Random tangent (blog)
Ameel Khan's personal blog. This is a blog about life, technology, photography, typography, the internet, science, feminism, books, film, music, and whatever other random stuff I come across or happen to be interested in today.
The down side of voting just as the polls open on election day is that it’s too early for a democracy sausage. Oh well.
Photo of an empty schoolyard with two unattended plastic tables and a closed barbecue placed in front of the school buildings.
The up side is that we were done by 8:30am.
Selfie of a man and woman, bundled up in puffer jackets, standing across the street from a primary school that’s being used as a polling station.
Turns out I’m pretty decent at making pies :)
#WinningAtLife
Photo of a large slice of apple pie on a red coloured plate that’s being held up outdoors.
I made this pie using leftover gluten-free pastry from last week’s sweet potato pie – hence the sparse and rather amateurish lattice work with the remaining few bits of extra pastry!
And, for those who are interested, I followed this American apple recipe from SBS Food.
Photo of an apple pie cooling in a pie dish that’s been placed on a wire rack. This is an open pie with a sparse pastry lattice on top.
It’s nice to have a dog that responds well to antihistamines. Instead of congested snoring while you’re trying to work you get adorable, quiet snoring :)
Photo of a red/brown dog curled up and asleep in a fuzzy orange bed. The dog’s face is nuzzled into the wall of the bed, and it has its paws tucked up in front of it.
There are four types of tech users:
Regular users: they only use what works; they do things the way they’ve always done them; they aren’t good at troubleshooting
Power users: they know how and, more importantly, why things work the way they do; they can troubleshoot, find solutions, and find workarounds
Fixers: when something goes wrong, they don’t just find a workaround, they actually figure out what’s happened and then they properly fix it
Hackers: they figure out why things went wrong and how else things can go wrong; they find the edge cases that make things go wrong
I bring this up because, while I’m usually a fixer, when I don’t have enough fucks to give I’m happy to just be a power user.
Screenshot of a Kindle Store page taken from an Amazon Kindle Oasis device.
Case in point: since my Kindle Oasis firmware got updated last week it has refused to open the book that I was reading when the update took place.
I’d tried everything short of completely factory-resetting the device when I found a workaround: if I go to that book in the Kindle store (via the device) and once there I click the ‘Read’ button, the book opens and works just fine. So that’s what I’m doing now.
Is this a pain? Yes. Does it fix the problem? No. Do I know why there’s a problem? Probably. Do I care enough to do something about it? No.
And so I keep using the workaround :)
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Tom Eastman posted this back in 2018:
Screenshot of a tweet from Tom Eastman posted on 4 December 2018 that reads “I’m old enough to remember when the Internet wasn’t a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four”.
He’s not wrong, and I get the point he’s trying to make: the internet is full of walled gardens and, by design, it’s difficult to talk across the boundaries.
But a few thousand years ago this could’ve been someone complaining that their valley is a group of five villages, each consisting of people telling stories they heard in the other four.
So while, yes, it is shitty that there isn’t more interoperability across social networks, I think it’s beautiful that humans love sharing stories they’ve seen and heard elsewhere with their own tribes — and that we’ll continue to do so, no matter what walls people build around us for their own financial benefit.
Yay for homemade, gluten free, sweet potato pie!
This is the first time I’ve made this pie and also first time I’ve made gluten free shortcrust pastry from scratch. Both turned out really well :)
Photo of a hand holding up a small plate on which there’s a slice of homemade sweet potato pie.
Today is my fifteenth blogging anniversary!
Well, at least that’s how long I’ve been blogging on insanityworks.org using syndicated blogging software. Before that I would add occasional life updates to a couple of static pages on this site.
Screenshot of an old webpage with a block of text titled “Summer/Winter 2006 onwards: Melbourne Business School”.
It’s been interesting to see how internet communication has changed over the years that I’ve been doing this. We started with plain blogging (with blog rings for discovery and RSS for pull notifications) and then added microblogging, photo sharing, videoblogging, podcasts, and now mailing lists.
