Taking an evening to enjoy some audiovisual entertainment with my loved one.
Progress on chicken tractor, path and children’s board book.
A visual treat for those that are tuning in anyway.
A night off
by Kimliatach by Kimliatach Mild sunburn, Big progress
by Kimliatach 
Much progress on the Chicken tractor today. A design and perspective shift around midday undid an hour or two’s work but has resulted in a far better overall build. Photoblog will await completion which is likely still a day or two away. I’ve begun scheming a cubby/ treehouse based on a similar design, provided more of the motorcycle crates are available for free which I believe to be the case. N’s orchard path is on the home stretch and her wee patch of lawn is now positively verdant. Even requiring mowing with scissors today.
Working on colouring the lake card I drew yesterday this evening. I need to find an unwanted scanner locally as I spent the first hour of the cleaning up the image issues in my photo of the linework. My plan is to then put all four of the terrain cards I’ve done so far side by side and do a consistency check.
Edit. Having finished the Lake card I’ve decided I’m unhappy with the grass palette, which of course will directly affect yesterday’s Downs card. 
Viewing the consistency check above I remain unhappy with the Downs card at left. The first I made ‘Mountains 1’ has very bright trees and not enough line weight variance.
Listening to these two while I work.
Hot damn that’s a good one.
Lessons from a study on happiness
Peter Pan and the Red Pill Right
by Kimliatach So we watched the first half hour of the 1953 Peter Pan which has frankly amazing amounts of overt sexism and racism. This got me thinking about the bizarre and alarming reactions so called Men’s Rights Activists (MRA) have had to films, games and books over the past year or so. I pictured the comical scenario in which guided by misplaced nostalgia Peter Pan was re-released to the big screen and the gigantic kerfuffle which would inevitably result between RedPill keyboard warriors and true believer Gender Feminists. This got me thinking about The Blank Slate(PDF Chapter link) again and I even began mentally composing a long form piece of the curious similarity between the two extremes in gender politics.
But… then N tagged out of a contested bedtime. Our beautiful progeny fought sleep until well past nine and all my aspirations beyond making art crumbled.
Speaking of my beautiful progeny. My firstborn A has been accepted into Law at Griffith!
Unfortunately not his first preference but a very good law school all the same. He may find he can transfer into his first preference with relative ease later if he still wants too.
L has finished 10 days of swimming lessons with huge gains in confidence and comfort in the water. He was uncomfortable getting his nose wet at the start. As he has taken a shine to the coach we are planning on getting him another 5 half hour 1 on 1 lessons over the coming month.
F has started expanding his vocabulary dramatically in the last week. This morning he said ‘Pterodactyl’ while playing with the toy.
We made minimal progress outside today as we spent most of the day at the farm for a family lunch. I have managed to knock out two cards though colouring on both and a revisit of yesterdays will happen tonight and tomorrow.
Fangs, which has taken more than its fair share of drafting, reference from bear teeth used in the end.
And now in colour! Not helped by my Wacom tablet drivers mysteriously malfunctioning. There are a couple of fixes to try but after trying one with no luck I persevered as is rather than get involved with restarts and reinstalls.
First lake terrain card.
Waiting for NBN Co.
by Kimliatach The title has been the name of my wifi network for a number of houses now. Particularly appropriate here where for the privilege of running a surprisingly respectable 5Mbps down I am paying $80 for a mostly symbolic home phone and 100gb a month. I know full well that 5Mbps is incredible in a rural area like this too. I also know that if Labor’s FTTP NBN had gone ahead the figure would likely be closer to 100Mbps.
The mess that the ABC has made of coverage of the NBN has been making some interesting waves this past week. I am deeply dissapointed in the ABC and very curious to see what if anything will come of the revelations following Nick Ross‘s resignation. The fact that Turnbull in his capacity as communications minister made three appearances on Q&A without being permitted to field any questions on the mutli-billion dollar project he is making a mess of should be evidence enough that something fishy has been going on at ‘Aunty’.
