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

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

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

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

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

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

What I've been playing

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

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

Music of the Week

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

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

It's been a very wet and rainy week. My swimming classes have been going pretty okay. I'm still struggling to sustain my swim beyond three strokes - after two or three strokes, I end up folding my knee a bit, and that pushes my head over the water and then I lose momentum. I haven't been able to improve on this. It's been supremely frustrating, but I guess I have to keep at it.

Jo has been sick on and off through the week - on Tuesday she was sick enough that she didn't go to work or come into the gym. She's feeling better now but not quite a 100% - especially mornings have been rough and she's not been sleeping well. Hopefully, she will get better.

Because of her sickness, Jo couldn't join in for Tuesday's PT but she did join on Wednesday (and promptly regretted that after the workout).

The work's been pretty okay. I focused on getting my performance test built out and was fixing some bugs that I discovered that was causing the performance test to exit out earlier than expected.

On Friday, I was working from home and Jo had to go into the city since she had some tests that were scheduled. After about two weeks of cloudy, rainy weather, the sun also came out. By evening, the backyard lawn, which had overgrown quite a bit, had also dried up completely so I decided to get the whipper snipper and the lawn mower out and got the backyard all nice and clean.

On Saturday, Amrita & Sathya invited us over to their house for lunch and we went over. It was good to catch up after a few months. They'd been to New Zealand recently and I was keen to hear about how the experience was - particularly since they did a road trip from Queenstown up North. And of course - some yummy food was had.

Saturday night was probably the coldest we'd felt yet and Jo woke up again with a blocked nose. The cold has been particularly painful with the sheets which makes it even colder than it is, so we decided to head over to Rouse Hill shopping centre and have brunch and then do some follow-up shopping and got some flannel fitted sheets and a nice warm blanket. While returning, Jo went over to the market and got some fruits while I had a long overdue haircut - not particularly a good one at that. Ah well, it will grow back soon.

After we returned home, I told Jo we should do the front yard (meaning just mow the front yard lawn and trim the sides) and somehow she interpreted this as doing our side strip makeover, which had been pending for a while. Thus, we spent a few hours trimming the lawn on the side with the whipper snipper (can't use the mower here as we have some plants growing). Once the lawn was trimmed, Jo put cardboard on it, watered it to set it down. Jo then layered it with some soil, compost, and weed block mulch to stop grass from growing. It looks a lot neater now.

What I've been playing

Civilization VII - With the new update out this past week, I have been playing it for a bit and wrote a post about it.

What I watched

30 Rock - I started watching 30 Rock during my morning commute and was reminded how good it is.

What we ate

Moss Bros Cafe, Rouse Hill - We stopped by here for brunch. I ordered the Chilli Chorizo Croissant while Jo ordered the Corn Fritters. I was pretty surprised by the portion size of my croissant - it was a lot bigger than I thought. Thankfully it wasn't just the size that was good - the food was really good too. Jo said her corn fritters were ok - she didn't expect them to be deep fried. That said, the coffees were good as well.

Milana Pizzeria, Stanhope Gardens - We had been to this pizzeria a month ago and revisited this place last Thursday. And like last time, we had a great pizza. This time we ordered a half-and-half - half of Giuliano (tomato base, chicken, garlic, pineapple, BBQ sauce, cheese) and half of Tandoori. I was expecting to like the Tandoori better than Giuliano but it was the other way around.

Music of the Week

Franz Ferdinand does a live play of their song Take Me Out. Shoutout to the drummer Audrey Tait for the fabulous work on the drums.

Link of the week

AI is [...] going to revolutionize the way we work [...] Everything getting faster and easier would be an extraordinary boon to all of our lives. Can we have a day off then?

Can we have the day off?

So, apparently we are at the cusp of the entire world’s white collar workforce (and, by extension, much of the US workforce) undergoing a revolution in productivity. AI is the technology that is going to revolutionize the way we work, the way we interact with the world, the way we learn, the way we socialize, and all of this. This sounds great. Really, it does. Everything getting faster and easier would be an extraordinary boon to all of our lives.

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

It's been a quiet, rainy week. I mentioned having given my Apple Watch for repairs last week - I got an email stating that they can't service my Watch in time and would offer a replacement of the same model - but in a different colour.

I wasn't keen on the band colour but then again I was reminded that I still have my old band and the main unit's colour is barely perceptible so I agreed to the replacement. I received it towards the end of the week and it's going well. I restored from backup and all my apps and Watch configuration - including the complications — were preserved. Happy to have my Watch back - Apple Health though seemed to believe that I was slacking around persistently reminding me that my activity was much lower than usual.

The PT went pretty well. We started working towards 1RM for bench press. Right now, we're still building up towards our working weights. Last I recall, the max I'd done on the barbell bench press was 50kg. Would be nice to get to 70kg - probably that's what my target would be as our trainer had told us to have a target in mind and he'll let us know if it's close to what he's thinking.

On the work front, I started working on a new project to deliver a benchmark/stress testing harness so teams can request for a benchmark across a variety of instance types and the harness will orchestrate it. I'm using Temporal as the provisioner and orchestrator for the harness. I have an initial proof-of-concept ready and looking to hear feedback from the requesting team.

I've also booked tickets for my first work trip in a few months - I will be heading to Bellevue, Washington for a meeting with my colleagues. I asked Jo if she'd be interested in joining and after thinking about it - she said yes. We won't be there for long (only for a week) and Jo hopes to spend a couple of days in San Francisco to meet her sister before coming back to Bellevue and explore a bit of Seattle. I probably will have a second trip to Seattle in August for the AWS Hero Summit - I haven't figured out yet if I will make the trip or not. Something to decide soon.

With the rainy week, we stayed indoors this weekend. On Thursday, we got the barbeque out. We applied some tandoori marinade to the chicken drumsticks and grilled them via indirect heat on the barbeque - and they came out well. Jo had pre-cooked some veggies - I heated them on the grill.

Jo also got a notification that the stocks for blood of her group were in low quantity, so we went over to a nearby mobile blood donation bank and donated some blood. After that, we went over to The Ettamogah to grab some lunch and were so full that we ended up skipping dinner.

As a bonus, I got to see this pretty cool Nissan GT-R near the blood bank.

What we ate

The Ettamogah, Kellyville Ridge - The Ettamogah is a cartoon pub created by cartoonist Ken Maynard, and built as a real pub just outside of Albury at Table Top, New South Wales. This is now a chain of four pubs and we'd always see this on our commute back home and we'd been planning to visit here since we first saw it. While the facade remains a faithful recreation, the entry isn't from there but from the back, leading to a pretty large open area consisting of beer garden, sports bar, arcade and a dining section.

Jo got the beer battered fish and chips while I got the smash burger with us sharing a plate of cauliflower arancini. The batter of the fish and chips was really good - only to be let down by the fish itself. My smashburger was really good. Overall a decent place to visit but you're not really missing out much if you skip.

Music of the Week

Not quite the Robert Plant songs that I was expecting but great Tiny Desk Concert nonetheless

Links of the week

Nisarga posts about how he found vulnerabilities in the CBSE scoring portal.

Exposing Critical Vulnerabilities in CBSE’s On-Screen Marking Portal: From Authentication Bypass to Full Account Takeover — ni5arga

thoughts about programming, security & life

ni5argaNisarga Adhikary

Simon Willison has a cool preso/post recapping the past 6 months in LLMs. Good wrap-up on what's been happening

The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

I put together these annotated slides from my five minute lightning talk at PyCon US 2026, using the latest iteration of my annotated presentation tool. # I presented this lightning …

Simon Willison’s WeblogSimon Willison

This blog describes the build, some of the issues I faced, and answers the question “was it worth it to build the server myself, or should I have rented cloud GPUs?”

tldr: probably yes if you can run them 100% of the time and have the required capital not only to buy the hardware, but also invest in supporting stuff (for example electrical work required to support it). If you ask me, for a casual person, I don't think the investment in local inference is worth it especially at current consumer hardware levels & cost. Also related: this is a good read.

Was my $48K GPU server worth it?