Interest in longform personal blogging dropped off many years ago thanks to the rise of
microblogging (tweets take so much less effort to write),
photo sharing (super easy to share just a photo with a caption), and
video blogging (simultaneously both easier and more difficult to do).
The shuttering of Google Reader only sped things along.
At the same time commercialisation got a lot of personal bloggers to start blogging professionally instead.
Now podcasting is following a similar trajectory: we’ve gone from lots of small personal podcasts to increasingly commercial interests muscling in to this space. And what are TikTok videos if not a mashup of microblogs and video blogs?
Long exposure photo of a train going down a track behind some trees.
There has been movement in both directions though. People write lengthy, threaded microblogs which are basically just longform blogs split into small paragraphs. And lots of branding- and commercially-minded people have moved their writing to subscription-only mailing lists instead of public blogs. So the era of longer writing is having a bit of a comeback.
That said, us personal bloggers have kept on keeping on all these years. There were lean times during which I didn’t blog much, yes, but I’ve been pretty consistent these last few years. And I’m quite happy with the volume and quality of my current blogging output.
So here’s to fifteen more years!
When you hit the jackpot on your walk but the asshole holding your leash doesn’t let you claim your winnings.
Photo of a red/brown dog amongst some greenery. The dog is straining at her leash, trying to reach some fast food that’s been dumped next to a bush. This food includes lots of chips, a burger, some dim sims, and more than half a large pizza.
Might not be a lovely, sunny day in Melbourne today, but we still had a lovely walk in the drizzle.
Selfie of a man walking a red/brown dog on a residential street on an rainy day. The man is wearing a light grey rain jacket with the hood pulled over his head. The jacket is wet in large patches. The dog is on a grass strip next to the road and is looking at something off-camera.
T = love? That's not something I’ve seen or heard in the trans community before – but, hey, you learn something new every day. Hormone therapy *is* love.
Photo of white coloured sky writing on a mostly clear blue sky. The text is upside down from this angle, but read correctly it shows the Christian cross symbol (meaning Jesus Christ, as represented by his crucifixion), the equal sign, and a heart shape. So the writing reads “Christ is love”.
(Or is that † = love because of Easter, meaning “Christ is love”? Nah.)
When the human has stayed up way past your bedtime…but you don’t want to abandon your awake human to go sleep in the bedroom with your asleep human.
Photo of a red/brown dog fast asleep inside of a round, fuzzy, orange dog bed. The dog is curled up on its side with its face smushed against the fuzzy wall, and with all four of its paws in front of it.
It’s a gorgeous day in Melbourne today and Maggie is making the most of it. (I’m a little jealous.)
Photo of a red/brown dog fast asleep on its side in a residential garden on a bright, sunny day.
Turns out if you need to pour cement into a block at the back of a good sized residential property then this is the crane you need.
Photo of two trucks parked back-to-back on a residential street. One truck is a cement mixer and the other truck has a tall crane on it. The two are connected via a large pipe.
It might be loud, but it certainly does the job.
Photo of a truck parked on a residential street. The truck has a tall crane built into it. The crane has a long pipe running through it. The pipe is pouring concrete into the very back of an empty plot of land.
It is a little disconcerting to have a four story tall crane teaching into the sky just a couple of houses away from yours though!
Photo of a residential street with cars parked on it. Also on the street is a truck with a four story tall crane that is reaching out to the back of one of the properties on this street.
It’s finally time…
Screenshot of a window titled ‘Windows Update’ that reads “Upgrade to Windows 11 is ready—and it’s free!” and “Get the latest version of Windows, with a new look, new features, and enhanced security” plus a button that reads “Download and install”.
This upgrade notification comes six months and five days after Windows 11 was officially released.
And it’s almost exactly a week after I did an in-place Windows 10 upgrade to fix a corrupt print services install that had been messing with my regular Windows updates.
