I’m back! Went offline for most of the last week, pics and stories to follow 🐊
Alrighty, where do I even begin on this? It’s going to be a series of photos and vids of epic scenery so if that’s not your thing, tune out now. Otherwise… it’s off to the airport:
And that was the last we saw of a mask for a long time. The Northern Territory has been largely COVID free and felt… normal. We ended up there on “Territory Day” with @TimmyTrumpet DJ’ing on the beach with the balmy 34C winter sunset, and life was good 😊
Plus, they had an F18 ✈️
And fireworks 💥
Darwin was really just intended to be a stopover until Kakadu, but it turned out to be unexpectedly cool. Just a really chilled place with plenty of nice beach atmosphere.
But also a heap of interesting history (it was bombed in WW2), beautiful parks and nice walks
It’s also got a great restaurant prescient on the water and I’d be really happy to spend more time there in the future
Time for a little plane and off into the middle of nowhere ✈️
Bamurru Plains on the edge of Kakadu National Park. The largest in Australia at 20,000km. It’s… rustic
*Kinda* rustic. The huts don’t have a lot of walls and instead use a mesh you can see out of but not into which means you get a front row seat to all the wandering buffalo and wallabies 🦬 🦘
Ok, so really not that rustic at all. An infinity pool looking out over the floodplains with just a small edge between you and the crocs (“don’t go out there very far”, they warned)
Air boats are one of my new favourite things; they’re loud, fast and they drift sideways over things that don’t look like they should be driven on…
…but most importantly, they get you to places that could never be reached otherwise. It’s unimaginably beautiful here.
And then there’s quad bikes. And again, it’s about reaching hard to access locations. Much of it involved navigating around the termite hills which are effectively 1m high blocks of concrete.
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COVID in Australia: I’ve had a bunch of people from other parts of the world ask if we’re ok or in some cases, make derogatory comments from afar. Here’s what’s happening and what it’s actually like on the ground:
Geography first: we’re on a sparsely populated island in the middle of nowhere with a handful of major cities. Half as big again as Europe and almost the size of continental USA, but with only 25M people.
International border control is much easier than most of the world so for the most part, we locked the virus out and didn’t spread it too far when it hit. There were still outbreaks, but contained to various extents until more recently.
They're screen caps of AEs related to COVID vaccines and reported to the TGA. The page then provides the "full 73 page TGA vaccine adverse event and death report" as it 7 Aug. Without further context it seems this is intended to scare people regarding potential adverse reactions.
This is shady AF. Reading a bit further whilst writing this thread, it looks like its well and truly already hit the news too: news.com.au/technology/uni…
“When users use a private window in Firefox, the connection to the requested domain will now default to HTTPS even if a user manually enters the HTTP protocol” zdnet.com/article/firefo…
Firefox 91 in private mode after attempting to load a site over the insecure scheme that refuses to do HTTPS. Welcome to the future, I like this 😊
Note that you can still access the site - nobody has killed HTTP here - you're just warned about there not being a secure connection. You can still decide to load it and take the chance.
I like the principal behind this and I’ve got a lot more confidence in Apple to do it in a privacy-centric fashion than others: arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…
But some of the comments in there seem to really miss the mark, for example “Client-side scanning on one ‘end’ of the communication breaks the security of the transmission”. Huh? It’s being done outside the context of any transmission, how does it “break the security”?!
Or this one: “informing a third party (the parent) about the content of the communication undermines its privacy”. This a cornerstone of parental controls, seeing what your kids are doing! The whole point is to limit their ability to sneak comms past parents.
For folks asking about 8.4B record “RockYou2021” password list that’s in the news today, this is an aggregation of multiple other lists. For example, this password cracking list: crackstation.net/crackstation-w…
Among other things, it contains “every word in the Wikipedia databases” and words from the Project Gutenberg free ebook collection: gutenberg.org
Unlike the original 2009 RockYou data breach and consequent word list, these are not “pwned passwords”; it’s not a list of real world passwords compromised in data breaches, it’s just a list of words and the vast majority have *never* been passwords
For my next IoT mission: I want to use Local Tuya to control lights without cloud. I don't want to solder stuff or pull lights out of the ceiling, you can no longer pull keys from the Tuya IoT portal (see descripting of vid) and I don't have a rooted Android. What's left?
All of this is just different levels of pain. BlueStacks and the Smart Life APK? My Tuya creds don't work. So screw it, just setup a dedicate Pi and use Tuya Convert to flash firmware. Nope, that won't work either:
I'm trying to find a "happy path" here, one that's not only happy for me, but one I can encourage others to follow. So far, that path remains having a cloud dependency and using the Tuya integration in @home_assistant. That's the least terrible of all the terrible options.