected and signed-off by a licenced electrical inspector first. That happened on 19 February.

So 44 days after I first requested quotes, our solar system was switched on and connected to our house.

6. Activated our feed-in tariff

The final (and technically optional) step in this process was getting our electricity retailer and electricity provider – Momentum Energy and Jemena, respectively – to receive the excess solar power we were generating from our panels.

That whole process took over a month but, happily, SpecSolar managed it all on our behalf.

Our solar feed-in was switched on on 25 March. That means our excess power is now going back into the electricity grid, for which we are being paid a tiny amount ($1.18 for the six days in March that this was active, for example).

7. Profit

So how is everything going? It’s going pretty great, actually!

We generated a good amount of power

March is the first full month we’ve had these solar panels and, over the course of that month, they produced 125kWh of power. We, however, used only 24% of this power.

It didn’t come as a surprise that we used less than a quarter of the power generated. In fact, that was part of the plan.

This solar system wasn’t provisioned for use in just the sunniest days of summer, it was provisioned to provide us with sufficient power even on the gloomiest days of winter.

The proportion of solar power we use in winter will be much higher!

We generated that power in spite of gloomy weather

March 2026 was actually a pretty cloudy month. Here is a table showing the month’s daily weather observations from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

The “Cld” (ie cloud cover) column under the 9am and 3pm sections shows the fraction of sky covered by cloud. This is measured in eights, meaning a score of 4 tells us that four-eighths (ie half) of the sky was covered by cloud.

This table tells us that, on 16 of the 31 days of March, we had cloud cover of 4 or above at both 9am and 3pm. And if you count-up the days in which we had cloud cover of 4 or above at either 9am or 3pm, there were 23 of those days in March.

What does this mean? It means we managed to use only 24% of the power generated by our solar panels during a month in which half the sky was covered in cloud for more than half the time :)

Basically, it means I’m confident that our system is provisioned suitably for whatever winter will throw at us.

We used a lot less power from the grid

What about the other side of the equation? How did generating solar power affect the amount of electricity we pulled from the grid?

According to our electricity bills:

• In March 2025, we drew 291.9kWh of electricity from the grid.

• In March 2026, we drew 157.1kWH of electricity from the grid – which is 54% of what we used this same time last year :)

That result is pretty much exactly what the Spec Solar predicted for us, by the way: an approximate halving of our electricity bill.

But wait, there’s more!

Getting a solar system installed on our roof isn’t the only energy upgrade we did to our house this year. We also upgraded the insulation in our roof.

The roof above our house already had some insulation (likely around R4) but there were large gaps in the batts where there was no insulation at all. Also, the roof above our garage had zero insulation.

‘R’ is a measure of thermal resistance, by the way, and the level recommended for roofs in Melbourne is between R6.0 and R7.0.

What did we do?

We got R4.1 insulation added to our garage and to the gaps in the rest of our roof. And then we got R2.5 spray insulation added on top this R4.1 insulation.

This means our garage now has R4.1 insulation and our house has about R6.5 insulation :)

Because of the reduced heat transfer from inside to outside, it will now cost us less to cool our house in summer and to heat our house in winter. In fact, as the weather in Melbourne has cooled, we’re already noticing that the temperature in the upstairs rooms doesn’t drop as quickly at night as it used to.

(We used Solar Savers to get quotes for this insulation installation too, by the way.)

What next?

Those are the only energy upgrades we had planned for this year.

With an approximate halving of our electricity bill, it should take us roughly seven to eight years to pay off our solar system investment. This includes the cost of regular cleaning and maintenance of the equipment we’ve just had installed.

Electric vehicle

If we drove our car a lot, upgrading that to an EV and getting an EV charger installed would be next on our list.

But we drive so little that we only fill-up on petrol every six to seven weeks, so upgrading to an EV is not worth the investment. (And EVs sure are expensive, especially first-hand ones!)

Household appliances

We’ll probably look into upgrading our stove and hot water system next, since both of those currently run on natural gas.

I don’t think that’ll happen for at least another four or five years though.

Home battery

Depending on how well our solar panels perform in winter, though, we might consider getting a home battery installed sooner rather than later.

The largest chunk of our annual electricity expenditure goes towards heating our house in winter, especially at night. If we find that our solar panels are generating enough excess energy during the day in winter – energy that’s enough to cover most or all of our nighttime heating – then it makes financial sense to store that excess in a home battery to use at night.

