I saw this video linked on Bluesky a few days back, and I’ve spent the last two days bingeing the series. I’m almost up to the end. It’s great! This young guy is a rapper and a music geek who nevertheless hates musicals and somehow hasn’t ever seen Hamilton. He watches a couple songs at a time, pausing to react to what’s happening, call out motifs that are repeating, and analyse how the writing illustrates character. Needless to say, he ends up loving it and gets fully invested in the story. His enthusiasm is infectious.
Author: Kris
Sinkhole
Apparently a Hellmouth has opened on Grafton Street in Chippendale. That seems appropriate for this week.
Facebook detox
In addition to demonetising my Meta data, I’ve decided to take a break from Meta platforms this week. It turns out that it’s surprisingly difficult to log out of Facebook Messenger on your phone, to the extent that I had to dig up a Wikihow article to show me how. Even after I managed to log out of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and Threads, they kept showing me a single-click “log back in” option due to some saved profile, which I then had to delete. The fact that they make it so damn difficult kinda reinforces my decision, to be honest.
The only one I haven’t signed out of is WhatsApp. This is solely because my main friend group uses it to communicate, and I haven’t yet figured out how to convince them all to move to an alternative.
Why just a break? Why don’t I delete my accounts? The temptation is definitely there. Sadly, FB remains my main channel to keep up with my family and friends in the US. It’s where I see what my brother and sister-in-law are doing with their cafe this week; it’s where I see whatever dodgy Jeep memes my Dad is laughing at; it’s where I see whatever quilt show in the Midwest my Mom is supporting; it’s where I find out if my college friends in LA are still safe. Instagram is literally the only way I know what’s happening with my young nieces and nephews, who would never be so crass as to text me or talk on the phone. It’s hard. I suspect the way forward will just be to cut my usage way, way back, and to move towards a read-only method of interaction there.
Problems with WordPress and Amazon CloudFront
Here’s a fun story. When I originally moved this blog to Amazon Lightsail five years ago, I followed the recommended best practice and installed the AWS for WordPress plugin. I used that to set up an Amazon CloudFront distribution to manage the site’s cache. For several years, everything worked great. Then in September 2022, AWS abandoned the plugin and removed it from WordPress.org. As far as I can tell, they provided no information for users to tell them what to do without it. I continued to use the plugin for sometime, even though this is generally seen as pretty bad security since it’s no longer receiving updates. A few months back, I got tired of my Security scanner blaring at me about this discontinued plugin and deactivated it. The CloudFront distribution still existed and my site continued to work as intended, so I figured it was safe to delete.
As you might guess, there have been consequences. I noticed recently that my site was sometimes caching things too aggressively. I’d write a new blog post and tell Rodd to check it out, but he’d still be seeing the old one for some time. I’m far from a CloudFront expert, but I’ve been looking at my distribution behaviour settings and comparing them to current best practices. This site, for example, recommends using “Origin” for your cache key. My plugin-created distro however uses “Cloudfront-Forwarded-Proto,” “CloudFront-is-Tablet-Viewer,” “CloudFront-is-Mobile-Viewer,” “CloudFront-is-Desktop-Viewer,” and “Host.” For object caching, my distribution had “Use origin cache headers” selected instead of a custom option. Without any documentation from AWS on how their plugin actually worked, all I can theorise is that it must’ve set some sort of header that CloudFront was using, and by deleting the plugin, I’ve mucked up that behaviour.
So what to do? For the meantime, I’ve changed the default behaviour object caching to have a default TTL of 5 minutes. I’ll see if that helps the situation at all. Otherwise I’m going to either have to look at my backups and see if I can reverse-engineer what the plugin was doing, or else figure out how to modify my distribution to work properly without it. Ugh.
Demonetising my Meta data
Mad at Meta? Don’t Let Them Collect and Monetize Your Personal Data | Electronic Frontier Foundation
I just went through and checked all of these settings. Not only is Facebook a privacy nightmare, Zuckerberg’s pivot to right-wing broligarch is sickening. I’d delete my accounts entirely except it’s my main way of communicating with some family members back in the US. At least I can limit how much I contribute to their coffers.
