Simon Rumble's blog

Is this a golden era of itch scratching?

2026-08-22T15:50:00.000Z

For tech-oriented people, the AI LLMs we're all playing with are a bonanza of itch scratching. Things that previously would have been too big an undertaking to tackle are suddenly easy.

I build iOS and Android apps for FBi radio and had a ball making them. Still iterating on them and making really quite incredible apps. I'm impressed myself.

Just last week I built a script to identify recordings of ABC Newsradio that actually contain the news bulletin.

This weekend, on a whim, I'm looking at improving the Android app for Subsurface. It's a diving log app that's Open Source and open. Linus built it while he was taking a break from the Linux kernel because there weren't any good Linux apps.

Subsurface does a lot very well, but it's got that "Open Source app" feel. Unstyled input fields. Weird UI choices. It's just a bit shit. Plus weird pauses and freezes, a long delay on first opening. But it supports a huge swathe of dive computers: my new Shearwater Peregrine worked straight out of the box.

So I've started working on a fork of the Android app to fix some of this stuff up in native Kotlin rather than Qt mobile. No idea if I'll bother getting it to releasable state. I might just end up using it myself. We'll see.

But the point of this post is it's really become easy to kick off little itch scratching projects. I've got hundreds of these under my belt done the old way but most didn't get much beyond the "little script that works in my environment" level. Now I'm willing to take on vastly more complex projects and act as Product Manager and Software Architect. It's fun, cheap and produces interesting outputs.

ABC Newsradio bulletin recorder

2026-08-14T10:26:00.000Z

I like to stay up-to-date with what's happening in the world. Probably more than I should. One of the ways I do that is to listen to the news bulletin. ABC Newsradio is pretty good for a quick update and the midday bulletin is a good opportunity to catch up while I make my lunch.

But there's a problem: I often end up stuck in a meeting and miss the top of the hour bulletin. For years I've had a script that records the first five minutes of the hour from the stream and saves it for me to run. That works most of the time but Newsradio doesn't religiously run the bulletin every hour. If the Prime Minister is giving a press conference, if the Press Club is happening or in Summer if just everyone's on holidays, there's no bulletin.

ABC Listen used to have a feature to get the latest bulletin but it was run by humans and clearly the process wasn't very solid. There'd be times when the bulletin was days out of date. It got killed.

So I wrote a solution. Presenting Newsradio Bulletin Recorder. I tuned it on a YouTube clip that has all three versions of the Majestic Fanfare to detect a bulletin. If there's no fanfare, there's no bulletin and it throws it away. Quite a simple solution.

It drops a text-to-speech clip of the time and date, trims right up to the Fanfare and then delivers exactly five minutes of bulletin. Working well so far!

The code was all written by the DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 model. "Cost" was US25c (though in fact I used 5 free Hypercredits from Charm Hyper). Amazing.

Updating history

2026-08-12T16:17:00.000Z

I've been working with an AI tool (GLM 5.2 inside Charm Crush) to raid the Internet Archive for all my old blog posts. I started blogging back in 1999, before the term was even really widespread.

I've used a bunch of different platforms:

Blosxom (1999-2006)
Travel diary (hand coded in Perl) (2000-2001)
Blogger (briefly)
Posterous (2006-2013)
Posthaven (2013-2026)
Self-hosted using Sveltia CMS which means I can manage it all in Github

Each time I moved, I attempted to import all the history but wasn't terribly careful about it all. So content got lost or given the wrong datestamps.

The AI managed to recover 21 posts but corrected the dates on 152. Nice!

I'll work on recovering some more of the images and videos now, and maybe even get some archived versions of the old site designs.

Hat tip to Damion who gave me the idea.

First unsolicited feedback on my FBi app

2026-08-05T18:08:00.000Z

I just got the first feedback for my FBi radio apps! Received last night and pushed through my software factory today. So once approved by the app stores, you'll be able to tap on the show title to see the show page for that episode, then share that.

Keep the feedback coming!

Ahoy Simon, thank you for making a wonderful app. I have a small request to add into the mix: would it be possible to add a button to open the individual episode page from the now playing screen? Ideally it would be nice to have the show notes/tracklist inline but intuitively that seems more tricky than a simple button perhaps.

And now I’m being greedy, but a share this episode button might also go well (although if there is the link/open she notes button I guess that gets one there!)

Happy to expand on any of the above if at all useful. And many thanks for creating such a lovely app!

