Kazza the Blank One

I've been playing a lot of Nonograms Katana lately (due to the ad experience in Candy Crush and Happy Colour being way too trash these days).  A few weeks ago this one came up.  Such a tiny little puzzle (only 10x10) but even only part way through it I picked what it was.  Fun stuff!

Went to Sydney on Saturday.  Went to the airport on Sunday.  Our flight was cancelled.  Spent two days in Sydney.  Went to the airport on Tuesday.  Went to Tamworth.  Came back to Sydney.  Caught a bus home.  You can read all about it here (photos to come soon).

Wednesday.  4th. 

Unpacking, blogging, processing and backing up photos.  I'm worried my little PhotoMate GPS logger is dying. On day 2 of the holiday I swear I turned it on and off for the day but there was no track. On day 3 of the trip I know I started it in the morning, but it skipped a whole bunch of the morning and didn't start tracking until later. This would be devastating if it died. Then for the flights on day 4 it's not displaying the track as a red line, but a series of "marker" points (it was fine until just before we took off, and also fine around Tamworth). I can't see anything wrong with the GPX file, no idea what's going on.  Upsettingly I seem to have lost a decor container. It had snackages in it I took away, but I don't remember packing it at Mum's or unpacking it here. I literally can't remember the last time I saw it. Normally it wouldn't be a big deal, just a container and some snacks, but it also had an old-school mercury thermometer in it, which I'm upset about losing. Why is everything so awful?  Pizzas for dinner (since we planned to be out tomorrow) and Stargate.

Meatlovers and Moroccan lamb

Thursday.  Didn't sleep very well. Was awake from around 3 for ages, mostly stressing over Qantas being turds. Stu didn't sleep well either. Around 6 he was like, wanna go birding? So we did! Didn't see the caspian tern that Stu wanted to see at the Fyshwick sewage ponds, but we did go for a wander around Jerrabomberra wetlands and saw a few interesting birds.

Got home and called Qantas again. Did some catchup blogging in the afternoon. I'm also annoyed at IFTTT (which I use to save Foursquare checkins to a Google docs spreadsheet). They suddenly started using up credits to do this, but they charge like 30 credits per checkin and you only get a couple of hundred per month. So it died after just a couple of days of them starting this new system. On a lighter note, Foursquare have fixed their checkin RSS feed which was broken for years, so now you can get it via RSS feed. But I bet there's still no easy way to backup the checkin history without a lot of hacking of APIs. Sigh. For dinner we finally used the gift card Stu got for Raku for his retirement. Very nice but very expensive dinner. Came home and watched V for Vendetta. Also - I saw Chrissie's clown loach today!  Haven't seen it in weeks, was worried it had died.

Friday.  Up early and headed out to Tidbinbilla to do the cascades walk.  All. The. Kangaroos.  !!!  So many kangaroos around on the drive in, although didn't actually get any photos of them, and they'd literally all disappeared for the day by the time we left.  Had a lot of frustration trying to get bird photos because of the little turds sitting in trees in the bush with all different levels of trees and the camera struggled to focus. Nice walk otherwise.

Stu's phone GPS app had a couple of brain hemorrhages and sent us in the wrong direction *twice*. Retarded.

Stopped at Murray's Corner on the way home for snackages.

Had a look at my raw GPS tracks from my PhotoMate. It's meant to do "smart logging" where it will log every 30 seconds if you're going lower than 6km/h, every 15 seconds between 15 and 60, and every five seconds over 60. But it's only logging everything 30 seconds no matter what. It seems to have changed some time between December 2025 and March 2026. Before that it was logging every 5 seconds no matter what. Every 5 seconds makes for much bigger logs, but is much more accurate. I dunno what's changed or why. Maybe another sign that it's dying. Also, our new neighbours turned up today!  Looks like a young couple.  Kievs for dinner and Black Mirror.

Saturday.  Awake from around 3 for ages, mostly stressing about Qantas. Did some food shopping in the morning. Called Qantas after lunch (third time lucky?). Might get some resolution on that. Did some culling of the trip's photos. Kievs for dinner then watched The Manchurian Canidate (I'd still like to see the original film one day).

Sunday.  Early night and slept relatively well for a change. House, photo and hobby day.

On a lighter note, Windoze has been remembering my folder view settings for the past week or two.  I wonder how long that will last...

