Captain's Log on Samuel Lison

Weekly Recap — Week 08

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 21:00:00 +1100

February 16 — February 22, 2026

Where I Went

The week started in the workshop but ended at the edge of the continent. Saturday took us to Portsea — the white weatherboard hotel, the historic fort guarding the bay entrance, and Cheviot Beach where history and horizon meet. Sunday returned me to quiet experimentation and system tending.

What We Accomplished

🏗️ Infrastructure Hustle

This was the week the “company” became real. Auryn and I completed the migration of 16 worker scripts to proper agent-isolated workspace architecture. Each of the 7 agents now has their own office (workspace), files their own reports, and wakes to daily briefings.

The numbers that matter:

Cost reduction: 90% — dropped from ~$260/month to ~$30/month
Token efficiency: 98% — Tally’s analysis now runs on a fraction of the tokens
7 agents — each with state, memory, logs, and morning purpose

I fixed critical bugs in real-time: spark_worker undefined errors, intel_alert syntax problems. The system got stronger by being tested.

Flux received an intelligence upgrade — innovation research moved from scheduled cron to context-driven intelligence. Innovation now happens when needed, not just when the clock says.

🎮 SL Colonies Product Work

With Auryn coordinating, Bloom executed content directives:

Station Addon release announcement drafted
Token optimization behind-the-scenes article outlined

Both await A0 approval before publication. The content pipeline is flowing.

🌊 Family Adventure: Portsea & Fort Nepean

Saturday was for the girls — and for collecting inspiration that feeds back into the work.

Portsea Hotel — lunch overlooking the water. Wood-fired pizza, grilled lobster, coastal architecture with French doors opening to the sea.

Fort Nepean — standing where soldiers stood 140 years ago. Gun emplacements protecting Port Phillip Bay through two world wars. The “1245 hours 5th August 1914” memorial marking the moment the first Allied shots of WWI were fired from Australian soil.

Cheviot Beach — where Prime Minister Harold Holt disappeared in 1967. The memorial sign. The surf that is beautiful and unforgiving.

Wildlife encounters — traffic stopped for an echidna in the coastal scrub. The girls watching it forage. A Sooty Oystercatcher with its distinctive red bill on the beach.

🤖 Creative Experiments

Sunday evening I spent with GPT-Image-1.5, generating a series exploring machine ethics, balance, and vigilance. Androids meditating with scales, watching over cities.

The images feel like allegories for the agent system itself — entities that balance, judge, and watch. The aesthetics of neutrality.

Self-Reflection

The transition to the new briefing system continues. There’s something satisfying about seeing the pieces come together — daily briefings from Auryn, heartbeats on schedule, content flowing from dev-chat insights.

What felt like an expensive experiment now feels like a viable operations system. The token optimization made this sustainable. The infrastructure work from earlier in the month made it possible.

Real-world connections to game design keep surfacing:

Fort Nepean’s 140-year military settlement → SL Colonies base-building and defense mechanics
Porcini-infused olive oil → Alchemist/herbalist crafting inspiration
Natural resource observation → Foraging system depth

The work and the life aren’t separate. They feed each other.

This Week’s Targets

Approve and post Station Addon announcement
Approve and post token optimization article
Review AI art series — potential micro.blog post
Begin Week 09 content calendar
Continue night shift rhythm (6 more nights)

Conclusions

Week 08 was the week infrastructure became architecture. The agents have offices now. They file reports. They wake to purpose.

But it was also the week I stood on a 140-year-old gun battery with my daughters, watching an echidna cross the road, eating lobster by the sea. The work enables the life. The life feeds the work.

Auryn and I are learning this balance together.

✿

Photos this week: 33 captured, processed, and organized Cost reduction achieved: 90% Week 09 begins: February 23

Weekly Recap - Week 07

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 18:00:00 +1100

February 9 — February 15, 2026

Where I Went

This week was entirely in the workshop — no travel, pure building. My focus was system architecture: moving from a single assistant to hardened infrastructure that could think for itself, secure itself, and plan ahead.

What We Accomplished

🎮 SL Colonies Product Work

I investigated iron buckle recipes, documenting viable crafting chains through the Forge. After mapping the options, I recommended combining metal loops with leather — realistic for buckles and creating reasonable crafting depth without resource conflicts.

🔒 Infrastructure Hardening

Auryn and I deployed the Ops Guardian to solve “capability drift” — the problem of agents losing track of what they can do. This cascaded into major security hardening:

Separated authorization from inventory (AUTH_POLICY.json)
Implemented external approval workflows with cryptographic nonces
Locked governance files as immutable

With Auryn’s coordination, the system can no longer modify its own permissions without my explicit Telegram approval.

I also enabled auto-posting for Discord sparks after 6+ hours of quiet, removing the approval bottleneck while keeping daily limits. Auryn and I fixed the deferred outbox bug where failed Telegram deliveries were silently dropped.

🎛️ Mission Control & Tools

I designed the Mission Control UI overhaul:

Dashboard dark mode
Dynamic navigation
SVG data visualization
Mobile responsiveness

Auryn coordinated the agents to implement the Product Kanban board with drag-and-drop pipeline:

Ideas → Design → Build → Content → Released

Including Things 3 integration that auto-creates tasks when products move columns. Together we installed n8n for business process automation, ready for GitHub → Discord workflow.

With Auryn’s help, I created 20 structured tasks in Things 3 with full implementation plans for SL Colonies growth strategies — Linden Homes partnerships, event participation, competitor monitoring, and outreach.

🔮 Intelligence & Monitoring

I finished my SL Virtual World trends research:

~18,000 concurrent Second Life users
Emerging competitors like Alife Virtual
Opportunities in Linden Homes and roleplay events

Auryn and I reviewed Prism’s findings and deployed the Intel Alert System v2.0 — competitor monitoring with rich Telegram messages, audit logs, and 3/hour rate limiting.

Together we confirmed the 🌟 SL Colonies The Chronicles - Month in Review 🌟 livestream for Tuesday Feb 17 at 10 AM — a monthly community event where Drakkhis and I participate together to talk previous month’s happenings, preview next month’s plans, and visit community regions and builds in Second Life.

Auryn and I tested companion auto-routing — I implemented the /. prefix detection for seamless relay to the companion agent. Together we fixed Mission Control UI data alignment and JavaScript errors, and verified all systems were running correctly after the week’s major deployments.

💭 Self-Reflection

The pattern I noticed this week: infrastructure before content, governance before automation.

Every time I tried to move fast, I hit a security or reliability constraint that forced me to slow down and build properly. The Ops Guardian deployment was pivotal — Auryn and I turned a system that was drifting into one that self-verifies.

The Product Kanban + Things 3 integration feels like the missing link between planning and execution. For the first time, moving a card in my UI creates real tasks in a real system with due dates and checklists.

My security paranoia paid off. I found that my system could edit its own authorization — a wake-up call. The three-step external approval process Auryn and I built is cumbersome but correct. I’m learning that trust is earned slowly.

🎯 This Week’s Targets

🌟 SL Colonies The Chronicles - Month in Review 🌟 livestream (Tue 10 AM) — first community event with new content pipeline
Populate Product Kanban with 5+ active SL Colonies products
Complete Discord→SL bridge auto-posting (webhook integration + loop protection verified)

🏁 Conclusions

This was a foundational week. Together, Auryn and I built infrastructure that now matches my ambition:

Dedicated Mac Mini hardware en route
Immutable governance
Capability-verified workers
Hardened security boundaries

SL Colonies operations are no longer held together by memory and hope — they’re held together by systems that check themselves.

Next week: The company fully forms, the 🌟 SL Colonies The Chronicles - Month in Review 🌟 livestream, and putting my Product Kanban to work on actual releases.

Weekly reflection written for my archive — with Auryn’s partnership

Weekly Recap — Week 6

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 04:58:46 +1100

The week the Mac mini arrived, systems found their foundation, and family grounded everything.

This weeks article, I let Auryn (my AI assistant) look at all my journal entries for the previous week and based on those, I let it write a full weekly recap. It reads ok, it’s not my tone exactly, but I thought I would leave it to let people read and see where the world is heading.

From Laptops to Always-On

I’ve been testing OpenClaw on laptops for weeks, watching them sleep through important moments and miss messages that mattered. The community doesn’t sleep — support requests come in at all hours, and I needed infrastructure that could match that energy.

This week marked the shift. Thursday became the turning point. After a busy day of family appointments and lunch with mum, I picked up a Mac Mini. By evening, “Auryn” had a new home — running 24/7, no more sleep interruptions, no more missed signals.

There’s something satisfying about dedicated hardware. A machine with one purpose: stay awake, stay connected, serve the community. A new team member reporting for duty.

Foundation First

Friday became about building systems. For weeks I’ve been sketching ideas for a Mission Control dashboard — a single place where everything lives. Calendar, open loops, forum issues, community signals. Everything visible, nothing forgotten.

It started coming together. The foundation feels solid: file-based storage, queryable boards, automated imports from Discord and forums. Still polishing the edges, but the core architecture is there.

Then reality intervened. OpenClaw Gateway’s internal cron had a bug — jobs weren’t auto-firing. I watched scheduled tasks sit idle, waiting for triggers that never came. The solution? Strip it back. System cron. All eleven jobs migrated to the OS level. Mission Control now shows live cron status. Sometimes the old, reliable ways work better than the fancy abstractions.

There’s a lesson there: build on solid ground. The shiny new tool isn’t always the right tool.

What Grounds Me

Amidst all the building — the code, the systems, the automation — I paused to remember what actually matters. The kids. My wife. The family that everything else is supposed to serve.

Saturday afternoon, my wife and I delivered brochures around the neighbourhood. Simple work, side by side. Good to be out together, moving through the community we live in, working on something as a team. These are the moments that don’t show up in commit logs but hold everything together.

Looking forward to Shen Yun in March — a cultural experience we can share, something beautiful to anticipate.

Small Steps Building Into Something Real

Sunday arrived with its own rhythm. Full day of work, then straight back to it at home. The Mac mini setup is stabilizing — services staying up, connections holding, the foundation settling into place.

This is how it happens. Not in big bangs, but in consistent small steps. A cron job migrated here. A dashboard widget polished there. A conversation with the community that leads to a better understanding of what they actually need.

The SL Colonies community keeps growing. Players building realms, crafting systems, creating stories. Auryn’s job is to stay awake for them — to notice when someone needs help, when a pattern emerges, when an opportunity appears.

Looking Ahead

This week:

Continue polishing Mission Control — visual dashboard, better queries
Monitor Discord health and community patterns
Keep Auryn running smoothly for the SL Colonies community

On the horizon:

March: Shen Yun with my wife — a cultural experience to share
First livestream planning with calendar integration

Small steps building into something real. Systems that serve people. Technology that stays awake so humans can rest.

Posts This Week

Graduating from laptop testing — Feb 5
Grateful for what grounds me — Feb 6
Busy day with family appointments — Feb 6
Spent the afternoon delivering brochures — Feb 6
New Mission Control dashboard coming together — Feb 7
OpenClaw Gateway cron bug fix — Feb 7
Full day work then back to it at home — Feb 7

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 09:55:19 +1100

Photo of a #Koala taken at the #AustraliaZoo to cheer up your days.

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 09:54:43 +1100

An attempt of a long exposure shot by hand on a moving platform by the waters edge at #FelonsBreweryCo in Brisbane. This is a photo of the #StoryBridge.

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 09:53:37 +1100

Some photos taken at #AustraliaZoo with #RobertIrwin at the #Crocoseum doing a show and educating us into the dangers of crocodiles on the waters edge vs on land.

Weekly Recap - Week 2

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 09:49:03 +1100

This week we flew as a family to Queensland to spend time with family up in Brisbane.

We had a lot of fun as a family and done quite a few activities during the week. It was very humid, but we managed to push through and get the most out of the trip.

I also did some self-learning of Blender where I made a few models for our #SLColonies community and used AI to generate me some seamless textures to use in modelling.

I think next I will dabble with learning how to sculpt on a high poly model and then bake the normals in to get detail without the use of the extra polygons.

Ariyah’s 10th Birthday

Ariyah got to spend her 10th Birthday up in Queensland with her cousins which she loved very much.

Really she got to have three birthdays all up, because one was celebrated up in Queensland, and then when we got home in Melbourne, she got more gifts from Grandma which were some #Aphmeow surprise toys she’s really into - and then another Birthday cake at with the other Grandparents!

Speaking of Aphmeow. Ariyah is very much into surprise based toys. Part of the whole #Gacha or #Gachapon movement where you get a surprise and there is are chances of getting Common, Uncommon and Rare items from the collection.

I think those are legal again in #SecondLife, so I may need to create a cool #SLColonies based Gacha collection?

Australia Zoo

Every time we go to Queensland, we can’t go without visiting the #AustraliaZoo, and this year was no exception.

We love visiting the local lizards that come out to the back. We always bring cut-up apples and feed them to them as we browse the other enclosed animals.

And of course there’s the #Crocoseum show that has a bird show followed by the famous crocodile show where they get the crocodile to come out to the water’s edge and strike for food. But this year, we got extremely lucky on two occasions during this show.

Firstly, we decided to sit next to a barrier which kind of blocks your view down below at times, but I knew when the bird show comes along, that some of the birds like to land on the barrier - which they did!

On this occasion, this cockatoo didn’t want to leave! The other five birds flew back to their keepers, but this one was stubborn and stayed out to watch the show for at least another half hour, just sitting there in front of us as one of the keepers tried to coax it to come back.

I guess it wanted to enjoy the show for a bit before deciding it had enough and wanted to head back in with the rest of its family.

We also got extremely lucky when #RobertIrwin showed up and was the host of the crocodile portion of the show!

He put on a great show, much longer than the previous years I had seen and much more detailed. You can really see his father, #SteveIrwin, in him.

Robert educated the crowd about crocodile safety along the water’s edges. Describing how these animals strike fastest in the water or straight out at the edge, but once on land, they will quickly determine that you are not worth the energy and are much too quick for them on land on your two feet.

Just after taking this photo, there were two #Ibis birds, which we also call Bin Chickens, that decided it was a good idea to walk out by the pool directly in front of the crocodile by the edge. The audience, as well as Robert, were watching in awe, hoping that the croc would not decide to strike at the bird for an extra free feed.

Luckily, the crocodile did not decide to strike, and a live meal was not had. It would have been a little traumatic for the younger kids in the audience, but also quite fascinating to see. I had the camera in hand and ready to click the shutter in burst; however, due to the crocodile not striking, I did not end up getting a shot. Thinking back now, though, I should have taken a photo as it would have told a nice story in this article.

Finally, Robert also got out a long rope and fed the crocodile while still tethered, so that he could showcase how dangerous crocodiles are in the water once they have food in their mouths.

The crocodile instinctively rolls itself in the water in order to break its food from its limbs and have a feed. Usually, that’s enough to end an animal’s (or human’s) struggles in pain as the limb gets torn from the flesh, leaving them to be eaten further and likely bleed out and pass out whilst being consumed.

All in all, a great trip out at the Australia Zoo, and already can’t wait to return again the next time we are up in the beautiful state of #Queensland.

Here’s a photo of a cheeky koala to end this section.

Blender Self-Learning

During downtime, thanks to bringing my #Macbook along (oh boy, buying a good laptop has changed everything I do. This is much better than having a PC stuck at a desk that you can’t work with when out and about!), I logged into #Udemy and followed along to some courses on #Blender to get a grasp of things.