In 2024 I quit my FAANG job to become an independent researcher. To do this I needed GPUs, so I built “grumbl”, a 6x 6000 Ada GPU server. This blog describes the build, some of the issu…

Rosmine ML BlogFixing LLM writing with Distribution Fine Tuning

Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

Local LLMs can be very very cheap

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

It's been a busy week. As usual, the week started with my swimming class on Monday. I've been getting better at swimming but still finding it hard to have a consistent swim. I can start fine, but after a couple of strokes I'm out tired, I stop kicking and then that's that. On the bright side, I managed to float on my back pretty well - so happy about that progress. On the flip side, after I returned home, my Apple Watch started acting up. It was detecting that the crown was fully pressed in all the time, invoking Siri or taking screenshots of the watch, depending on what I was trying to do. After a few restarts did not help, I let it sit aside and drain the battery completely. After it charged up, I turned it on and the behaviour continued. A quick search indicated this is pretty common if there's some debris in the crown, with most people saying a repair is the way to go. I scheduled a repair with Apple Sydney. Later on at night, I was about to pack away the Watch into my bad and I saw that it was working like nothing happened before.. 😒anyway the Watch needed a battery replacement so I decided to keep the appointment and thus I've been watch-free the past week.

It was also AWS Summit Week time in Sydney. I didn't go to the main Summit event, I did get an invite to a private AWS Community Leaders meet with Dr Werner Vogels being the guest. With Werner at the event, I wasn't going to miss it, and it was good to meet the various other AWS Heroes and User Group leaders.

This meet meant that I missed my Tuesday PT session. I did go to Wednesday where we had a new metcon programmed by Daniel, our instructor. The metcon was 3 sets of

• 20 reps of kettlebell swings
• 10 reps of jump onto plates
• 10 reps of dumbbell push press.

The goal was to finish these 3 sets of these without any breaks but the push press got to me and I had to stop for a bit to get some breath in.

The rest of the week went by pretty ok. On the work front, we finally managed to tear down all the Windows nodes that were serving as the Tableau Bridge and it's now 100% Linux containers running on Kubernetes. It's also one of my first (and major) projects which involved migrating an existing service across different hosting styles and Operating Systems, adding Kubernetes specific features, custom exporters for metrics and dashboards entirely driven by AI (Claude Code with Opus). I think that deserves a separate post on it its own, someday when I get some time, I'll publish it - if it doesn't get outdated by the current pace of coding agents. I'm pleasantly surprised by how well it came to, and also annoyed by how many papercuts I discovered which required lot of steering.

I also finished writing my post on our EV test drive from last week and what we bought as our new car - check it out below.

We test drove four small/mid-size EV SUVs.

We spent a day test driving four electric vehicles - the GAC Aion V, BYD Atto 3, Geely EX5, and MG S5. Here are my thoughts on each, and which one we ultimately chose.

Sathyajith BhatSathyajith Bhat

My colleague told me that Sydney Metro had an open community day today where you could walk into the service tunnels. It wasn't opportunity to be missed, so we went over to Rosehill to check it out. It wasn't too long of a walk - about couple of kilometers of walk into the tunnel and back. And there was free gelato too! All in all a good day.

I also made a short clip from my Insta360 video captures

I've always been interested in attending a medieval fair, but never had a chance to. A few weeks back, I saw that Blacktown City Medieval Fayre was coming soon and told Jo about it. She reminded me this Sunday morning that the fair was today. The tickets were still on sale, so we bought a couple of tickets and attended the fair.

The fair was located in Nurragingy Reserve which looks like a really good place to visit. We made a mental note to revisit here after we've got our car. The fair itself was pretty interesting. There were a lot of people, many of them in costumes. I believe there was a best dressed costume contest as well. There were a few different acts going on. The one that caught our eye was jousting - so yes there was actual jousting between a group of four knights or dames. There was also a re-enactment of the Vikings versus the Saxons fight so that was pretty interesting. All the play acting, their weapons were fairly real and you could see some of the shields had actually broken off. I'm sure there were prop shields. We also had some food and we came back signing off for a really good Sunday afternoon.

As with the Tunnel Walk, I collected a few clips on my Insta 360 and made a small video out of it

What I read

For reasons.. unknown, I was suddenly reminded of Questionable Content and started reading it from the first comic.. which was going well till the website got hacked and all the comics were deleted :/ The author mentions he's got backups and is working on restoring it. If you have recommendations for web comics, let me know.

Music of the Week

The Foo Fighters do a NPR Tiny Desk concert. Pretty awesome

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

Having passed my driving license test, Jo and I decided it was time to look at buying a new car. Prior to moving into my house, I debated if I should get a plug-in hybrid (PHEV) or a simple hybrid - EVs were not at all on my radar.

Why EV?

After I moved to my new home, I was still skeptical if I should get an EV — range anxiety being the primary reason. Not having a nearly independent energy setup was another - a comparative analysis indicated that running costs for an electric vehicle when not having access to a home charging setup would be similar, if not slightly higher than petrol cars.

The below is an annual running cost breakdown that I did for three different car categories. Some assumptions:

• Home Charging Cost: $0 (utilizing my 42kWh battery + solar).
• Public DC Charging: $0.75/kWh (for long-distance top-ups).
• Fuel: $1.75/L
• Total Annual Distance: ~18,720 km based on:
  • average of 60 kms a week in city driving
  • smaller road trip of 300km once a month - assumes this falls within the Geely's range
  • semi-long 1000km road trip once a month - assumes we start with 100% solar charge and pay for public charging for the remaining 600-700km of the 1,000km trip.

The cost comparison was quite interesting to say the least - below tables indicate the running costs for home charging setup vs. public/grid charging

I almost considered getting a PHEV but it didn't make a lot of sense given that the short range of the batteries would mean I'd be carrying dead weight during the larger road trips.

We booked test drives for four cars on the same day - the GAC Aion V, the BYD Atto 3, the Geely EX5, and the MG S5. Here's what we found.

GAC Aion V

The GAC was the first car we tested, and I have to say, first impressions were pretty good. The driving position felt a bit lower than what I expected, or rather, the hood felt higher, so it felt like I was looking straight on rather than having a commanding view of the road. Initially, this annoyed me, but I quickly realized the seat height was adjustable, and once I sorted that out, the position became a lot better.

One of the first things I noticed was the regenerative braking - it automatically slows down a bit when you lift off the accelerator, unlike standard petrol cars where you have to explicitly press the brake. It's not a dramatic slowdown, but it's noticeable and something you'd get used to quickly.

The car was impressively quiet - I could actually hear the music clearly, even with the volume reduced. CarPlay connected quickly, and the car has traffic speed detection systems that automatically announce when the speed limit changes. Pretty handy feature. As with most systems, it wasn't able to accurately detect school zone hours or not, and in no time, the pretty handy feature became annoying.

The Interior Experience

The seats are pretty comfortable - very soft and supportive. The lumbar support is excellent; I haven't felt the need to constantly adjust my sitting position like I usually do. It's got a really good hugging position, which I think would be great for longer drives. There's wireless charging for your phone (it's CarPlay plus wireless charging), decent cupholders, and plenty of storage space. The back seat has lots of room - Jo said her feet weren't even touching the front seat, and that's with me in a comfortable driving position.

There's no sunroof, but there is a moonroof (a moonroof doesn't open, for those wondering). The 360-degree cameras are excellent, especially for reversing - really useful when parking. The turning angle is pretty good too; I was able to get out of a tight spot without much fuss.

The most glaring omission, however, was a lack of a glovebox. You just get two hooks - I’m not quite sure what the designers were thinking when they did this.

The Drive

The steering is light and quite comfortable. I've heard complaints about it being floaty, but I didn't find that to be the case. It felt responsive and easy to handle. The car is incredibly smooth - whether I was going at low speed or medium speed, I couldn't feel any bumps. The sound system could use some work though - it lacks a bit of bass and feels a bit flat. The mids and treble could use a boost as well, but it's not overpowering with bass, which I actually appreciate.

There's a small driver dash screen showing the driver information, including tire pressure monitoring, map display (though it doesn't show turn-by-turn instructions), and what song is playing.

