Author Archives: admin

Planes I have flown in (updated to include A330 and Dash 8)

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2020 Birding Targets

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In no particular order, my 2020 targets are:

  • Sooty Tern
  • Malleefowl
  • Black-eared Cuckoo
  • Southern Scrub-robin
  • Gilbert’s Whistler
  • Australian Owlet-nightjar
  • Barn Swallow (suspect I will need to upgrade my ID skills a bit for this)
  • Shy Heathwren
  • Rufous Fieldwren
  • Noisy Scrub-bird (will need a trip to Cheynes Beach for this)
  • Western Whipbird (as above)
  • Eastern Yellow Wagtail

TempMonHTTP

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For a while I’ve been tinkering around with a simple project – an Arduino-based temperature (and humidity) monitor that outputs a webpage on my home LAN. The Arduino I used was the Freetronics EtherTen, a quality product.

Screenshot of the TempMonHTTP webpage. Yes, it gets hot in my walk in robe where the home LAN switch is…

Check out the code at https://github.com/gjhmac/TempMonHTTP.

Australian Birds known to be kept in captivity in Perth

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I’m going to compile and maintain this list to assist in distinguishing aviary escapees from over-travelling legitimate wild birds (relative to the Perth metro area).

  • Rainbow Lorikeet
  • Red-Collared Lorikeet
  • Princess Parrot
  • Scarlet-chested Parrot
  • Bourkes Parrot
  • Budgerigar
  • Cockatiel
  • Emerald Dove
  • Diamond Dove
  • Zebra Finch
  • Double-barred Finch
  • Painted Finch
  • Masked Lapwing
  • Banded Lapwing
  • King Quail
  • Brown Quail
  • Stubble Quail

Ahead of their time…

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One of my tasks as an undergraduate in the engineering firm I was working at was to look after the website. Back then knowing a little HTML and how to use FTP wasn’t as common as it is now.

The web hosting company we used provided quite detailed logs for all of our virtual visitors. By looking at the IP addresses in the logs it was possible to speculate (the key word here being speculate) which company the visitor worked at.

Our sales and marketing guy caught wind of these logs and suggested we send emails to the companies we suspected had had one of their employees visit our site asking if we could be of any assistance or if they required any further information.

I explained that a) we didn’t 100% know that they had visited and b) this raised all sorts of privacy issues. Plus to me this sort of practice was creepy and not how the Internet was supposed to work.

How naive was I?

New Year, New Kit Update

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The new iPad (iPad 6th Generation (128GB)) has been fantastic. I’m now hanging out for some of the goodies promised in iOS 13 (or iPadOS as it may be)…

Unfortunately I can’t say the same about the keyboard/case I selected to go with it (Logitech Slim Folio iPad Keyboard Case). Firstly, the top part of the keyboard seemed to rub on the iPad screen (thankfully only damaging the screen protector). Secondly, the keys are quite fragile and it wasn’t long before one had popped off after the mechanism had broken. To be fair I may have gotten unlucky, plenty of other people online recommend this keyboard/case.

After abandoning the keyboard/case I purchased an STM case and an external Logitech K380 Bluetooth keyboard. Both are going well.