Weekly Notes 16/2026

What's been happening

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.

1. Electricity usage prior to battery install which coincided with our billing cycle. 2. Usage after battery install (see blue bars almost nil 3,4: Solar generation and battery usage dashboard from the foxess-exporter.

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.

Thrifted 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.