I firmly believe AR (2 links there) is going to replace the smart phone in your pocket within the decade, possibly within 5 years. When it does bandwidth is going to be like the weather, a constant background influence in our daily lives. Only a real NBN can cope with these developments. Malcolm Turnbull’s Mess is going to put Australia at a serious economic and social disadvantage over the coming decade, one from which we will take a long time to recover.
No time for long rants tonight there is creative work to be done. Lots of progress made on the chicken tractor today. A detailed photoblog of the build process will come on completion. Progress is so good I am thinking it is time to make an order for day old chicks. I am particularly enamoured of the Double Laced Barnvelders and Plymouth Rocks but we may just go for a plain Isa brown. Who we get the chicks from remains to be seen, that site has nice pictures, reasonable prices and immunised chicks though.
I’ve also written a new board book called ‘Belly belly bum bum’ today. Got to get onto trying to get one printed soon.
Downs/Grasslands card complete. Going to need to revisit this one but calling it done for now. 
On iOS v Android.
by Kimliatach I can in no way claim to be fully impartial, I’ve been with Android since the beginning of the smartphone age and with Nokia, Sony and Motorola prior. I’ve never even used a blackberry. This iPhone 4 is the first apple product I’ve owned since an ipod video almost a decade ago. I am not an Apple fanboi and I although I have at times tended to the rabid opposite. I no longer identify as such. iPad’s have finally received the upgrade that would have prompted me to buy their first generation in a heartbeat, their laptops and computers are rock solid (if limited when it comes to gaming) and their phones are undeniably sexy pieces of technology. All that aside I still fall firmly in the ‘if you can’t open it, you don’t own it camp’ for computers and phones alike.
I have also in truth not been giving the iPhone exclusive use, partially because it is very slow, partially because despite not functioning as a phone my Gs4 is still fully functional as a mini tablet loaded with my audiobooks, comics books and a superior camera. My stories and their bookmarks pretty much ensure I need to keep the Samsung with me. I am also aware that the iPhone 4 is a full generation older than the Gs4 and so not fairly comparable for performance and specs.
The Good
The parallax is very shiny.
The bottom swipe up app drawer is excellent.
The kind of perky, bouncy nature of everything in the OS is sweet, but not to my taste.
The top swipe notification tray does all that it should, though old hat on Android.
There are a number of iOS exclusive apps I’ve been enjoying. In particular ‘Camera +’ and the extra instagram apps ‘Boomerang’ and ‘Hyperlapse’ I have also tried out a whole bunch of other random crap that hasn’t made it over to android some good, some rubbish, some absurdly expensive.
Siri is cool and very comparable in accuracy to google equivalent, neither can do what hound can:
The Bad
So small, for dainty little hands maybe, this one gives me cramps.
Updating this phone, which had to be done, none of the google apps would even install without the update, has reduced its speed considerably. Is this an example of Apple deliberately slowing down an older product to encourage a new purchase or do they simply not care to tailor their software to the old architecture?
The home button on this phone is on its last legs, repeated presses are required for any action using it and I’m more likely to end up with siri than my home screen. I’ve resorted to using the onscreen home button to counter for this. It seems this was a really common problem with this generation which is a shame.
Lack of a physical back button drives me bananas. It would be all very well if there was some uniform system wide on screen action that would perform this function but even that isn’t present. Most but far from all apps include this function as an on screen button. I honestly do not understand how people put up with the lack of this feature. To those of you who are iOS lifers, Android phones, in addition to the power/lock, volume and home buttons typically have a back and a menu button on either side of the home. The menu button is falling out of fashion being replaced by system wide standard ‘swipe in from the left for menu’ function. But ‘Back’ is for now at least, here to stay. I have encountered and witnessed people being confused by the buttons behaviour. All it does is if possible go back to the previous screen or action. It can go back through a number of screens or actions this way usually depositing you back at the home screen after a couple of presses.