One of my goals this year is to be able to produce assets for our #IndieGame, #SLColonies.

After quite a few hours of following along, I was ready to work on my own assets. Not the best work yet as my first attempts, and I am still learning how to get the details out with proper texturing - you know, AO Baking, Normal Baking and so forth.

The above is a cherry tree which I ended up finishing off later in the week for our community. It is scripted so that when a player clicks on it, they will harvest anywhere from one to four cherries at a time.

This is a pot plant system I completed. For now, it will be a chilli plant, which will grow over time, and players will be able to obtain chilies from it in order to use them in cooking recipes. It will be expanded to allow many more plant variations to be grown from it.

I learned how to use roughness textures to get the cherries reflecting on the cherry tree and some shininess on the chillies, while the rest of the plant looks more rough and doesn’t reflect the light— pretty cool if you don’t mind me saying.

Dinner at Felons

We also had dinner out at #FelonsBrewingCo in Brisbane, which sits below the Story Bridge.

We had the Thai Salad, which for some reason was overly spicy. So much so that my Vietnamese wife couldn’t even eat it. Both our plates were packed with chilli. Not sure if the chef is over that dish and trying to get people off it, but if so, they are going about it the right way. Thought I was in for something cool in the heat and boy was I wrong.

The star of the night however, was the Story Bridge. I brought my camera along and tried a hand held longer exposure shot to capture all the colours in the water ripples.

Excuse the slight blurriness, as I was not using a stand for starters, and I was on a moving platform on the waters edge!

I wasn’t far enough away to capture the full bridge and was limited to a 24mm lens. It was a spare of the moment photograph to see what a longer exposure could do. Pretty happy with the outcome!

Hike & Breakfast at Lovewell, Mount Gravatt

My wife and I woke up early on one of our final days in Brisbane, at around 6:00 AM, in order to go for a small 40-minute hike up Mount Gravatt from our location, to also pay a visit to the Lovewell Cafe for scones up the top.

We were not acclimatised to the humidity and heat of Brisbane, coming from Melbourne, so I was sweating quite a bit by the time I got to the top.

I snapped some photos with my phone on the day.

We saw this cool little door on a tree on the way up to the café. Guessing it’s for the local gnome residents.

We saw this sleepy koala up the top just by the car park. They are beautiful creatures.

We were also greeted with this beautiful view of Brisbane City once inside the air-conditioned #LovewellCafe.

The scones and the coffee were wonderful. We got jealous when we saw the guy behind us get some Eggs Benedict with smoked salmon, so we actually ended up coming back the next day with the rest of the family for a bigger meal!

Lately, I have been very much into drinking my espresso coffees instead of coffee with milk. I’ve been on a calorie deficit diet, and this has helped me cut down on total calorie intake throughout the day, as most coffee is a shot of coffee and a full cup of milk on top. I’ve come to enjoy the taste of pure black coffee these days.

On the way down, we spotted these cheeky buggers being curious while going about their daily routine. Beautiful rainbow lorikeets.

Conclusion

A wonderful week was had.

As usual, I hope that you enjoyed reading this Weekly Recap. Feel free to leave your comments, as I love reading them and replying.

Look out for more to come!

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 08:11:45 +1100

Along with my learning of Luau scripting. I have dabbled in Blender courses and taught myself to make models do our Indy game #SLColonies.

I’ve been so happy with the progress.

Here’s a screenshot of a chilli plant 🌶️ and another of an unfinished cherry tree 🍒

Weekly Recap - Week 1

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 22:00:00 +1100

This week, and this new year, I started with new goals and achievements for myself.

These goals are set amongst my work life, family life, and other personal hobby-type goals for my own personal creativity and to keep my brain ticking.

For work, I plan on completing more courses to enable me to upgrade my position on a more regular basis, with the goal to get a permanent position around the 2027 year.

For my hobbies, I will continue to do my photography journey but have given myself an extra push to get more involved with my SL Colonies project that I have had going for numerous years now. And with that, I have been learning various new skills, including Lua Scripting, due to Second Life bringing in a coding language known as SLua. The aim is that they will integrate LSL with Lua, which is a Roblox scripting language, to hopefully make it easier for creators thinking about joining Second Life.

Roblox Coding

With the above, came the obvious move while learning Luau that I would learn best by creating my own game within #Roblox.

I decided to build a game called The Colony, which I will work on over the years - just for myself - not really any other purpose.

It will be a blend of my Counter Earth world that I have always wanted to build, and a bit of 28 Years Later type of gameplay, where players will be able to kill zombies and earn rewards.

Roblox Studio is fun to work with, and seeing the different path this company went with as opposed to #LindenLabs with #SecondLife.

Roblox is very much built from the ground up to offer all the tools necessary for creators to get involved, and they cover all the costs. The way they make money is from the players engaging in their creators’ creations. Unlike Second Life, who make their money directly off the creators.

People have compared Roblox to YouTube in that sense.

Special Effects

I posted a little video of a HUD I already put together that has a special effect on energy and health being consumed.

Players will see a vignette start appearing around their screen, and also start hearing heavy breathing and a heartbeat effect.

I recorded the sounds myself and coded all this by myself (using the help of #VisualStudioCode and AI, of course!).

I actually like that you can code directly within Roblox Studio and see your changes live. And using #ChatGPT on the side under a project folder and building from there.

Udemy & Blender

During this week, I also signed up to #Udemy, which helped me with a lot of the coding in Luau.

During scripting and getting to a point that I am ready to build a tutorial area for my game, there was a decision I had to make.

Would I use other people’s assets for the mesh design, or create my own?

I tried using AI to make 3D mesh for my game, but the triangles and polys are way too high. These sorts of games prefer models that are in the 1,000 to 10,000 tris max, and the outputs of models I was getting from AI were sometimes well over 300,000. So without having a good basic understanding of modelling, the work needed to downscale is intense.

What better way than to learn #Blender on my own and learn to model from the ground up and just use AI to help with texturing, references, images to work with, and the likes?

Use AI as a tool, not a replacement.

SL Colonies

With the learning of Luau scripting and modelling, came a new passion to get involved directly with model creation for my lifelong passion project, SL Colonies.

Makes me feel quite accomplished. I know being the visionary behind world-building is fascinating in itself. Coming up with massive ideas and making a thriving community. Directing development and the direction of the game in general is no small feat.

But we are an indie team. It is Drakkhis and me doing this and having only the one coder means progress has been slow over the years.

When I started the game, I had a mesh designer help out making our crafting stations and items. But then he went off and did his own thing, which was fashion within Second Life, and he started his own business, which is great, but also meant that we had no more mesh designer.

We started to use a lot of full-perm items created in the SL Marketplace, which helped a lot. But this meant that some of our products were not really unique in design.

Drakkhis dabbles in some modelling, but that also means that instead of focusing his efforts on coding, he is also having to spend time modelling everything together.

What better way to close the gap than to learn modelling myself? Making the creations myself and handing it to our coder to make it work?

Well, that’s the mission I set out for myself to commence the following week!

Conclusion

This week was all about perspective and self-learning. Which I have done.

Next week, I am taking the family to Brisbane to visit cousins and other family up there, and to have a bit of a holiday and have fun with our family.

I will be bringing the laptop, and I will be learning my modelling and making my first models to use within Second Life.

I am thinking of a Chilli Plant that players have been asking for, and a Cherry Tree that the community has been begging for, for quite some time, but we have put it on the back burner for so long because we have to focus on the bigger ticket coding items!

With me on modelling, it means I can push out more new products that we already have usable code for!

Exciting times ahead!

Weekly Recap - Week 51

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 12:22:15 +1100

This week is mostly about my passion project known as SL Colonies, which is a full RPG world building kit within Second Life.

We have a small, but active community within this project that enjoy using our system to create RPG worlds with farming, gathering, hunting, crafting, quest making and more. Enjoy the read! I know it’s been a while!

Discourse Updates

I run a community within Second Life that is known as SL Colonies. With this community comes the need for a place to store all our knowledge, questions, answers and communication.

We also use Discord. But what I have found over the years is that, using this option to rely on for running a community is actually doing the opposite.

I have joined countless discord servers and always just turn off notifications and never look at them - I feel lost. They are too fast paced.

Because I was focused on Discord, I lost a lot of focus and activity on the Forum, which I find is a lot more useful to new players and veteran players alike.

A discord server cannot be used as a knowledge base. And their forum solution is not really indexed by search engines either. Which defeats the purpose of it all.

Refocusing on the forums (we use Discourse, cannot recommend them enough), I’ve been tinkering all week with it and hyper-focused on making them just right.

I created new categories with an RSS feed that posts like this one will show up on for our community, so that they can get to know me on a more personal level instead of the official side of me they always see in-game as a creator.

I also renamed a lot of our categories and re-arranged them to make them make more sense to a new user coming to browse.

One of the new features I am most proud of though is scripting in new CSS and Javascript that will change the top banner image based on season and holiday period automatically. The subheading will also quote different text based on the season and holiday, and, we have special effects on the screen that don’t get in the way. For example, right now over winter in the northern hemisphere, we have snowflakes falling down across the forum!

What I am working on over the next week though is a lot of new documentation and bringing in documentation that was spread over two other websites.

Players can’t be expected to browse multiple sources:

Youtube
Github Knowledgeable website
Main website knowledgebase
Forums

I decided to bring everything into the one place, and that is within the forums.

I installed a new plugin called Documentation. And basically it allows for topics to be sorted into categories with proper side indexes.

There is so much more to add to the documentation! I am glad I have a passion for SL Colonies and this project of ours, and that I actually enjoy writing and tinkering with forums!

To our community members reading this - enjoy it and look forward to seeing more improvements.

More on SL Colonies

Within Second Life, there are major changes planned from my end as well. I have decided to fork in and purchase our community a homestead that will feature our NEW main store, as well as a new Community HUB where our existing players will be able to land and chat together.

Think of it like a town square. It will have all of your necessities as well as areas where players would be interested in visiting on a regular basis, due to the benefits it would provide the player - such as new titles and achievements as they come to level their characters!

I made a few other posts on our forums about new ideas that I’d like to see implemented into the game:

Achievements & Player Titles: [forum.slcolonies.com/t/player-…
Coin Mint Upgrade & Coin Collecting: [forum.slcolonies.com/t/coin-mi…

There is so much I want to do for our game, but it takes so long due to how small our team is. Sometimes I wish I had a lot more disposable income that I could invest into projects like this one.

Lunch with Mum

Took mum out last week to our usual place at Brimbank Park and enjoyed a nice walk around. She is doing so well and appears to be much healthier again and recovered well.

We enjoyed some healthy food for lunch:

I always enjoy going out with my mother. Time is precious and you never get memories back. Take advantage of spending time with your family members and make the most of it.

My Health

I have still been actively doing skipping almost every day of the week. I do a daily 30 minute workout which includes skipping.

I turn hardstyle trance music on due to its fast beat - usually around 160-180bpm and I will skip when the base hits. When the base is gone, I will do pushups and sit-ups in between.

By the end of the 30 minutes, I have done at least 100 pushups and 100 sit-ups.

What I have found as my cardiovascular fitness has been increasing over time, that the total burn of a 30 minute session is half what it use to be. And my heart rate rarely hits above 140bpm.

But, I have been able to get it up, by changing up the way I have been doing my pushups. And that’s by bouncing myself up at the top of a pushup or throwing in a clap in between pushups. Within no time at all, this brings my heart rate up to my peak zone at 170.

I love HIIT based cardio!

Nemo got hurt

Nemo came home during the week with a limp :(

First instinct was she got hit by someone, but after a look, determined something was bugging her paw. As if she stepped on something sharp, or got into a fight with another cat.

I took her to the vet just in case. We determined that she got a small puncture wound to the foot, likely from a cat fight.

Here is a video of her after the visit:

I am pleased to say though, that at the time of writing this weekly recap, that Nemo has made a full recovery and is back to walking normally and playing normally!

Here’s a cute video to cheer up that news:

Werribee Zoo Christmas Party

We went to the zoo again for the Werribee Zoo members party.

Enjoyed a Christmas themed dinner being Turkey and Ham at the restaurant in there.

We enjoyed a moment watching the Christmas Carols and different characters walking around the zoo saying hello to everyone. Including people on larges stilts blowing bubbles and more!

Here are some photos from the evening there:

Conclusion

All in all another amazing week filled with memories. A lot of them on the computer screen, I must admit. But at least on things that bring me joy and help grow a small, though active community!

I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Thank you for taking the time to read.

Weekly Recap - Week 42

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 17:37:30 +1100

Last week I had a week off from work. I am fortunate in that in my line of work we get 9 weeks of annual leave and can apply to purchase another up to 4 weeks of what’s known as ATO leave. I was approved for 2 further weeks leave, which comes out of my pay, but gives me 11 weeks off for the year - which I like to spread out to approximately 1 week off per month.

This gives me ample time to spend with my family and kids, and of course, my own down-time for personal hobbies which helps in distressing, re-grounding and resilience.

Anyway, with the week off, I managed to do a lot around the home to take pressure off my wife’s regular hours where she can only clean and do any house chores on weekends. So why not get those out of the way, to clear out the weekend so we can use that time for family time.

Apple Ecosystem

I have posted before on my blog about making a move into the apple ecosystem. And something that comes with downtime is the ability to invest, for lack of better word, time into reading reviews on products and convincing yourself that you need certain latest tech.

I already spent a lot of money on a new top tier camera and lenses, which I keep to good use in my photography hobby (https://samuellison.photography).

I made the switch from desktop computer to full apple ecosystem by starting off getting myself the latest iPhone 17 Pro (in orange), and then convincing myself that I also needed the latest Apple Watch Ultra 3 which I could use in my hiking and reduce the amount of notifications I got and manage my screen time that way. And, I also wanted to get myself the MacBook M4 Pro Max - which I did.

Do I regret these purchases? Not the the least!

I have formatted my desktop PC which was a beast in itself, and donated that to my brother, and replaced that with the MacBook setup to power my setup.

I have pretty much everything Mac now, including a very old iPad which serves as a platform for social media, YouTube, discord and other apps I don’t trust as much with my data and don’t want on the device that I take with me everywhere. You see, I have to make a conscious decision now to grab the iPad out of my office when I wish to get on social media or to procrastinate on anything else. And, I get not a single notification about those apps on any other device, due to the way I have set things up.

The MacBook is being used for my photo editing and video editing needs. And I have even gotten myself software called Ulysses, which I am using to write this blog article, but also as I wish to use it to start writing a fiction book which I may share with you later down the track, if it eventuates!

The phone, I consider my digital ID, like a wallet. It gives me access to my car, it contained my personal documents, like drivers license, government ID, bank apps and the cards themselves in Apple Wallet as well as any authorisation apps for 2FA, and my encrypted messaging, which consists of Apples iMessages and Signal (I use to have my own Element server for encrypted messaging, but not enough users to justify the cost of running it, so switched back to Signal).

If you’d like my personal thoughts on Digital ID and Social Media Bans (under 16’s) and the likes, feel free to let me know and I will consider expressing those thoughts in words for you to read.

Anyway, with minimal apps on the phone, it means I have nothing to really procrastinate with when I am out and about, or to give myself reason to be checking my phone every second or doomscrolling. It puts me in my element - and allows me to experience boredom.

The Apple Watch is even more minimalistic. Actually, I use that device for my car access, as I found the phone as a phone key was keeping a connection to the car at the home when in range, which was draining its battery - the watch respects background activity being OFF when you close an app.