This will increase our payback time on the whole system, of course. The payback time on a home battery is about as the same as it is on solar panels: seven to eight years. But if the winter daytime excess energy numbers are good, then the total payback time of the combined systems might increase to only ten years instead of doubling to fourteen or fifteen years.

I’ll keep an eye on the stats over winter and we’ll make a determination either way in summer next year.

Enough solar for now

For now, though, we’re just going to enjoy having the sun power about half of our lives.

Sometimes there isn’t even much for the sun to power. A couple of weeks ago, for example, Nadia was teaching at uni and I was working from home. Even though it was a cloudy day with intermittent drizzles, our solar panels still managed to generate enough energy to export most of it to the grid!

(Things would have been different had I been running the air conditioner, dish washer, or washing machine, of course. But that’s not something we do every day in summer.)

For now we’re just happy with what we have. The rest we’ll figure out next year.

Coffee and dessert options at West Street Cafe in Hadfield

Wine display at West Footscray Wines

Wine display at West Footscray Wines

I already have the TTArtisan AF 27mm f2.8 prime lens (41mm full-frame equivalent on my APSC-sensor camera), which I shoot with all the time.

So when TTArtisan announced the TTArtisan AF 17mm f1.8 Air prime lens (26mm full-frame equivalent), I bought it 97 minutes after I got the email :)

And it took me that long to place my order only because I was in a work meeting when the announcement email came through!

With both my favourite focal lengths now covered with a prime lens each, I am a very happy man.

Sadly, I’ve been able to take my new lens out on a walk only once, but at least I got a couple of nice photos with it.

Spray paint marks the path

Rectangular topiary

I’ve been trying to take a good photo of this tree/bush for several months now. Happily, this time I was using a lens with the exact right focal length at the exact right time of day on a very lovely day :)

Just a little off the top

Get ready for the road ahead

Sadly, I haven’t had the chance to try these out on a proper photo walk yet. All I’ve managed to do so far is test them on a short walk after work.

Still, aside from the tiny bit of vignetting at the highest density level, the results I got with them were great, and I managed to take two really nice, richly-coloured photos of objects on a bright, sunny day.

Hopefully I’ll get the chance to play around with these filters properly over the coming weeks.

So much depends…

A very Australian problem

Nadia, grinning, at the gate

Nadia looking off to the side

Nothing to see, just a totally normal inspection

A normal inspection was carried out

Keep left on the bike path

Shattered paint on a bike and walking path

Scooped right out of the hedge

Context: where I read my ebooks

Like most people, I started reading ebooks on a Kindle ereader, though I have since moved on to a Kobo ereader.

Over time I have also compiled a fairly large collection of DRM-free ebooks.

I read these downloaded ebooks in one of three ways:

• Transfer them to my Kobo ereader.

• Read them on my Linux computers using Foliate.

• Read them on my Android devices using ReadEra.

ReadEra is great, by the way, and I even purchased ReadEra Premium (for one-time fee of $24) since that supports the developer financially and, relevant to today’s topic, also lets you add your own fonts to the app.

First-choice typefaces

The typefaces I use to read almost all my ebooks are Bookerly (download) and Literata (download basic, download full family)

I use Bookerly on my Kindle, Literata on my Kobo, and I switch between the two when reading in Foliate and ReadEra.

Second-choice typefaces

New books

If, for some reason, I don’t want to use Bookerly or Literata, my second choices are usually Caecilia (purchase) or Bitter (download).

Caecilia is Kindle-only; Bitter I can use on Kobo, Foliate, and ReadEra.

If I don’t want to use a slab serif, however, I usually go with Vollkorn (download) or Merriweather (download), depending on the vibe of the book I’m reading.

Classic books

Those are all great typefaces for reading books in my favourite genres of science fiction, fantasy, crime, mystery, and thriller. However, it just doesn’t feel right to read ebook versions of classic books or older books using a slab serif or otherwise modern typeface.

In an earlier post, I’d listed the four Latin-script typefaces that come to mind when you think of what older books, magazines, and other text-heavy material used to be printed in:

• Bembo (released in 1496),

• Garamond (1549),

• Caslon (1725), and

• Baskerville (1752).

When I want to read the classics, poetry, or just generally older books, these are the typefaces I turn to.

Of those typefaces, the ones I like to read ebooks in are Bembo and Caslon. The specific digital versions I use are ETbb (download) for Bembo and Willy Caslon (purchase) for Caslon.

Another good Bembo version/alternative that I like is Spectral (download), though I don’t use this very often.