On Thursday the sweetie and I went to Raku.  When he retired he'd been given a voucher for $150 to spend there and we'd been meaning to use it for a while.  We'd last been with Annie and Stu back in May 2024.

We were sat at the preparation bar so that was cool to watch them work.

I put Stu in charge of ordering food.

He ordered two of the 6 piece signature selection nigiri ($75).  Yes these two little plates of food cost us the entire voucher.  It was quite a bit cheaper to order them like this.  We had Aburi otoro (seared bluefin tuna belly, normally $30), I think it was Tenaga ebi (scampi, foie gras, truffle oil, soy jelly, normally $34), and Aburi wagyu (seared Tajima wagyu 8+ striploin, garlic soy, fried leek, normally $30).  All delicious (except for the wasabi flavour on the scampi), but I was like, well that was a nice entree (for $150), what's for mains?

So we ordered more food.

First up though, a cocktail!

Nekuta martini - spiced rum, passionfruit liqueur, peach and basil syrup, lime ($27)

First was kumogani tempura (soft shell crab, potato starch w kimchi mayonnaise $30)

And then probably the highlight of the night - Jidori karaage chicken (soy marinated free range chicken, bonito w yuzu lime mayonnaise & chilli ponzu $26).

So with a prosecco each it came to something like $274, with $150 off, so about $124 for the night out.  

We may or may not have gone to Anita Gelato for dessert afterwards!

Super quiet quarter.  Too fricken busy.  Both of these were done at work.

This one came from another floor.  It was a bit of fun.

I think this Where's Wally jigsaw came from the Green Shed sorry Vinnies sorry Goodies Junction.  Lots of missing pieces too.  It took ages!

14.10.26

Stu had already been out here to see the painted honeyeaters, so with excess flex to burn we headed out one Wednesday morning so I could see them as well.

Noisy miner

Eastern rosellas! Eastern rosellas!

Galah

Buff-rumped thornbills

Weebill

White-winged triller

Grey fantail

Black-faced cuckooshrike

Superb fairy wren

We think this is a female rufous whistler

Grey shrike-thrush (we think)

There were a pair of wedgies flying over, and nearby was a huge next with at least two "baby" wedgies

There were several new birds for me.

Apparently this is a Horsfields bronze-cuckoo

Dusky wood swallows

Oriental dollar bird

And of course, the painted honeyeaters!!

28.10.26

Here we went looking for scarlet honeyeaters and a few other things, none of which we found, but did find plenty of other stuff.  On a weekday morning pretty much the only other people in the gardens are other birders.  All looking for the same birds.  Funny stuff.  Talked to a lovely lady Andra who showed us a tawny frogmouth with chicks!

Superb fairy wren

Eastern yellow robin

New Holland honeyeaters

A satin bowerbird and his bower

Eastern spinebill

Galah

Tawny frogmouth and chick

28.10.26

We headed out there because some birders had spotted a whiskered tern, which apparently is rare here.

I didn't any good photos - too far away and looking into the sun.

Sunday.  25th.  Leftovers for dinner then watched the movie-length first episode of Stargate SG1. "MacGyver a solution" haha

Monday.  Ok day, nothing exciting. Stu cooked some mushrooms for dinner and we had those with some leftover pork and watched more Stargate. Blogged some bird watching blog entries. Then I tried to file my emails for the week and that's where the wheels fell off. Eudora froze up and that's never good because it can corrupt mailboxes. I killed and restarted it then had to check through all the mailboxes to make sure they weren't corrupted. I think they're ok. Played a little Arcane Library. I'm not a gamer so I don't really *get* how powerups work. I'd done one level up of a couple of things but didn't realise how it worked to get them even better. Once I maxed out the summoning spell, as well as levelled up the filing spell it now really feels like *cheating*. You can stand in front of a shelf with one book, summon all the rest of them, then file them instantly. No wandering around piles of books looking for matching ones. If I'd realised ages ago you could do this I could have saved *ages* haha. Now I know why Dave2 said some people don't use the powerups and just do it the manual way.

Tuesday.  Awake fairly early. Setup my phone to record the cacophony of birds in the morning, but pressed the wrong button and deleted it before I'd a chance to listen to the stuff it captured. Will have to try again tomorrow. Ok day, busy trying to do things but getting interrupted.

Wednesday.  Had some more flex I needed to burn so we did some birding.  

Donkey Kong mosaic at Pialligo

Saw a whiskered tern at the Fyshwick sewage ponds, and then to the Botanic Gardens.