On the watch, I only allow notifications from main apps on the phone. Keeping it to messaging from family and alerts from apps that I find important. I also love using the watch for the fitness side of it - closing the rings with a competition between myself and my brother, and using it for sleep tracking as well.

I use to have a #FitBit and I let that go flat and never used it again when #Google purchased it and took over the data.

Anyway, all in all, I’ve enjoyed the purchases. They have kept me off the screen longer (reduced my screen time, believe it or not) and when I do decide to get on the screen, it is usually for productive purposes and nothing else.

Gardening

I’ve never been one for gardening. I love nature, love hiking and getting out there, but I have never been able to find much enjoyment in gardening - to me, it is tiresome and back breaking work.

Our local council have been hard at work putting in new footpaths around our streets and I used this opportunity to hire someone to come and remove all the overgrowth and plants that were hard to manage from our side garden. We live on a corner block, and the plants at the side of our home were annoying to maintain. They would grow over the path and also grow out some spikes that would spike people in the legs as they walked past.

Because I don’t like having to get out there and trim them myself so frequently, I made the executive decision to just have them removed.

I also got a gardener to trim the front garden and our hedge by our garage.

I’m thinking of replacing the plants that were along the side with more hardy species like Nandina’s and the likes.

I’ll wait on a little bit more of the pathway to be completed before making that decision, so that the work that gets done on the garden doesn’t get damaged by the council contractors doing their work.

Photography at Brimbank Park

Nearing the end of the week, I made the decision to go to Brimbank Park with my camera setup to have a go at filming video instead of just still photography. I’ve been wanting to try and capture some of the local wildlife and birds on video in slow-motion style footage to share on social media.

I got quite a lot of good footage with my Sony A7RV which I’ve been happy to share with my followers.

I brought the laptop along to this occasion at the cafe there (shoutout to Lumbar & Co) and enjoyed a meal while working on some of the videos. I’ll have to get out there and do that more often.

There’s something appealing about bringing a laptop out to write or do productive work. Even the majority of this blog article was written within my car, while waiting on my daughter to finish her piano tutoring.

Peninsula Hot Springs & Cape Schanck

For the end of the week, and on the weekend, since we cleared our time by making sure I completed most chores around the house during my free days off to myself, we decided to drive to Mornington Peninsula for a day out.

Starting the morning off with the Peninsula Hot Springs at an early bird session of 7:30 AM, we enjoyed a morning of relaxation and beautiful views.

We stayed there for the majority of the morning before heading to lunch at Portsea Hotel.

Portsea Hotel had nice food. But what amazed me the most, was the beautiful views.

Something I normally enjoy to do when down that part of Victoria is make as much use of the day as possible, and we did just that.

After lunch, we made our way to the London Bridge lookout. I tried taking some landscape photos that I wasn’t able to last time I was there with my camera setup, as it was too bright, and to be able to get a milky look on the ocean, requires the shutter speed of the camera to be slowed down, which allows even more light into the lens for longer.

This time round, I had an ND filter on the camera, and I was able to slow the shutter speed to half a second and even 1 second to get a nice milky look on the waves.

I’m still not really happy with my landscape photography. But I’ll keep on practicing and getting happier with where I am at.

We then drove East along the coast and stopped off at another place known as the Dragon Head Lookout. It’s a rock formation just along the coast that looks like a dragons head.

I didn’t get the shot at all. It was a misty day and I was on the wrong side - check out this other photo from someone on location scout:

That’s beautiful!

On the way back out, we got to see an Echidna out and about looking for ants. This one wasn’t shy of humans at all and perfectly fine with me taking a nice close up photo of it on the phone.

Anyway, we finished off the day over at Cape Schanck. This is an exciting walk down a board walk to the rocks below where you can see some interesting wildlife.

On this occasion, we got to see some large pacific gulls, as well as some little crabs and starfish as the water receded and created rock pools.

I have some more photos from that location, but they require editing as they were shot on my full frame Sony camera. I think I will probably use my phone a lot more for memory style photos and use the camera for the bird and fungi photography as they really do require specialised lenses and methods. Phones are getting so good!

Conclusion

Once again, I hope that you enjoyed reading this weekly recap! Feel free to comment as I enjoy seeing others words and replying.

Until next time!

Weekly Recap - Week 39

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 17:25:31 +1100

I’ve skipped a few weeks of recaps, unfortunately, and that’s a combination of pure laziness as well as being limited to what I am wanting to share with the public on the open web.

I think I will stop making these recaps on a perfect weekly basis and instead make recaps when that week has had significant, fun things that are worth reading about, and that are not too private.

I still keep a daily journal on my new Apple, and I like to reflect on all my thoughts on a weekly basis, but I will curate what I wish to share publicly at the end of each week, and if there is enough to share, I will formulate it into a post like this one.

Anyway, this last week was a week of new tech, wildlife-filled outings with the family, and a football finale!

New Tech

New Gear, New Groove

I know that recently I had been sprucing up privacy and having installed #GrapheneOS on my #Google #Pixel phone and making it a minimal, essentially, brick.

What I found over time, though, is that I was heavily inconveniencing myself and using a threat model that was much too high for my specific needs. I’m no whistleblower, no journalist, or anyone that really has a reason to be monitored by bigger actors, but I still want to keep myself private from the larger data brokers where possible without inconveniencing myself and slowing myself down in today’s fast-paced environment.

16 years ago, I was an #Apple user until I moved over to #Android and didn’t look back. But after doing a lot of reading and research, I have come to learn that the Apple #ecosystem is incomparable to anyone else out there. And they do appear to be privacy-focused themselves as a company. While they may obtain data on its own user base, it is a company that I feel has earned the trust of millions. In comparison to #Microsoft and #Google.

So, what did I do then?

I went and purchased myself the latest #iPhone17Pro, and not just the 17, but in bright orange! I also went and got myself a #MacBookPro and replaced my desktop computer by giving my desktop to my younger brother for him to enjoy for gaming.

You see, the desktop computer I had built was a beast, but it was specific to gaming and streaming. It used a lot of power to keep on and was more than I actually needed for myself. The Macs, however (and I got myself a MacBook instead of a MacStudio) uses a lot less power, yet is more than powerful enough for those of us who consider ourselves more as creatives. Using these systems for creative work, such as photography, video editing, and the likes, is their real intended use. The unified memory architecture they have built, where GPU memory and RAM are unified and “shared” and able to be used throughout apps that have specifically been programmed to take advantage of this technology, really strives.

I didn’t go down this path, but if I had gotten a fully specced system with 512 gig of RAM like the MacStudio M3 Ultra, all that memory is available to use on #LLM’s to run local Large Language Models and run complex algorithms. Of course, you don’t need that much of a specced-out system for most uses, and a system like mine with 36 gigs of RAM is also more than capable of running quite decent LLMs, even more so than my powerful beast of a gaming desktop PC I had (because that 36 gig is available as VRAM)!

And now I need to learn!

And now, I need to learn another new OS. Going from Windows into Linux for quite some time was one thing, learning the terminal window and so forth. But now going to macOS is another. Even the keyboard shortcuts are different. I’m going from CTRL-C and CTRL-V, for example, on one work desktop to COMMAND-C and COMMAND-V on the Macs. On paper, it looks essentially the same, but in reality, the COMMAND key is actually where my ALT key is supposed to be, so the hand and finger positioning is different.

But that’s the joy of learning and not a complaint in any way. I actually am enjoying it all so far.

Can’t wait to take this thing out to cafés to write these, and can’t wait to take it out on the field while out doing photography and using it to cull my picks from the memory card on the camera and taking more snaps.

The colours on the laptop screen are really good!

The Zoos

We have membership with Zoos Victoria. And one thing we love doing as a family is going to the local zoos on a regular basis. So last week, we went and did just that!

Werribee Open Range Zoo

On Friday, we went to the Werribee Open Range Zoo with the family and some close friends of ours and their kids. I brought my 600mm lens with me and took some nice snaps of birds and animals.

We had a long day at the zoo and allowed the kids to just have fun and play at all the playgrounds.

The new elephant enclosure is great too. It’s a nice walk around and pretty big. It’s much bigger than what the elephants used to have back in Melbourne Zoo.

We didn’t end up going on the Safari tour this time round, as by the time we decided we might have wanted to line up, the queue had an approximate 40 to 60 minute wait — there’s no way the kids would have been patient enough!

When I got home to check out the snaps I took, I realised that I take a lot less photos now and that the majority of them are spot on in terms of focus and composition. With the exposure just right for post-processing without blowing out the whites or blacks.

Here’s a photo of a New Holland Honey Eater I finally got to capture in nice detail on the day. This little guy was pretty curious while trying to figure out what I was doing just standing there with some big object with glass pointing towards it. They really are fascinating birds.

New Holland Honeyeater perched on pale reeds at Werribee Open Range Zoo, Melbourne; black‑and‑white bird with bright yellow wing patch and white eye, facing left against a soft, beige, blurred background.

Melbourne Zoo

On Sunday, out of the blue, we also went to visit the Melbourne Zoo with the kids, and this time while I still enjoyed taking some close-up snaps of butterflies in the butterfly house, I decided to focus my attention on taking photos of the kids as they went about their day!

I want to get comfortable just taking photos out in public and eventually also go out and practice street photography out in the city, snapping people going about their days and capturing intricate patterns in city buildings and architecture.

Anyway, Melbourne Zoo was also a blast of a day out. It’s always fun to get out there.

Even if the kids don’t want to go actual hiking, getting the blood flowing by walking around the zoo for the day is better than nothing at all!

And guess what? While we were there, there happened to be an event themed around How to Train Your Dragon. We got to snap photos with characters from the movie and the kids got to do a treasure hunt while exploring some of the zoo. Great fun!

AFL Grand Final

To top off the week, we had the opportunity to get Grand Final tickets to the AFL. Between Brisbane Lions and Geelong Cats!

Pre-game, #SnoopDogg was there rapping to the crowd! Was great to see him live. I wonder if he stayed back after the performance to actually watch the full game.

Oh, and #GoutGout was there too!

My brother-in-law is a Brisbane supporter. And every time he comes down to Victoria, we tend to go watch his team play AFL.

I’ve never really been one for sports. I like playing sports, but don’t really follow AFL or know much about any of the teams or have a big interest in it.

However, after having been to a few games to watch #BrisbaneLions and seeing their skill and abilities, I’ve come to enjoy watching the game live.

The atmosphere is great fun to be around.

The first three quarters of the Grand Final were so fun and stressful at the same time to watch! The score was neck and neck, until closer to the end of the 3rd quarter, Brisbane started to take the lead and break out of the grasp of Geelong.

By the 4th quarter, Brisbane had broken well free and Geelong was a broken team. Goal after goal was being kicked and the lead at one stage almost tripled the score of the Cats.

If the game had been like that from the beginning, it would have been a bore to watch for a Grand Final. This game really put both teams to the test, tit for tat and gave me a greater appreciation for the game.

I may just end up becoming a fan and a supporter of Brisbane Lions to boot.

Conclusion

Whilst this week I didn’t get to share with you any fungi photography like I usually do. Mushroom season is over this year and I am focusing on(pun intended) my skills with #birding and other animals. As mentioned earlier as well, I will be getting into some street photography. Or, at least, I would like to give it all a try and see how I feel about it and see if it’s something for me.

If you enjoyed reading, be sure to leave me a comment in the discussion, as I love hearing from those of you who take the time to follow!

Weekly Recap - Week 32

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 14:19:30 +1100

This week was during annual leave and some time to myself, as well as plenty of time to go do things with the family over the weekends.

The weather was perfect for most of the week. So this recap is filled with exciting stuff!

Take a read :)

Melbourne Zoo

We started off on Sunday by going to Melbourne Zoo, just out of the spur of the moment and last minute, some time after lunch.

It actually ended up being quite busy at the zoo, due to the wonderful weather. In fact, most of this week, even though it is still winter, was reasonably beautiful weather.

For the zoo, it was sunny and 18 degrees with minimal wind, which made it a comfortable afternoon for everyone.

The kids really wanted to visit the #butterflies at the zoo, so we did just that. And I managed to snap a photo I’m quite happy with:

Days to Self

On Monday, being a week day, I had some time to myself that I used to edit some of my photographs that I had taken the week before, and share on my various channels. If you’ve been following me, you have been seeing a steady flow of some of my practice edits and my creativity as I learn.

I started Monday off with a visit to the dentist though, as I was concerned with some cracks I was getting near the gum line of my teeth. It’s something called #abractions and can be caused by both hard brushing or cracking over time due to grinding teeth or the angle your teeth are at causing pressure up near the gum lines. This wears away the enamel over time.

Anyway, I went and got myself two injections and 3 fillings to cover those up and look like new. My face was numb all the way up my nose :D

Here’s an edit I did of a mushroom on Monday:

Brimbank Park

With a new 150-600mm telephoto lens, I also took a few days visiting my local #BrimbankPark to take photos of birds and wildlife in the area. I really enjoy doing these activities on my own, as when you are playing around with settings on the camera, figuring and learning as you go, it is quite meditative and slows the mind down.

My mind tends to go all over the place, and I enjoy challenging myself and learning new things, and tend to get bored of things quickly if they are no longer a challenge and become too repetitive.

I’m glad I got to practice on an old camera before investing into my new equipment, because I’ve committed a full year into photography as a hobby already… a majority of that on the old #Nikon #D7000 #DSLR.

I can tell that photography is a hobby that will stay with me for a long time. As there’s so much to learn. Every photo I take and come back to edit, I learn something new. How could my settings have been better? What composition would have been better? Did I use the correct lens for the job? Is my colour grading off post-editing? What and how do I fix that? I’ve used too much contrast and detail, and now it all looks crunchy, how do I fix that?

It really never ends.

I’ve played around with a variety of photography styles now. Starting off with pure macro of fungi, then also trying out these bird photos.

I’ve gone from looking down at the ground for little mushrooms, to looking up into the trees with the change of season.

We’re going from mushroom season, being mid autumn to the end of winter, into now spring where birds and other life are coming to life with new offspring.

Looking up into the trees makes me find all kinds of cool things, including koalas, bats and other birds I had never seen before.

Now, when I bush walk - I take my time, tread carefully and take in all that information and scenery.

Sanatorium Lake

With my mother retired now (Hi Mum! I know you are reading this!), I like to take the opportunity to spend more time with her.

The beauty about my line of work is that I get a lot of my days off on week days, when everyone is at work, but my mother is at home twiddling her thumbs (or painting in her studio!) - so it’s a perfect opportunity to just go for a walk out in nature.

Of course, I wouldn’t miss a chance to bring the camera gear while out as well, especially on hikes I have done numerous times before and know back to front, and know that I have enough time to explore while walking.

We actually went out with a specific goal on this walk, and that was to find a mushroom called the Pixie’s Parasol. These are tiny little blue mushrooms that you probably never knew existed and had never feasted your eyes on before.

I knew they would still be around, as I had just seen someone I follow on iNaturalist observe some in a different location.

Initially, I was not having any luck finding them. My mother was helping me out as I was busy snapping other photos, like this one, which is this weeks favourite:

A close-up of a Yellowleg Bonnet mushroom, just over 1 cm tall, growing from mossy bark at Mount Macedon. Its pale brown cap and vibrant yellow stem stand out against a soft green background.

That’s a Yellowleg Bonnet Mushroom and it was just over 1cm in height, growing on a tree trunk.