Much as I like Garamond and Baskerville, for reading ebooks they just don’t do it for me.

If Garamond and Baskerville do float your boat though, my recommended free(ish) versions of those typefaces are:

• Garamond: Crimson Pro (download), which is a little on the small size, and Novela (pay what you like), which is a little on the large side

• Baskerville: Libre Baskerville (download), Baskervville (download), and Begum (download)

The Conversation website is a great example of Libre Baskerville in action, fyi.

Children’s books

While I rarely read children’s books these days, I did go back and read some of the Enid Blyton books I first read when I was as a child. The typefaces I use when reading those ebooks were Besley* (download) and Century Schoolbook (download).

Typefaces I don’t use

I know this is a post about the typefaces I do use, but I should also mention a couple of default and popular ereader typefaces that I actively don’t use.

For example, I almost never use a sans serif typeface unless the book – usually a textbook or non-fiction book – specifically calls for it.

And I don’t use any of the other serif typefaces available on most ereader devices and ebook reading software – typefaces like Palatino, Rakuten Serif, Noto Serif, Georgia, and Malabar (which you used to get on older Kobo ereaders).

Rakuten Serif is the default serif typeface on Kobo ereaders, by the way. I did read a couple of books using this typeface when I first got my Kobo, but I never got comfortable with how the text looked. This typeface is too much like Baskerville for my liking (at least when it comes to reading ebooks).

The one ereader typeface I haven’t used, but would like to at some point, is Amasis, which is a typeface available on Nook ereaders.

Final thoughts

It makes sense that the typefaces I’ve settled on were designed for reading on screens, and specifically for reading ebooks on ereader devices and through ereader apps. And I love that most of the typefaces I’ve mentioned above are easy to download and free to use.

What typefaces do you use for reading ebooks? I know from chatting with folks online that there’s a wide range of opinions out there. I’d love to hear about which typefaces you’ve tried and which ones you find yourself using more than others.

Some examples

Here are a few examples of older and newer books in our collection that mention the typefaces they’re printed in, as shown on their copyright pages.

The typefaces used in those books are:

• Dante in The Dark is Rising Sequence by Susan Cooper from 1984

• Bembo in Terra Nullius by Claire G Coleman from 2017

• Minon in The Endsister by Penny Russon from 2018

• Sabon in Bloody Hello! by Mona Eltahawy from 2025

These are all classified as Garalde or old-style typefaces, by the way, and I love all four of them.

(I haven’t written anything in Dante myself, but I do enjoy reading books set in it.)

A tiny peek behind the curtain

Reading through the copyright page at the start of every book taught me so much about publishing and printing. In fact, that’s probably where I first came across the concept of typefaces.

Those pages also introduced me to things like copyright, ISBN, editions, prints, and the cities and countries in which book designers, typesetters, and printers were located.

I loved learning and nerding out about all this when I was younger and, to this day, I go through the entire copyright page of every book I read. [1]

Of course I get an extra thrill when I find a book that tells you what typeface it was set in.

It’s even cooler if it tells you the font size and line spacing used. Those are the numbers separated by a slash that are sometimes printed just before the typeface name, by the way. So, “10/12 pt Sabon” means 10 point Sabon with 12 point line spacing (or “leading”, as it was traditionally called).

It takes almost no effort to add this information to a copyright page and I wish more publishers would do it or more authors would insist upon it.

Oh well.

[1] This is one of the things I find incredibly annoying about Amazon Kindle ereaders. When you open a new book on those devices, they jump straight to the main text. That means every time I open a book, I have to manually make my way back to the cover so I can read all the front matter before starting the main text. Conversely, I love that Kobo ereaders open new books at the cover, so you get the chance to read through all the front matter every time. Having read books on Kindles for many years, reading books on Kobos now brings me a lot of joy :)

tl;dr

Caslon is an underused typeface, and for good reason: it isn’t well know, its has some design quirks, and it has very few good/complete digital versions.

Latinotype has just released an excellent contemporary revision of Caslon with five weights (plus italics) named Willy Caslon, and it’s on sale at MyFonts right now (60% off!).

If you’ve always wanted a good digital interpretation of this style of typeface, now is your chance to pick one up.

There’s also nice write-up about Willy Caslon in WE AND THE COLOR.