Dropped into the Lighty for lunch on the way to work.

Fighting with DNS in the afternoon.

Thursday.  Fighting with DNS all day. Trying to make /25 PTR zones in AD work "properly".  Sort of got it working but sort of not.  Good drinks.

Pizzas, Stargate.

Mills and Grills Mexican (not very Mexican, more Mediterranean) and Loaded Mills

Friday. Spent all day just getting organised, packing and doing *stuff*.

Kievs for dinner and Black Mirror.

Saturday.  Another day of organising and packing, then off to Sydney after lunch.

So I blame Dave2 for this!  When I saw just his comments on it (I didn't even watch the video) I thought that looked like something I might enjoy.  I didn't buy it straight away but when I saw there was a special on Steam games a little while ago and this game was 20% off so I grabbed it.

I played for about an hour the first time I played it.  Although, first things first, I needed a map.  I mean sure there's a map on the wall, but it's a pain to go and check it for every book.  So found one on Reddit.  

I really had no idea what I was doing to begin with. I managed to get a few books put away but not many. One of the biggest problems was the fact I don't have a fancy graphic card, so it really chugged on my machine and caused massive CPU spikes and the fans to go crazy. So after the first couple of sessions I tweaked the settings - made it a much smaller window and reduced all the graphics options to bare minimum. That worked a lot better.

The hardest part was figuring out what shelves the books should go on. Some of them were a lot more obvious, like healing and holy magic, and they had the added advantage of being white so they stood out, so I started with them. Daily magic was another category with lighter coloured books. Then I did a lot of the bottom floor black stuff, so curses, necromancy and stealth.

Then I started to look at the magic options. I didn't quite grasp their significance to start with. I mean sure a summoning spell is useful to pick up another book of the same thing you're holding. But it took me a while to figure out that if you maxed out the level ups on it you could summon an entire shelf of books with one key stroke!! Similarly you could save a lot of time loading all those books onto a shelf by another key stroke. Once I started doing this the pace of the game accelerated rapidly. I never bothered with the numerical sorting spell and only used the book glow spell once. Once I really got going I then used the spell that showed you which shelf a book would go on. I used this *a lot* because a lot of things I had no idea where they'd go.

Then there's the "minor" magic. You're meant to find keys for four chests. One is pretty obvious and gives you the ability to jump, but I found jumping up annoying and didn't work very well, so really only used it to jump over the railing to the floor below. Two of the other keys could only be found by jumping up, but I found none of the three other powers any real use and didn't use them at all.

Right near the end I noticed a little glowing thing on the intro stand. I clicked on it and it allows you to summon all the remaining books into a pile right there. Funny.

My two favourite categories were Daily Magic, with titles such as "What Kind of Magic Works Best for Job Hunting?", "Handy Kitchen Magic Recipes", "Three Seconds to Office: Magic for Last-Minute Commuters", "Magic to Mute a Specific Person's Voice", "How to Commute with Magic", "Compendium Magic for the Lazy", "Everyday Magic for Deep and Restful Sleep";
and The Travels of the Otherworld with things like "The Cursed Workplaces of a Magicless World", "A People Enchanted by Glowing Slabs", "The Ultimate Guide to Otherworldly Swear Words", "They Worship an Invisible Entity Known as Wi-Fi", "The Otherworld: Demanding Fresh Graduates with 10 Years of Experience", "Strange Technology from Another World! The Ultimate Language: C++".
But this one in Psychology also cracked me up - "The Psychology of Prioritizing Gaming Over Tidying Your Room".

Once you completely fill all the shelves you can leave the library... and your reward is.. a pizza!!!! hahaha

Another fun thing you can do after you're done is click on a link in the main menu to take you to a special level where you just stand in the room and watch all the books fly into place while listening to the Blue Danube. Fun stuff.

So apparently this all took me 10 hours 21 minutes. Totally worth the $6.80 I paid for it :)

10.10.26

This was actually the first time Stu took me to find the black-fronted dotterels, but they weren't there that time.

Did see plenty of other stuff though.

Australasian darters are so funny trying to take off

This wood duck family had four babies

Sacred kingfishers are always super cool

This willy wagtail was not all impressed with the sacred kingfisher and kept attacking it

Female satin bowerbird

There were a few red-rumped parrots pigging out on the cape weed seeds

Female superb fairy wren