2025 – dangermouse.net

Trying paint colours

Today I went to the hardware store to get a couple of things: coat racks, which we’re going to mount on the wall of the bedroom to hang jackets and hats and things, and some small sample pots of paint to test different paint colours on the walls.

Because we’ve planning this repainting of the whole place, we’re also taking the chance to look at other ways of refreshing and reorganising things to improve the living space. We’ve been hanging jackets over the dining chairs, which is a bit annoying when either you want to sit or when guests come over. And we have a few random hat hooks in places, but we realised we can install a rack of hooks in a space in the bedroom and move all of that stuff into one location to make things neater.

When I got home, I cleaned a section of wall to prepare it for painting, and when it was dry I applied coats of two different colours. We’re going for a warm white shade, lighter than what we have on the walls at the moment, which are quite creamy. I also have different lighter shades for the skirting boards, which I’ll add tomorrow to see the full effect. I painted wall patches about a metre high from the floor and 40 centimetres wide, so we can see it over a significant area of the wall. It’ll all get covered up by the full repaint when that gets done in October. So until then we’ll live with odd patches of different colours.

I also worked on Darths & Droids a lot today. There’s forward planning to be done for the next bit, so I wanted to get ahead on it.

On TV I’ve been watching Archive 81 on Netflix, an 8-part series which is described as horror, but it’s really more of a mystery thriller with some vague supernatural elements. I’m six episodes in and it’s been really good.

Fate of the Fellowship

Friday was board games night with my friends. Five of us gathered at one guy’s place and we played a game of The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship, a recently released new game, which is getting rave reviews. It’s a cooperative game in which the players play various members of the Fellowship or allies and try to complete three random mini-quests scattered across Middle-earth, followed by Frodo destroying The Ring.

Wth five players, each player gets dealt two random character cards to play. There are two cards that contain “inseparable” pairs of characters: Frodo and Sam, and Merry and Pippin. I was dealt Frodo and Sam, and also Arwen. Other players had Gandalf, Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas, Galadriel, Boromir, Faramir, and the “Merry & Pippin” combo.

The board is a map of Middle-earth, and the characters all start in sensible places: Frodo & Sam in The Shire, Arwen at Rivendell, Faramir at Minas Tirith, etc. Players take turns and take various actions such as moving, mustering troops, fighting orcs (the small red pieces on the board), or more abstractly converting cards in your hand into resource tokens. The cards and resources can be spent to enable certain other things and to pay penalties. For example, whenever Frodo & Sam move, they have to pay a “Stealth” card or token, otherwise they attract the Eye of Sauron. There are also 9 Nazgûl miniatures that move around, trying to hunt down Frodo.

The game is a mixture of:

Frodo & Sam trying to move across the map to Mount Doom without being discovered by Sauron or the Nazgûl.
Other characters mustering troops and fighting off orcs, to (a) prevent them from conquering haven sites such as Lórien, Helm’s Deep, Rivendell, The Shire, etc., and (b) to draw Sauron’s attention to the battle (and thus away from Frodo).

There are several actions available to help both of these, such as passing cards between characters who are in the same location, and various unique special abilities that each character has. After each player’s turn, the forces of evil have a turn, dictated by a randomised card deck. This involves them variously: adding orcs, moving orcs towards safe haven locations (to conquer them), moving Sauron’s eye, and moving Nazgûl as they hunt Frodo.

We played for about 2 hours and had a lot of fun, completing two of the three mini-quests, but ultimately we were unsuccessful, as the orcs conquered too many safe havens and overran Middle-earth before we could destroy The Ring. We realised as this began happening that we’d made a beginner mistake, underestimating how easy it was for the orcs to do that, and hadn’t fortified the havens with troops. Next time we play we’ll have a much better idea of the overall strategy.

Here are massed orcs pouring out of Mordor while Frodo and others are trying to walk in via the Stairs of Cirith Ungol:

While playing the game I had time between turns to draw a quick sketch of the game. There’s also an “Eye of Sauron” Barad-Dûr dice tower that overlooks the board ominously, which isn’t in the photos I took.

I’m not normally a fan of cooperative games. I’ve played many, and haven’t really found any that I’ve liked, other than Codenames Duet and Hanabi. I’ve tried and haven’t liked Pandemic, Spirit Island, The Crew, Forbidden Island, Magic Maze, 5-Minute Dungeon, one of the Marvel co-op card games, and a bunch of others. My friends tend to like them and keep buying them, but I generally dislike them all. But this Lord of the Rings game was a lot of fun.