Caslon doesn’t get much love

When you think of classic, Latin-script typefaces used in books, magazines, and other text-heavy printed material, a handful to mind:

• Bembo (released in 1496),

• Garamond (1549),

• Caslon (1725),

• Baskerville (1752), and

• maybe Bodoni (1790). [1]

Putting Bodoni aside for the moment (since that’s not as general-purpose as the others), if you want to use one of these classic typefaces in your work in 2026, you have several high quality digital options (both revivals and interpretations) to choose from.

Of those options, these are my favourites:

• Bembo: Bembo Book (Monotype); Minion (Adobe); Spectral (Production Type; free)

• Garamond: Adobe Garamond (Adobe); Garamond Premier (Adobe); Stempel Garamond (Stempel/Linotype); ITC Garamond (ITC); Garamond (URW); Sabon (Linotype); Sabon Next (Linotype); Minion (Adobe); EB Garamond (Georg Duffner, Octavio Pardo; free); Crimson Pro (Jacques Le Bailly; free)

• Caslon: Adobe Caslon (Adobe); Caslon 540 + Caslon Bold (Paratype); Libre Caslon Text (Impallari Type/Arrowtype; free)

• Baskerville: Baskerville (URW); ITC New Baskerville (ITC); Libre Baskerville (Impallari Type; free); Baskervville (ANRT; free)

Everyone has heard of Garamond and Baskerville, and some people may also have come across Bembo because it used be bundled with Microsoft Office, but I bet most people won’t have heard of Caslon. (Though if you’re a macOS user you’ve had a version of Big Caslon included since, I think, macOS Sonoma.)

Why is Caslon not more popular these days? There are two reasons for this.

History

Caslon, developed in London by William Caslon I, was hugely popular in the British Empire and British North America when it was released in 1725. American polymath Benjamin Franklin used nothing else, for example, and the US Declaration of Independence of 1776 was printed in Caslon.

But Caslon wasn’t popular elsewhere in the world (eg in Europe where a lot of other Latin-script typefaces were being being used and developed) and then it fell out of favour globally as transitional typefaces like Baskerville rose in popularity from the mid- to late-1700s.

Caslon did have a bit of a revival in late 1800s/early 1900s, but it was again eclipsed by both newer typefaces (like Plantin, Times New Roman, Sabon, and Palatino) and revivals of older typefaces (like Bembo, Garamond, and Baskerville).

Digital versions

When the world moved to digital type, the classic typefaces that were popular at the time were the first ones digitised, sold, and bundled with operating systems and with design and desktop-publishing software. [2]

On the sans serif side, that meant we got typefaces like Helvetica, Arial, and Futura instead of Franklin Gothic, Univers, and DIN. And on the serif side, that meant we got typefaces like Garamond, Baskerville, and Times New Roman instead of Bembo, Caslon, and Sabon.

Operating systems and design software did sometimes bundle limited versions (only one or two weights) or lower quality versions (oversimplified) of less popular typefaces, but that was about it.

I’m a fan of Caslon

I haven’t had the opportunity to use Caslon in my own work very much, but I really like it. It looks great in the The New Yorker, for example, and that publication uses Adobe Caslon in both its print and digital editions. I also prefer Caslon (an “old style” typeface) to Times New Roman (a “transitional” typeface).

That said Caslon isn’t a go-to typeface for me, which is why I haven’t felt the need to purchase a copy of Adobe or Paratype’s Caslon yet.

The main reason I don’t reach for Caslon very often is because its digital revivals are, well, a little too accurate to the original design. [3] The original Caslon’s design has a few quirks that makes it less than ideal for the majority of my use cases.

One repeated complaint about Caslon’s design, for example, is that its uppercase characters are noticeably taller and darker than its lowercase characters. So when you’re reading a block of text, those uppercase characters jump out on the page a little, making the overall colour of the page uneven. Adobe Caslon faithfully replicates this quirk.

What’s cool about the Latinotype interpretation of Caslon is that its designers removed the original design’s metal-type, print-era inconsistencies and added more precision and uniformity – all without neutralising the typeface’s essential character.

(Dirk Petzold’s article in WE AND THE COLOR goes into more detail about Willy Caslon’s design, if you want a deep dive.)

This is why the text set in Willy Caslon in the graphic below looks more uniform. And because it is slightly darker overall, this typeface works great on screen and in print.

(FYI, the design of Libre Caslon Text fixes the size and colour inconsistency between uppercase and lowercase characters, but leaves the rest of the design as is.)

Why am I so excited about Willy Caslon?

There are many digital versions of Caslon available (see Fontspring, MyFonts, and Type Network), but very few are fully featured and useable in modern publishing contexts.