Screenshot of a window titled ‘Windows Update’ with heading that reads “Error encountered” “There were some problems installing updates, but we'll try again later”.
For weeks I’d been getting that unhelpful 0x800f0831 error when trying to update Windows.
To fix this I ran the Windows Update troubleshooter and tried all the troubleshooting tips I could find on the web. Nothing worked.
I then pored through the Windows Update install logs to see what was wrong. I found the error — a Windows install-on-demand printer service installation had been corrupted — but nothing I tried to do fixed that issue.
In the end I had to overwrite my current Windows install with an in-place Windows 10 upgrade. #NucularOption
That finally cleared the logjam because now it’s upgrade time…
Time card image from the SpongeBob cartoon series that reads “Two hours later”.
…and after lots of downloading, installing, rebooting, Windows updating, and app updating, I’m finally all set to enjoy Windows 11!
Screenshot of a welcome window titled “Hi Ameel” that reads “Let’s make sure everything is set up just how you want it” and has a button labelled “Get started”.
So far it’s great!
The Australian federal election has been called for 21 May 2022.
As a result, ABC have launched the 2022 version of their Vote Compass, which is “a tool developed by political scientists to help you explore how your views align with those of the election candidates”.
No surprises on where I fall along that spectrum.
Screenshot titled “Vote Compass” and “Australia 2022 Federal Election”. Below that there are two visuals.
One is a grid chart titled “How you fit in the political landscape”. The horizontal axis of this chart shows whether you’re on the economic left or right; the vertical axis shows whether you’re socially conservative or progressive. In the economic right and socially conservative corner is a marker for the Liberal-National Coalition (LNP). Close to the exact middle is a marker for the Australian Labor Party (ALP). In the economic left and socially progressive corner is a marker for the Australian Greens (GRN). In the top left quadrant (economically left and socially progression) is a marker that shows where I stand. This is located between the Greens and the ALP, but much closer to the Greens.
The second visual is a bar chart titled “How much agree with the parties” and it shows that I agree 90% with the Australian Greens, 60% with the Australian Labor Party, and 33% with the Liberal-National Coalition.
An excellent way to spend your Sunday afternoon.
Photo of a red/brown dog sleeping soundly on a human bed with its head propped up on a pillow.
And not just one, but two packets of chips to yearn for!
Photo of a red/brown dog on a red leash twisting its head sideways as it tries to reach for a couple of brightly coloured empty packets of potato chips mere centimetres away from her on the other side of a chain link fence.
They make all that effort to add random spaces in words so automated SMS spam filters don’t block their attempted spam/phish…and then the spam filters effortlessly figure it out and block their messages anyway.
(งಠ_ಠ)ง
Another year, another fantastic Barbell Babes Brigade lifting party for Nadia – with one equal and two new personal bests!
Photo of a woman in a large indoor power lifting gym. The woman is wearing black exercise gear, wrist straps, and a lifting belt and is smiling at the camera. She is leaning on a barbell with heavy weights on it that’s been placed on a lifting rack.
This year’s results:
Squat: 90kg
Bench press: 50kg
Deadlift: 107.5kg (up from 65kg just two years ago!)
Photo of a woman smiling broadly at the camera. The woman is wearing a sleeveless black exercise top and is standing in a large power lifting gym.
#JustStrong
Photo of the back of a woman’s head. The woman is standing in a large power lifting gym. She is wearing a sleeveless black exercise top and her hair has been arranged into a bun that’s being held together with paint brushes.
Maggie was only a little stressed at the vet today. Her visits usually end up net positive though, because the *second* the vet gives her a treat all her stress goes out the window :)
Photo of a red/brown dog standing in a large waiting area, looking up at the photographer. The dog’s mouth is open because she’s panting and her ears are pulled back slightly from the typical alert position. She looks a little stressed.
This is personal website of Nadia Niaz and Ameel Zia Khan. Here we document our lives in Melbourne, Australia.
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia