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 Dylan's birthday") where he had a round of mini golf with Daddy:

He lost because "Daddy and his calcubrain"

Mini golf was followed up by a dip in all of the pools and many attempts at swimming:

"See if you can do it without touching the ground!"

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 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.

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).

Little Big Boy getting used to the ramp

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!"

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

Critical error #1: do I need extra pants for Cub? Nah he'll be fine and we're running hellishly late.

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.

Note: most of the instructions are MacOSX Lion and Firefox-centric as that's what I use.  Firefox is the same across all operating systems.  The only difference is the location of their preferences panel; in OSX it's in the Application menu (it's right next to the Apple menu in the top left hand corner and will say "Firefox" when Firefox is in focus) and in Win7 and Ubuntu it's in Edit -> Preferences.  Other browsers should have similar settings about the place but you're on your own there :)

Note 2: this is a GUIDE not an instruction set.  You do not have to do everything laid out here exactly as stated.  You can skip things or modify them to suit your requirements.

Note 3: the guide focuses on privacy and security, NOT anonymity.  Privacy in this case means giving information to people you want to give it to and not having anyone else snoop in on it and use it for whatever they want.  It may make your browser stand out a bit, which is only a concern if someone is targeting you specifically.  The stuff outlined in here will help you avoid trackers and keep some control over where your data is going, but it will not magically make you safe and/or anonymous.  You still need to be conscious of what you're doing and why, and you still need to monitor your kids while they're online.

Disclaimer: I'm a hack not an expert, and I'm using/plugging stuff I'm familiar with.  You can do your own research.  You do not have to trust me.  Even if you do trust me, read up a little bit on some of this stuff anyway.  Just don't bubble ;)

Update 0000F14x | 2013-05-23: made a collection called Fortifox with most of the extensions used in this guide.

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.

System:

quad core 3.4Ghz Intel Core i7
16Gb 1333MHz DDR3 RAM
AMD Radeon HD 6970M with 2Gb on board RAM
250Gb ssd
2Tb hdd

No hardware problems as far as I can tell.

Normally open:

A hundred billion things running simultaneously.  At the very least:

• Adium
• Skype
• Mail
• iCal
• Firefox
• Sophos
• iTunes

Plus all the system and background processes.

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).

Throughout the years I've used:

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.