Homewares
I was excited yesterday to find at a Mittagong antique shop a set of 6 placemats depicting artworks from the famous Australian artist Tom Roberts. Mr. Snook was similarly excited to find a red metal EAT napkin holder for $2 at the Vinnies. 😂❤️
The Myth of the Papal Toilet Chair
It’s weird that a lot of the media I have consumed lately – Wolf Hall, The Tudors, and Conclave – revolves around cardinals and Popes. Yesterday I was talking about papal conclaves with Rodd and he told me in all seriousness that they check the genitals of every papal candidate these days. “What?! No way,” I scoffed. “Yes way! It’s because there was a lady Pope once. They even have a special chair,” he claimed. A few minutes of research later, I crowed as I revealed to him that the papal toilet chair is a myth. He remains disappointed.
The Quoin and Canva
A company in Tasmania has purchased an ecologically-damaged 5000-hectare property called The Quoin that they are restoring and rewilding. I was stunned when reading this story to realise that the folks behind this effort are my friends Cameron Adams and Lisa Miller from Canva.
The news story was linked on Metafilter, and here’s what I wrote as a comment there:
I was one of the early Canvanauts (as they call themselves), working there for 16 months across 2015-2016. The job involved a pretty serious pay cut for me, but I was burnt out after working in streaming video (“How many ads can we cram in this before people stop watching?”) and it was so nice to work on a product with no ads, and that people loved enough to pay for. Cam was a colleague and a friend, and I met Lisa and their kids on many occasions. Melanie (CEO) and Cliff (COO) interviewed me and I worked with them on a daily basis. I didn’t always agree with every decision they made, but it was clear to me that their ambition did not extend to screwing over users. Even back then, when Canva was far from the unicorn it is now, the founders put their principles into action. I remember in particular a company offsite in Manila (we had a large team there) where the entire company spent a day giving back. I went with a group of colleagues to a shelter for women and kids who had been sex-trafficked, and we played games and I taught them to knit and it was one of the most meaningful things I’ve done in my whole tech career.
It’s wild to me now to see people that I am still Facebook friends with referred to as some of the richest people in the country. No, billionaires shouldn’t exist. But I’m really happy to see that these three continue to do good with their fortunes, and I’m proud to have contributed in some tiny way to important projects like the Quoin in Tasmania.
Mittagong and Bowral
We recently learned about Rail Discovery Passes, which allow you unlimited travel on NSW regional trains, as well as extending all the way to Brisbane and Melbourne. This suits our goal of doing more regional travel in 2025, so we recently bought six-month passes. Today we used them for the first time, catching a very early train from Sydney and riding 90 minutes to Mittagong in the Southern Highlands.
We started the day by grabbing some coffee and heading to Lake Alexandra. We patted dogs, looked for turtles, and learned about the history of the Fitzroy Iron Works.
The park has a fun playground too.
We spent an hour or two shopping in town, and I got a couple skeins of wool from Victoria House. Our real destination though – and the original motivation for the trip – was Paste Australia. This award-winning Thai restaurant is run by a Michelin-starred chef who relocated from Bangkok to Mittagong, and we’d heard great things about it.
We had a booking for noon, and it turns out we were the only people there! Other dates were booked out, so I think the cool, rainy weather kept people away. We had the set lunch and chose to start with the grilled eggplant salad…
…along with the roasted duck with rice crackers.
For mains, we had Jeen Juan chicken curry…
…and the restaurant’s speciality, Sator Pad Goong, with prawns, pork, and “Thai cluster beans.”
The set lunch also came with green beans (with garlic and chilli) and rice.
Everything was delicious, and of course, the service was phenomenal since we were the only ones there! Well worth the special trip.
After lunch, we went for a wander over to Eden Brewery and sampled some of their brews. Cool place.
The weather had turned seriously windy, cold, and rainy, so we called an Uber and headed to nearby Bowral. We had several hours until our return train, so we joined every pensioner in Bowral for a showing of Conclave at the New Empire Cinema.
After the film – which is fantastic – we did some window shopping along Bong Bong street. Hey, that’s right, Don Bradman is from here!
And then it was time to head home! Our train was a little delayed so we watched the darkening sky from the platform.
From Michelin-starred lunch to a meat pie on the train. Classy 😂
Colour Maze Redux
Another shift at the Colour Maze! Today I was in the swinging ball room, making sure that kids didn’t brain themselves too hard or strangle themselves in the nearby rope room.