Today I did a 7.5k run – phew! I didn’t manage to do any runs during the week, so I wanted to get some distance under my belt. The weather is starting to warm up into spring and I went just before lunch, so it was a little tougher than running in cooler weather.

After lunch my wife and I caught the ferry across to Balmain with Scully and walked around the shops there. My wife wanted to drop off some old fabric that she doesn’t plan to sew with any more at a charity sewing shop there. We donated two large bags of fabric, and the staff were very happy to see it all. We stopped at a Persian cafe for a drink and snacks. I’ve had baklava there before, but today I opted for a slightly less sugary chocolate and strawberry cake, which was good.

We caught the ferry back home and are having a relaxing evening.

Finishing off pinhole cameras

This morning I had two online critical thinking classes. Then after lunch I went to Wenona School to finish off building pinhole cameras with the students – which we began work on last Thursday. I cut out holes for the different sized lenses we had and got the girls to tape the lenses into place, and then add tracing paper as a screen for the projection. We ran out of tracing paper and had to use tissue paper for the last two which turned out to be not as good as it has more texture to it, making the image not as clear. I’m hoping they can replace it with tracing paper.

Here are photos of the resulting cameras:

The largest diameter lens is on the left, stepping down in size to the right. So the projected image should get darker from left to right. It’s a little bit obscured by the fact that boxes 1 and 4 have the tissue paper, which isn’t as translucent as the tracing paper. But overall the project worked really well!

The science head is going to try to get the boarding school girls to take photos of the moon over this weekend when we get a full moon, to use for the 3D stereo effect. Hopefully they can get that achieved properly.

I walked back home, and on the way I passed the shop that has 3D-printed D&D and gaming scenery. It’s always been closed when I’ve walked past before, but today it was open! And there was a guy inside painting scenery. So I popped in to have a look and chat to him. He was happy to have a chat and we talked for several minutes about miniature models and playing D&D. Turns out this guy is also running an Old School D&D game, using the Swords & Wizardry retroclone of the original 1974 D&D rules. So it was cool to swap some stories about our campaigns.

The weather was warm today, reaching 24°C, the warmest day since early May. On Monday the forecast is 27°C!

I got home and taught three more classes in the evening, and baked a sourdough loaf which I’d made earlier. Phew!

Desert island books

This morning the builder who does jobs around the apartment block came in to inspect our window sills. They’ve been water damaged over the years, being made of wood, and we discovered they can be replaced at the expense of the collective building maintenance fund, rather than us individually, so we’re going to have them replaced. The guy came in to confirm the damage and measure up the windows for new ones. We want the work completed before we get the place repainted at the end of October.

I had two individual classes today, one for the student doing basic science. We did a precipitation experiment, using epsom salts and washing soda, and went over states of matter and how they relate to molecular structure. The second one was essay writing, where the student and I went through a sample essay he wrote on zoo animals.

Then this evening I had three classes on the new critical thinking topic: Stranded on a Desert Island. One question I ask is the classic “What one book would you want with you?” Most of the kids opted for a survival manual, very practically. But I had one class where the answers were as follows:

A survival manual
Little Women
A big book, to use as a raft
Robinson Crusoe

I asked the last kid if he didn’t think Robinson Crusoe would be a bit depressing to read if stranded yourself, and he said no, it would be inspiring. Well, maybe, I guess.

Dental day

Today I wrote my class plan for the next week of critical thinking. The topic is “Stranded on a Desert Island”. I’ll be asking the kids questions about survival and rescue, both alone, and also as part of a group of strangers. One question will be asking them if a waterproof bag washes up with them with one book and piece of gear in it (other than a radio or anything else that would mean easy rescue), what book and gear would they choose.

While thinking about this, I casually browsed some survival books on the Internet, and I ran across this interesting looking one: The Book: The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding a Civilization.

When I’d finished, I had to dash up to the dentist, for my regular dental hygiene and check-up appointment. And when I got there, guess what book was on the waiting room table:

The very book I’d been looking at online less than an hour before! So of course I had a good flip through it while waiting for my appointment. It does look very interesting, although not nearly as practical a survival guide as some others. It’s a lot more eclectic and fun than a useful guide.

The hygienist gave me a clean bill of health after cleaning my teeth, but the dentist took x-rays and suggested some work to fix an old filling that is starting to deteriorate, before it causes problems. I need to schedule that work in some time in the next few weeks.

After the appointment I went to my wife’s work and picked up Scully to bring her home for the afternoon. I did some comic writing, and then an online class this evening before relaxing for the night.

Another long run on a busy Monday

Monday… 4 critical thinking classes, up to 1pm. Then I had lunch, and then went for a run. I ran 7.5 km today, trying to keep up this new habit of doing longer than 5k at least once a week.