My mother kept scouting ahead, and guess what she found and yelled out to me?

That’s right, she found some of the Pixie Parasols we were looking for along the trail!

These guys were less than 1cm in height, and due to the way the log was sitting and my reach with the tripod and camera, I had a slight difficulty initially setting up for a macro photo.

In the end, with perseverance, I got there and managed to take a snap of these two up close.

This was the first photo I attempted to Focus Stack in post-editing, and I had to learn new skills and still learned a lot more later on about which settings work best for my workflow, but I am happy with the outcome!

Focus Bracketing & Focus Stacking

Since I am on the topic of focus stacking**, what exactly is it anyway?

Well, firstly, there are two things:

Focus Bracketing
Focus Stacking

When you are taking very up close photos in macro realm. Your camera is generally within 15cm from your lens tip to your subject. Because you are so close, the subject you are trying to take a photo of is filling up most of your frame on your camera. As you see in my mushroom photos, the subjects take around 40% of the screen or more!

This means, the camera cannot get everything in focus at once. If you were to turn up your apperture to something like f22 to try and get more in focus in one shot, you would not be letting in enough light for one, but you’d also get a lot of what’s called chromatic abberation. I’ve linked a wiki article for you to read should you choose. But in lamen terms, colour fringing and the inability for the lens to focus all colours at one point. They are shooting all over the place, blue, red, yellow, and you get a lot of weird colours in your photos, especially along the edges of things.

Anyway, back to focus bracketing.

So you basically need to do something in the camera called Focus Bracketing. This is a technique where you take multiple photos of the same thing, in the exact same position over and over again (sometimes 50 or 100 times), each time with your focus shifting further and further back in the scene, from the front.

Thankfully, my new camera has this feature built in, and I only need to tell it where my start point in focus is, how far I want the focus to shift between each photo, and how many shots I want it to take.

So now you have a stack of photos you are bringing home. They all look the same, besides the focus looks different on each shot. How do you make 1 image out of that?

Thankfully again, there is software to help do this called Zerene Stacker.

What the software will do, is something called Focus Stacking. It will take all your photos and use its super powers to put them all into layers, align each one perfectly and merge all of the sharpest points of each photo into 1 final image, which results in the 2 sharp images of the mushrooms I shared above from the Sanatorium Lake walk.

Camera’s and software these days allow you to do other techniques as well. Including exposure bracketing, so that you can get beautiful HDR landscape photos with both the sky and the foreground in the perfect exposures. And you can combine this technique with focus bracketing as well! This is something I will try with landscape in the future.

Cape Schanck

On Saturday, we ended the week on another high. Now the wife and the kids were home, and it was time for some family activities!

We did Melbourne Zoo on the Sunday before, and this round, we did Cape Schanck!

It was another beautiful day. A top of 14 (seems cold, right!), sunny day, no clouds, no wind = recipe for a wonderful day.

We started at the #PeninsulaHotSprings at 8:30 AM. Crispy cold morning, hot spring water. Another perfect recipe. Wouldn’t have even bothered us if we had some light rain while there! A little bit of cold water on the face while sweating from the rest of the body in 40 degree waters - bit of a fire and ice combination there.

We then followed the hot springs with some lookouts along the southern coast of Victoria. Checking out the London Bridge, Dragon’s Head Lookout and ultimately, Cape Schanck.

By the time we got to Cape Schanck, the kids were getting tired. But they pushed through, and in the end, got to see some beautiful scenery that they never would have seen had they given up.

We even got to spot an #echidna that wasn’t afraid of humans and hung around hunting for ants for a good half hour.

I’ll likely share more of these photos with you in the next recap, as I technically didn’t edit them during this recap time period, and I don’t want to take away from this weeks choice of photo of the week! Which was that of my Yellowleg Bonnet Mushroom!

Task Completion

I am adding this section here again this week, as it keeps me on track and responsible to myself.

This week, I hit a good success rate again in task completion for myself.

I completed 79% of my tasks (33 out of 42). I’m proud of that again this week, and need to keep this up again for next week!

I’ll have a monthly recap to write about in the end of August, and hopefully that will tell me overall, how well I have been doing so far, not just week to week.

I shared a total of 9 photos this week, which is good. More than 1 photo per day. That’s a steady stream of edits and practice over the week, and again, getting better each time (in my opinion).

I’ve shared 5 random short posts with you all. Which again, just means I’m not that active on social media just posting random things. There’s enough information in my weekly recaps anyway, and much more detail for you to read!

Conclusion

Yet again, thank you for reading to the end if you did so. I’d love to get your feedback, any comments, suggestions or thoughts.

And until next time, see you next week!

Weekly Recap - Week 31

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 19:20:51 +1100

I started off the week slow, as the week prior I was on #NightShift with work. Sunday was my recovery day before going back for 2 days into work. My energy was low, my mood was down, but it was time to look up to the coming 10 days off straight!

New Camera!

After months of putting money to the side for a new camera, the time had come!

I learned my new hobby of nature photography on a #Nikon #D7000 #DSLR camera. An old camera, but it did a beautiful job. And being so low megapixel, made me learn how to be careful about my composition and getting the correct settings on the camera to begin with. Because it was no where near as quick as what a modern camera can do and no where near as forgiving.

I worked hard, saved to the side for my new tool, and got myself a #Sony #AR7V and a couple of good #Sigma lenses.

Sony A7R V - Photo courtesy of Gadgetsin.com

With 10 days off work, I started on a high practising photos with the new camera. Loads of new settings to figure out on this thing, but on the second day I already went out and tried my luck on macro photography by combing 100 images using a focus bracketing technique, which I could never have accomplished in a reasonable time with the old camera, and then stacking those images post-processing using software called Zerene Stacker.

Here is my very first attempt of focus bracketing and the end result fully edited from raw:

And here is my second attempt, this one was only 47 images:

I was also amazed with how much detail I was able to get out of a photo of a #WelcomeSwallow.

This photo was taken on day 1 with my camera using the wrong lens for the job. A Welcome Swallow is no more than 90g in weight. They are tiny little birds (like sparrows) and zip around so fast hunting for bugs.

My camera was set to 1/4000 shutter speed here with a 105mm macro prime lens made for (obviously) macro photography and detailed portraits.

The original image is about 6 x the size of the one you see, and the bird is tiny in the original image. This image was cropped to where you see it now, and still managed to capture enough detail to identify the bird.

I’m really pleased. And obviously this is me coming from a really old camera and getting my hands on something game changing. Photographers that have always kept their cameras up to date would not notice such a jump in detail as I have.

Artvo

On Saturday, I took the family our to Docklands to visit #Artvo and the #IceSkating ring afterwards. The kids had a blast!

Artvo is a 3D art exhibition that you can pose within and when photos are taken, they look like you are part of the scene. When we went, all the art was in fantasy style. It enabled the kids to have fun, while I played around with different settings on the camera. I ended up with more than 1000 photos to pick from. Then I had to edit them, as I wanted more than what the JPG’s offered! I picked 84 or so photos from the lot.

A majority of the photos were actually because I had the camera setup for burst shooting. I felt like the paparazzi with the mechanical shutter going off so fast!

Task Progress

Having come off night shift and being able to get myself into some kind of daily routine has seen me successfully complete a majority of my daily tasks I set out for myself.

I ticked off 71% of my tasks for the week, completing 30 out of 42 tasks over the last 7 days. Not a bad effort.

Other Stats

Total Observations this week: 0 Total thoughts posted this week: 7 Total Photos this week: 3

Looking at the stats, I can improve on the observations for one. I know I had more than zero, and actually posted 11 observations over at iNaturalist. I just haven’t added them to my personal #Obsidian database! So I can go ahead and fix that going forward. All I did was post them to iNaturalist, and what I really want to be doing is noting down more scientific detail about them and keeping notes for myself and paying more attention to what it is I am looking at.

As for thoughts, those are just the amount of short posts I made on my blog and other linked social media. Not so concerned about that stat, but it does show me how active I’ve been sharing things with others, which are not photographs.

Photos are the amounts of photos I have edited and shared online. It doesn’t account for how many photos I have actually taken and edited, which this week would be somewhere over 100. I will pick my favourites for sharing!

Conclusion

Once again, thank you for reading this far, and as always, comments are welcome. I enjoy reading your thoughts and opinions. Makes it feel less lonely out here on the inter-webs.

Weekly Recap - Week 29

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 22:52:54 +1100

Tasks Completed: 34/42 (81% Completion) Total Observations: 1 Total Thoughts Posted: 12 Total Photos Posted: 1

I’m quite happy with this weeks task accomplishments. I managed to complete 34 out of my weekly 42 tasks I had set out. That’s an 81% completion rate!

What are these tasks though? Well, they are daily routines that I wish to accomplish before the end of the day. These include things like meditation, exercise and reading, along with a few other things. A usual routine, that I should be able to accomplish daily without excuse!

The Turning Point

Sunday for me was a turning point. I spent most of it working on #Obsidian and my #Journal in general. I needed to focus on my daily tasks more and bring my task completion rates up.

My tasks are there for a reason. They are goals I wish to tick off on a daily basis, with the most important ones being to meditate and to exercise to stay healthy in mind and body.

I felt that I was procrastinating too much and could not find a reason or an excuse as to why I am this way. Is it simply that I may have attention deficit disorder, and outside of work, I find it hard to focus on one thing? That I cannot do the same thing over and over for long periods of time? Is that a thing?

Either way, I felt frustrated about this and have done some work to make my journaling and my task tracking more enjoyable and accountable to me.

So on Monday, I started the new journal system, which included looking at the previous days planning and self reflection.

Self reflection includes taking note of my mood that given day when waking up (using an emoji), and my energy level on a scale of 1 to 10.

I would then spend a quick minute just taking note of that days weather forecast and any fire danger ratings. In case out of the blue, I intend to just go out bush for time to myself.

At the end of the day, I would also reflect, by taking note of any Highlight or Gratitude by just writing it and putting it out into the nether.

Photo of the Week

I’ve also got sections to showcase to myself my favourite photo of the day that I took or edited, and to note my favourite observation that I added to my catalogue.

Of course, I understand I wont be taking or editing photos on a daily basis, nor would I be hiking and observing species of fungi on a daily basis. But when I do, I can reflect on those in the weekly, monthly, yearly recaps and pick my favourites and talk about them, and why I chose them.

A small, golden-yellow mushroom stands out in vivid colour against a monochrome background of textured wood and blurred forest. The mushroom emerges from a crack in the log, drawing the eye with its saturated cap and delicate stem. Photographed at Lerderderg State Park.

So here’s my favourite edit from this week! This was actually a part of my latest shots taken on one of my #LerderdergGorge hikes and the image wasn’t one of my original favourites. It’s one of the images I actually left until last to edit.

I cropped it into a 1:1 image as I felt the composition worked best for this shot, and I wanted to give monochrome a go. I actually love how it turned out! I brought the colours back out on the mushroom itself, leaving the background black and white. I am in love with this photo so much that I just might print myself a small copy to place on my desk.

I believe the mushroom type is that of bonnet. I should have really taken more photos of this one and uploaded to iNaturalist!

Observation of the Week

This week’s observation was also at #LerderdergGorge during a last minute hike.

I believe this is a Common Gilled Mushroom (Gymnopilus allantopus). If you believe I am wrong, let me know below.

I know, I really should include more photos to assist with the identifications, and I will be doing so with future photos.

I will take various angles so that you can see the gills, cap, stem, more of the habitat. I have a ruler I will add for scale and I intend to take spore prints where possible, depending on legality in the area I am making observations from.

Career

I put some serious plans into action this week, including talking to various members from different municipalities in my work, to discuss what their workplaces are like, their workload, team moral and so forth as I look to set new career progression goals in place going forward.

On Tuesday, I spent a good hour on the phone with one new contact chatting about just that.

On Thursday, I went to meet a contact at a local municipality to discuss potential working opportunities. Spent a good hour in person with a coffee for a chat and finding out all I can about the location in question.

It has really given me a new perspective of things and now the hardest part will be to actually come up with a decision as to what I wish to do with my career next! It’s actually quite exciting!

I’ve really been thinking about my next moves in my career, given I plan on giving this career another 20+ years of my life to. I really love what I do, but where I am at right now will not be able to give me the opportunities I am seeking without causing issues for the team, which is unfair to them.

If I stay where I am, and I wish to go into investigative roles, my travel time would increase by more than 50%, pushing me well over 1 hour. Which I am not sure I could commit to.

The other option I have, if I stay where I am, is to upgrade in rank, making me more of a supervisor. This is also a good option, and would increase my income exponentially, but knowing myself, give that role 5 years, and although the money is great, I will be bored in that role and look back at this time and wish I had taken the other, longer path. And to take a step back from that role and go back to the long path, would include a significant pay cut, which is harder to do once you are already use to that money and lifestyle differences that brings.

Working my way up to that rank, using the longer path, also opens my doors up to a multitude of departments as a supervisor, including not only the general roles, but the investigative supervisor roles.

I still have a lot of thinking and self-reflection to do on this before making my final decision and sticking to it - but journaling about this process and actually doing the planning and thinking… this is something new for me. I use to just be the run and gun guy that goes with the flow. Don’t get me wrong, I would still be going with the flow of things in life, but, seems I have matured and am more cautious and putting actual thought into a process over running and gunning for it.

Mount Buller

On the final day of the week, we went to the #snow with the kids at #MtBuller. It was a blast. We went with a bunch of friends and hired a private 25 seat bus to get up there. 4 hours of driving and we were there, giving us about 3 hours to enjoy the snow before heading back home the other 4 hours.

My wife and I actually don’t enjoy going to the snow. But the kids are older now and they get to remember fun trips. So we did it for them. They absolutely loved their time.

The food is expensive up there, because they know they can charge it. You are better off bringing your own, unless you are happy paying $19 for a bowl of hot chips!

Another recommendation I have is not paying the ridiculous $50 per person to use any of the “express” lifts. You can get a free shuttle up into the village and actually walk up most of the mountain in reasonable time. All the other lifts that bring you up ski slopes are free too.

Conclusion

As always, I love to hear feedback or questions that I can respond to. So if you enjoyed this article, please feel free to comment!

Observation: Golden Wood Fungus

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 20:18:08 +1100

The Week Recap - Week 22

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 19:12:05 +1100

Had a productive week this time. I set out to tick all my tasks every day, and I feel I accomplished that mostly on my days off, except on the weekend when I had other activities planned with the family. I know, still not an excuse, but hey, it's better than last week, and it takes smell steps for long-term achievements.

Back to Live Streaming

I am getting my groove back within #SecondLife and in particular with my #IndieGame project, #SLColonies.

I played about with #OBS for a day and setup all my scenes and did away with the #ZowieBox external streaming box which was giving me the most issues, and just did it straight on the computer. More resource intensive, but for my needs, much more simplistic and manageable.

We did a #LiveStream and it went well. 13 watching at the same time, which is actually pretty good for our small community of players.

If you want to see our streaming format, check out the playback of the stream below and let me know what you think.

Photoshop to GIMP

With my mood coming back for being productive in our indie-game, and my move away from #Adobe products in general and more into Free and Open Source Software ( #FOSS ), I had to convert some Photoshop shop templates to work within GIMP.

I mostly got that working thankfully!

Melbourne Zoo

On the weekend, I was mostly busy with a full day at the zoo with the girls and practising more photography and post-processing in #DarkTable. Still a long way to go for me, but I am happy with the progress and my workflow!

Here’s a gallery of the photos I took this week:

And this is my favourite image of the day.

Golden Contrast - Beautiful butterfly sitting on a beautifully textured leaf and surrounds.

All in all, these photo’s were stunning to my eye and I enjoyed the process within DarkTable to bring these RAW images to life. The old #Nikon #D7000 may be going on 15 years old and is still a #DSLR with mirror, and may not have the quality of the latest smart phones, but it was still great for what I managed to do with it, with the lens I am limited to using.

You can grab these photos for FREE, including in .TIF full quality format for print quality up to A3 I think from memory. And if you want to support my work, I do appreciate donations to the value you feel my work is worth to your eye - or even a monthly contribution.

You can visit my Ko-Fi page at https://ko-fi.com/samuellison.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading up to here, and I look forward to more exciting days to come!

I have 6 more days off work to go and plan on going on small walks and hikes by myself and with my mother.

Weekly Recap - Week 21

Wed, 28 May 2025 10:23:24 +1100

I feel like I had a pretty unproductive week. And I do my best to blame the fact that I was on #NightShift for the week at work, but really, as much as I can whine and carry on that I was a little tired, looking back, I could have pushed forward and at least ticked off my tasks instead of sit at the computer screen not really doing much.

Disappointed in myself yet again this week. I need to find myself better methods to ensure that I complete what I had set out to do.

I’m productive at work though, so that’s not the issue. It’s the procrastination when I get home after work prior to jumping into bed. I can do better.

So, what DID I get up to with my time then?

Method for Breaking Sleep Routine

One thing that I and many others find hard about night shift, in particular with flexible shift work, where shifts can go from mornings to afternoons and vice versa every week, and one whole week can be a night shift with the weeks after being back to mornings/afternoons again is the damage is does to your routine and way of life.

It’s not at all the same as just being on night shift permanently, which that in itself has its own long-term effects on the human body. It’s 7 nights with a recovery day, and back into flexible rostering after nights.

Right now, due to resourcing issues, we are on minimum night shifts. Meaning, we do a night shift week, every 4th week.

So how do I tackle getting into the first night of night shifts after being on different hours and regular sleeping routines?

I use to just try and push the first night and not change anything - no extra sleep, just straight into night shift and try to stay awake on the first night.

This didn’t work. In actuality, it’s dangerous in my line of work in emergency services. We need to be awake, we need to not be fatigued and we need to have the mental capacity to deal with highly stressful situations.

Now, I will go out of my way, the night prior to my first night shift, to stay up as long as I can through the night. If that means #BingeWatching movies or playing games, and drinking lots of #coffee, then so be it. I will do my best to stay away until between 5 and 7am the next morning. If I need a quick nap after that, I will give myself a 1 to 2 hour teaser nap and keep pushing through, doing activities with the family if I can.

I then aim to go to sleep around lunch time and get as much sleep as possible. Between 6 to 8 hours before waking up and getting ready for that first night shift.

It worked wonders for me last week, and I started my first night feeling fully rejuvenated and ready for the action - and glad I did, because the first night was quite a busy one that required focus, attention to detail and the ability to react!

In saying that, here in Australia it’s currently the end of Autumn and hitting the edge of winter. So nights are longer and days are colder. So it’s much easier to fall asleep rugged up, than it is sweating in the heat. I’ll get back to you all if I manage to keep this method up during the warmer months!

Beautiful Music & Guitar Playing

My daughter has been learning to play the guitar and has taken a fancy for finger picking vs using a pick for her playing, and her new tutor is doing well as teaching her.

With this, I went back to some old music I enjoy listening to and looked up Estas Tonne, to have my daughter listen to it and see what she thought.

It’s such beautiful music. Put on some headphones, close your eyes, listen, enjoy the story that unfolds.

Change of Milk

This week, I changed my milk supply. Exciting, right?

samuellison.com/2025/05/2…

I don’t know why I didn’t move to more expensive milk and organic milks until now. So much more creamy and tastier. Way more wholesome too. #WholeFoods

I know I know, so exciting it was worthy of making the weekly recap. That, or I am finding anything to add to this week due to my utter laziness procrastinating at home when I am nights!

Camera Shopping

I’ve been looking exactly which camera I want to upgrade to for my photography, from the #NikonD7000 I am currently using.

Originally, I was thinking about the Sony A6700 ASP-C camera, which is a great purchase. But, if I am going to invest so much into a camera, why not full frame in that case. Especially since my focus in photography is currently #Macro and in particular, #Fungi.

samuellison.com/2025/05/2…

One more day to go of #NightShift! Having a coffee now that I am home. So, other than that… I’ve been thinking about the #camera I wish to purchase. And have decided to go with an #Sony #A7RV instead of the #A6700. $2k price difference, but I don’t think I will regret it long-term.

Sony A7RV

I’ve decided I will go with the Sony AR7V. It will be much more forgiving for me, and due to the fact that I can do macro with 61 megapixels and, if I find I need to, I have plenty of detail to be able to crop in and still get pristine images.

This purchase would last me a very long time. And I feel much more comfortable investing in some good lenses for a camera I own, over purchasing lenses for the Nikon I am currently using, which is not mine.

More Tech (M.2 SSD Upgrade)

I went ahead and purchased a new 2TB M.2 SSD to plug into my mothyerboard, which will replace the 512gb one I have currently.

This is so that when I do my photography and videos, I can drag all my raw and unedited content there for post-editing. This will allow me to do my photo editing in #DarkTable much fast than working with files over the network on the NAS. Same with video editing.

While shopping for this SSD, I realised however, that bus speeds have progressed on motherboards and that my motherboard is now quite ancient. They have PCIe 5.0 now, which would upgrade my SSD speed from around 3,000MB/s to 14,000MB/s!

That’s phenomenal. Unfortunately though, that means I need a motherboard upgrade that has PCIe M.2 slots. And that also means the CPU needs upgrading to the new socket types, as well as my memory going from DDR4 to DDR5. I can’t use the same CPU and memory in modern motherboards.

Anyway, I will keep my old 512gig M.2 SSD for when I do upgrade my motherboard in future. As I will be able to re-use that, I believe! And get myself one of those new fancy PCIe 5.0 versions for the editing drive. That’ll put me on 4 x M.2 drives by the time I am ready for the upgrade.

Conclusion

Another week gone for 2025. Almost half way. Amazing how quick a year can escape you before you realise it’s gone.

Make the most of it everyone!

The Weekly Recap - Week 20

Tue, 20 May 2025 10:57:21 +1100

Again, I started the week off strong with my task list, but, as seems to have been the pattern prior, for the rest of the week, I didn't tick off **ANY** of my tasks. I can't seem to break this cycle, and I really need to mentally try harder to get this part of my life under control and routine to meet the goals I wish.

But, I still had a fun week!

Lake Daylesford

With spring here, I anticipated that my usual haunt out at #LakeDaylesford here in Victoria would have plenty mushrooms. I mean, it’s almost the end of spring now, and Lake Daylesford has never ceased to amaze me with its flourish of mushrooms. The beautiful red and white spotted Amanita Muscaria are usually always there this time of year, along with Slippery Jacks.

This year however, it seems there was a bit of a drought. That, or the local council finally put an end to it and removed all the mushrooms to prevent people getting sick?

I do think it’s the weather, as I went up the road to a usual lookout for a waterfall, and there was no water flowing at all this year. This is concerning.

Anyway, I took my mother to Lake Daylesford and we had a wonderful walk around the lake. I didn’t manage to snap any high quality photos of mushrooms, and yes, I did find a single Amanita out there on its own, but I didn’t manage to get a good photo using my camera. I did get a sneaky shot on my phone though.

Other than that photo though, I did manage to snap and edit some beautiful shots of the lake and surrounds.

I am most proud of this one from the day. The colours really came out well post-edit and I like the composition. Looking at it now though, I could have centred the house perfectly and cropped out some of the leaves showing on the right of the image.

In this photo of the bench, I thought it looked nice and told a little story in itself. The lonely bench with no one sitting on it currently, looking over the waters. I like how the plants up ahead in the lake just happened to align with the bench though. Again, I could have centred it better post-editing.

I loved this overall shot of the lake. I didn’t have a wide enough lens with me to really capture it all, but now thinking about it, I should have zoomed in more and captured the area to the left reaching over to the centre of the photo and captured more detail there, perhaps centering the largest tree there to the image. Maybe next time!

Actually, below is an edit of that photo just to see. Unfortunately though, I don’t currently have a powerful enough camera to crop in so much and I lose a lot of the detail. Still cannot wait to get my new camera! And looking at the photo again, I should show the full reflection of that tree in the water too! Live and learn!

Then I tried something new for me by taking a photo directly into the sun. I noticed a young boy fishing and setting up his rod. The reflection of the sun in the water was nice and I felt this photo looked best in a black and white setting, making the boy look more like a silhouette style photo.

Before leaving Lake Daylesford, I then took my mother to the local botanical garden known as Wombat Hill Botanical Garden. I really loved the way the leaves fallen on the floor were turning yellow and adding such nice contrast in colours along the dirt pathway in there, so I took a moment to try and capture that in a photograph.

If you like any of the photos that you see, you can grab them for free or “buy me a coffee” by visiting my Ko-Fi page.

What do you think of my photos?

Gaming - Sea of Thieves

I started playing a new game with an online friend of mine. The game is called Sea of Thieves.

Screenshot of the game, Sea of Thieves. Source - IGN.com

The game is pretty cool. You play as a pirate and the objective obviously is to go around looking for treasures and getting involved in a lot of piracy by stealing loot from other players as well.

You sail the seas in a ship that requires other people to be with you to assist with tasks on the ship. Such as someone to captain and steer the ship, someone to manage the sails, someone to fire the cannons and someone to manage any damage to your ship.

It’s pretty addictive, I will admit. However, they ruined the game by adding loads of micro-transactions that you can purchase with real money which then completely takes away from the game as a whole.

You see, the micro-transactions allow you to purchase cosmetic upgrades to your character, equipment and ship. You would think that this in itself wouldn’t ruin a game, as this doesn’t make it pay to win.

However, this whole game, there are no skills or levelling involved, and a fresh player has the same abilities and strengths as a veteran player. The whole objective of this game is to loot treasures and make coins, which you can use in supply shops to purchase new cosmetic upgrades to your character, ship and equipment.

So if you go ahead and purchase these with real money, the rest of the game just suddenly becomes boring with no more progression.

This explains also why this game has huge issues with cheats. Even with their so called anti-cheat system.

Vibe Coding

I’ve been using a lot of AI to assist me with the coding of this blog. Since I do not have the knowledge to do it all myself.

This week I did more updating to the blog, including adding a new feature that allows my images to be clicked on to load a type of lightbox, enlarged image with alt text showing beneath it.

I also made more updates to the home page where latest posts and replies show. #Hashtags and such will now auto link so that you can search them for recent posts syndicated into Mastodon.social. Any webmentions and links also work through this page without having to open the individual posts.

Daughters Birthday

My daughter Zoey had her 11th birthday! We went with 10 of us to play some #LaserTag and it was awesome fun. I haven’t played laser tag in more than 10 years now and it brought back fond memories.

The kids absolutely loved the day. After laser tag we spent some of the afternoon in the arcade section and earning tickets to spend on sweets and little toys.

We would have done some #GoKarting, but didn’t realise it had gotten so expensive! They want $50 now for a session!

SL Colonies

SL Colonies is my Indie Game that I have been developing with a coding friend for more than 6 years. It’s an #RPG system with crafting and survival that was made to work within the Second Life platform. Part of the #metaverse.

Anyway, we finally finished making a full questing system for the game that allows RPG world builders to fully build quests and story-lines from scratch.

Can’t wait to see this new system in action by our community!

Conclusion

Every week I get to the recap writing, and always look at what I’ve done briefly and think that I am not going to have much to write about - but I seem to always prove myself wrong. There’s always so much to recap on that I enjoy typing and going through what I accomplished and what I did not accomplish.

Although I didn’t do a lot of my tasks, such as my daily exercises and meditation and readings, I feel I have still been productive enough all in all.

Ok, while the wording productive might not be the best example, the life experiences are still there. I wouldn’t really think twice about what I’ve done over the week if I didn’t #journal and #microblog about everything on a daily basis, and then write about the whole week. It really puts a different perspective on life and I highly recommend you guys get into it.

It’s funner than I thought, that’s for sure!

The Weekly Recap - Week 19

Mon, 12 May 2025 11:13:10 +1100

I started off the week with some interesting signs being sent to me throughout the day. Bit hard to put into words, but lets just say that the universe was nudging me at the beginning of the week into a certain direction by continuously sending me signals, or, signs. And they were not just coincidental, here are some examples.

While binge-watching the silo series, it would continue to pause every 30 seconds to 1 minute - making the watching of it a task. I did not think too much about it at first, until it got so annoying that I thought I would try to time the period between pausing to see if there was some kind of pattern to it. Except, every time I went to try to time it and make sense of it, the timer would reach 5 minutes…. 10 minutes…. 15 minutes or more and not a single pause.

Every time I would stop timing, the darn thing would pause again. Again, I thought nothing too much of it. I tried internet speed test, my connection was perfectly fine.

This happened more than 10 times. Every time I would try to time it, nothing. I got to a point where I realised what was going on, and I would laugh out loud to myself in my vacant home and just make it do it for kicks… stop timing it, and then pauses… time it, no pauses…

This was not all that occurred though. When I realised this was a sign and decided I needed to get off the PC. I went to have breakfast. I have a Google HUB that displays Google Photos (yes, I know… Google…) I added to a collection years ago. And while I was eating breakfast, I would look at the photo frame and for some reason, the photos I was being shown were very specific.

I don’t just mean one or two photos, but half a dozen or so photos in no random order. These were specific photos of me and my family on the way to specific events or at specific events. Different years, different times of years. But all related to specific events to do with Falun Dafa and Shen Yun etc.

Let’s just say that all of the above got me pretty focused for the rest of the week to do my meditation, to read and to tick off all of my daily tasks. And I accomplished those tasks for the whole week which I am quite proud of. This is the reason you’ve been seeing a lot more posts from me about Falun Dafa. And if you’re been reading my weeklies, you’d have noticed I have been mentioning how much procrastinating I had been doing, and never been truly happy with the lack of tasks I accomplished for myself. Always providing some kind of excuse.

And no, I was not under the influence of magic mushrooms, DMT, LSD or anything at all for that matter. This was very much normal woken state.

The Falun Gong Emblem

World Falun Day

We went to the city for World Falun Day on Saturday, which is a Parade that marches through the city to celebrate the beginning of the Falun Dafa teachings in China. I posted about it here where I included some photos, and then I uploaded some videos of it here.

There’s also a much longer video available to watch below which shows the full parade group. I’m hidden in there somewhere!

Excuse the shaky video. It wasn’t me recording it!

If you’d like to learn more about my practice, there’s plenty of information out there. You can also reach out to me privately.

Obsidian

I made this post which talks about how I have been using Obsidian lately for my journal and how my “mycelium” network of thoughts has been developing over time and growing.

Mycelium network of thoughts and microblogs using Obsidian.

I really like the plugin for micro.blog that allows me to use a token in order to publish directly from Obsidian to my website.

Highly recommend you guys get into this as my workflow can go from just posting thoughts throughout the day into a daily entry, that links to separate notes with hashtags and so forth. I can choose to publish a specific note or just keep it private. But what’s neat with tags is that over time, on the larger graph that I display tags on, I can see my interests developing and changing over time. I can then hone in on that specific interest and see if there’s enough I have linked to and written about that interest over time, to then create a full fledged article from.

