Better Anki forecasting for Review Heatmap with Anki Simulator

Review Heatmap is an addon for Anki that adds a heatmap showing past and future card review activity. It is handy to see at a glance whether there are any particularly heavy or light days coming up, and a colourful reward for regular reviews.

However,… »

Who is Sparkleshot? – about my new profile picture

CW: Some discussion of transphobia.

This week I rolled out a new profile picture across my social media. This, and a previous one I have used on Discord, have raised some eyebrows – ‘Why is your profile picture a unicorn?’ It's a long story.

AustraliaSim… »

Broken Uno house rules; or, the importance of systems thinking, rather than ‘reasoning by Lego’

House rules are a staple of card and board games, and Uno is no exception. Recently with friends, we played some games of Uno, observing a common house rule:

House Rule 1. A player who incorrectly calls ‘Uno’ must draw two cards.¹ (Each player

From the archives: NAT 2024 – Tax file numbers for secondary school students

Until 31 December 2014, secondary school students in Australia could apply for a Tax File Number (TFN) through the Secondary Schools TFN Program. Application was made through the NAT 2024 form: Tax file number – application or enquiry for secondary school students, available… »

Editable template: Receipt for vehicle sale

• Download PDF
• Download SVG

Adapted from VicRoads Receipt of vehicle sale form to remove Victoria-specific references. Used under licence.

Editable colour SVG Secret Hitler for prepress

Secret Hitler is a popular hidden identity party game developed by Goat, Wolf, & Cabbage, licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International licence. However, the official freely-available ‘print-and-play’ PDF edition is in black and white, and low quality. To remedy this, I have created by… »

CIGMAH Grand Prize donation distributions

This year, I was the winner of the inaugural Coding Interest Group in Medicine and Healthcare (CIGMAH) Puzzle Hunt Grand Prize, with a value of $150. I have now distributed the prize funds to the following charitable and not-for-profit causes:

Some statistics on Pickles government vehicle auctions

I collected information on sales at three Pickles ‘Victorian Government & Council Vehicles’ auctions on 13, 20 and 27 August 2019. I collected data on ‘personal vehicles’, which I defined as vehicles with a sedan, wagon, hatchback or liftback body type. I compared winning bids… »

Starship (Starkid) official recording songs (direct links and timestamps)

Unlike some of their other recordings, Starkid's Starship (2011) is split into multiple parts, making finding individual songs difficult. Here are links to all of them:

• I Wanna Be: A1P1 2:21
• Get Back Up: A1P5 4:40
• Life: A1P6 1:31
• Life (Reprise): A1P6 8:31
• Hideous Creatures:

Welcome to the new look Inane Observations! And a trip down memory lane

A slightly belated welcome from me to the new look Inane Observations blog! The new theme has been created from scratch, using resources from the Jekyll Minima theme, and aims to be clean, minimalist and responsive. In accordance with this style, the tagline has also… »

US Election 2016: What if the Electoral College was proportional?

The title says it all really. What would have happened in the 2016 American federal election if votes in the Electoral College were allocated proportionally, either within each state or nationwide? I was curious, so here's some number-crunching.

IB Physics Imaging option: Magnification of optical instruments

Take note of sign conventions!

Magnifying glasses

A single convex lens can be used as a magnifying glass.

If an object \(O\) is placed within the focal point \(F\) of a convex lens, a virtual image \(I\) will be formed.

The linear magnification \(m\) of… »

Thoughts on Black Mirror S03E04 ‘San Junipero’

‘San Junipero’ is, without a doubt, one of the most unique episodes of Black Mirror in all its three seasons. Unlike the other episodes, which are primarily straightforward one-sided criticisms of particular aspects of technology and society, ‘San Junipero’ deals with deeper, more thoughtful questions… »

Welcome to the new home of ‘$ sudo FIXIT!!’

I've just completed the migration of all blog posts and comments from the old Blogger site to this new Jekyll/HashOver-based blog. Hooray for open source software!

Along with the revamped site and layout comes a name change: Goodbye, $ sudo FIXIT!!,… »

Evil Bash Scripts: Sudo Impersonator

[runassudo@NEXUS tmp]$ cat awesomeprogram
#!/bin/bash
if [[ $EUID -ne 0 ]]; then
   echo "This script must be run as root"
else
   echo "Sorry, try again."
   echo -n "[sudo] password for $SUDO_USER: "
   read -s tmp
   echo ""
   echo "PASSWORD IS $tmp"
   # Do evil things

Adventures in Arch: Part 2 - Is It Working Yet?

Let's Get Some Hybrid Graphics Up In Here!

if [ ! -f /etc/X11/xorg.conf ]; then
        sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.fglrx /etc/X11/xorg.conf
fi
startx /usr/bin/openbox-session -- :1