Pricing & Verdict

The GAC Aion V Premium is priced around $42,000 AUD. It's a solid car with plenty of room, good comfort, and impressive smoothness on the road. The back seat was a bit bumpier than the front when we were on internal roads, but overall, it's a very comfortable vehicle. There is a Luxury variant which comes with leather seats and an in-built fridge in the center console. While we didn't get to test drive this, we sat briefly in the Luxury variant and didn't feel any difference in the seats.

BYD Atto 3

Next up was the BYD Atto 3. Right off the bat, the seating position felt too low with no proper under-thigh support - this was my main complaint. The visibility is slightly better than the GAC, probably because the windscreen has a different slope.

Power and Handling

The Atto 3 doesn't have as much power as the GAC - it feels a lot slower and more laggy to respond. When I pressed the accelerator, it felt like the car was deciding whether it wanted to respond or not. It's bumpier compared to the GAC, not as smooth, though I'm not sure if that's because we were going through a lot of roundabouts at the time.

After switching to sports mode (using the voice command "Hey BYD, switch drive mode to sport"), things improved but not a lot. The car felt a bit more responsive, but even then, it didn't feel as refined as the GAC. In eco mode, the power delivery felt quite sluggish.

Interior and Features

The seats are decent but not as plush as the GAC. The headrest is not adjustable, which could be a problem for some people. The back seat has decent leg space, but not as much as the GAC. There is a sunroof though, which can be opened with a voice command.

The driver display dash is more in-your-face and easier to read compared to the GAC because of the better background contrast. However, the map display isn't as intuitive. The regenerative braking can be adjusted between standard and strong modes, which gives you more control. One last party trick was being able to rotate the display to portrait mode, but not while in Apple CarPlay/Android Auto mode, which defeats the purpose as I expect most people to use them.

Voice Commands

The voice commands are... interesting. "Hey BYD" works for some commands like opening the sunroof and switching drive modes, but it's not as reliable as I'd like. We tried "Hey BYD, close the sunroof" multiple times, and it didn't recognize the command consistently.

Verdict

The BYD Atto 3 is a decent car but falls short when compared directly to the GAC. The main factors that would influence the decision are the brand name, dealership network, and the sunroof feature. The sunroof is nice but not a must-have - when you're driving on the motorway, you can't really use it because of the wind noise. In the city, you're more likely to keep the windows up anyway. The moonroof on the GAC gives you brightness without the noise factor.

Price-wise, I think the BYD is slightly cheaper than the GAC (it's also a slightly smaller car), but I don't see any compelling driving reasons to choose it over the GAC. If the price difference is significant, it might be worth considering, but otherwise, the GAC feels like the better package.

Geely EX5

The third car we tested was the Geely EX5, and honestly, this one impressed me the most. The Geely was also the first car that I was interested in, but when we went to the Castlehill dealership, we were told there was no stock and there was a minimum wait time of 2 months. However, at the Blacktown dealership - the sales rep was far more personable and was really great to chat with.

Seating and Comfort

The seating position is excellent - probably the best of the three. I liked how high the seat position is; it gives you a really good view of the road. Good visibility, good space, and comfortable seating. The steering wheel is not circular (it's slightly flattened), which some people might find weird, but I got used to it pretty quickly.

The steering feel is similar to the GAC - responsive and comfortable. The build quality feels pretty good, and the driving position is very natural. Unlike both the BYD and the GAC, I didn't feel like I was sitting in an awkward position. Both the GAC and BYD seats felt a bit high on the sides, so I had to sit in a slightly hunched position, but the Geely let me sit normally and comfortably.

Performance

The power delivery is excellent. I could feel the regenerative braking working effectively, but it wasn't very strong. The acceleration is good and responsive without feeling sluggish.

One thing that's slightly annoying (or it's supposed to be a feature) is that there are speakers inside the headrest, so you feel the navigation directions coming from the back of your head, which makes you want to turn your head. It's a bit distracting at first, but something you'd get used to easily.

Interior Features

There's a proper glove box (which Jo was very happy about - apparently, this is important for storing stuff!), a wireless charging pad, two cupholders, and decent storage. The music system is supposedly one of the best in its class, and I have to agree - it's got good punchy bass and clear sound quality. Definitely better than both the GAC and the BYD.

The car is very silent inside. The suspension feels good - I didn't feel anything bad about it, at least on these roads. The back seat is smooth too - Jo said she couldn't see much difference between the back and front in terms of comfort, even on narrow roads.

Comparison to Others

The styling feels similar to the GAC in terms of interiors and positioning. The car is a bit smaller than the GAC but feels just as roomy for four adults (five can fit). The turning radius is pretty good - I did a tight turn without much fuss, and it felt very easy.

I didn't feel much difference between eco mode and sports mode in the Geely - the car felt good in both modes. In the BYD, eco mode was pretty much unusable, and even sports mode didn't feel great.

Heads-Up Display

One minor issue: the heads-up display is barely visible with polarized sunglasses (the polarization cancels out the display). Without the sunglasses or in low sun conditions, it's visible, but in bright sun with polarized glasses, you can't see anything.

The Final Test

The Geely handled everything with ease - smooth acceleration, good braking, comfortable ride. Jo tested the back seat on all and confirmed that the Geely's back seat is the smoothest of the lot.

MG S5

The fourth car we tested was the MG S5, and this was an interesting comparison, especially since it's a rear-wheel drive unlike the other three.

Interior and Build

The interior feels very similar to the Geely EX5. There's a proper glove box (always appreciated!), two cupholders, and wireless charging. The styling and positioning are quite similar to the Geely - I didn't feel any significant difference between the two in terms of interior layout.

The sitting position is actually pretty good - I felt like I was sitting a lot straighter and taller, at a really good height. I could see a lot further ahead compared to the EX5. The visibility is excellent, comparable to the Geely.

Driving Experience

The steering feel is similar to the other cars we tested, and the build quality feels pretty good. However, the power delivery is a bit lacking - it's not as bad as the BYD Atto 3, but it's not as good as the EX5 either.

In sport mode, I could feel the power coming in a bit more, but the steering became a lot heavier - it was harder to turn, requiring more effort. The sport mode also makes the suspension a lot stiffer, which means less bouncing around but you actually feel the bumps harder because the stiffer suspension requires more force to absorb impacts completely.

One thing I noticed is that the start is a bit jerky - the power delivery isn't as smooth as the Geely. It's more noticeable in sport mode. This was kind of surprising because everyone praises the MG as a nice driver's car, but I found the jerkiness a bit off-putting.

Rear-Wheel Drive - Any Difference?

The MG S5 is rear-wheel drive, which I was curious to try. Honestly? I don't feel any difference whatsoever compared to the front-wheel drive cars we tested. I think rear-wheel drive advantages might be more noticeable on wet roads or in risky driving conditions, but for normal day-to-day driving, I couldn't tell the difference.

Other Observations

The 360-degree camera doesn't come on automatically - it only pops up when you're stationary, which sort of defeats the purpose. I remember seeing a YouTuber mentioning the same complaint. The turning radius is noticeably wider than the Geely - I couldn't do a full U-turn as easily as I could in the EX5.

The back seat is pretty decent with good space, though probably not as much as the Geely. It's slightly narrower in the back. Jo mentioned feeling a little bit more thrown about during turns, and I'm not sure if it's the rear-wheel drive setup or just the suspension tuning.

The sound system is pretty okay - nothing great. I think the Geely's sound system was much better. It feels like the sound is coming from somewhere far away rather than being immersive. The wireless charger had trouble charging my iPhone 14 with a silicone cover on. After I removed the cover, it started charging, albeit very slowly.

There's no heads-up display on the MG, but they have a display panel that's positioned a bit lower.

Pricing and Verdict

The MG S5 is priced in the mid-40s, around $48,000 AUD. The speed limit detection is pretty bad - it keeps picking up school zones and you hear the ping-pong sound constantly. However, there's a button to customize and disable it, so it's not a dealbreaker.

The back seat is fairly comfortable, and as smooth as the EX5 in terms of handling. The brakes are smooth and not annoying. Overall, it's a pretty decent car with no major complaints.