Have a lovely evening

Migrated to a new CMS

2026-07-28T21:36:00.000Z

I've migrated away from Posthaven. They really haven't kept up with the times and US$5/month for the service isn't really worthwhile.

It took a bit because my entire blog is, I think, four different blog platforms migrated over time. I think I lost some between about 2000 and 2003 though .

This new blog is a static site on Vercel with images hosted by Cloudflare R2 and a Svelte CMS

I built a software factory

2026-07-26T12:41:22.000Z

Software factories are the hot topic right now. The #software-factory channel in the work Slack is a hive of discussion, show-and-tell and learning. What are they?

A software factory is the idea of a system where you push work in one end, agents create software, test it, review it and deploy it at varying levels of automation.

Lots of people are experimenting with these patterns. Including me.

v0.1 with Cursor

I really got into this using Cursor and Linear. This isn’t Cursor the AI-connected IDE, which was fun but not the game changing software factory. Cursor’s real power is its AI agent framework.

Here’s how the workflow happened:

Linear to track issues and assign work
To Cursor which uses different models to do the work
Then pushes PRs to Github
Github Actions build and run automated tests
Github Actions run reviews of the code
Agents keep working until the tests pass and the reviews are green
Human merges the PR
Github Actions builds and deploys

This worked really well and once I discovered Cursor’s Composer 2.5 model, chunking maintenance and minor changes into tickets became super cheap tasks to do. Composer 2.5 is a reinforcement on top of Kimi’s 2.5 model. Fast, effective and with the guardrails of tests and reviews, very good at what it does.

The reviews are really quite fun. I’ve created a bunch of different reviewers for different angles. Security, design, usability, analytics tracking, performance, cost, test coverage. So much so that I’ve got a triage agent that decides which review agents to kick off.

Then Cursor got bought by the Space Nazi. Dammit. Gotta leave.

Looking at alternatives

I spent some time disentangling from Cursor and wasn’t really satisfied with any alternatives. I tried Factory (couldn’t really work out what it’s supposed to be), Kilo (good but seemed to crap out on tasks from Linear), Cyrus hosted in a VM on my home server (really good but very token-heavy and with hindsight a bit inflexible), Capy (couldn't make it work with the models I use).

v0.2 playing with Symphony

Then I stumbled over OpenAI Symphony, which is an open spec for a software factory. It’s meant to be built around Codex but being open that’s really not necessary.

While on a work trip to Korea I’d spent the flight over playing with the pi agent harness. I rebuilt my personal site using it while in the air, using Z.ai’s amazing GLM-5.2 model.

Once in Korea, I pointed the agent at the Symphony spec, with some changes to substitute in the cheap models I wanted to use. And I wanted it built in Go. Cos why not!

I left the laptop running while we went out for team activities, came back, made some tweaks and had a working software factory running on my laptop, driven by Linear. Amazing!

Speed isn’t that important and local models need to be running 24x7

While thinking this all through I had a realisation: with a software factory like this, speed isn’t all that important. You assign something and can have faith it’ll build and deliver an object that passes your tests and reviews. If your tests and reviews enforce what you need, you can just assign the task and go to bed.

So now local LLMs get interesting. Let’s say you decided to buy a $10k Mac Studio to run local LLMs. You really want that investment working 24x7 to maximise what you’re getting from it. Same if you were to buy any of the approaches to running local LLMs. I feel like this is going to be a trend as the local models get Good Enough™️.

Marry those two things together: a software factory that just crunches through your backlog, plus a mixture of expensive frontier models doing planning and coordination of cheaper models (potentially local, though OpenRouter hosted cheap models are pretty damn good and cheap enough to avoid dropping $10k on a space heater) doing most of the work. Again, speed isn’t so important if it’s crunching through things 24x7.

This approach is also interesting from a cost perspective. If you’re a cloud inference provider, bursty traffic is hard to plan for. People sitting at their desks in work hours and you run out of capacity, then they go home and you’ve got idle hardware sitting around not making you money. Z.ai already have a Peak Hours pricing approach. Provisioning a consistent throughput could be an interesting pricing option designed for software factories and aligns with the inference provider's interests.

v0.3 Symphony for the Devil

So my latest approach is an iteration on the OpenAI Symphony approach. It's called Symphony for the Devil because that's the first thing that came to mind with the name "Symphony".

Workflow

You assign a Linear task to the agent ("devil").
The coordinator spins up a VM that contains all the tools you need for the task, customised to that task.
The VM runs a pi agent harness and pulls the repo out, works on it
Agent pushes in a PR
Agent waits for the tests and reviews to run, then works on those until all resolved
(optionally) merges the PR.
The VM is then put into sleep state.
After 7 days the VM's disk is deleted.

NixOS VMs

I'm using nixOS for the VMs. That's a Linux distro with composable config. My son has been using it for ages and it feels like a great fit for this project. You write a configuration and can build a new machine (he uses it for his desktop) from the config with no interaction and it ends up just as you want it.

For VMs, I've got a base VM image with the core coding harness in it and access to the LLM keys. Then for different tasks I add to the base. A web version with nodeJS and Playright browser so it can test it. An app version with Android and iOS libraries to build that stuff (I do those builds in Github Actions cos you need a Mac to build iOS). Thinking maybe a test version with the appropriate bits for that.

Hosting

This all runs in a VM on my home server in 16 gigs RAM, so I can host 3 or so concurrent tasks. For some reason I can’t afford to upgrade the RAM in my server to get headroom. I wonder why? But there’s no reason this couldn’t be in a cloud machine or spin up cloud VMs for much more throughput.

Future optimisations

There’s a lot of tweaking to do. I’ve got a bit of a roadmap forming.

Coding plan maximisation: get the pacing just right to use as much of the coding plans as possible (I currently have Z.ai and Kimi but you could just as easily use OpenAI or other providers)
Cheapest model optimisation: work out which models are the cheapest for the subagents doing most of the work. Prompt compaction looks like the signal that the model isn’t up to the task. Break the task down into smaller tasks or use a chunkier model?
Testing mechanisms: bigger VMs specifically for running automated tests, maybe for builds too?
Devil Dashboard: what tasks are being worked on, tokens per hour, cost per hour, VMs running, RAM and disk consumption

Spec-driven vibe development

2026-05-22T00:13:24.000Z

I've been playing with loads of AI coding tools the last few months and while the tools themselves are evolving rapidly, my knowledge of the limitations and the right ways to work with them have really leveled up what I'm getting out of them.

I've just deployed the first few versions of a pretty complex little blob of code implementing a bulletin board system running on the Meshcore mesh networking system. Meshcore runs over seriously bandwidth constrained radio links: 184 byte message payload limits, really slow link speeds at the radio layer (~1.7 kbit/s on the typical settings used in Sydney). Claude investigated and planned out an architecture to make this work and made intelligent suggestions.

The process worked like this:

Outline the setup and how I'd like to deploy it, what I wanted from it and how users would connect (I'll drop the initial prompt down the bottom of the post)
Claude comes back with deep insight into the limitations of the network, the architecture I'm planning and brings up things I hadn't thought of like spam, abuse and network overload considerations
I ask it to write a detailed spec including all the architecture and components
The initial spec includes a whole section of unresolved questions which I answer and it finalises the spec.
I move the spec into a new chat and direct it to build the thing.
Claude outputs a tar file with the full thing.

All this was done on my phone while lying in bed. I went to sleep that night and the following morning dropped the tarball into a directory and pointed Claude Code at it. Build the docker container, install on my Unraid server, connect up a Meshcore device and get serial routed to the container.

Bam. Up and running. And it works really quite well!

Unbelievable.

Further iterations were a bit clunky with me having to deploy the containers manually and going through the config loop more than once. I worked out a better flow using Github Actions to build the containers and deploy them to a container store that Unraid can reload. Turning into a nice workflow.

What I'm now thinking through and will start experimenting with is getting a really tight process for doing these kinds of projects that neatly migrates straight into an easy production workflow. I toyed with this a bit on my FBI Radio apps using Linear for issue management, Cursor for coding agents and Github actions for build and delivery.

So I'm evolving towards a workflow that looks something like this:

Initial spec in an LLM output to Markdown
Migrate into Cursor with Linear upstream
Cursor agents build the app
Deployments go to Github PRs which are built and test by Cursor agents
PRs merged manually which builds the production artifacts
I've used Railway a bit for deployment here

What's blowing my mind is the quality of the agents in these processes. Not just at writing the code but building the deployment pipelines, testing the code, reviewing it and making quite good suggestions and changes.

We are in an interesting world. Knowing a bit about coding and coding workflows sure is becoming a superpower.

That initial prompt:

I want to set up a Meshcore bulletin board system that users can access through direct messages. It could provide services such as news headlines, quick weather info, public message boards with persistence and messages to other users that are asynchronous.