Most are available in just a single style (regular). A few include italics or bold; some include italics and bold; and very few include the basic set of regular, italic, bold, and bold-italic.

Some versions are distressed fonts, which make them more suited for graphic design than for body text applications.

And some, like Matthew Carter’s Big Caslon, are display fonts and not text fonts.

The handful that do include the basic font set (and sometimes more, like the semi-bold and black weights) are:

• Adobe Caslon (Adobe)

• Caslon 540 + Caslon Bold (Paratype)

• William Caslon Text (William Berkson)

• Caslon Pro (SoftMaker)

• Caslon FS (FontSite)

• Libre Caslon Text (Impallari Type/Arrowtype; free)

I don’t have first-hand experience with all these typefaces, but the problem with pretty much all of them is that they’re either too faithful to the original design or they simplify the design so much that some of the original Caslon character is lost.

Willy Caslon benefits from the recent trend of type designers releasing digital interpretations of classic typefaces that retain the character of the original but are now suited to the needs of modern digital and print publishing. [4]

I, for one, am thrilled that a really good, high-useable version of Caslon is now available, and I’m looking forward to using Willy Caslon wherever and whenever I can.

[1] If you keep going forward in time, you can add these to the list of popular editorial typefaces too: Plantin (1913), Goudy Old Style (1915), Times New Roman (1931), Janson (1937), Ehrhardt (1938, 1680s), Palatino (1949), Dante (1954), Sabon (1967), Palatino (1949), Minon (1990), Hoefler Text (1991), and Adobe Jenson (1996).

[2] Yes, yes, I know I’m greatly simplifying things here. A lot went into deciding which typefaces got digitised first, including considerations around licensing, availability, practicality, and personal preference.

[3] Another reason I don’t reach for Caslon very often because its free version, Libre Caslon Text, works best at 16pt and above, so that only works for web pages and not for documents.

[4] Kris Sowersby’s Martina Plantijn (Plantijn) and American Grotesk (Franklin Gothic) are prime examples of this trend.

The cactus does not fear the barbed wire

A quiet spot along Merlynston Creek

Stormwater culvert that helps manage flooding on Merlynston Creek

It is dark in the stormwater culvert

Naturally, I brought my camera along and took a few photos while I was there :)

Introduction

Thuy On kicking off the ‘Poetry & Wine’ session

Jaidyn Attard

Jaidyn Attart is a street poet and I actually posted a photo of one his poems back in 2024 :)

Jaidyn Attard reciting his poetry - 1

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Nadia Niaz

Nadia Niaz getting ready to recite her poetry

Nadia Niaz reciting her poetry - 1

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Thuy On

Thuy On reciting her poetry - 1

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Outdoor LED lighting at West Footscray Wines

Lili Ward

Lili Ward reciting her poetry - 1

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Volunteer photographer

Footscray West Writers Fest 2026 volunteer taking a photo - 1

I like taking photos of photographers and videographers, the folks who are usually on the other side of the lens. I even have an album on Flickr with all such photos I’ve taken over the years :)

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Magan Magan

Magan Magan reciting his poetry - 1

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Since I’d already seen most of this show once – there was a six-song difference between day one and day two – I took more photos and videos during this show than I normally would. Here are some of them.

tl;dr

I only recorded small bits of some of the songs that Linkin Park played because I wanted to spend the rest of the time in the moment. I’m much happier listening to these songs being played live in front of me than focusing on what I’m capturing my phone’s comparatively tiny screen. Anyway, I’ve compiled those clips into a single video.

LPU early entry

I’ve been a member of Linkin Park Underground (LPU), the Linkin Park fan club, since 2010, skipping only the 2022-23 year because that was when we bought a house and got a mortgage, and so I cancelled literally all my subscriptions. (Including my other long-term subscription to Feminist Frequency, which I’d had since 2012.)

One of the benefits of an LPU membership is that, if you have a General Admission (GA) ticket, you can apply for early entry to Linkin Park’s concerts. Only the first 100 LPU members with verified GA tickets who apply are selected and, because I was a little late in applying, I was #74 on the list.

Still, that meant I got to queue up with VIP ticket holders and other early-entry LPU members at 5pm on Tuesday. Doors opened for everyone else at 6:15pm, openers Polaris kicked things off at 7:30pm, and Linkin Park’s set started at 8:45pm.

Waiting in the early entry line at Rod Laver Arena

We were escorted into the empty Rod Laver Arena floor at 5:30pm, a full 45 minutes before gates opened to the general public at 6:15pm – which was super cool.

Empty Rod Laver Area floor, before doors open to the general public

The Linkin Park team makes an effort to recognise its fan club members so, while we went about arranging ourselves along the barricade at the very front of the arena floor, our LPU avatars were being displayed on the big screen at the back of the stage.

Avatars of early-entry LPU members on display

In case you’re wondering, mine is the blue one in the bottom-right corner of this photo :)

Early-entry LPU member avatars on display behind the stage

A new era for Linkin Park

One of the coolest things about the latest evolution of Linkin Park is how their audience has evolved right along with them. When I attended their show the last time they were in Australia, which was in December 2010, I think around 40% of concert attendees were women. In this new era of Linkin Park, easily 50% of attendees were women or non-binary. That was true on the arena floor as well.

There was also a difference between the Sunday and Tuesday shows. When Mike Shinoda asked for a show of hands on Sunday, about one-third of the crowd indicated they’d attended a Linkin Park concert before, while two-thirds were attending their first one that night. He didn’t repeat this question on Tuesday, but it felt like those numbers were reversed and we had a greater proportion of long-term, die-hard fans in attendance. (Tuesday being a school night also meant there was fewer children there.)

The vibe was different enough on Tuesday that there was a good amount of crowd surfing going on. Even Emily Armstrong crowd surfed for a bit :) I hadn’t noticed any crowd surfing on Sunday, thought that might have just been me not paying enough attention.

Concert etiquette, behaviour, and security practices have come a long way since 2010 because, when Linkin Park performed in Melbourne back then (which was also at Rod Laver Arena), there were clear signs telling us that, “Moshing and Crowd Surfing is NOT PERMITTED”!

Fast forward to 2026 and concert security were constantly making sure folks on the arena floor stayed hydrated at all times – regularly passing down water in paper cups, for example – and they were super efficient at helping crowd surfers get down safely once those folks had made it all the way to the front.

Before the event kicked off, tour management also came by and talked to us about what to expect during the show – like the mosh pit that’s formed during Two Faced – and what to do if we weren’t feeling well.

All told, it was an excellent experience on the arena floor. But then – much like the members of the band itself – Linkin Park’s fans are, on average, more considerate and, frankly, nicer people. At least in my experience.

Video show-and-tell

Speaking of how things have changed from 2010 to 2026, I made a video to show some of the differences between the two live performance.

Aside from the permanent line-up changes – with lead vocalist Emily Armstrong replacing the late Chester Bennington and drummer Colin Brittain replacing Rob Bourdon – their songs are now played in a different key to suit Emily’s vocal range and Alex Feder is their touring lead guitarist because Brad Delson prefers not to go on tour.

Just like the band’s concert technology, my filming technology has also received a massive upgrade. Back in 2010, I was recording video in 720p resolution on a 2000s-era Canon IXUS 120 digital camera. In 2026, I’m recording in 1080p using my Google Pixel 6 Pro smartphone.

The 2010 audio from my Canon camera was completely unusable, by the way. Its tiny microphone could not handle the concert volume and absolutely could not handle the bass! Fortunately, back in the day, LPU members who could show evidence they’d attended a particular concert were able to purchase an audio recording of that show. This was audio recorded straight off the mixing console. This approach obviated the need for any bootlegging recordings and also made the band a bit of additional revenue. I’d bought this recording for the show I attended in 2010, and so I was able to used this in my video instead of the crappy in-camera audio :)

One of the best shows I’ve attended

Here, finally, are some of my photos from Linkin Park’s performance.

Mike singing

The massive video screens directly above us

The joy of standing so close to the confetti canon

Those canons really do launch that confetti across the whole arena!

Emily and Mike encouraging fans to sing along

Joe taking photos of the crowd

Me in the background of Joe’s photo

I only took a couple of selfies at the show but neither turned out very well. Happily, you can see me (wearing the black face mask) in the top-left corner of this photo that Joe Hahn took and then posted on his Instagram account.

The main focus of Joe’s photo is Irene, the LPU member who was gifted a Linkin Park hat signed by the entire band. I was right behind her when this happened and took a video of it, which I later sent to her and she posted on her Instagram :)

Mike rapping while standing on the barricade directly in front of us

Mike is the one who presents this gift to a fan every night, and here’s the photo I took of him rapping to start the next song. Yes, he is standing on top of the barricade that’s directly in front of us.