That said, when it comes down to the EX5 versus the MG, I'd still go for the EX5 even if it's 2-3K more expensive because it feels a lot nicer. The smoother power delivery, better sound system, and overall refinement make the Geely worth the extra money. If there's a 5-6K price difference, the MG would be worth considering purely from a value-for-money perspective, but given they're similarly priced, the EX5 is the better choice.

Final Thoughts and Our Decision

After a full day of test driving, here's how I'd rank them:

1. Geely EX5 - The clear winner. Best driving position, most responsive, great sound system, and smooth ride overall. The power delivery is smooth and refined, and the overall package just feels right.
2. GAC Aion V - A very solid second choice. Incredibly smooth, comfortable seats, good tech features, and plenty of room. The only downsides are the sound system, the slightly lower driving position (though adjustable), and the lack of a glovebox. This was a close second.
3. MG S5 - Good value for money and decent overall. The rear-wheel drive didn't make a noticeable difference in daily driving, and the jerky power delivery was a bit disappointing. The wider turning radius and lack of refinement compared to the Geely put it in third place.
4. BYD Atto 3 - Decent but doesn't stand out. The sluggish power delivery (even in sports mode) and the seating position issues make it hard to recommend unless there's a significant price advantage.

Our Final Pick: Geely EX5

After weighing all the factors - driving experience, comfort, features, and pricing - we decided to go with the Geely EX5. While all four cars had their strengths, the EX5 simply felt like the best of the lot. The combination of excellent driving position, smooth and responsive power delivery, superior sound system, and overall refinement made it stand out from the competition.

The deciding factors for us were:

• Driving experience: The EX5 felt the most refined and enjoyable to drive
• Comfort: Both front and back seats were comfortable without compromises
• Build quality: Felt solid and well-put-together
• Value: Even at a slightly higher price point, it felt worth the extra money

We've booked the car in Jungle Green colour and the car has an approximate delivery time of end of June. Had we opted for the light interior trim, it would have been available earlier but we felt it would have gotten dirty pretty easily and would be hard to keep it clean.

This week's weekly notes was delayed because Jo decided she wanted to barbeque.. more on that in a bit. As with the past few weeks, it was another cold week. This week, though, it felt like someone turned up the heat just a bit and then a day later dumped some huge ice bricks on us - and my temperature sensors agree!

You can see the spike to over 25°C then the plunge to single digits. I've started using the heater more regularly now and being able to turn it on and off without having to worry about power bills is truly amazing.

The gym sessions were pretty decent. On Tuesday, both of us were mentally drained and were in no mood to get some serious workout, so our trainer took it easy on us and decided to skip the metcon, which was pushed to the next day. And that paid dividends - the next day we ate properly and smashed the metcon, finishing a partnered workout of 3 sets of:

• 12 calories on the spinning bike
• 10 synchro reverse lunges
• 5 burpees

in under our target of 9 minutes. Pretty happy with that! The rest of the week went by pretty fast. Over the week, I'd been planning for scheduling test drives of various EVs that I was interested in and that were in our budget - Jo had a suggestion to schedule it all in the same day so we can compare it against each other. So that's what we did for Saturday - scheduled 4 different test drives through the day. And as with the house purchase, the Insta 360 came to good use, with us recording our initial impressions, driving and passenger experiences and overall thoughts on the car. I'll have a detailed post on that soon. And once we got back home, Jo, excited by the weather and the empty backyard pushed to get a barbeque ("barbie in 'strayan, mate). And that's what we did on Sunday. Buoyed with my new found freedom thanks to passing the driving license test, we rented out a GoGet and started on our Barbeque shopping spree.. First was to get some lunch in. Then, we went over to the Weber store and bought the Weber Family Q 3200N+. Jo did extensive research on which to get and finalized on this. The Weber store also had the gas cylinder, so we picked that up as well. Jo wanted to head to Bunnings and get an outdoor table and couple of chairs.. and of course there was no space in the hatchback we rented.

So we switched to plan B - drive to Costco nearby to pick up some meat, head home, drop by everything and then head to Bunnings in Seven Hills which is a bit closer to pick up the furniture. At Bunnings, we picked up the coffee table, two chairs, some BBQ accessories and the mulch and as expected it was too much to stuff in the car. So we had to do a lot of car and furniture tetris to fit in the table, mulch and the BBQ accessories and of course, the chair wouldn't fit in. So I went on another trip to drop them off at house while Jo was at Bunnings. And then once I returned, we had to do more tetris to fit the chair in as the seat was a lot rounder than the car opening.. somehow we managed to stuff it in.

Once we got back home, Jo was pumped to build the BBQ and thus she did, with me helping a little. We also assembled the table, unwrapped the chairs and voila, the backyard is open for grilling business.

From our Costco haul, we grilled the beef bulgogi, spicy pork sausages and some onions and potatoes. And it came out to be amazing. The beef had amazing char on it. Look forward to some more "shrimp on the barbie, mate!"

What I've been playing

Diablo IV - Lord of Hatred: I completed the campaign of the new expansion pack - and I'm a bit disappointed. "Fan service" is a good way to describe the campaign. I don't get the gushing that's being put forward for the story.  I thought the writing was extremely cliched and boring. But unlike the previous expansion, you do get closure, so I guess that's a positive.

I started the campaign with the Warlock which was introduced in this patch. The warlock is a fun class whose archetype is taking demons and smashing them to the ground to deal damage. I tried a home brew build when playing the campaign and it was pretty fun. I tried a couple of other builds as well - apocalypse and dread claws. Apocalypse is the screen clearer but is clunky to play because you have to wait till apocalypse charges up, which takes some time. So the gameplay is like throw some chains, which start spinning up and charges apocalypse, and then detonate Apocalypse. It is really fun and gives a huge dopamine boost to see screenwide destruction but the charge up detracts from the experience - if you don't charge up, then you barely deal any damage.. Dread Claws has decent area of effect - not quite screen clearing material, but is quite fluid. I'll continue with dread claws build for now.

Meanwhile, Grinding Gear Games revealed what's coming up in the next patch end of month and it's going to be amazing. It's a good time to be an ARPG gamer.

Music of the Week

Limp Bizkit's Take a Look Around is super high octane (and introduced me to the Mission Impossible series of movies, but this cover is flamin' hot.

Links of the week

Interesting video on Polymarket and the prediction market.

Two guys who go by the name Taste Buds came up with the most enjoyable (to produce) YouTube series imaginable

(via Kris)

Experience the real-world sounds of AI with this interactive audio generator.

Check out DataCenter.fm

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

It’s been a good, busy week - even though the week started with a holiday. Anzac Day falling on the weekend meant that we had a day off on Monday. We just chilled at home. Last week of the month is generally a busy week at work for me - especially as a scrum master as we do monthly sprints and end of month is when we do a sprint review and planning for the next sprint. We have a new product manager who’s stepping in as our previous product manager left the org. I was expecting some feedback from him on our sprint planning and processes and how I run things but was pleasantly surprised when he had only good things to say. That’s what you get for having an imposter syndrome I guess.

The gym sessions went well too. On Tuesday we improved our metcon timings for the partnered workout of 20 cals bike, 10 synchro reverse lunges and 10 burpees - beating our previous time by a minute. Pretty happy with that. On Wednesday, our PT session had to be cancelled as our trainer had to run the group class. The group class runs at the same time as our PT, so we decided to join the group class which went well too.

Through the week, I was preoccupied with my NSW Driving Test. I'm glad that I passed the test. The test experience, however, left a very poor taste in my mouth - I've written more about it on a separate post.

The Saturday was packed - I had booked a plasma donation for Lifeblood at Town Hall in the morning.

Given my driving lessons were over, I'd also booked tickets to Anastasia The Musical for the afternoon. The couple of hours break in between the two meant that we could grab some lunch.

After the musical, we went back home but not before stopping by at a coffee shop for a Mocha and a cookie.

