technonaturalist

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life

Eight

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:

Mini golf course at Maylands Water Park

He lost because ‘Daddy and his calcubrain’

fyn's silly season wishlist

love

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 :)

Rainy day

Playing in the rain

You can still play outside. They spent half an hour out there, then Cub 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

Skate ramp tests and first honey harvest

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The skate ramp is skatable!

Skater almost silhouette

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).

Six

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Very Small Small Girl is 6.

Playing on the water course at the Perth Zoo

She woke up the morning of her birthday, came running into the computer room and announced, “I’m SIX!”

She wanted to go to the zoo by public transport for her birthday so that’s what we did.

fyn's guide to paranoid internet computering

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.

Full disk encryption and "large files" - a loose experiment

So apparently full disk encryption is not the best idea for people who work with “large” files (where “large” was loosely defined as “multi-megabyte” in one of the threads I skimmed through). I couldn’t find anything informative never mind definitive on how full disk encryption would affect 3d and large digital painting work, so decided to run some experiments particular to my usage. These are not benchmarks in any way, shape or form, I was entirely too lazy to do things properly.

re: patent trolling

Dearest Apple

I hear you’ve won your most recent case against Samsung regarding rounded corners on rectangles. Please forgive me for not jumping up and down in excitement over this little victory, as I happen to think the whole thing was pretty fucking stupid (pardonnez mon français) and a massive waste of time, effort and resources that you could have spent doing stuff like making your existing products better and maybe even inventing something new (or at least a new take on something old).

Pokemon themed sketchdump

The kids watched many Pokemon dvds while we were on Christmas Island. I have a Pokemon fanfic sketched out in my head which I don’t give a lot of time to as it’s a very occasional diversion from working on AR. This is sketch of my OT (that’s “Original Trainer” for those that aren’t versed in Pokemon fanfics) and two of her Eevees; Amber (combining cliches, she is an abnormally large shiny mutant, and female!), and Lightfoot (perfectly normal male). They’re hunting whatever might be good eating probably somewhere in the Kanto region.

Photos from the surprise Christmas Island visit

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Recently, in a mad jumble of chaos and confusion well coordinated and executed attack, my sister and I surprised our parents for their 60th.

I took a bunch of photos but didn’t put them on my laptop due to the constant dramas I’ve been having downloading photos from the camera (keep losing connection, and the closer I get to finishing the import the more it breaks) and also the internet connection on Christmas Island is so agonisingly slow that photos would have taken aeons to upload anyway. So now having gotten back to Perth and back onto my desktop, after struggling with importing 227 photos for the last two hours, I’m going to do one of those big long photo posts that is going to exasperate my sister.