Then I had a shower, and it was almost time to head into town for my university teaching. I went in and tried a new place for dinner called Cheeky Bao, which does bao bun burgers, an interesting fusion of Asian and Western cuisine. I tried the Korean fried chicken burger, but only discovered after it arrived that this wasn’t one of the signature bao bun burgers – it came on a regular style bun. Oh well, it was still good.

The lecture tonight was on machine learning classification for image recognition. Pretty easy for me as the tutorial section was more a demo than questions for the students to work through, so I didn’t have to do as much interaction as usual.

Picking paint colours

Today I went to the hardware store with my wife to look at the range of paint colours and grab some brochures and paint swatches to bring back home. We want to change up the colour scheme of our place a little as we plan towards getting it repainted in October. We grabbed about a dozen different “white” shades and very light “neutral” shades, and then picked a bunch of colours that we like to consider doing accents in places like the architraves, skirting boards, and cornices.

One of my friends suggested a feature wall in a different colour, and I explored today with taking photos of the interior and opening them in Photoshop and selecting walls and changing colour overlays to simulate painting them different colours. This achieved the effect of making my wife say to thank my friend for suggesting it, because now she knows for sure that she doesn’t want a feature wall.

We also received a quote for the painting from the painter who came to look on Friday. It’s roughly what we expected, so we asked to go ahead and book a date. The painter is away on a holiday for the start of October, but the best time for us to do the painting is the week of 13-17 October, because that coincides with my next ISO Photography Standards meeting. It’s in California, but I’m not flying over, and will be attending online. I need to take the week off from teaching Outschool classes so I can do the meeting, which will be 11pm to 7am in my time zone – absolutely the worst possible. So I’ll need daytime to recover, and won’t be up to teaching classes. If we can get the painting done the same week, it would mash the inconvenience together into just one week.

But I suspect we’ll have to get the painting done the week after. Which is worse, but not terrible, as I can use the daytime in between my meeting nights to pack things away in preparation. It will be worse again if the painter can’t do it until another week later. So we have to wait and see when they’re available.

We’ve also invited our new neighbours over for a board games evening in a couple of weeks. We know they like modern board games, so it will be a good chance to actually sit down with them and get to know them better, compared to the very brief conversations we’ve had so far when bumping into each other in the hallways or garage.

Sketching at The Rocks

Friday night was online board games with my friends. We played some games of Jump Drive, Knarr, Can’t Stop, and Just One. Nothing really big or long, as people were popping in and out with things they needed to do. I made pizza for dinner in the middle of a game, another guy took his dog for a walk, and so on.

During the day I did my usual critical thinking classes.

After lunch we had a painter come in to inspect the place and prepare a quote for repainting our apartment. We’ve decided to bite the bullet and get that job done. It will be a big job, requiring packing a lot of things into moving boxes and storing them in the garage so we can move the furniture into the middle of rooms to allow access to the walls for the painters. The guy said it would take a full week to do the job. We’re planning to do this some time in October or November.

Today I did a 5k run in the morning. The day was very cold and very windy. A cold front system is blowing up from the south, bringing a lot of cold air. We were supposed to get snow on the Blue Mountains west of Sydney overnight, but I don’t know if that actually happened or not. It only snows up there about once every three or four years.

Scully had a vet checkup to follow-up her tooth extraction last week. The vet said she’s doing well and can go back on crunchy foods. Then after that we dropped her off at the groomer for a full cut and wash. While Scully was at the groomer, my wife and I took the Metro into the city and used the opportunity to go places where we can’t take Scully. We got off at Barangaroo and walked over to The Rocks.

We browsed around in a art supply shop and bought a few things. I found some fillable brushes with actual bristles, that you can fill with ink or liquid watercolour. I’m going to try them with ink for drawing. Then we stopped at La Renaissance, a French patisserie, and had some pain au chocolat. I did a sketch while sitting at the table outside the patisserie.

We moved to a bench seat by the street across from The Garrison Church, and where we also had a view of the Harbour Bridge. Mt wife sketched the Bridge, while I started work on the church. Unfortunately, about a quarter of the way finished, a bus pulled up and parked right in front of us, entirely blocking our view! The driver turned the engine off and got out, having a break. I had to walk around the bus and stand on the other side, next to the traffic, to finish drawing the church.

After heading back and picking up Scully from the groomer we went out to our local pizza place for dinner. Normally I have pizza, but tonight I tried a fettuccine with lamb ragu and mushrooms, which was really nice.

