Weekly Notes 19/2026

What's been happening

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.