Media - Page 9 | virtualwolf.org

A photo of a bowl of laksa in a white takeaway container. It consists of thin noodles with a chilli coconut soup all over it, there are pieces of barbecue pork scattered throughout, and two big pieces of tofu on top.

Nothing major today, I even left work on time, but we did go to our favourite laksa place for lunch (Laksa King on Erskine St) and I'm happy to confirm that it's still excellent. 😎

I always forget just how slow the week passes when you're in the office every day though, I can't believe it's only Wednesday today.

darkroom food portrait mode laksa in the office

Posted on 12 November 2025, 19:23

A photo of the Sydney Opera House, behind it and partly obscured by the Opera House is the distinctive coathanger shape of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. There's some blue sky at the right but most of the sky is cloudy, though in a somewhat dramatic way rather than a bland and boring and flat way.

A photo of gulab jamun, an Indian dessert. It's a single brown round ball sitting in a little silver dish.

For day two, we went for a lovely (if rather windy) afternoon walk up to Circular Quay and around to Mrs Macquarie's Chair, then went for dinner at an Indian restaurant called The Grand Palace. 👌🏻

In related news, I am very full.

darkroom food sydney opera house sydney harbour bridge in the office

Posted on 11 November 2025, 20:23

A photo in portrait orientation taken from the fourth floor of our building, looking down Carrington St in Sydney. There are tall buildings on on the left, and a bunch of trees and greenery on the right, with more tall buildings rising up in the distance past the greenery. It's completely sunny and the sky is totally blue except for a single fluffy cloud.

I'm in the office today, and for this entire week which is going to be a hell of a shock. We've got a team event where we've flown in the whole department from all over the place, so I'm going to be non-stop peopling and am going to be so drained come the end of the week, heh.

sydney darkroom buildings in the office

Posted on 10 November 2025, 12:46

A photo of the battlefield at the beginning of the game. It's played on a roughly six-by-four foot play mat that's decorated like grass, and the terrain is almost fantasy-looking, there are some sections of hills and a bunch of various stone ruins. Closest to the camera are the orange-clad Space Marines, including two large walkers (the Dreadnaughts) and a gravtank with a big lasgun on its turret), and on the opposite side are the hordes of "Tyranids", which all look like a cross between crabs and the actual Tyranid models. There are a ton of small ones, and two HUGE ones that a towering over everything else.

A closeup photo of one of the large "Tyranid" units ( I don't remember what it was, but it's all chitin and huge claws and if it was actually alive and real size would scare the fuck out of you) towering over a squad of Space Marines.

Today started with me hopping on the Metro first thing after breakfast to go to Crows Nest to pick up my last two fully serviced and restrung guitars (the Ibanez JIVA10 and the Epiphone SG Standard), then I headed over to a friend's place for lunch (it was tuna mornay and it was gooooooood) and to hang out and watch a game of Warhammer 40,000! It was Space Marines versus "Tyranids", where the Tyranid miniatures were some custom 3D-printed alien crab things. They didn't end up doing the final turn because the Space Marines were already ahead 50-35 and it wasn't going to be possible to bridge that gap.

There was some hilarious dice rolling though, including a squad of 20 Termagaunts firing their Spinefist weapons at a squad of Space Marine Scouts, which involved rolling forty dice. 😂 (The Scouts ended up dead, unsurprisingly.)

warhammer 40k darkroom gaming games workshop guitar tyranids seven hills space marines

Posted on 8 November 2025, 18:38

A screenshot of the "King of VHS" app on the iPad. It's basically a screen full of nothing but knobs and dials, with a very 80s-looking feel to them.

I've discovered that there are a bunch of synth apps available on the iPad, and they work magnificently with my little Arturia MiniLab 3 keyboard. This may be a very large rabbit hole I'm about to fall down. :ohno:

(At least I'm not getting into actual physical synths though.)

music screenshot midi keyboard

Posted on 4 November 2025, 21:15

I've been doing some transcribing of songs following the lesson on justinguitar.com, and someone in the discussion forum linked to another batch of 15 that were good to do. They're just power chords and I'm just doing the initial riff and not doing anything fancy, but I was going through some of them this afternoon using Transcribe! (also on Justin's recommendation) and I managed to totally nail The Donnas "New Kid in School" and Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit"!

Posted on 26 October 2025, 21:23

A photo of a standard-looking silver 16" M1 MacBook Pro sitting on my desk. It has two Deep Space Nine stickers on it, one shows has Garak the Cardassian from the chest up standing there smiling with his hands up as if in greeting, he's looking very pleased and it says "Friend of Garak". Behind him is a rainbow. The other sticker is Major Kira holding a Bajoran phaser upwards in front of her and pressing a button on top of it, with the caption "This machine kills fascists." (Presumably she's setting her phaser to kill.)