For Sunday, Jo had grand plans to head to Costco & Bunnings to stock up on groceries and get some more soil - a plan that was dashed by me because I wanted to chill at home 😂 I've promised her we'll do it next Saturday. Having secured my licence, I plan to do some test drives for some cars and finally decide on what car to buy. That said, we did end up going to Parklea Markets to get some fruits and get an idly & vada before we came back.

What I've been playing

Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred - The new expansion of Diablo IV came out earlier in the week. I haven't completed the campaign yet so no reviews yet, but compared to the other regions, the new region of Skovos is absolutely gorgeous looking and very picturesque. If the art was not beautiful enough, the soundtrack is just phenomenal and puts you in the right mood. Ted Reedy has done a fantastic job in nailing the soundtrack.

What we watched

Anastasia The Musical - Jo was looking forward to watching this musical since quite some time and I booked the tickets for this for the weekend. Anastasia is an adaptation of the 1997 movie of the same name. The story follows the legend of the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia, who was rumored to have escaped and survived the execution of the Russian Imperial family. The runtime of the musical was about two and a half hours with a twenty minute break in between. I enjoyed the musical - the songs were choreographed well, the live orchestra was fabulous, and the live lights and stage effects were amazing. While I felt there were at times the musical could have been trimmed down a bit, I can't really fault it and had a good time watching it.

What we ate

Jiggle Korean BBQ, Pyrmont - Jo was looking to have kimchi pancake after our plasma donation and we saw this place was listed on Eat Club and nearby Lyric Theatre, so we decided to go here. We ordered a kimchi pancake, LA Galbi and the marinated pork ribs. The food was really good - the kimchi pancake was really nice and crispy and not very thick. The meats were very good - quite juicy and not at all dry. The place was a bit more expensive compared to a few other places we've been to, so something to be aware of.

Music of the Week

Continuing with last week's metal touch, Five Finger Death Punch's Wash It All Away is another great song

And as mentioned above, the absolutely amazing Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred soundtrack

Links of the week

Tiny Tool Town - A place for stupid-delightful tools made with love. Free, fun & open source. Made for an audience of one.

Tiny Tool Town 🏘️

A delightful showcase for free, fun & open source tiny tools. Stupid-delightful software made with love.

Tiny Tool TownScott Hanselman

ShakTV absolutely smashing it out of the park with another awesome skit.

Great throwback to the Indian cars of the 90s

I had no idea the creators of Goat Simulator were the developers of Satisfactory. Really good doco

Want to listen to some sounds of datacenter? Datacenter.fm has you covered..

DataCenter.FM 🤖🔊 The sound of AI

Experience the real-world sounds of AI with this interactive audio generator.

DataCenter.FM

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

I have been driving in India for over 20 years. When I first moved to Sydney as a temporary visitor, I was eligible to drive using my Indian licence until I became a permanent resident. At the time, there was very little incentive to take the NSW driving test; if I failed, I would have lost my eligibility to drive on my Indian licence, too.

Last March, due to regulation changes, I could no longer continue driving with my Indian licence. Soon after, we got our Australian Permanent Residence and I'd been meaning to get my licence done but we focused on our house hunt and purchase, that meant most of our weekends were spent on house inspections. After moving in to our new house, I couldn't put off getting the licence done anymore - while we were in the city, public transport was easy and frequent so even get by most of our daily routines, or grocery shopping without any hassles. Now that we're in the outer suburbs - it was a lot harder. Even though our suburbs are reasonably well connected, it was harder to move around. For example, even a 3 km journey would take a really long time because of bus timetables, or that the bus route was long.

There's no shortage of driving schools and instructors in Sydney. Every person I asked gave a different contact. One evening, when Jo & I were going on a walk, I noticed a driving school close to our house. I reached out to them since I figured it'd be easier to coordinate lessons. After a couple of emails exchanged with my instructor, she confirmed she'd be able to take me on.

The Driving Lessons

I started my driving lessons in early March, a few weeks before my test date. While I'd been driving for years back in India, I wanted to make sure I wasn't carrying over bad habits and that's what I told her as my objective.

My instructor started the first session by getting me to just drive while she observed quietly. After a few minutes she asked me to pull over. Two things jumped out at her immediately. The first was how I held the steering wheel. I'd been doing the hand-over-hand technique and that meant I was crossing my arms over quite a bit - this was an absolute no-no. My instructor got to be familiar with the push-pull technique. Muscle memory is a stubborn thing, so this needed deliberate unlearning and took a couple of "hands" checks from her before I stopped doing this. The second was blind spot checks. She stepped out of the car, stood at a spot where I could see her in the mirror, then slowly walked back until she disappeared from my view entirely. "That's why you turn your head," she said. It was a simple demonstration but it stuck with me in a way that just being told "check your blind spots" never would have.

Over the following weeks, she took me around in/around Blacktown where my test would be held to get familiar with the roads. There were couple of tricky places where I had to remember positioning. The highlight, if you can call it that, was what she cheerfully called "the roundabout of doom": a multilane roundabout with pedestrian-activated signals on both the entry and the exit.

It was exactly as chaotic as it sounds. By the penultimate session, my instructor said she was happy with the progress, but had one last note — my blinker-mirror-blind spot-turn sequence was technically right but mechanically rough. I was yanking the wheel a fraction too early and with too much force, which meant I'd have to correct mid-turn. She wanted it smoother. "Make it one fluid motion," she said. So that's what I worked on heading into the final session, and then the test itself.

Test Day and the "Examiner from Hell"

My instructor booked my test for midday on a Friday to take advantage of lighter traffic. On the day, we did one last warm-up session to calm my nerves. We headed into Service NSW, filled out the forms, and met my testing officer. I knew instantly I was in for a rough time.

My test officer was extremely rude. She saw me and greeted with "oh you people" and I was taken aback immediately. She kept making exasperated sounds and we hadn't even started our test. There was not a single ounce of friendliness within her. She was always upset that I was going too cautious. There were a couple of moments where I felt with her reactions and expressions that she was setting me up for failure by making me more anxious than ever and making me even more cautious.

An example is when we're reaching this round this intersection and slow down I looked to the left to see if there were any cars coming and her reaction was, "Oh are you going to do this every single time that you're driving?" I'm like, "Yeah." She's like, "No of course you're not."

When approaching roundabouts, I would slow down to look to the sides and there she was getting annoyed that I was slowing down.

Whenever I slowed down to approach a roundabout, she would huff with annoyance. The whole test took about 30 minutes, covering a three-point turn and a kerbside stop. As luck would have it, she directed me straight through the "Roundabout of Doom." I even encountered a red light there - something that had never happened during my lessons. I had to do a quick stop-start because a car came barreling down from the right, but otherwise, I held my nerve.

The Results

Back in the Service NSW center after the test, I told my instructor all that had happened she was also very surprised by how the test officer was behaving. She actually sat and argued with her, saying, "Would you rather be driving with someone who's a bit on the conscious side or would you want to be sitting with someone who would make you sit at the edge of your seat, holding onto dear life?"

And while all of that was happening - my instructor told me I had passed the test, much to the chagrin of the officer who was still making faces about me passing.

I got Gemini to take a look at the road test results and give a brief summary here.

Your examiner rated your performance across 25 different "zones" or tasks. You achieved a total score of 99 out of 106, which is a very strong result (approximately 93%).

The letters in the grid represent specific driving skills:

S (Speed Management): You scored 22/25. You lost 3 points here, likely for minor fluctuations in speed or not adjusting quickly enough to a new limit.

P (Positioning): You scored 24/25. You lost only 1 point here, meaning your road positioning and buffing were almost perfect.

D (Decision Making): You scored 22/25. You lost 3 points here, which usually relates to choosing safe gaps at intersections or when merging.

H & R (Hazards and Response): You scored a perfect 6/6. This shows you were excellent at identifying potential dangers and reacting to them correctly.

C (Control): You scored 23/25. You lost 2 points here, which relates to the physical operation of the car (e.g., smooth braking or steering).

Specific Notes

The examiner made a few shorthand notes in the "Notes" column:

Zone 10 (D): There is a circle around "D" with a note "(M)". This likely refers to a minor decision-making error during a Manoeuvre (like a reverse parallel park or three-point turn).

Zone 13 (C): There is a circle around "C" with a note "(KB)". This usually stands for Kerb, suggesting a minor control issue while parking or pulling over to the kerb (perhaps a slight bump or being a bit too far away).

Final Thoughts

I'm happy to have passed the test but also pretty disappointed with the staff's overall behavior. I wonder how a 17‑year‑old would feel during their first interaction with the staff.

To add a final twist of bureaucracy, I realized after the test that I didn't have my passport with me, so they couldn't verify my residency status to lift condition Q on the spot. I had to go home, have lunch, and return later with my documents.

But now, it’s official: I have an unrestricted NSW licence. I’m just waiting for the plastic card to arrive in the mail, and then I’m looking forward to some proper Australian road trips!

It's been another cold week, but we're slowly beginning to get used to the cold. My swimming classes are going pretty well. I'm now 100% focused on building my muscle memory so that I can use my arms when swimming. At the moment, I can either glide forward, glide forward a bit and then start kicking, or glide and use my arms, but not all three. I need more practice and I'm confident I'll get there in due time. My gym sessions went pretty well. With the intensity toned down a bit especially after the heavy squats, we've been working on our shoulders and aerobic capacity and it's pretty cool to see the heart rate go up steadily as we get closer to the end of the metcon.

I'm not the one to order merch t-shirts from YouTubers/streamers but I made an exception when I saw Path of Exile streamer Zizaran's Gauntlet collection and bought a Rapture Gauntlet T-shirt. Pretty happy with the quality and was delivered in a few days!

On Friday, I had my penultimate driving class - the driving test is scheduled for next week and I'm hoping I can pass. My instructor's pretty happy with my progress, but she did ask me to work on doing the blinker-mirror-blindspot check and then the turn a bit more smoothly - right now, I'm yanking the steering wheel a little too early before completing the blindspot check as well as with a bit more force, requiring me to do an exaggerated correction. Need to make it smoother. She got me to do some of these before ending the session. So I'll have one last session just before the test - hopefully, that will go oj.

On Saturday morning, we did a small morning walk over to Little Corner Cafe in Quakers Hill. Generally when we walk, both Jo & I would have our airpods on and listening to our own music, this time for reasons... we didn't and were talking to each other - admiring the different houses in the neighbourhood, the plants that they have and chatting about walking down that lane when we did a house inspection, talking about what we'd like to do on the yards next.

After we came back, because it wasn't quite as hot and our front yard had overgrown a little bit, so we decided to clean up the yard. Jo did the edge cuts which made it easier for me to do a deeper line trim and then the overall mowing. The cold certainly has slowed down the growth of the lawn, there was barely any clippings in the bag when I was done and usually the bag's quite full.

With the Monday being a holiday for Anzac day, we did a day trip to Leura, Blue Mountains. Leura's a lovely place to visit especially mid to late-Autumn to see the autumn colours. We took a train to Leura, had some breakfast once there, and did a nice hike to part of the Leura Cascades Circuit, and then returned back to home.

What we ate

Milana Pizzeria, Stanhope Gardens - Jo was in the mood for a pizza and since this was nearby, we went here. This place actually blew our mind - fabulous place with really good pizza. Unlike many places which have flimsy cardboard like bases Milana’s had amazing super soft dough and healthy chunks of veggies and meat. Good friendly service as well. Many repeat visits are planned!

Naughty Krishna, Blacktown - A small little North Indian restaurant by the Westfield Shopping center. Jo had visited their Seven Hills branch and suggested trying this place out after we returned from Leura. I ordered a Gobi Paratha for myself, Jo got the roti-curry set plate and we also ordered a Bombay Bhel to share. The food was pretty good. My gobi paratha was a bit bland by itself but changed tuned when I paired it with the pickle/raita. Jo mentioned her roti was quite fluffy, and the curries were good too. Would definitely return again.

Music of the Week

Trivium's "Until The World Goes Cold" is a surprisingly catchy metal song with the usual metal riffs, and some amazing drums & bassline.

Links of the week

The new expansion of Diablo IV launches next week and the reviews as well as changes look promising. I look forward to playing it.

I didn't know Eurotrip didn't do quite well during its initial run. I enjoyed the movie - was quite fun.

I don't agree to a lot of the (AI) influencer crap but Karpthy's "A pattern for building personal knowledge bases using LLMs" has been doing pretty well since I started using it since the past couple of weeks.

I've started adding all the things I've working on, my meetings and to see the AI do a great job of transcribing, linking, updating my repo has been quite interesting. I can finally say at the end of a Claude code session - "summarize all that we did, the problems we ran into" into my Wiki and it gets added there. So if someone asks what was the pain with that project I don't have scratch my head on the problems I ran into and have a ready reference. Teacher's Tech has a nice quite 15-minute non-fluff guide on how to use this, good reference if you prefer a video guide.

Saikiran takes us through our childhood really well.

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

The cold days continue and we've switched to winter mode. We've switched to the winter sheets and duvet so it retains the heat a bit more. I'm also wearing jeans while going to work, and carrying a hoodie around. It's only going to get colder. Speaking of cold - the swimming center where I go to learn swimming has heated interiors and pools, so that's been nice. The swimming lesson went well, and I'm slowly focussing on using my arms to propel forward. I've also got hang of floating on my back - it's still not quite 100% but better than ever before.

With us hitting our 1RM on squat last week - this week was a bit lower on intensity. On Tuesday, we did a dumbbell shoulder press with the metcon of three sets of bodyweight squat, dumbbell snatch, and jack knife sit ups. These metcons have been great to improve my aerobic endurance and this was clear after I had a follow-up with my GP on the bloodwork results. On Wednesday, we did the incline dumbbell bench press, with single leg glute bridges which, for some reason, I struggled a lot. Something to improve on over the next few weeks.

Work's been going on pretty ok. This week I continued on the work of moving Tableau Bridge away from Windows server to Linux, running on Kubernetes. The Tableau Bridge is a piece of software that is clearly not built for running as ephemeral workloads and it shows, with some really bizarre restrictions such as being forced to use a dedicated service account token per client, and this really kills reasonable ways of getting autoscaling to work without hacks. The other piece of work - visibility into prefix-level metrics for S3 buckets is almost ready with my team mate picking up my design and working on implementing it. We should see the benefits of that soon.

It's been about 10 days since we have had the batteries installed, and apart from the trickle handshake, we've not bought electricity from the grid at all.

The batteries kick in just before sunset and has been powering all our appliances pretty well. I'm yet to use the aircon for heating for extended times - for the couple of times that I ran it, the dishwasher and the washing machine was running in parallel and the consumption wasn't too high. I also built an exporter that gets the metrics from FoxESS's API and publishes the data to an InfluxDB.

The weekend was pretty quiet. Jo went about thrifting on Saturday and got these two cute frames.

Meanwhile, I went on my driving class and did a mock test - which I failed. The fails were a result of not doing blind spot checks and a few decision errors. Early on into the test, I signalled way too early. This guy in front of me thought I was going into the lane he was coming out of so he just barreled out. That was a bit of a jolt, and sort of set an early negative mindset. This is one of the areas that I should be careful, which is not to signal too early and get into the lane before that. I have one more class so hopefully for that and for the actual test, I will do better.

On Sunday, we went to Bunnings to pick up some potting mix, compost, picture hanging nails and I picked up a garden hose trigger - the garden hose trigger at the front yard wasn't working and needed a replacement. I need to replace the entire hose set in the backyard as that is leaking more water than it is spraying. I also got this nice snake plant for my office and happy to have that.

What I've been playing

Path of Exile - Continued refining the reap-ignite build. This week, I used a LLM to find avenues to improve my build. A few weeks ago, I built a tool that looks at a Path of Building build code and spits it out in text format the required gear for the build. Path of Ninja lets you import your character build and get a Path of Building build code, so using that I was able to feed my character's details into Gemini and say, this is my problem, this is my build, point out where I'm doing wrong. And amazingly, it was able to provide some suggestions that have made it easier to survive. That's pretty cool. I managed to improve the survivability and damage output with the provided suggestions.