The whole band in one photo

Fantastic laser light show

Dave doing his thing

Emily doing her thing

Bass, rhythm, lead guitar

Emily connecting with at a fan

Lights turned all the way up after the end of the show

The crowd behind me, right after the show ended

Confetti’s gonna confetti

So that’s that.

I’ve been in GA crowds several time over the years, but this was probably the most fun that I’ve had in one. It helped that all of us early-entry people were avid, even nerdy, Linkin Park fans and we quickly made friends with the folks around us. When you’re jumping up and down, squeezed between your neighbours, with the bass pounding and confetti flying, it’s good to know the names of the folks around you and that you’ll all look out for each other over the course of the night :)

That said, I do like to take at least a couple of photos for posterity. So here are some of the event photos and videos I’ve taken over the last few months.

I’m going to skip over one event I attended because this was a rare exception to my take-very-few-photos rule. I’ll cover that in the next post.

Garbage

12 Dec 2025. Garbage is one of my all-time favourite bands. I had to travel for work when these folks toured Australia in 2016, but this time I made sure I was there. Nadia and I attended the concert (and went out for dinner before that) with a whole bunch of friends and we had a fantastic time.

Garbage performing at the Palais Theatre in Melbourne

Elderbrook

14 Jan 2026. Elderbrook is one of my favourite electronic musicians/DJ. He toured Australia as part of the summer music festival circuit and we got to watch him at the Australian Open concert series. (Yes, the AusOpen tennis tournament is about a lot more than just world class tennis.)

Elderbrook playing the drums during his set

Here’s a super short video from this concert too.

Gianmarco Soresi

24 Jan 2026. Gianmarco Soresi’s stand-up material ranges from very personal to very political. Your face won’t hurt at the end of his show because you laughed too much – his shows aren’t like that – but your brain will be full of zingy thoughts and unhinged imagery that you were absolutely not expecting.

The Capitol is such a gorgeous theatre

Wet Leg

10 Feb 2026. I’m not hugely into post-punk revival, but I do love Wet Leg. We didn’t have the best spot from which to watch this show, but it was a fun concert nonetheless.

Wet Leg at Northcote Town Hall

Nerd Nite #67

11 Feb 2026. Since this is probably the first time you’re hearing about this: Nerd Nite is “evidence-based entertainment” – a series of informal talks given at a pub by nerds, for nerds. Started in Boston, USA in 2003, the concept spread all over the world, though I believe Melbourne Nerd Nite is the last chapter still running in Australia.

I’ve watched a lot of these talks online, but this was the first time I attended in person. It is so energising being around that many nerds! Nadia and I will try to attend all these talks going forward.

Nerd Nite at the Howler in Brunswick

Photo of a stage with a cinema-sized projector screen at the back. The screen shows a graphic of a stylised Melbourne tram with ‘Nerd Nite 2026’ written in graffiti on it.

Linkin Park

8, 10 Mar 2026. Linkin Park is one of my all-time favourite bands and the group were performing two shows in Melbourne. Nadia and I attended the first of those concerts together.

Selfie from Linkin Park’s From Zero world tour

I’m a Linkin Park Underground (ie fan club) member, so I get access to ticket sales really early. That meant we got excellent seats: right in the centre and just four rows back from the mixing desk :)

Seated right behind the mixing desk at Rod Laver Arena for Linkin Park

I attended Linkin Park’s second show by myself (this time in General Admission) and I’ll show you the photos and videos I took there in my next post.

Laura Ramoso

13 Mar 2026. Unlike Gianmarco Soresi, you do come out of Laura Ramoso’s stand-up shows with your face hurting from laughing so much. Laura did a fantastic job at transposing and translating her online skits and characters to the stage.

Waiting for Laura Ramoso at The Palais Theatre in St Kilda

This has been a really fun summer, and though we have fewer events planned for the rest of the calendar year, I’m looking forward to all of those as well.

We upgraded our NBN connection from FTTC to FTTP, and because the switch to FTTP allowed us to upgrade to the Home Ultrafast speed tier, now our download speeds are ten times faster and our upload speeds are four times faster that before.

The start of our NBN story

We got connected to Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN) in December 2015.

Then, because we were renting, we moved house a few times. That meant both our connection speed and connection type changed every few years (which I documented along the way using the ‘NBN’ tag on this blog, in case you’re interested).

All that stopped in 2022 when we bought a house in the northern suburbs of Melbourne that had a Fibre to the Curb (FTTC) NBN connection. That’s the connection type in which the fibre optic cable carrying the internet signal terminates at a distribution box on your street (ie the “curb”) and a standard copper cable goes from there to your house.