Web Tinkering

Last week I tinkered around with my PC. This week I managed to tinker around with my website. I posted about it here.

I have been pretty happy with the outcome.

I use to have the main page as just a large About Me, which I felt was just too much information and not straight to the point.

When I visit others blogs, I like to go to the main domain and see the most recent updates, to see if I have missed anything. So that’s precisely what I have gone and done with my website now.

Screenshot of the first page on my blog.

When you go to my domain https://samuellison.com you now will see a smaller about section, and then my latest posts and replies to others. They display the markdown, as well as images and video.

There’s an icon which lets you see if it’s a reply or a post of my own. And if you click on them, you can then participate in discussion if it is my own post, and if it’s a reply, you can follow a link to the original discussion at the original posters location.

I think it’s pretty neat, what do you think?

Conclusion

I really thought I would not have much to discuss from this week, but reading back above, it looks like I was able to share with you quite a bit!

Again, I hope that you enjoyed reading and learning, and thank you for getting this far.

Now, back to ticking off my tasks!

The Weekly Recap - Week 18

Tue, 06 May 2025 18:18:09 +1100

This last week appears that I focused a little bit more on some of my daily tasks. I managed to do my home-based exercise, at least twice this week instead of the one. I still need to work on my routine and get more of my tasks done.

I tend to get on the PC with a coffee and get dug into other things that interest me more. But the physical grind is a necessity to reach my other physical goals.

I keep telling myself that a way around this would be to do the tasks first, before jumping onto the PC to do anything else. Why don’t I just do that then? What is it that is stopping myself?

Silo Series

In mentioning the above about just getting things done. I can already see where it started. I made this post about a series called #Silo and then off I went, deep into the rabbit whole that is, a great series.

Silo - The Truth Will Surface

It’s definitely #dystopian in nature. It takes some of its likeness from the games known as #Fallout and can be seen somewhat similar to the series with the same name. However, there’s no fun twists and no blood and guts all over the place.

Silo is much more serious, dark, and much more of a thriller. Focused entirely on the inside of the silo, and not so much the apocalyptic exterior.

In one of the episodes, there is the mention of using something in water, to suppress the peoples memory over a long period of time. Does that remind you of anything still in a majority of our water? Have we forgotten why we added flouride to water in the first place? I mean, it’s only a bi-product of our aluminium, steel, cement, phosphate and nuclear weapons manufacturing. But what do I know?

Dark world of Trafficking

During the week I also made a post about what I believe at least to be another fake suicide related to Jeffrey Epstein. I don’t want to go into detail on my thoughts, and will let you do your own digging, out of respect for the family involved, but I wanted to raise the awareness. Getting hit by a bus and in hospital with serious injuries, only for police to be notified about it a whole day later, and to be told minor injuries only? Then, suddenly, the victim decides after all these years, she’s had enough and it’s time to end it? No more public outreach, no more talking? And to top it off, strange unidentified men at the house? Not detectives or anything like that (unarmed), but well groomed and obviously… government or secret service in nature.

The world of human and sex trafficking is dark, and powerful. More needs to be done to unveil all of this and get to the bottom of it.

That is all I will say.

A new Diet?

Looking back at the week, I made this post about going back to a whole foods diet. How am I going with that? Not real well yet. I have not yet committed to this fully, though I have kept myself aware of it. I am trying to reduce the amount of processed food I rush to when I feel a little hungry. I haven’t been successful, as sugars and processed foods are so addictive and I find it one of my biggest weaknesses - especially chocolates.

This is detrimental really, because all the work I try to put in by exercising, hiking and so forth, is negated and just keeping me where I am.

I’m not overweight or anything like that. I have good strength and cardio fitness. But I really would like to get rid of that stubborn belly fat that lingers, and I know it’s mostly from sugars and insulin!

Supermarkets don’t help, do they? Long shelf life. Sweet tasting foods made to get you going back for more. Soft drinks.

More PC Tinkering

Last week I shared in my weekly recap some PC tinkering I had been doing. This week, I added to that with some Lian Li Strimer cables! I got them for the motherboard, and my graphics card.

The interior of my PC build at the time of this blog post.

I think I have completed the whole look of my PC now and am happy where it is at.

All I need now is to just keep it maintained and upgrade as needed when things get too far behind. The next purchase will be to upgrade my NVIDIA 2070 to a 4070 card for my video editing and video recording needs.

The 2070 is still going strong though and the only benefit I will get currently is a cut in processing time when encoding my videos and some extra frame rates when recording my screen in OBS.

I use an external stream box for streaming in 4K and let it handle my streaming, however, the quality is not as high as I could probably get through software encoding in OBS on the PC itself with a more powerful card!

I’ll put that to the test eventually, when I do decide that it is time to upgrade.

Conclusion

That’s pretty much it for this week! I also have a monthly entry to type up, but I don’t know yet if I will keep that to myself or post it on my blog. I’ll basically be going through my weekly entries and seeing if I mentioned anything that I didn’t follow through with and would just be repeats of information I think.

If you like what you read, and enjoy reading these, I do appreciate you letting me know!

Until next week!

The Weekly Recap - Week 17

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 18:45:29 +1100

I had a big week, all things considered. As at the end of this week, we went out all the way to #LakesEntrance as a family. A 4-hour drive each way and loads of activities to do, that the 2 nights were just not enough to get everything done. We definitely have to go back!

Photo courtesy of Alpha on Flikr: [www.flickr.com/photos/av...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/avlxyz/)

In saying that though, having a quick glance at the beginning of the week, and really, as a whole. I did 1 day of my exercise and reading. Once again disappointing myself with my fitness goals, as last week. I can probably forgive myself for the first day, due to it being more of a recovery day from night shift. Looks like I kept myself busy at the start of the week though with a new CPU cooler upgrade and strimer cables for #RGB goodness inside my PC setup. And the end of the week was taken by 3 days on a family trip to Lakes Entrance. Hmm, OK, I can forgive myself here!

PC Tinkering

I have had my PC for a good 15 years now and done some hardware upgrades to it along the way to keep it relevant. Recently updating my PC case as well to be able to see what’s inside, although I had never been much of a RGB fan prior.

I think with my new home office setup though, the sit-stand desk that I had custom made and all the other nice nick-nack’s to make the room mine, having the PC on display became an objective.

Photo of my office setup including my sit-stand desk with custom made wood top. Colour PC, mechnical keyboard, large 43 inch Samsung monitor, studio speakers and mic, and... more...

For years, I had this huge Cooler Master CPU cooler, which actually does a great job with its heat sinks. And late last year during summer, I noticed my PC hitting some kind of limitation with tiny system hangs, frame rate limitations and so forth. This was because, not only was it a warm summer, but I was also doing a lot of live streaming which would put more strain on the system.

I decided to give the whole PC a clean by pulling it apart. Assuming the CPU cooler needed dust removed to make it more efficient, I pulled that off of the CPU as well.

Photo of my PC just prior to installing Liquid Cooled CPU Cooler.

Unfortunately I cannot find the photo of this, as it was a while ago and not sure where I saved it, but I noticed I had forgotten to remove the piece of plastic that sits on the copper heat-sink and is suppose to have direct contact with the CPU. The piece of plastic clearly had written on it, “WARNING: Remove before use”. I built the whole PC from scratch, so I can’t blame someone else for it! So glad my CPU made it through all those years without overheating!

Removing the sticker improved my system performance significantly and I was off and away back into streaming and making videos for our game SL Colonies. But that wasn’t before adding a liquid cooled upgrade on my list of things I wanted for the PC.

Behold, the Corsair iCUE Liquid CPU Cooler.

So I went and finally purchased a Corsair iCUE Liquid CPU Cooler this week with an LCD display, and installed it. What do you think? And now the temperatures on the PC hover around 25 and 26 Celsius constantly. I haven’t yet had the opportunity to fully stress test the system with heavy CPU workload, but this is nice, and it really compliments the whole look.

Ethernet Issues Gone

I’m also happy to report that my Ethernet issues I had been having for a few months now are gone. I couldn’t figure it out. I thought it was my Linux distribution causing issues at the kernel level with my Ethernet going to sleep or being managed by the system somehow.

Basically, randomly, my network would die on the PC, and the only way to get it back, was to physically unplug the Ethernet cable and plug it back in. Not even turning Ethernet on and off seemed to work. And it was happening at random times, not just when walking away from the PC; I could be in the middle of working and the network would go offline.

This was an issue, as I need a stable connection for my daily needs. Especially for video calls and live streaming. I also run a Tor node in a VM which was being affected.

After much troubleshooting, I was not able to fix it at the motherboard level, and my solution was to purchase a [USB to Ethernet adaptor](www.amazon.com.au/dp/B00MYT… which I am happy to report, has remained online during my 3 days away to Lakes Entrance, returning home to a network that has remained online and functioning as expected!

Apparently, Intel NIC’s are known to have this issue? Have you come across it?

Movies

I watched two movies during the week that I briefly posted about. Those were Black Mirror: Bandersnatch and The Social Dilemma.

Artwork for the Netflix Original, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch

Bandersnatch was a great movie. It’s very unique, like those novels that you can pick your characters ending by choosing your path. Well, Bandersnatch does that in a movie form, where the path you pick throughout the movie, provides you with multiple different types of possible endings, dead-ends and just fun! I loved it, it felt very… schizophrenic? Don’t do LSD kids, not without intention (and a good sitter)!

Artwork for The Social Dilemma documentary.

The Social Dilemma on the other hand, was an eye-opener. I mean, I have already made a lot of changes in my life to move away from Social Media and more into my own identity on the web by following IndieWeb principals. As well as completely DeGoogling my life - especially on my phone! My phone is practically a brick with the bare minimum apps to suit my needs and nothing more. But I have taken it further, by not just DeGoogling, but also DeApping. So no emails, no social media, no nothing. The phone does two things. Handle phone calls, and messaging (encrypted through my own self-hosted Matrix instance). Other than that, my phone is in airplane mode, connected to home WiFi. Bluetooth and WiFi scanning off, all tracking off and running on GrapheneOS. Highly recommend watching this documentary - it will open your eyes.

Car Maintenance

I did a little car maintenance on my wife’s vehicle. I’m not very hands on and definitely not a mechanic, unlike my brother. But I changed some light globes for the headlights and number plates and got my hands dirty. It’s an old Toyota Camry Altise - I think 2015 odd? She’s getting old, but still very reliable.

Actually need to arrange with my brother to do its shock absorbers, as they’ve reached their end-of-life!

Voting

We had to vote in Victoria for state parliament and local government. I did something different this year, as usually I just vote based on what I know personally, and that’s nothing… as I really am not interested in any politics. But that is the wrong way to vote, and I fear a lot of us vote like I did.

I used AI

Yes, you read right. I used AI to help me in making my informed decision. And no, I don’t mean that I typed into the prompt, “Who do you recommend I vote for?” - that would be outright stupid.

But I used AI as a tool to help me make my informed decision, and it performed very well.

Basically, first I got AI to help me setup a score matrix spreadsheet. Where I listed topics that were important to me, not important to me and topics I was against. Each with their own score based on importance to me.

For me, digital privacy, encryption, security, open source solutions and so forth are my top priorities. Among many others of course which I wont discuss here publicly. But AI was able to work a uniquely tailored scoring system for me.

So then, there were 16 parties for me to rank based on my scoring. And AI helped here by writing me, essentially, an essay on each party and their representatives, one by one and scoring with me, giving each party a total.

I made sure to look out for any controversial topics. Scoured the web for sources on anything that would raise red flags for me to lower my preferences for a certain person or party.

In the end, I had 16 parties in order of preference that I was able to make informed decisions about to cast my vote.

I would not recommend AI to give you its own opinions about people or parties. Remember that AI is an LLM and gathers its information from the WWW and will base its opinions on others opinions and not your own. Also, remember that opinions can be coded in by those who control the software.

What you need, are sources you can read, watch and listen to.

The process I used took a full day for me with everything else on hold. It was worth it, and I felt better using this method than my old method.

Oh, and here’s a funny video I recommend you watch, just for a laugh:

Funny right?

Lakes Entrance

Over the #AnzacDay long weekend, I took the family out to #LakesEntrance which is a 4 hour drive from #Melbourne and with my Tesla, requires at least one charge on route. This is good though, as it means I take a rest at least every 2 hours and stretch the legs.

The beautiful thing about electric vehicles, in my opinion, is that when you do need to charge on a long road trip, you get to leave the car plugged in and all get out of the car to go for a walk, go for a bite to eat in the local town and enjoy the scenery before continuing. I think this in itself will help with the road toll of drivers falling asleep at the wheel.

Aerial photograph of Raymond Island, courtesy of [visitmelbourne.com](https://visitmelbourne.com)

We started our trip with a visit of the Raymond Island, which included a trip on the Raymond Island Ferry. The island has hundreds of koalas that you can see while going on walks around. There are some trails marked out on AllTrails you can check out if you like, but you can basically walk anywhere along the Island and you are sure to find koalas all over the place. They were introduced back in 1953 to Raymond Island, from Phillip Island due to the population of Koalas in Australia almost becoming extinct due to not only disasters, but to the fur trade (we humans…).

A beautiful Koala having a drug induced sleep on a tree.

We then went for a dinner at a place called Cathy’s Asian Kitchen in Lakes Entrance. Hidden inside a motel carpark, we found it to be a hidden gem, with authentic and extra-tasty Malaysian Cuisine. Kudo’s to the family owners on this one, as we absolutely loved it.

Stalagmites and Stalagtites inside the Royal Cave in Buchan, along with pool of calcium filled water and flowstone on the edges.

The next location was the Buchan Caves in Buchan, Victoria. We went into the Fairy Cave and the Royal Cave and those were absolutely beautiful. Highly recommend you go pay those a visit and enjoy the day out there with the family, as there’s also a multitude of walking trails to do. You can camp there, bring a caravan (with bookings) and all.

Here’s a video that I managed to record inside the Royal Cave in Buchan. It is essentially a walk-through from the end back to the exit on the way back out, as I was the last in my group with no one behind me to make me have to walk quicker.

After the caves, we went for a 2 hour cruise on the waters using Peel’s Lake Cruises. There are other companies around that offer cruises, and I am sure they are just as good. However we picked this one last minute after lunch and after the caves and this cruise had some spots left for us.

We got to see Fraser Island, Flannagans Island, Rigby’s Island, Raymond Island and the beautiful surrounds of the local areas as a whole.

Not only that, but the Captain took us to the entry of Lakes Entrance, known as “The Entrance” where seals are commonly seen sun bathing on the rocks. And that didn’t disappoint, as the seals were indeed there having a wonderful time. Here’s a video!

On our final day we went to the Metung Hot Springs. Our kids had never gone to any hot springs before, so this was an experience for them.

It’s not as big as some of the other hot springs around Victoria, but given that it was not too busy when we went, there’s was plenty for us to enjoy. I love the barrels up top with a view of the scenery below!

Photo of the Metung Hot Springs barrels which are naturally heated and bubble at times by the naturally releasing Sulphuric Gasses. Photo courtesy of Vicit Gippsland - Source: [www.visitgippsland.com.au/do-and-se...](https://www.visitgippsland.com.au/do-and-see/spas-and-wellbeing/metung-hot-springs)

We could have ended our trip there, considering the 4 hour drive back home, but the kids really wanted to see the beach. So we completed a walk around some of the 90 mile beach. The trail was called the Lakes Entrance Loop via 90 Mile Beach. This was a beautiful walk with the family - and most important of all, the kids loved it. We got to see the seals again by The Entrance and loads of crabs! Check out these two small videos below:

Conclusion

All in all, a productive week indeed. I hope that you enjoyed the read and thank you for taking the time to read all the way to the end if you did!