The phone doesn’t display the number you are calling, only the contact name.
iTunes is almost as bad as I remember on PC. It slides its tentacles in deep, cannot be removed from background operation completely and is generally a cumbersome and irritating program to use. By comparison the Gs4 behaves like an external hdd when plugged in and is fully accessible. Prior to rooting I could not write to the SD card this way without removing it and plugging it in separately to my computer thanks to a google mandated security update.
The Verdict
Really the bulk of my issues with iOs come down to customisability. My Gs4 always had Nova installed so even though a few months ago I finally got around to Rooting it and installing Cyanogen Mod installed it is functionally and visually identical to what it was before, with the exception that I have superuser write access allowing me to bypass a few of the annoying restrictions in Android.
These are my Gs4’s two home screens, current background image is the camera obscura image the lounge room curtain gap makes on the wall in the middle of the day. Everything I need is on my home page, all other apps live in the app draw which shares the button with Nova themes settings, red button bottom centre. My icons are a custom set, labels would normally be switched off, but I haven’t bothered since the factory reset done while trying to diagnose the sim problem. I use signal the crypto messenger as my default sms client with the added bonus that if both I and the recipient are using signal and on WiFi the messages are sent that way instead.
My iPhone looks exactly like everyone else’s. The icons aren’t customisable, the spacing grid alignment isn’t customisable, icons don’t expand to fit low volume folders, every installed app populates neverending visually indistinguishable homescreens. There are no widgets, seen below a clock and weather widget with custom skin and on the other homepage a custom skin for a calendar widget. Bloatware apple apps are irremovable.
Android wins for me for now at least.
Discovered this wonderful site via someone being effusive about Elon Musk. Very pleased to with this discovery.
This post has taken way longer than it ought. Back to work inking a card now.
More #daddylonglegs #araneae #spider #macro phalangioides Pholcus
A photo posted by @liatach on
Work on the Horizon and more thoughts on The Revenant
by Kimliatach Thanks to family contacts I am as of today apparently top of the list for casual work at the local High School. The need for work is getting critical so that is very good news.
I’ve been scheming my Android v iOS comparison for some days now but I’ve again left it too late to start on that tonight.
Further thoughts on The Revenant.
I don’t ‘Like’ it and I can’t in truth reccomend it.
It has stunningly light, incredible suffering and examples of human depravity and absolute callousness galore. It is riveting but not I think, particularly memorable. Once the glamour passes holes and gnawing problems abound. For instance I am for some reason really annoyed that Glass can run on what was a very broken leg by the end of the film. Hypothermia is ignored for the sake of plot armour. The film completely fails Bechdel, yes it is about men in the 1820 frontier but there are women in the film, none has any agency. I haven’t read the book, nor to be honest am I likely too, but as discussed here (Spoilers) the film diverges pretty wildly from what was already a fictionalised adaptation of an allegedly true story.
Today I’ve completed principal line work on a Downs/Grasslands terrain card. Rough snapshot below. Linework needs cleaned up some as I’m trying a new pen.
I also pencilled what will be my first evolution card but I’ve not yet finished the evolution card templates I will frame them in.
I’m learning to use appropriate hashtags on Instagram. Garnering a lot more likes on my insect pictures thanks to them.
Unknown #beatle deceased. 15mm #macro #insect
A photo posted by @liatach on
The Revenant and Bureaucratic Nonsense
by Kimliatach Double swim today, picking away at the value of the season pass, once for L’s swim lesson in the AM and again late afternoon when the heat was just abating but it still felt to hot to do work.
N butted heads with bureaucracy repeatedly today, converting to a NSW licence and changing surname at the same time is apparently a tall order, but she succeeded. Not so with the children’s passports which apparently have to wait until her new licence arrives because birth certificate, passport and a bank statement showing address are apparently insufficient for lodgement of childrens passport applications. So there is likely a two week wait until N’s new licence arrives and lodgement is possible. We may try in Dubbo if her licence hasn’t arrived by then. We remain eager to lock in flights.