The speeds on this connection type were decent, but not great: 95Mbps down and 19Mbps up.

The upload speed, in particular, was irritating because it was half of what we’d had with a Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) connection in our previous places. Now it took me a lot longer to back-up my media to the cloud, for example, and I had to make sure I wasn’t doing any uploading when Nadia or I were on a video conference call for work (especially if Nadia was teaching a class). First world problems, I know, but irritating ones nonetheless.

A new hope

You can upgrade! No, you can’t.

Happily, in January 2025, NBN Co announced its ‘full fibre upgrade’ program. This would let 622,000 properties across Australia upgrade their existing, slower connection types to the fastest-possible Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) connection.

I immediately tried to sign up to this upgrade but found that we weren’t eligible yet. We live in a property with only three units and, at the time, NBN Co was prioritising upgrades for properties with four or more units.

*sigh*

You can upgrade now! Wait, no, you still can’t.

Not too long after, in October 2025, all types of properties became eligible for the upgrade so I immediately signed us up.

I didn’t hear anything till November 2025, when someone from the Fibre Upgrades team at NBN Co reached out to say our application was still under review.

Then, in January 2026, they reached out to say we could now formally proceed with the upgrade. We just needed to fill out a form and each unit on the property needed to pay $275 to cover the remainder of the government-subsidised installation cost.

Unfortunately, in the intervening months, things had changed at our end: one of the units on our property had been sold and, when I reached out to the new owners to say, “hey, we’re now all set to do the NBN upgrade” these folks said they didn’t want to do the upgrade.

So that was that. End of story. No upgrade for me.

(Obviously that’s not how the story ended.)

The twist ending

Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, at the end of February 2026, I got one final email from NBN Co that read:

Hi Ameel,

We’re writing to share an important update regarding the nbn® fibre upgrade at [YOUR ADDRESS].

Your premises/complex was previously progressing through the nbn Full Fibre Upgrade for Complex Multi‑Dwelling Properties program. Following a recent assessment, it has now been reclassified and is eligible to individually order an nbn® Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) service via a High-Speed Tier plan.

What this means

Instead of continuing through the Complex MDU upgrade pathway, individual premises within the complex/block can now request an order directly with their preferred retail service provider (RSP), provided they select an eligible high‑speed plan.

This meant our upgrade to FTTP was no longer an all-or-nothing deal for the whole property. Individual owners of each unit could now apply separately through their internet service providers (ISPs) to upgrade just their own NBN connections!

Woohoo!

Happily every after

From then on, things proceeded at pace.

Our ISP is iiNet – who we’ve been with since 2009! – so shortly after I received this email, I went to their ‘Fibre upgrade’ page and signed up for a free upgrade.

The very next day I got a message to say our upgrade-installation was booked for exactly one week later.

One week later, which was yesterday, the installer turned up and, within two hours, had:

• laid the new fibre optic cable from the street to our unit,

• installed two new connection boxes (outside box shown below), and

• activated our new NBN FTTP connection.

All I needed to do was log into our modem and uncheck the VLAN tagging checkbox that was needed for the old FTTC connection but was stopping our new FTTP connection from working.

And just like that, we were done.

Serious speed upgrade

So what speeds are we getting now?

Well, not only did we upgrade our connection type to FTTP, we also upgraded to the ‘Home Ultrafast’ speed tier that gives you download speeds of up to 1,000Mbps (ie one gigabit per second) and upload speeds of up to 100Mbps :)

And because we’d upgraded to the latest Synology router in 2024 – the WRX560, with its 2.5Gbps WAN port – I knew all our hardware (and the Ethernet cables in our walls) could handle the speed upgrade just fine.

Here, then, are our current download and upload speeds.

We’re currently getting speeds of 937Mbps up and 89Mbps down – which is a whopping ten times faster for downloads and four times faster for uploads!

What now?

So that’s it. The end of the road. Our final NBN upgrade is complete.

Yes, NBN Co has announced an Ultrafast II speed tier that gives you 2GBps download speeds, but that is absolutely not something we need at home so our upgrading days are very much over.

Now we just get to enjoy blazingly fast download and upload speeds, and the next time I need to upload a few terabytes of data to the cloud, I won’t have to leave my desktop switched on continuously for a few days in a row!

As someone whose work and personal life is inextricably intertwined with the internet, I am a very happy person right now :)