What we ate

Kokoro Mazesoba, Sydney CBD - Mazesoba is a brothless ramen that replaces soup with an umami soy-based sauce. It generally comes with wheat noodles, meat, raw egg and some other sauces that you mix up and eat. This place was Jo's recommendation so we went there for lunch. The Mazesoba was better than what I thought it would be. My order, Mala Mazesoba had good amount of heat so enjoyed it. Well worth a visit again!

Music of the Week

Tash Sultana's Jungle is her breakout song, and this bedroom recording is even more amazing to watch.

Link of the week

Listen to PyPI is a cool project by fellow AWS Hero, Mike Fielder

Listen to PyPI turns the Python Package Index into a live ambient soundscape. Every time a package is published or updated, you hear it as a tone and see it as a glowing circle

While on the same note (heh, see what I did there), Train Jazz is also amazing

Every dot is a real subway train. Eight hundred of them, give or take, form a small jazz combo (walking bass, piano, sax, vibes, brushes) that has been playing without pause for over a hundred years.

Backblaze has quietly stopped backing up your data

My first troubling discovery was in 2025, when I made several errors then did a push -f to GitHub and blew away the git history for a half decade old repo. No data was lost, but the log of changes was. No problem I thought, I’ll just restore this from Backblaze. Sadly it was not to be. At some point Backblaze had started to ignore .git folders. [...] A user was surprised to find their Dropbox folder no longer being backed up. Alarmed I logged into Backblaze, and lo and behold, my OneDrive folder was missing.

I don't use Backblaze but if a backup service silently ignores my backup folders, that is bonkers.

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

With Monday being a public holiday thanks to Easter, the lazy long weekend continued. Well, not quite - I didn't have my swimming class because of the holiday, but in the evening we did a bulk meal prep for the week. Jo & I have been experimenting with bulk meal prep for the week. Jo will have a meal plan for the week and work on portioning it out and preparing the various bases. I helped out with some peeling and chopping.

I was also very excited - for I had taken the extra day off on Tuesday. The batteries were finally being installed! The battery installers arrived in the morning at around 8am. The person introduced himself and going by the name, I knew he was Romanian, but asked him just to be sure. When he nodded affirmatively, I greeted him in Romanian with the usual greeting that I would do when I was in Romania -

Salut, salut! Ce faci?

Hello, how are you doing?

The look on his face was priceless - how in the world is this brown dude in suburban Sydney speaking Romanian?! We chatted briefly, then it was onto the work - he told me what the plan was for the day. I showed him where the batteries were to be installed and waited for the rest of the installers to come over. The install took about 6 hours - the installers unloaded the battery to the back of the house, mounted them, while the electrician worked on drawing the wires from the main switch board (which was all the way at the front of the house) to the batteries. And when it was all set and ready to connect, they shut down the power supply to finish the final connections and then turned it on. The installer configured the batteries - for which I had to provide my phone as a hotspot. The batteries need Internet connection to complete the setup, but when the power was shut down and later restored, that seemed to have caused a problem with my router and it went on a bootloop, refusing to start. It was only a few hours after the install was done and configured that the router somehow booted up - but in trying to get this done, I had attempted to factory reset the router many times, so all my WiFi settings, DHCP leases, IP reservations were all lost. So I spent another hour or so re-configuring them. But no problems with the batteries! They've been working well.

I had shut down my homeserver and NAS the previous day as I knew the power shutdown was going to happen but didn't want to wait for the whole server shutdown time, so the day after the batteries were installed, I turned them on and left for work. Imagine my surprise when I reached back home in the evening and the homeserver and the NAS were fighting with each other for network connectivity - it turns out the homeserver got a 192.168.0.40 IP via DHCP from the router, but this IP was configured as a static IP on the NAS from the OS level, so these two devices kept fighting to claim the same IP. Untangling this was not fun, particularly when I was losing SSH connection every 30 seconds or so. I finally figured out this problem and got into the terminal and managed to shutdown the homeserver which let the NAS keep the IP.

Wednesday was also 1-rep max (1RM) day - we'd been working on our backsquats the past few months and it culminated with the 1RM day. Originally planned for Tuesday, Jo was running late for gym due to her work and thus we had to push it to Wednesday. We started with a couple of minutes of cycling to warm up, and then the lunges and bodyweight squats for some more warm up and preparation for the squats. The barbells were then loaded and we slowly progressed from 20 -> 40 -> 60 -> 80 -> 90 -> 98 -> 100 kg (!!). As someone who's been deathly afraid of the barbell because of my previous back injuries, getting to here has been a major milestone and I'm very happy with this. Jo also hit her 1RM of 60 kg! Incredible work from her as well. We'll be changing the block from the upcoming week, so not sure what's next but will know soon. Here's the 1RM workout from me.

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I also met an old friend on Wednesday. Subhashish "Bhuto" Das had let me know he was visiting Sydney, and we managed to catch up over coffee on Wednesday afternoon. It was nice to meet - I think I'm meeting him after close to a decade. It's pretty incredible how many amazing people I had met over Twitter during its early days. On Thursday, my team went to Bistecca for lunch for my team mate's farewell lunch - he's retiring at the end of the week and we wanted to celebrate. We had some good food, drinks and chatted a bit and wished him the best!

After the Easter break, I resumed my driving classes with two sessions. My instructor's been taking me to different places in Blacktown, where I will be having my test, to get me acquainted with the different roads and the little twists each of those roads bring in. This week, I was made familiar with Blacktown's "the roundabout of doom" - a multilane roundabout with pedestrian activated signals on the entry and the exit of the roundabout. Navigating this was a pain. When I returned home, the entertainment unit that Jo had thrifted from Salvo's store had been delivered, so we moved the TV to the new entertainment unit and moved the old one to Jo's office.

We did a mini food crawl in Pendle Hill on Saturday morning, and then I went back home while Jo went about searching for armchairs to thrift (she was successful).

What I've been playing

Gravel - Gravel is an arcade off-road racing game that I had bought during the steam sale. I've been playing a bit of this and has been pretty fun. The game is packaged as an action oriented TV program - with many tournaments covering different racing modes such as sprints, time trials, rallycross and rally. The graphics are pretty decent, but the AI is either stupid and you end up with a 20 second+ lead, or rubberbands like crazy and leave you far behind. Thankfully, the game offers "stars" for your race progress and doesn't mandate that you have to win every single race.

Path of Exile - I've been working on improving the reap ignite build and it's at a stage where any further upgrades will require a lot of grinding - either to get the required currency to buy or materials to craft. I'll continue trying to get to the higher tier maps, but I think this might be the end of the build. It's pretty fun to make one attack and see screenwide clears - might see if there's other similar builds for next league.

What we watched

While not movies, there have been some cool gaming videos that were published and that I enjoyed this week

Forza Horizon 6 trailer

Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred - The Queen and The Saint

Diablo: Lord of Hatred - First Look

Diablo IV's Vessel of Hatred campaign was pretty poor, I'm hoping the next expansion - Lord of Hatred would be much better.

What we ate

Bistecca - Sydney CBD - As mentioned above, I went here with my team for a team lunch. Bistecca is a literally hard-to-find place thanks to the secret entry door that is pretty easy to miss. Once you go in, you are requested to deposit your phones into the box and they'll lock it away, so no pictures were taken. Unlike other steakhouses, Bistecca only has one cut - their signature t-bone that is done medium-rare (or your preference) and weighed by the kilo. The steak I had was amongst the best yet, and the sides were pretty good too. Gidley still remains my all-time favourite for Sydney steakhouses, but this is very good.

Pendle Hill Food run - See my other post

Music of the Week

Elderbrook's Inner Light is a fantastic track with an even more amazing music video.

Links of the week

The Ingenious Design of the Aluminum Beverage Can - Such a great video on what does behind the scenes of your favourite drink's can.

Top 20 Australian TV ads - I don't know top 20 by what measure but these are pretty good.

20 Years on AWS and Never Not My Job

Colin is the creator of Tarsnap and a fellow AWS Hero. This is such a great read from Colin on his experiences with working on, and with, AWS services.