Noticed at the pool this afternoon that we are apparently far enough south that this noxious weed is ornamental:
A video posted by @liatach on
N has made some progress on the bike path. Six or seven courses of bricks down since this animation.
Rather than working this evening we watched a screener of ‘The Revenant’.
Having just finished it, I feel it is too early to pass judgment, I will share some impressions now though.
Incredibly brutal, visceral film.
I was repeatedly reminded of ‘Blood Meridian‘.
Nature does the best lighting.
Revenge stories are predictable.
Leo deserves an Oscar, but is it for this performance or for his body of work. I am not sure this is his lifetime best so far.
Tom hardy can play nasty well.
Alejandro Iñárritu puts his actors through hell.
Teaching again
by Kimliatach Back in the saddle, well kind of,
tutoring has begun.
Today I spent an hour each with two delightful children, getting to know them both and learning how best I can help them.
I promptly spent my earnings on sausages and beer to feed the ravenous horde at home. We have had two nephews about. Both playing very well with our boys while, during my absence N and her parents tore down the ancient and hazardous back fence and constructed an entirely new one using their wealth of fencing experience.
They found some pretty extraordinary pieces of metal in the process too. Some of which will feature in future projects.
I haven’t managed to finish the card I’ve been working on today, in truth I’ve barely touched it. Going to put some time into templates now.
Found a great early learning maths game for L and as a reward activity for my younger students. From the always brilliant ‘Dragonbox’ creators WeWantToKnow games ‘Numbers’ is rather brilliant for little ones.
More #Bluetongue. Try as I might I was unable to get a picture with it’s tongue out.
Some wanton stupidity made amazing by the grace of Slo-Mo
Garden Beds and the Font of Absurdity
by Kimliatach Garden progress, Finally filled the raised garden bed tanks to the brim today, though we are expecting some subsidence, they will be ready to be planted into very soon. Each is filled with a nice wet lasagne of sheep poo, soil, potash, cardboard, hay and compost, some layers mixed more thoroughly than others. Shade cloth for the poly covers is still required. The chook tractor build is stalled waiting on suitable plywood for the roost walls. N made significant progress on the orchard bike path digging and paving should commence there tomorrow.
Spending this evening preparing a go bag for my first tutoring session tomorrow. In the process I have discovered that the only way to legally acquire the official handwriting font for NSW and the ACT ‘Foundation Handwriting’ is to pay this dubious and outdated Northern Territory based site $30. More hilarious and baffling still, judging by the pricelist they also charge schools $60 a licence as well. So despite no doubt having been paid to create the fonts in the first place, they now have the gall to charge the education departments, parents, teachers, tutors and schools for the privilege of using the mandated font for NSW school students. All free hosts back to page 5+ of the search have received takedown notices or are obvious scams.
Absurd.
Anyway ‘Foundation Handwriting’ appears nearly indistinguishable from the frightfully ugly QLD QCursive handwriting font and in yet another discovered policy win for QLD v. NSW they at least give their font away for free.
Lots of interesting biology around yesterday and today.
Mantids
Baby mantids each about 10 mm. #macro I let them all go in the fig tree shortly after they hatched.
A photo posted by @liatach on
A lizard
Tiny bearded dragon on my pinkie.
A photo posted by @liatach on
Didn’t have my lens with me today unfortunately.
Yabbies caught on the farm.
#yabby s are really rather alien looking creatures up close.
A photo posted by @liatach on
Big day, Little post
by Kimliatach A fun unproductive day, mostly spent swimming, cooking, cleaning and entertaining.
There was a bit of scribbling in the margins this morning but nothing to show.
Some favourite musicians announced a new album with style:
Terry Pratchett’s Fbook page teased something coming in April.