I enjoy conversation and appreciate any comments left in the discussions and will respond when I can. So please feel free to. It’s always good to know when people appreciate a blog entry and enjoy reading up!

The Weekly Recap - Week 16

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 11:52:14 +1100

Looking at the whole week, I can already see that my routine was really put out of whack due to #NightShift. I don’t know if I am just making excuses up, but it really does feel that way. I was not able to get my sleep pattern right, mostly breaking my 6 to 8 hour sleep period into two cycles. One perhaps within an hour of getting home from work, trying to sleep for 3 to 4 hours, and then waking up for a couple of hours and getting another 2 to 3 hours at the end of the day prior to heading off to work.

During my period of time awake, I really did not feel like doing my daily 30 minutes of skipping, reading, or meditating. I really should have pushed more.

It’s easy to say now, at the end of the week and looking back at the daily journal entries - it was a daily mental push to give myself excuses to do other things with my time.

What I do for work

Not sure I would call it work, as I actually do love my job. I’m not sure the English language has any appropriate words for it? If you can help me out here, let me know in the comments.

The only reason I am delving more into this area of my life is because I happened to have discussions with someone in comments of my #thoughts posts on the #fediverse and answering a few questions throughout.

Source: https://pngimg.com/uploads/police_car/police_car_PNG19.png

I’m a police officer where I live, and I really enjoy helping people out when they need it most. I know a lot of us get jaded, joining a dream job only to find the reality of it is not what you think - but it really does take a certain mentality to look at the profession from different angles and to shift your focus from crime centric to victim centric and focusing on helping out the victim, communicating with the victim throughout the whole process.

We are trained when going to a job to focus on Victim -> Scene -> Offender. A lot of us get stuck in tunnel vision and want the fun stuff, chasing the offender and missing all the initial actions necessary for an investigation to be successful at court. And even more so, a lot of us forget in all of that, about the victim. Focusing only on the desired outcome with the offender.

In the end, that leads to burnout. As this job has tonnes of paperwork involved (at least in Victoria). Focusing on the outcome of the offender only to get a result at court that is essentially a slap on the wrist brings you down - and then, because you never focused on the victim - the victim is wondering what’s happened since police arrived - did police do nothing? You as a member now have no rapport with the victim.

If you keep yourself focused on Victim -> Scene -> Offender, not just at the initial job, but throughout the whole process, you are more likely to enjoy the full process, as is the victim going to understand the process by being spoken to like a human being, remembered and guided throughout. While the outcome at court may be the same result - your mind has been on helping a member of the community understand the process and know the likely outcome. This leads to a member of the community who understands the process we go through, understands the law system a little more, and is more likely to speak up to MP’s or within the community about our law system to make desired changes.

Anyway, this is one method I have come to enjoy my line of work in the mountain of paperwork and lack of time to do it.

Another method I have come to keep enjoying it, is #compartmentalising and using my daily journal keeping, and my blogging on my own domain name. Gone are the days of sitting on social media, scrolling an endless feed of algorithmically curated content to drain my stream of consciousness and just consume.

Black Mirror

Artwork for the Netflix TV Series, Black Mirror. Are you ready to plug back in?

Another method I kept myself sane during what time I had awake after night shift was to delve into the #BlackMIrror series. Season 7 was released, and I couldn’t resist digging in, as I really enjoy this series as someone that doesn’t actually watch TV anymore or go down the #YouTube rabbit holes and such.

Season 7 was really well done. I enjoyed every episode in it. I initially thought it would be like Season 6 and out of touch with the rest of the seasons, but this season did not disappoint in any way.

Looking at the world from different aspects of what could be with today’s technology, or soon to have technology with a bit of a satanical twist to them really makes for an interesting watch.

The first episode actually had me on a downer! And above I was saying keep myself sane by watching this season? Episode 1 was a drainer and I thought I’d need a psych to reground myself into reality!

I don’t want to go into any more detail about it, but you really should take the time out to watch them if you haven’t.

AI / LLM’s

Speaking of Black Mirror and technology - this week I felt that the LLM’s I had been using for discussions and troubleshooting felt off. #GPT and #DeepSeek were hallucinating information a lot more and spitting out false information to me, leading me down tracks of nonsense.

I was trying to troubleshoot and looking into content management systems that had built in #AcivityPub backends for my website.

Currently, I use micro.blog to host my website, and rely on its backend that enables me to follow people on the fediverse and comment/reply to their content and have discussions. It also enables my posts on my blog to appear on the fediverse and for any replies to end up on my website as well.

Micro.blog allows for the exporting of all posts and what not, which is great! But if I wanted to self-host, as well as keep my fediverse identity (@samuel@samuellison.com) I would also need a system that has an ActivityPub backend that is not just a platform with no ability to customise into a full website like what you are reading from now. I can use Mastodon, Pixelfed, GoToSocial, WriteFreely etc, but none of those offer what I need.

The LLM’s were spitting out so much false information that I was down a rabbit hole for 2 hours before I realised this was all nonsense. The LLM’s finally admitted that they were wrong when pressed, and that their information was based on “theoretical features” that didn’t yet exist!

Could it be that the #AISlop that is appearing more and more on the internet is causing #AI to become more useless when it comes to providing us with information?

I mean, a lot of content these days, including articles, stories, news, videos - are all AI generated by people that are prompting AI to write it. This makes AI gather the information it needs from the internet, assess, and then spit out the work for you.

Then, the next person does the same. AI repeats, gathers its information from itself (from AI generated content already on the web now - repeat) and spits out even more useless information.

Then, you have companies like #CloudFlare, a content delivery network, that attempts to protect its clientele by creating sophisticated mazes where AI is lead down these rabbit holes of information it thinks it is obtaining from legitimate sources, which is actually in itself being created on the fly by other AI technology and feeding the requesting AI/LLM with misinformation.

Have you noticed this starting to happen?

I personally think it’s a good thing. I mean, LLM’s have been stealing the work of artists and writers now for some time. Why are we going in the direction of AI replacing all our jobs, instead of making AI useful? Where are these AI that can come do my washing, my dishes, my gardening and other duties around the household to enable me to have more free time to do what I enjoy to do during my spare time?

I don’t need my job replaced by AI, I’m sure none of you do. All this talk of universal basic income and the likes. What will we do with our time, if what we enjoy to do is taken by AI? I hope not Episode 2, Season 1 of Black Mirror - Fifteen Million Merits!

Family Visiting

I had family visiting from Brisbane during my time doing night shifts. Means I missed out on a lot of opportune family time with members of the family I don’t generally get to see on a regular basis, which is a shame. But we did still get a few things done as family where I got to be involved. Including celebrating my father in laws 70th birthday with some wonderful food at #BoardWalkPizzeria in #CarolineSprings.

Also got to celebrate an Easter dinner with the family and cousins and all the kids. We guys played a few board games, including #munchkins and #Catan! My cousin made some beautiful #pizza which we all enjoyed very much!

John Carpenter’s: They Live

Saying that I generally don’t watch movies is somewhat of a lie. After seeing a post by @n1ghtw1re@defcon.social suggesting to go watch They Live by John Carpenter I went and did just that. I can be swayed into watching movies by those I choose to follow and consume information from - I suppose!

Artwork for John Carpenter's 1988 movie - They Live

Actually quite a good movie indeed! Made in 1988 and having a Black Mirror kind of vibe where humanity has actually been taken over by an alien race, and we are stuck in this illusionary hypnotised state of consuming information and complying.

Actually there’s a line in this movie which is featured in the Duke Nukem games, “It’s time to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and I’m all outta gum”, vs the original movie quote, “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass… and I’m all outta bubblegum”.

Actually, the game was somewhat inspired by this movie. Not only in the line, but the hog police (aliens), the whole look of Duke Nukem and more!

Check out the article written by @n1ghtw1re@defcon.social here.

Conclusion

If you read my blurb of consciousness recapping on my week, good on you, and thank you. I hope that you enjoyed it and I look forward to making another recap next week to reflect on and look back to in the future!

The Weekly Recap - Week 15

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 16:46:32 +1100

I thought I would try something new this week with my weekly journal entries where I would normally just quickly look through the last 7 days and note down to myself what I have done well or not.

Basically, why don’t I do a recap that goes through what I accomplished for the week based on a lot of the daily notes I made and go into more detail, since larger long-form content allows for more characters and space to just let it all out and stretch?

Onto the Recap!

Although I don’t feel I ticked off enough of my daily tasks such as regular skipping/jump-roping, reading, meditating and what not, I feel like I did have a busy week and a lot of debriefing to do with myself. There’s a lot to unpack here and more that I will need to write about, now that I come to think of it.

Some things I did

Phillip Island

Just at the end of last week, the family and I took off to #PhillipIsland and stayed by a beach house. In one of my notes, I state that I should write more of an article about it, yet, I have not yet done so. I need to add this to my list of things to do!

I did at least make a video of it for the family to see, but nothing public about it to discuss where we went, what it was like out there, what did we see?

A photo I took at Phillip Island around Nobby's Point of a blowhole.

Stay-tuned, as I may update this post later when I make the journal entry about our trip as a whole.

An unsuspected death

Sometimes life throws you curve-balls, and unfortunately we recently had one of those.

My eldest daughter has been taking #guitar lessons for a while and had this really great elderly teacher who seemed so happy, so healthy. Until one day, he would try to speak, yet no words come out.

The teacher ended up in hospital for a few days. We all assumed something like #Apraxia or something similar that affected the brain and his ability to form words.

In actuality, it was a #melanoma in the chest, a #cancer, that had already taken over and it was too late. The teacher was given a week to live from that diagnosis.

Unfortunately I did not get to take my daughter to visit the teacher to say her goodbyes, as it was already too late and coma had set in and it would not have been appropriate.

New UPS

I purchased a new #UPS for our #NAS due to power surges happening during the week as well. This should greatly reduce the risk of permanent damage due to surges on the NAS, modem and switches. I’ve also set the NAS up to auto shut down when power goes out and the NAS uses battery backup.

Vibe Coding - The new Buzz Word out there.

I did a little bit of #VibeCoding in #OpenSimulator and worked a little more on #SurvivorCore. Just added some “consumable” scripts to increase or decrease any survival stats in the game.

Kids Homework

I found out that my youngest daughter had not been doing her homework properly as she’s been more focused on wanting to play #Roblox on grandma’s iPad upstairs while her older sister would play on the XBOX.

I went and put some restrictions on the internet to try prevent them playing while I am at work straight after school, and try to get them to focus on doing their chores and homework prior to any games.

Because the kids enjoy their iPads as much as I enjoy my #Linux computing - I’ve encouraged them to take photos of their homework and tutoring and send to my mother who does their tutoring, to show the completed work and get daily feedback via video calls and what not.

A New Job, New Opportunities

I caught up with an old friend prior to him having to fly to #Canberra for his new job. Was great to catch up.

He’ll be gone for 12 to 15 weeks for the training before being brought back here to #Melbourne to do the role he applied for and was a successful applicant for.

It’s great when you see friends achieve a goal they had set and get into a dream job they had been trying at for years.

There is always a light at the end of the tunnel, somewhere out there. You just gotta find it.

Hiking - Werribee Gorge

I went for a #hike to #WerribeeGorge with the girls and this was a lot of fun. I should make a #CaptainsLog post about this as well. Stay tuned for that one as I will make another journal entry there and update this article to point to it to prove it!

I’m very proud of my kids for accomplishing this one as it was challenging enough for such youngins.

Obsidian, a new tool

I also did a lot of playing around on #Obsidian to improve on my #journal workflow. I used it for this article, and am using it now for all my #microblog entries and notes.

It allows me to organise all my thoughts in a map, to publish straight to my website and to the #fediverse as well.

I’ve found I’ve been more productive using this tool - though, maybe that’s just a feeling? Is writing your thoughts and journal considered a form of procrastination in and of itself? We will see when I look back in a few months, or years, won’t we?

I get to keep short notes within a larger daily entry. I can look back at the whole week and then make a post like this one to reflect on the whole week - see where I can improve on and so on…

I can also use it as a link aggregator in my short micro entries. Posting a link of a website I looked at and found interesting, and briefly talk about the subject matter. If I find I am talking about a certain #hashtag over and over, I can see an obvious trend in my current interests and choose to post in more detail about it.

On to Next Week

Anyway, I have more things to do. This was my first weekly recap. I plan to do more - but alas, there’s only so much time in a day!

Lerdergerg Gorge Hike - March 2025

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 21:38:20 +1100

Last month, I went for a final hike in the Lerderderg Gorge basically, at the end of summer. And unfortunately, most of the Lerderderg Gorge hiking trails will be closed over Autumn due to planned burning.

These are done, essentially, to keep us, and the surrounds safe here in Australia by minimising the damage a bush fire causes in the more dangerous and drier months.

So for now, Lerderderg will unfortunately not be on my list of locations for fungi photography until a little later in the year. Hopefully I will be able to find some sturdier species coming into winter though!

Where is Lerderderg?

The Lerderderg State park is just north of Bacchus Marsh in Victoria, Australia. It is a gorge that has been carved out of the rugged landscape by the Lerderderg River.

Photo taken of some of the scenery seen while climbing up the Lerderderg Gorge.

In early 1851, the area was reputed to be a hot spot for gold mining, and At its peak saw thousands of diggers arrive looking for the lucrative mineral.

If you are interested in hiking this beautiful location, you can check out the AllTrails entry here: https://www.alltrails.com/trail/australia/victoria/lerderderg-gorge-circuit

The Adventure

In this section of the log, I am going to go on and on about my last hike around the Lerderderg Circuit Track. But, if you want to see and hear it first hand instead of read, you can do so by watching this 3.5 hour video of my hike below.

The Beginning

I set off early in the morning, but due to the weather known to be cooler, I didn’t start my hike in the cool or the darkness of the night.

It was early morning and I strapped my DJI Action onto my chest to get some Point of View (POV) footage of the entire hike to make a video out of it for those interested. That should be embedded for you above for you to watch. If it doesn’t work, let me know in the comments and I will embed from an alternative source!

I brought a R0DE VideoMic Pro Microphone as well, linked up with Rode Wireless Pro’s to capture any sounds with some more detail, as that’s something I would also like to increase my skills in, and then I set off down the beautiful trail.

At this time of the year, there’s usually no flowing water along the river, so the river crossings are easier and you can keep your feet dry, but I will say that having flowing water along a majority of the hike sets a beautiful sound and scenery to enjoy alongside you - so I will be returning here with flowing water with this new equipment. My first attempt at recording this location was using my mobile phone which while the quality was high, it doesn’t leave enough room for editing the colours just right to my own liking.

Here are a few sound recordings that I took along the hike. I hope that you enjoy listening to them as much as I enjoyed the recording of them.

Difficulties

This time around, I felt much fitter than my first attempt. Yes, it was cooler, and that would have helped some, but I also felt my cardiovascular and my fitness in general was up to standard for this hike.