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

Jo woke up on the Saturday morning with a hankering for hoppers. The eating kind, that is. Hoppers (or appam as I've known them) are a staple Sri Lankan/South Indian dish consisting of a thin, crispy, bowl-shaped pancake made from fermented rice flour and coconut milk. Pendle Hill and Toongabbie have a pretty sizeable Sri Lankan population and of the two Jo decided we’d go to Pendle Hill.

Heading to Pendle Hill from Acacia Gardens was pretty easy. We walked over to the nearby bus stop to catch a bus to Blacktown. From Blacktown station we took the train to Pendle Hill.

Pendle Hill was only three stations away so it didn't take long, probably would have been like 10 minutes to get there. Once we reached Pendle Hill, we got off and we started walking towards our first stop - Lathu's Pure Vegetarian takeaway. We had our first food stop here and despite the name, they did have a few tables to sit at. Lathu’s is a vegetarian place and among all the choices, we had sambar Vada each. The Vada was pretty good. Being dipped in sambar, I couldn’t say if they were crispy or not. The sambar had a unique flavour, quite different from the Bangalore or Chennai sambars that I’m used to.

Slightly fueled up on the vadas, we went walking down the road aptly titled Pendle Way. Walking down the Pendle Way was like walking through market street back home as a kid - lots of folks walking about, some huddled talking to each other. A few places were blasting some music and in the midst of all of that I even heard a Suprabhatam being played somewhere. We entered a small bakery and picked up a loaf of whole grain bread to take home. From here, we crossed the road and went over to have the main dish - hoppers at Cinnamon Leaf.

Much like Lathu's - Cinnamon Leaf is also a small, unassuming restaurant with a few tables and display of the available items. They had a wide variety of items - hoppers, rice, biriyani, roti and more. We ordered the hoppers pack which got us one egg hopper, three plain hoppers with a meat curry (we opted for lamb) and a sambol. The hoppers were amazing - soft, crispy and done right. The egg hoppers were even better, and after having the lamb curry, I told Jo we should take home the string hoppers (idiyappams) and the lamb curry so we can have it for dinner!

We'd been eating for a while but I still hadn't had coffee yet. We saw Sree Flavours, a Kerala restaurant which had pazhampori(banana fritters) and south Indian filter coffee, so we walked in. I noticed they also had egg puffs, so another item we picked up to take home.

All in all, a good day's eat (quite calorific, I might add).

It's been another cold week! And with the cold persisting, our socks have come out. Won't be long before we have to get the jacket, hoodies and winter duvets/sheets out.

This week's swimming class was probably one the best that I've felt since starting. I'm getting better at breathing out through my nose, and was able to push myself from the starting wall and glide till the first flag, which is a great milestone to be at. There's a couple that have started taking lessons just before my slot and they're pretty much at the same spot as I was when I started a few weeks ago, so to see my progress from there to where I am now is really encouraging.

Good progress on the gym front as well - I hit my PB of being able to do two reps of 90 kg on the back squat. A year ago, I'd be very cautious of going beyond 50kg due to my back issues, now I don't even think about it. I'm glad that I finally started doing strength training, it's been a huge boost to my health.

Over the week, I also had a brief meet with Thej over coffee. Thej's visiting Sydney for a holiday and it was good to stop by and chat, and get to know Anju and Uma in person.

I'd been researching on Amazon S3 Storage Lens and Amazon Athena for a new proposal at work. I worked on refining the proposal, converting it into a RFC to be worked on after the Easter break. I also got a draft blog post on it done, I'll clean it up and publish it next.

I've been working with LLMs and coding agents such as Claude Code, codex, OpenCode since quite some time now and it's pretty amazing to see how far they have progressed. I've gone from having to double and triple check the output and ensure nothing's been hallucinated to now not worrying about hallucinations any more. They're still far from perfect, and require quite a bit of handholding to ensure everything is as expected, but it's been a pretty big boost to me, especially in terms of getting some minor, nifty tools that I'd have not been able to complete without spending way too much time into it. Some of the things I built this week are

• pob-gear-cli: A CLI tool that decodes a Path of Exile build code and prints the gear required in a clean, easy to read format. Prior to this, I'd have to hover on every item and have to remember every single affix that is required/priority. With this, I have a easy reference in text that I can overlay on my left monitor, that makes it handy especially when I'm crafting/trading for new gear/builds.

• tuya-exporter: I had bought a few Tuya based temperature and humidity Sensors and installed them across various rooms in our house. I'd been meaning to publish the data from Tuya into InfluxDB in my home server but never could find the time to finish. I used OpenCode to finish off this, and also got it to write a Grafana dashboard. It's cool to see temperature variations from night to morning, or mid-day, and how much temperature varies from one room to another.

There's a few more that I use on a regular basis, they're all published on my GitHub. With the long weekend, Friday was spent on gardening and yard work. The backyard lawn had really overgrown thanks to the rain and and sun from the past week and was in need of a trim. Jo trimmed out the hedges that were a bit too long as well and once she was done trimming the hedges, I used the mower to trim the lawn as well as clean out the cut hedges that had fallen on the lawn. Jo had also bought a leafblower that I made good use of to clean up the fallen leaves, grass and dust on the backyard.

On Saturday, Jo wanted to head over to Salvos Stores in Minchinbury. Since Penrith was enroute to Minchinbury, we made a trip out of it, stopping by a cafe in Emu Plains and walking across the Yandhai Nepean Bridge.

We had planned a Bunnings Visit on Sunday to pick up some soil and other gardening equipment but didn't realise it was closed, so stayed at home and relaxed.

What I've been playing

Path of Exile - I switched over from my minion build to a reap ignite build that's pretty fun. There's a nice satisfaction of walking over, herding a big mob of demons and then setting them on fire and watching them explode! The build however doesn't do that well for single target damage/bosses so have mixed feelings.

Music of the Week

Lounge House has been on my playlist this week and Jones Meadow's Paint is just amazing.

Links of the week

Some fun space-themed links for the week

I Recreated Project Hail Mary in KSP! | Mission to Adrian & Kau Ceti

Star Trek but the Computer is Australian

Spin Gravity compared

Artemis II crew now halfway to Moon as they take 'spectacular' image of Earth

Artemis II crew now halfway to Moon as they take ‘spectacular’ image of Earth

The snap was taken aboard the Orion capsule by its commander, Reid Wiseman, as the crew head towards the Moon.

BBC News

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

We didn't have any travel plans for the long Easter Weekend but wanted to get our steps in. Jo had been meaning to go to the Salvos Store in Minchinbury which isn't too far from Penrith, so we decided to make a trip out of it.

We started off from our house to Blacktown via the bus. Once at Blacktown station, we took the train to Penrith.

Once in Penrith, we had initially planned to walk to and across the Yandhai Nepean Crossing but it started raining. So we took another bus to Emu Plains, just across the Yandhai Nepean Crossing.

Emu Plains is the westernmost residential suburb in the outskirts of the Greater Western Sydney area. We stopped by the Laughing Boy Cafe to grab some brunch and coffee. I ordered the hash brown mountain for myself while Jo had the breakkie burrito.

We ordered the large coffee as well, and the coffee was a little light on strength and was more milky. The food was pretty good but with the public holiday surcharge, it cost us a fair bit ($75 for the two).

Once we were done with brunch, the rains had stopped as well so we decided to walk over the bridge and walk back to the station.

The Yandhai Nepean Crossing is a pedestrian bridge. It is also the longest single clear-span footbridge in Australia. There's space for pedestrians and cyclists though we didn't see too many cyclists. The bridge spans the Nepean river which supplies potable water for Sydney and flows downstream to eventually form the Hawkesbury River. On the river, we could see a bunch of people practicing rowing. The crossing is also a part of the Penrith Great River walk, an 8km walk offering views of the Nepean River and Blue Mountains. The walk looks pretty straightforward and is something we'd like to do in the near future. For now, we crossed the bridge, walked over to the Explorers' Memorial - a monument to the explorers who discovered a route across the Blue Mountains to the Bathurst Plains.

We head back to Penrith, taking a bus to Minchinbury and then to home.