This toot is brought to you by my ex-work MacBook Pro that I installed Asahi Linux on! (I figured I'd chuck a couple of stickers on it to distinguish it from my completely and utterly identical-looking M4 MacBook Pro work machine that arrived last week.)

Gotta say I'm extremely impressed with the job the Asahi team has done, the installer was a breeze, it all Just Worked and I even have working brightness and audio keys (and audio!) out of the box! I decided to go for the KDE environment, partially because I haven't used that since 2003 when I took this screenshot of KDE 3.1 back under Mac OS X when I was mucking around with running XWindows inside it, and partially because that's the Asahi team's main focus in terms of polish. I haven't pushed it yet but just doing light browsing and general poking around getting things set up, the battery life is exactly what I'd expect the machine to be under macOS; right now it's reading 85% charge and 10 hours of battery life remaining, and it's completely cool and silent.

I haven't looked into the keyboard shortcut swapping yet (having Ctrl-C be copy everywhere except in a terminal session where you have to remember to use Ctrl-Shift-C irritates the bejesus out of me every time, and in general I find the ergonomics of having the Command key position being the primary modifier to be far superior to Control) but that'll probably be my next mini-project. I got 1Password working, although they don't have a proper distribution of aarch64 binaries yet so I'm having to start it in a terminal session like some sort of barbarian. The browser extension works fine at least.

[EDIT] Well that was easy, someone wrote a thing called Toshy that takes all the hard work out of remapping everything!

our house darkroom linux

Posted on 26 October 2025, 20:14

A photo of a slice of lotus biscof cheesecake sitting in a plate. It has three layers and the top has a really intricate swirly pattern.

We went to Crows Nest today to drop my remaining two guitars off at Mannys for a restringing and full setup, and caught up with @[email protected] for coffee and sweets.

We get on the Metro at the very first stop, today there were a ton of people already there, 90% of them Indian and like 75% dressed in either Australia or India cricket jerseys (including kids being dressed in the Australia jerseys and their parents in Indian ones), and it turns out the third game of the Australia vs. India one-day match is today. It was a good vibe, everyone was cheerful but MAN was it absolutely chockers by the time we got off at Crows Nest!

I was wearing one of my Arch Enemy t-shirts and when I got into Mannys the guy behind the counter said "Cool t-shirt!" and then pointed out the Arch Enemy tattoo he had. And then on the walk back to the carpark on the way home someone was wearing a Fear Factory Obsolete t-shirt, and we both did the metalhead nod of recognition to each other, haha.

darkroom food portrait mode crows nest guitar dessert

Posted on 25 October 2025, 15:00

We had our air conditioning unit replaced today, the old one worked but holy crap it was loud and the unit that lives in the roof had this incredibly irritating high-pitched whine. You couldn't notice it too much during the day when there was ambient noise, but at night we would have to wear earplugs or it'd keep us up. 😫

Definitely not a great day for it given we just inched over 40˚C, so I can only imagine what it was like up in the roof, I was genuinely concerned for the two tradies who needed to go up there! Now that it's all done though, wow, it feels like we have grown-up aircon. It's so quiet I legit can't hear it over the sound of the fridge, and even on the maximum fan speed it's barely audible! This new unit is a Daikin which apparently interfaces far better with the AirTouch system we got last year, and it seems to use less power as far as I can tell and the temperature control is a lot better.

our house renovations text only

Posted on 22 October 2025, 20:42

A screenshot of the "Course Complete" achievement you get when you finish the course. It looks like a round badge, it's black with flames in the background, and says in a very angular metal-looking font "course complete" on it.

Almost exactly two and a half years since I got my bass guitar, I have finished the BassBuzz "Beginner to Badass" course! 🎉 I probably would have finished it a bit faster but a) I have too many other hobbies, and b) around the start of this year they released an entirely revamped course with better videos and lessons so I decided to start totally afresh from the beginning.

I still wouldn't say I'm anywhere near a good bass player (I feel like an utter noob when playing with people at work), but obviously I'm going to keep practicing, and there was a final video in the course giving suggestions on a bunch of lessons to go through and check off to ensure you can really smash them, plus some tips on where to go next and how to build a practice routine. There are also some "masterclass" videos that introduce playing with a pick, slap bass, and a few other things that I'll make my way through too.

screenshot bass guitar

Posted on 17 October 2025, 21:40