The idea would be that messages to and from an individual user would be their unique stream connecting them to the BBS. Authentication would just be their public key used to sign their DMs. If in understanding how DMs work correctly.

How would I get this set up? I'm thinking of running it in a VM on my unraid server with a serial connection to a Meshcore companion device. It could use the Meshcore python library to connect.

https://github.com/meshcore-dev/meshcore_py

Build me an outline of how this would work. Highlight any potential issues or things I haven't thought of.

Music and AC control

2026-03-30T03:46:25.000Z

I spend a lot of time in my office listening to music so I built a little module to control playback and at the same time control the air conditioning in the space.

It's built on this Matouch rotary encoder display unit. As well as the circular screen and rotary encoder, you can push the whole thing in to operate as a switch and the screen is a touch screen.

So the interface is pretty simple. It usually shows whatever is currently playing. Rotate the encoder to change volume. Press to play/pause. There's hot locations on the screen for next track/rewind. Press and turn and you can seek. Around the edge of the display there's a bar showing the position within the track. Press the dot down the bottom to switch to AC mode and you can turn that on/off and change the set temperature.

The interface is built in ESPHome connected to Home Assistant. ESPHome GUI configuration is an abysmal process with C++ embedded in YAML. Two awful tools, together at last. Fortunately Claude is really good at it! I iterated over the design a fair bit and am pretty happy with it. Though it can be a little unstable, crashing fairly regularly.

Oh and I had to create a little server-side proxy for the album art because the JPEG library ESPHome uses can't handle progressive JPEGs which is what Tidal sends through.

FBi radio app with Android Auto

2026-03-16T10:35:30.000Z

So I guess I'm an Android Auto developer now...

There's a local community radio station here in Sydney called "FBi" (Free Broadcasting Inc) which plays great music. However they don't retransmit the radio signal in any of the tunnels and their signal only gets just outside Sydney. Their web-based player requires you to keep the browser open to play it.

I got Claude Code to build me an app. It scrapes the site's GraphQL to find out the currently-playing show and displays the details.

And of course it has Amplitude tracking including session replay. SR only works with the phone side of the equation, not what I see on the car's screen.

That was a fun little evening project! Should I release it on the app store?

Music discovery

2026-03-10T02:34:20.000Z

I listen to a lot of music, and I'm always looking for new music. People often ask me how I discover so much new music.

I read a lot of music reviews, and if anyone ever recommends an artist to me, I will add it to a playlist and make sure I have a good listen. If it's someone whose taste I really respect, I will give it multiple listens and maybe even follow up and talk to them about it, explore why they recommended it.

I also listen to lots of radio, primarily Sydney's FBi and the French FIP. I listen to Ultima Thule on 2MBS, which is a long-running ambient show, and on BBC Six Music I listen to Stuart Mackonie's Freak Zone. I watch videos from Tiny Desk and from KCRW on YouTube. Give each of them a go.

Now I've got a new music discovery tool. I was in San Francisco last week and had the weekend available to me, so I thought, I wonder what gigs are on? I asked Manus, which is a really cool agentic AI tool, to recommend some gigs to me, but I didn't give it any context. I've been recording my musical listening history for over 20 years into last.fm.

So I asked Manus to look at all of my musical history and then to make some recommendations on gigs I should go and see in San Francisco that night. It nailed it in one. It was quite incredible. The list of artists that it suggested I go see was spot on for my tastes.

Artist	Venue	Why You'll Like It
The Brian Jonestown Massacre	The Chapel (9:00 PM)	Their neo-psychedelia and shoegaze sound aligns perfectly with your long-term interest in bands like The Cure and Sonic Youth.
Indigo De Souza	The Fillmore (8:00 PM)	A rising star in indie rock with raw, clever songwriting that fits right in with your appreciation for The Beths and Vampire Weekend.
Opiuo	Public Works (9:30 PM)	If you're in the mood for something electronic, his glitch-hop and bass-heavy sets will appeal to your interest in Four Tet and Plaid.
Tigran Hamasyan	Great American Music Hall (8:00 PM)	For something more instrumental and complex, this jazz-fusion pianist is a great match for your interest in GoGo Penguin.

it also suggested Go Go Bordello, which are an amazing band, but a little more high energy than I was up for, given the hectic week I'd had. I also wasn't keen on Brian Jonestown Massacre because I've seen them before and I didn't have time for Anton's bullshit

I went and made up a playlist of the other artists and got into my work with it playing in the background. All the music I heard would've been a fun gig.

And then this track came up. My brain pretty quickly perked up and I was asking myself "WTF is this time signature?"

So that kinda decided it. Perfect for a Friday night after an intense week of work.

The gig was incredible. Incredibly skilled musicians. The drummer was a fucking metronome. Just amazing, and insane music.

The answer, BTW, is 256/32 with the main motif in 35/16. Click for a video that follows it. Insane right? 🤯

And here's the AI's full interaction in Manus. I'm quite digging this new method of music discovery!

Hot sauce

2026-02-15T05:41:03.000Z

I just bottled my latest fermented hot sauce. 30 bottles using Andy's recipe. Same as last year except last year I used red jalapenos and this year I'm using "long red" chillis. I have some habaneros growing in the garden but nowhere near enough for a big batch of the hot stuff.

Last year's sauce was delicious but a bit too mild in the heat department. This year is a bit hotter which is getting to about my sweet spot.

2025 was busy

2026-02-03T09:26:57.000Z

2025 was a pretty busy one for me. I did 128,000 kilometres of travel, saw 21 gigs with 64 different artists. Phew!

Music

A lot of gigs. Best gig of the year was Ezra Collective at the Opera House. I've never seen the entire Concert Hall up and dancing.

Download PXL_20250531_125641849.LS.mp4

Artists I saw (excluded some from festivals):

Bahamadia
The Beards
The Beths
Cloud Control
Clouds
DJ Shadow
Egoism (twice)
Ela Minus
Ezra Collective
Fontaines D.C.
Furnace and the Fundamentals
God Is An Astronaut
PJ Harvey (twice)
The Herd
Kneecap
Kristin Hersh
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard
The Necks
Parcels
Pete & Bas
Hania Rani
Severed Heads
Skeleten
Sun Ra Arkestra
Tangerine Dream
Throwing Muses

Travel

Nine trips to Melbourne, two to San Francisco and an epic Singapore-Paris-London-Porto trip with the Rumbleskins. The Europe trip was a load of fun!

Adblock detection on Recipetineats.com

2026-01-18T09:38:25.000Z

Hi there Nagi.

I don't know who's advising you, but the adtech on your site is neither "limited" nor "respectful". The actual ad units you're displaying might be small but what's happening beneath the surface is quite extensive.

The adtech on your site in my test makes the browser connect to 150 different web servers. That is, it's attempting to share my behaviour with all those places. The purpose? Well, that's where things get shady.

I'm a big fan. Take a look at the food-splattered, well-thumbed books. We love your stuff in our household and use your recipes all the time. I feel like your recipes have massively increased my partners' cooking confidence because they work so well to bring delicious food to the table every time.

I'm also an expert in online behavioural tracking, adtech and internet privacy. This is what I do for a living. When I block ads, it's only partially because of the distraction and annoyance. The main problem is the shady supply chain behind the modern digital ad business. I also know how little you'll actually be making from each of these shady suppliers. Is it worth it?

If you'd like to discuss what's happening here and get a perspective from someone who isn't your adtech vendor, drop me a note and let's have a chat. (I'm in Sydney too, so no problematic timezones.)

Here's a list of all the domains your site gets browsers to connect with right now. Do you know what they're all up to?

King Giz, Throwing Muses and Parcels in one weekend

2025-12-07T22:53:53.000Z

I've been slack with blogging about gigs so I'll try to catch up. Just lived through a hectic weekend. In the Australian Summer there's always lots of gigs on as artists tour and play the festival circuit. We often end up with really busy times. This weekend was especially nuts.

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. If you haven't seen them live, get on it. Their recorded music is very eclectic and can be challenging but live they're unbelievably fun with a lively crowd. Honestly I never thought they were my thing, then went to a show and now I'm hooked.

Saturday night was supposed to be some down time. Then our mates put us on the door for Throwing Muses at The Factory around the corner from our place so we dragged ourselves off the couch and ducked around.

We saw Kristen Hirsch on her last solo tour and she's a mesmerising performer. She's tiny but she fills the stage with presence and incredible songs. Amazingly we even got to meet her afterwards and she was gracious and funny, having to socialise with the promoter's rando mates. Absolute legend!

Sunday night rolled around and the one we've been hanging out for. Parcels. On the Sydney Opera House steps!

Fortunately the weather improved from the oppressive heat of Saturday to be cool and breezy. Perfect for a cool and breezy band, seemingly made for outdoor stages. Fantastic set of good vibes and fun times.

Download PXL_20251207_102702069.LS.mp4

Only one gig in the coming weekend!

FBi to Podcast

2025-11-02T01:46:12.000Z

I love our local Sydney community radio station FBi, Free Broadcasting Incorporated. They've been running for years and always have interesting music, arts and culture.

However they recently launched a new web site which makes it quite difficult but not impossible to play archived programmes any way except through your web browser. I want to play them on my music system without so much fuss. Enter my co-developer Cursor and we've got a script to scrape my favourite shows and generate an ATOM feed suitable for a podcast player.

The code is up on Github and it's currently running through a cron job on my home server so I can listen to old episodes any time. It should be relatively easy to adjust it to your favourite shows.

Disable power exporting when the price goes negative with an Enphase solar inverter

2024-12-18T05:30:26.000Z

A few weeks ago we got a Tesla Powerwall installed, taking advantage of the price drop and the NSW government subsidy. I've signed up for Amber, who pass through the wholesale power price such that in the 19 days we've had it, we're $70 in credit having consumed nearly 400 kWh of power. Admittedly we've been using the air conditioners a lot to chew up free solar and keep the house pre-cooled during the hot days.

To get the most out of Amber, you need to be able to store power and predict when you will need it. Their SmartShift app does this for you, but you can control it crudely when you need to, for example tell it to not dump power to the grid on a night you know you'll need power, say to run the oven. Otherwise it automatically works it out, and it's been pretty good for that.

However, Amber can't currently control my Enphase inverter. You need to be able to stop your solar generating and exporting power to the grid when the power goes negative. Fortunately a guy in Melbourne has written a great little script that does just this. It monitors the Amber power price and when it goes negative tells the inverter to switch to an export profile that has "0 kW" set as the export limit.

The only problem, as reported here by another Enphase user, the Powerwall reacts so quickly to any loads in the house that the Enphase microinverters see essentially no load and don't produce any power. If your battery isn't already full, your house will drain from the battery and then once empty it'll use the grid. Using the grid when it's negative isn't a bad thing but draining the battery not so much.

So I worked with Brendan to work out where I could hook in a quick check to see if the battery is full, using Home Assistant. I don't know Ruby at all so Brendan was very helpful and patient.

Here's the diff you can run against the repository to make the required change. You'll need to create a long-lived API token in your Home Assistant instance and set that as ZEST_HOME_ASSISTANT_TOKEN, then find the URL for the battery charge level resource in the Tesla integration and set that in ZEST_HOME_ASSISTANT_URL. For mine that URL is http://<IP of HA>:8123/api/states/sensor.my_home_charge. That's it.

Thanks so much Brendan for helping me out!

With the instability in the grid these days pushing the spot prices up a lot I suspect I'll be able to pay off the battery much quicker than it'd be on a normal power plan, with the added bonus of us not having to worry about when we use power so much.

Herbie Hancock

2024-10-23T00:21:01.000Z

Not usually my kind of thing but my mate Damion was visiting from Melbourne and bought tickets for both nights and I'm always up for catching up with him and I'm a sucker for Opera House gigs. Cracking show and it's amazing how sprightly and nimble this 84 year old is! Lots of great tunes.

EGOISM

2024-09-08T23:56:36.000Z

It's been a long time since I've been to a gig in someone's front room! This gig was advertised as a "secret" location and that turned out to be someone's terrace house in Redfern. Lots of fun as they played through all their tracks including some of their very early tracks.

Belle and Sebastian

2024-08-29T23:27:38.000Z

Download PXL_20240822_121321123-1920.mp4

There's a short list of bands that I'll see every time there's an opportunity. Nick Cave, The Cure, Billy Bragg, The New Pornographers and... Belle and Sebastian. Always a great night out and this was no different as they played the Enmore Theatre last week and played all the hits. Big singalong for The Boy With The Arab Strap with a bunch of the crowd up on stage. Loads of fun!

Adventures in sous vide and smoking

2024-08-23T10:35:00.000Z

I did my second crack at sous vide pulled pork using Serious Eats' great recipe. First time was great though my smoker gave up soon after getting it going, so I finished it using a foil-wrapped packet of woodchips in the gas BBQ. Worked fine so I went all the way with that.

22 hours in the sous vide circulator, then a couple of hours in the BBQ with smoke. Brilliant. A crunchy, super tasty bark and unctuous, flavoursome meat. Brilliant taco filling! Nom.

Download PXL_20240822_223351862_1_.mp4