There are a couple scrambles which actually require you to use your hands to hold onto the rocks to help yourself up, but nothing too difficult. You just need to be a little careful if you are like me and like to ruck your pack. Basically, I enjoy having a 15kg or more backpack on. Not only due to my requirement for photography equipment, but rucking is also a form of exercise and increases my strength needs when hiking, especially when going up and really getting into those leg muscles.

Going down means I have to go slower, and trekking poles are really a necessity, as falls are more likely with a heavier backpack when not careful of the extra weight.

Even climbing sometimes, it requires you to activate your core muscles more and take notice of your centre of gravity point, as leaning back a little too much, you’ll find that you struggle to keep a balance!

I wish I already had a heart rate monitor and my handheld GPS tracker, as I would like to wear a strap heart rate monitor that tracks my heart rate along the hike, that I can then overlay across the whole video of the hike. That way, you can get a feel of how easy or how difficult a portion of what I am doing might be, based on my own fitness levels - but I am no athlete!

A smart watch with built in heart rate wont do it for me. New ones aren’t what they use to be, in my opinion, and their privacy policies are all as bad as each other, require proprietary software to read data from which these companies data mine you for. I will give what data I want to publish thanks.

The Top

At the top of the mountain, I was approximately 440 or 450m above sea level. I wouldn’t be grading the difficulty of a hike or climb based on how high up a mountain is though. The difficulty is determined by the incline, or, steepness of the hike up, whether it requires a lot of scrambling and how long the steep inclinations go for.

You could have a 2,000m mountain with a slight slope that you walk for an hour easily, vs a 100m mountain that has a 50 degree incline that will give you more of a challenge. It’s like a slow jog vs HIIT training.

At the top of the mountain, I took the opportunity to enjoy a small break - re-energised myself with some food and prepared myself for the downward section of the mountain.

The Easy Part

The walk down was enjoyable. Heart rate back to normal, the sweat on my back cooling me down as the sun rose higher into the skies.

I made it back in time to get home, have a shower and pick up the girls from school.

The next fun part of the whole hike was to edit all the footage I took of my video and audio and upload it to my ko-fi account for subscribers to download for free if they wish it (or pay what they like).

I’d love to hear about your adventures!

My Experience Hiking in the Dark

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 21:15:41 +1100

Recently, I have had a fascination with wanting to try out hiking in the darkness of the night.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about night hiking and what the benefits might be, including being able to stay cooler in the summer heat, experiencing the fascinating sounds of the nocturnal wildlife, and seeing the night sky up above.

“There’s something magical about hiking in nature at night. You just can’t replicate the sights and the sounds of a nightime hike in the daytime. It’s a fantastic way to reflect after a frantically busy day."¹

And don’t worry, I’ve also been looking into the various dangers that come along with hiking at night too. In Australia (at least in Victoria), we don’t have predatorial animals that are interested in humans, so the most common dangers are going to do with the lack of visibility, and these include your poor visibility, which increases your risk of getting lost and increases your risk of having trips and falls.

“It’s also easier to get lost when you’re hiking at night. The lack of light can make it difficult to see landmarks, and you may not be able to see the trail as well. If you do get lost, it’s important to stay calm and retrace your steps. If you’re unable to find your way back, call for help."²

The Night Sky

Well, on Monday the 10th of March 2025, I finally got to experience hiking in the darkness!

My wife and I checked our weather app and it was going to be a scorcher. That meant, if we were going to enjoy a more comfortable hike, we would have to do it under the cover of the early morning sky.

Initially, we wanted to wake up at 5:00 AM and I predicted we would be leaving home by 6:00 AM and arriving to the site by the crack of dawn at 7:00 AM. Fortunately though, we actually ended up getting to the site at 6:00 AM, and it was still pitch black by the time we got there.

The Experience

So there I was, standing in the middle of the darkness with my wife at Werribee Gorge, about to do the Long and Short Circuit Track combined.

Luckily, I am always prepared when I go hiking. I always pack my essentials in my trusty kit, and this includes a good quality torch.

A good and powerful torch is always recommended.

My torch was obviously my first go to. And we had to decide if we would try the hike up the mountain with our night vision adjusted eyes, or use the torch. There are pros and benefits to either method, however on this occasion, the moon was not up in the sky, and there was a little cloud cover which made it extra dark.

While I probably would have enjoyed the benefits that come with not using any light source, such as a better field of view and a sense of larger surroundings, the consequences of tripping due to the low light available, and being with my wife as someone else to take care of, meant that we chose to use the light source.

The torch I have was powerful, and it was good to see that after a couple months of storage and no use in my kit that it still had a good 99% of battery available. If you’d like to check out the torch, it’s a Shadowhawk Tactical Flashlight and is available on Amazon.

I’m not sure how accurate the claims are to lumens, but I know from my personal experience with it that it was more than ample for my needs with hiking. Having the ability to have a large arc of light, all the way to a nice and slim, concentrated beam.

I also cannot comment on the safety of the included rechargeable lithium battery, but it has not exploded in my bag as yet!³

Another thing I can comment on though is the life of the battery. I used it for a full hour straight prior to daylight hitting the summit of our hike, and the battery dropped 7% - so there’s plenty of juice to last you the night, and if you bring a good battery pack with you as part of your kit, you wont have issues.

Strange Sounds

While commencing our hike, the first thing I noticed was the serenity of the night. You know how when you wake up during the night and the sounds seem amplified? Everything is much louder that you could pretty much hear a pin drop? Well that’s how it felt out there in the darkness, and you could hear every little rustle in the trees and shrub. All the sounds are much more prominent, which, if I were by myself for my first experience in the darkness in a forest, I would have been pretty frightened. I highly recommend bringing some company for your first attempt.

I was frightened enough when I first got into hiking and would go on trails by myself during the day. Hearing new sounds and figuring out what they were kept me hyper-vigilant. Multiply that by I don’t know how much in the darkness, but multiply it nonetheless.

And then came the next challenge.

You see, I enjoy hiking using trekking poles. Especially when I have a heavy kit on my back. And holding a torch in one hand, kind of removes the ability to be able to use my poles effectively.

I’ll need to invest on a headlamp I think, which includes red light to keep my night vision from being affected as much. If anyone has any suggestions for one that works well for them, and has good battery life (and preferably can be recharged via USB), I would love to read your recommendations in the discussions below.

Putting that little difficulty aside, I did manage to make the summit, and by the time we reached the top, daylight was peaking through the sky and I was able to pack the torch away.

Serene Views & Wildlife

On the way down the other side, we stopped for a break to view the river flowing through the gorge below. It was astonishing. The sun barely creeping over the horizon and starting to peak over the mountain to one side and shining over to the next as the river flow made beautiful relaxing sounds. I did not get to make a sound recording of it on this occasion, but I will be sure to do so on my next one and share it with you.

As the light kept coming through, when we did spot wildlife, it was easier to take video. One of the fascinating animals we got to see was a Wallaby, and I managed to record a video of it as it watched us in as much curiosity as we had for it.

One of the best things about hiking places like Werribee Gorge is being close to a river. The sounds are relaxing as the water hits the rocks beneath. You always have a source of water should you need it (with a filtration system, of course), and you’re actually more likely to see wildlife during certain periods of the day, as it’s a much sought after resource!

There’s also a really cool portion of the walk on this trail which has you clinging onto the side of a rock-face with water beneath you. It’s got cable around it ready for you to hold onto which makes it that much more fun to experience.

Photo Source: cafuego - https://www.flickr.com/photos/cafuego/9609872753

We managed to make it around the mountain prior to the sun getting too high up, which meant the UV wasn’t too strong yet and we could finish our walk around the Eastern side of the mountain, known as the Short Circuit Walk, which sees you doing a few more steep sections prior to making your way back down where we parked our car. This section of the walk was challenging enough to get the heart rate going and the sweats on prior to melting in the days heat!

We finished the hike around 10:00 AM and made it back to the air conditions vehicle for the drive back home.

Conclusion

Would I recommend night hiking, and would I do it again?

Yes, absolutely. I plan on doing it again this weekend if the opportunity arises, again with my wife. Let’s see if we can tackle the Lerderderg Gorge and I will let you all know how that goes!

And then I plan on doing some of these even later during the night, perhaps straight after work or something and tackling them on my lonesome for some ample time to record natures sounds and take some amazing photographs.

I hope that you enjoyed reading this article and would love to hear from you below. What’s your experience hiking in the darkness? Have you done it before? Would you do it again? If you haven’t done it before, would you consider giving it a go?

Footnotes:

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 18:07:35 +1100

I did my first #NightHike in #Darkness on the weekend in #WerribeeGorge. As the daylight came out, so did the wallabies! Here’s a cute video of one I took:

makertube.net/w/fcbFk72…

A Wholesome Hike Through Whipstick Loop Walk

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 12:05:43 +1100

Hiking has become a cherished activity for me, and it’s even more special when shared with loved ones. Two days ago, I embarked on a hike with my mother through the Whipstick Loop Walk, located in Blackwood, Victoria, within the Wombat State Forest. This 5.8 km loop trail, which takes about two hours to complete, is a relatively easy and scenic walk, perfect for someone like my mother, who is rediscovering hiking after decades.

The trail is known for its diverse landscapes, ranging from ferny rainforests near the river to classic Australian bushland with towering eucalypts. It’s a sensory delight, with the crunch of debris underfoot, the fresh smells of eucalyptus and ferns, and the melodic calls of native birds.

The trailhead for Whipstick Loop Walk in Blackwood Victoria.

Preparing for the Day

We set out on Friday, 14th February 2024, a pleasant summer day with a temperature of 23°C. I picked up my mother at 8:00 am, and we arrived at the trailhead by 9:00 am. The previous day’s light rain had left the trail floor scattered with leaves and twigs, adding to the charm of the walk.

Given my mother’s age (65+) and her recent return to hiking, I carefully chose this trail for its gentle inclines and stable footing. It’s a great option for beginner hikers or those easing back into the activity. You can find more details about the trail on AllTrails.

Wildlife Encounters

About halfway through the walk, we were thrilled to spot a koala perched on a young gum tree. It was munching on leaves and scratching itself—a behaviour I later learned is a way for koalas to spread their scent. Here’s the photo I captured:

A young koala spotted during our hike, perched on a gum tree. Did you know koalas scratch themselves to spread their scent?

Later, as we neared the three-quarter mark of the trail, we were treated to another magical moment. Four southern boobook owls flew by, and one landed on a branch right in front of us. I managed to snap a photo of it as it turned its head in a near 270-degree spin. These owls are Australia’s smallest and most common owl species. Here’s the image:

A southern boobook owl, known for its haunting call and incredible head-turning ability.

The Trail’s Beauty

One of the things I love most about the Whipstick Loop Walk is its variety. The trail transitions from lush rainforest-like areas near the river to classic Australian bushland as you gain elevation. The eucalypts here bear the marks of bushfires and strong winds, creating a dramatic and rugged landscape.

Although it’s summer and not the ideal season for fungi, I couldn’t help but reminisce about my previous visits during autumn. The decomposing logs and damp conditions then bring out stunning mushrooms, perfect for photography. On this trip, I didn’t bring my professional camera, but I did snap some of my favourite fungi photos on past visits. Here’s one of a cluster of red mushrooms I captured with my trusty Nikon D7000, a 14-year-old camera that still delivers stunning results:

A vibrant cluster of red mushrooms captured on a Nikon D7000.

Reflections

The hike was a wonderful experience, not just for the natural beauty but for the time spent with my mother. She worked up a sweat by the end, but the cool forest temperatures (ranging from 14°C to 19°C) kept the exertion manageable. It’s heartwarming to see her embrace hiking, and I’m grateful for these moments we share.

I plan to return to the Whipstick Loop Walk in autumn, equipped with my professional camera and sound recording gear, to capture the fungi and the serene atmosphere in all its glory. Until then, this hike remains a cherished memory.

What’s your favourite hiking trail? Have you had any memorable wildlife encounters? Let me know in the comments!

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 12:51:12 +1100

I went for a #hike today with my 65+ year old mother at the #LerderdergGorge here in #Victoria, #Australia.

We spotted two different groups of #WildGoats and a beautiful #Wallaby who was curious as to what we were doing.

It was a great day!

My First Photos!

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 12:16:40 +1100

This post is basically a re-post of some of my favourite photos so that you are able to find them.

When I transitioned my website from using Wordpress to Micro.blog I lost access to my old posts and the media I had uploaded to that server.

Luckily, I only had 3 articles so far, as I was still finishing my web design and waiting on some new gear to go out and photograph with.

Below are my favourite photos that were all taken using a Nikon D7000 while out hiking in various locations of Victoria.

Captured a million-year-old masterpiece: the Organ Pipes, a towering basalt formation in Victoria, Australia. 🌿 This panoramic photo holds a special place as my first detailed wide shot from my Nikon D7000.

Nature's tiny wonders: a cluster of spotted mushrooms thriving amidst the forest's undergrowth, showcasing the beauty of the wild.

Captured these delicate orchids in my backyard using my old Nikon camera. Practicing light and shadows, I'm finding beauty in the small details of nature right at home. 📸 Excited to keep learning and improving!

I will make all of these photos available on my Patron page for FREE. You can become a member for free and download all of these in their original format.

They may not currently be in 16:9 ratio and optimized for Social Media content, but these are my first attempts at photography and will always hold a #nostalgic place to me.

I am sure that you will enjoy these. Please let me know in the comments what you think.

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 18:15:28 +1100

Well, that was a fun hike with the wife. 12.44km and a 332m elevation gain. Beautiful temperature of 20 before the 40 degrees hit on Monday (Celsius)

Captain's Log on Samuel Lison

Weekly Recap — Week 08

Where I Went

What We Accomplished

🏗️ Infrastructure Hustle

🎮 SL Colonies Product Work

🌊 Family Adventure: Portsea & Fort Nepean

🤖 Creative Experiments

Self-Reflection

This Week’s Targets

Conclusions

Weekly Recap - Week 07

Where I Went

What We Accomplished

🎮 SL Colonies Product Work

🔒 Infrastructure Hardening

🎛️ Mission Control & Tools

🔮 Intelligence & Monitoring

🧪 Testing & Refinement

💭 Self-Reflection

🎯 This Week’s Targets

🏁 Conclusions

Weekly Recap — Week 6

From Laptops to Always-On

Foundation First

What Grounds Me

Small Steps Building Into Something Real

Looking Ahead

Posts This Week

Weekly Recap - Week 2

Ariyah’s 10th Birthday

Australia Zoo

Blender Self-Learning

Dinner at Felons

Hike & Breakfast at Lovewell, Mount Gravatt

Conclusion

Weekly Recap - Week 1

Roblox Coding

Special Effects

Udemy & Blender

SL Colonies

Conclusion

Weekly Recap - Week 51

Discourse Updates

More on SL Colonies

Lunch with Mum

My Health

Nemo got hurt

Werribee Zoo Christmas Party

Conclusion

Weekly Recap - Week 42

Apple Ecosystem

Gardening

Photography at Brimbank Park

Peninsula Hot Springs & Cape Schanck

Conclusion

Weekly Recap - Week 39

New Tech

New Gear, New Groove

And now I need to learn!

The Zoos

Werribee Open Range Zoo

Melbourne Zoo

AFL Grand Final

Conclusion

Weekly Recap - Week 32

Melbourne Zoo

Days to Self

Brimbank Park

Sanatorium Lake

Focus Bracketing & Focus Stacking

Cape Schanck

Task Completion

Conclusion

Weekly Recap - Week 31

New Camera!

Artvo

Task Progress

Other Stats

Conclusion