Dear Google bek is part of my real name. I am currently running under the assumption that it was either my initials (of my real surname) or my handle (ryivhnn, which I use on Youtube, Artician, deviantART and as a username on the Diaspora pod I’m on, though the display name there is bek) that triggered WASPobot as I hope your code isn’t so defective that you would ping me for a string that was entirely your construction (all I did was choose that particular display).

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now] Last week and a bit have been slack and uncoordinated partially due to Easter and mostly due to the sleeping pattern going seriously out of whack resulting in myself and the kids going to bed way too late (me because I was staying up late to finish stuff off and also to make sure the bigs were asleep before turning out their light, and them because I have no idea).

I have this gorgeous little boy. This one right here. Recently, he turned 4. The day he turned 4, I teased JJ about feeling old. We missed kung fu training so I could cook a sausage stew for his birthday dinner (JJ is perfectly capable of making sausage stew I think, but the kids seem to think he doesn’t do it right). He wanted to go to the zoo on his birthday but because it was on an adults at kids’ prices day, we put off to the weekend so JJ could come too.

It’s been a while but we’re slowly getting back into it. A few days ago I took an old sock (tucked into the waistband of my shorts to help with scenting) and Tali’s giant rope bone to the footy oval and we did a couple of easy tracks to see if he remembered how to do it. He had exactly no trouble remembering how to do it, and the fact it was a black and grey sock on green grass probably didn’t hurt. He can at least use both his eyes and nose at the same time and even managed to find it when I draped it over the fence above his head.

That’s how old my Little Big Boy is. My goofy scrawny scrawnlet with a prodigious appetite and no apparent storage area chose to go to Maylands Water Park for his birthday (aka “The water park we went to for [his friend]’s birthday”) where he had a round of mini golf with Daddy: He lost because ‘Daddy and his calcubrain’

In no particular order: no more massacres (that’s everything from American schools to mass murders politically correctly defined as “war”) free quality education for everyone (including how it’s received) equal access to resources for everyone marriage equality for everyone everyone for everyone Happy solstice/theAbysmal New Year/Yule/Christmas/end of the world/whatever you celebrate at this time :)

You can still play outside. They spent half an hour out there, then 3yo came in as he was cold. The big two followed 15mins later, tired and happy and telling me that it was awesome and I’d missed out :) They’ve had a nice warm bath and are now playing video games and looking forward to sausage stew for dinner. The end of the world is nigh and it’s a great time to be a kid

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now] The skate ramp is skatable! Okay so this is a slightly older picture but it was a good opener :P All but one of the backs are up (the thing that will prevent skaters and skateboards from ending up in the raised bed or in the neighbour’s yard) and the whole thing is now covered in both layers of skin and has been reinforced and all those good things. Now it just needs a paint job (and I know someone who is good at painting that I would like to rope in to help).

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now] Very Small Small Girl is 6. She woke up the morning of her birthday, came running into the computer room and announced, “I’m SIX!”

Update 20180202: I didn’t realise this was still coming up in search results, but it’s been brought to my attention from a couple of sources that TrueCrypt seems to now be defunct and a lot of the Firefox add-ons now won’t work with the most recent versions of Firefox. So please keep this in mind if you’re reading this now. For good results do levels 1 and 2. I highly recommend level 3. 4 is optional extra and 5 if you’re extra paranoid. In a section after level 5 I also include some slight modifications to the installation guide for Ubuntu because I believe making the switch to Linux is really worthwhile if you don’t need a program (or suite of programs) that doesn’t have a Linux version. If you find any of “free”, “secure” and “probably ethical” (I think) desirable in an operating system (all at once even!) hit up the Got Linux? section first and then come back to top. It’s at the bottom because I was building up from pretty-easy-to-do to requires-a-bit-of-effort.