Weekly Notes 14/2026

What's been happening

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.

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Getting my 90 kg reps in

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 EarthThe 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.