Weekly Notes 08/2026

What's been happening

It's been about a month since we got the keys to our new house.

What have we discovered in the first month? The biggest change, of course, has been moving into suburbia. Both Jo & me were worried that moving into suburbia would be a pain. And we both discussed over the week that it hasn't been as bad as painful as we thought it would be. Suburban Sydney can be quite car-heavy with some suburbs more so than the others. We've been living in the city, car-free for over three and half years now - relying pretty heavily on public transport. Over in the suburbs, we've had to change that. The biggest change has been trying to meet the bus schedules - a delay or missed bus can often mean that the next bus is 30 minutes away and that has a domino effect on subsequent trips. Other change has been that we can't make impulse decisions to go to a (new) cafe or restaurant around the corner - it's pretty quiet out here. Sometimes, quiet is nice.

That said, we've been keeping ourselves quite busy - I had to mow the lawn again. The backyard lawn had overgrown quite a bit and was tall enough that birds started playing hide-and-seek there 😅 So on the Friday just after a heavy lunch, I was feeling quite sleepy and instead of taking a small power nap, I decided to take the mower out and do the backyard. I've gotten better at moving the mower around - it was running throughout the entire 20+ minute run that I took to clean up the backyard, as opposed to the first time that I ran and it kept turning off every minute or so.

The edges are still a bit overgrown- I had to get back to work before I could do the edges with the whipper snipper. That's for another weekend.

That wasn’t the only bit of DIY that we did over the week. Our master bedroom didn’t have any curtains and Jo wanted to put the curtains on so we could keep the window open without having the entire world peek into our room.

Thankfully, the window sill already had holes drilled into it - seems like the previous owner had the same idea as us. This gave me a chance to bring out Jo’s latest and greatest gift to me

Why yes - a handy screws organiser - best thing ever.

With the great suitcase opened up, I picked up a few screws, the motorised screwdriver in hand and used it to drive the screws that would hold on the base for the curtain rods. I have no idea why getting to use these (not so power) tools got me so excited. But here we are.

Curtains up!

I also signed up for driving classes so I can get some tips and hands on just before I can take the test. The classes don’t start till March 6th, so there’s still some time left. And I signed up for these, my learner's license also arrived in the mail.

This week’s swimming class also went by pretty well. I am of course still str to stay afloat but was doing much better than last week. In fact, I waded My way through the entire length of the pool. Sure I made generous use of the floats but it was still progress compared to last week!

Our gym sessions have been going well too. I'm missing the third session, that is the group class more than I thought I would. Sure, it was always a pain to get up and drag myself to the gym and I would dread the thought of doing the metcons but I realise now how much those helped me improving my aerobic capacity. Over the weekend, Jo went over to a couple of op-shops and got a nice little pot stand with some frames. The frames featured all Beatles photos, but this one below featuring the line drawing of the Sydney Observatory is really pretty.

Thrifted picture frames and pot stand

We also went over to Parklea markets to get some grocery shopping done. Before we wrapped up, we picked up a few pots so we can transfer the indoor plants to these larger pots from the current tiny ones. We would have loved to get some potting mix but they are only available in 25kg bags - not something we can carry over now having to rely on public transport. That will have to wait for later as well.

What I've been playing

Path of Exile 2 - I made a lot of progress on my druid character. It's now the highest leveled character yet in Path of Exile 2, in probably the quickest time as well. I was comparing the paper stats of my Druid build as compared to my previous Invoker Monk build, and it's kinda amazing how much more "weaker" my Druid/Oracle build is on paper (+ not res capped) while doing 1/3rd damage compared to invoker monk & yet the Druid just flies through maps & trials at the same level.

I'm guessing the cast on crit + thunderstorm + constant whips from thrashing vines + slows from entangle make for much more consistent and wide AoE damage compared to te the invoker's Storm Wave. I'm now doing Tier 13 maps pretty easily. And as luck would have it, I got my first Divine orb drop as well.

Comparing the two builds(left), divine orb drop (right)

What we ate

Haveli, Stanhope Gardens - Haveli is the closest Indian restaurant around here. We’d been here previously when we were doing house inspections. This visit was because when we retuning from the gym, I was watching a Chef Meherwan Irani video which featured chaat and she craved for some. Thus, we got off at Stanhope Village and went over here for dinner. We had bhelpuri and chicken 65 biryani. The bhelpuri was nice, but the biryani was pretty average and slightly on the bland side.

Dinner at Haveli

Music of the Week

John Butler's "The Way Back" lyrics can really hit you right in the gut

Links of the week

I saw this cool project called Knock-Knock.net on Hacker News

I built a honeypot that accepts every connection, records the credentials they try, and displays it all on a live dashboard with a 3D globe.

Brilliant piece of writing from Vikram on his newsletter about Valentine's Day

Love, in Bengaluru, is all about [ … ] someone says … “Hey, I am on my way, I’ll come and pick you up.”

Top prank from Misfit Minds that got the entire town bowled out, including the council members

We pranked an entire country town into thinking we were building a 20 storey state of the art McDonalds

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.