Making pinhole cameras

After two online classes in the morning, I did a 5k run today. When I got home I had lunch and then had a shower and left to go in to Wenona School for a second visit to help do science things with the students there.

Today I was working with some Year 8 students, helping them make pinhole cameras, both with open pinholes and also ones with lenses in the hole to focus the light and produce a brighter image. The lab assistant brought out a collection of dozens of lenses, many of which were in paper sleeves marked with diameters and focal lengths. I asked if the focal lengths were likely to be correct and she almost laughed as she said no.

So the first order of business was the find a set of lenses of different diameters with roughly the same focal lengths. We found four different diameter lenses, and there were many of the two middle diameters. We measured the focal lengths by holding them up and using the lenses to focus the view out a window into a sharp image on a white board, and measuring the distance from the board to the lens. Some of the focal lengths were too short, but we found a good set with lengths around 20 centimetres.

Then I got the girls to help cutting cardboard boxes (which held reams of copier paper) to lengths matching the different focal lengths. The lab assistant had brought out Stanley knives to do the cutting because I’d requested some when emailing the science coordinator about equipment. But I realised it might not be a good idea to have 13-year-olds using such knives and called over the coordinator to ask. Lucky I did, because she said that the girls were definitely not allowed to use them. But they could use scissors, so I got them to work cutting boxes with scissors.

I used a Stanley knife myself to cut a circular hole in one to fit one of the lenses, and had some girls use tape to affix the lens in place. Then they taped a sheet of tracing paper over the open end of the box, and we tested it out. The lens projected an upside down image of the view out the window onto the tracing paper and it was nice and sharp! It worked beautifully. This got the girls excited and they played with standing in front of the window and waving their arms while others watched the live image on the back of the box. It was pretty cool.

We ran out of time before completing all the boxes, but the partially complete ones were put on a trolley to be stored away safely for next time, when we’ll finish them off.

I headed home and then in the evening did three more critical thinking classes. Unfortunately, my Internet died during the first one, and I had to hurriedly open Zoom on my iPad (which has 4G) to continue. The second class I ran entirely on my iPad. It worked, but was a bit clunky. I had to hold the iPad in my hand the whole time to get a good camera angle for the video, and I couldn’t share prepared slides I had to illustrate some things. Fortunately the Internet came back in time for the third class. It’s been really flaky this week, dying multiple times on the weekend as well. I don’t know what’s going on with it.

Hopefully it won’t happen again…

A lesson on post-scarcity economies

Because I was busy with other things yesterday, I put off preparing my new critical thinking topic for the week to today. I had to do it in time for classes this evening, so I worked up a lesson plan on the topic of post-scarcity economy. I set it up by talking about how the prices of technology like TVs and computers has fallen enormously since their introduction. Televisions in particular I was a bit surprised to discover have fallen to about just 1% of their value when they were first invented in the 1930s, taking into account inflation. I ask the kids what if this trend continues and in the future TVs and computers become so cheap you could buy them for less than a dollar? Or even that they might be given away for free.

Then I follow up with getting them to imagine this applies to all products. Anything a person might need or conceivably want is super cheap, either free or effectively free. We discuss what a world like this would be like to live in. What people would do, if they didn’t need jobs to make money? Would there be more or less arts and science? Would it be a better or worse world than we have now?

I ran the first three classes tonight and it was really fascinating. Opinions of the kids ranged from “this will never be possible” to “this could happen within 30 years”. And from “it would be a utopia, everyone happy, doing the things they enjoy” to “it would be a nightmare, everyone lazy and nobody doing anything intellectual”. It’s hard to recall a more polarising topic that I’ve done. So it’s a good one!

It was warmish again today, but we had a heavy black sky roll in over lunch time, and I got caught in some light rain with Scully while out for a walk. It didn’t rain much though, and the sun came out again later in the afternoon.

On the problems I mentioned yesterday: I tried PayPal again today and this time I tried transferring an amount below what I discovered to be a single-transaction limit, and it worked. I only found this limit with a Google search – I couldn’t find any mention of it on PayPal’s user help pages. It’s definitely lower than amounts I’ve transferred successfully in the past, so it seems PayPal has introduced this limit without telling anyone (or me at least). Anyway, one problem solved.

The other one, backing up my wife’s new MacBook, I haven’t solved yet, but I did find this StackExchange post about what sounds like the same problem, with two different possible solutions. I’ll try them later when I have some time.

For relaxation I’ve started watching Project UFO on Netflix. It’s a four-part series which is sort of a Polish X-Files/Chernobyl mash-up set in the 1980s. Very Cold War Soviet-style vibe, with dry humour and UFO hunting. I’m very interested to see where it’s going and how it ends.