It took me a while to get with the mosh vibe but great energy, silly music, lovely crowd. Lots of fun!
Pizza for dinner, of course.
Last Friday night we got to see Kristen Hersh of Throwing Muses perform her solo work at The Vanguard in Newtown. I haven't been to this venue since the 1990s when it was "Top Gun".
Hersh was incredible. Her voice is so distinctive, ranging from gentle singing to a gravelly growl and everything in between. The sounds she gets from her acoustic guitar, the range of textures and tempos: she's a master at work. Absolutely incredible. Also really funny banter in between songs.
Quick dinner before the gig was Pappa's Stew Chilli Cuisine, a Hunanese place. We had a big hotpot that was rich, spicy and amazing. Alongside it we had what could be described as spicy spag bol: fat round noodles with a topping of spicy pork mince, kind of a Biang Biang type of thing.
I love to cook and so I have a lot of cookbooks.
This brings about a problem. Much as I love leafing through cookbooks, sometimes you need to work out what to cook more quickly. And I'm often trying to work out what to cook with a particular ingredient we have in abundance.
I actually set myself the task of building a combined recipe index for all my cookbooks. Manually typing in every recipe and the key ingredients. Then as I looked around to see if any tools existed for this kind of thing, I stumbled upon Eat Your Books, a site that already has all the hard work done for you.
You register all your cookbooks and then you can search through all of them by ingredient or recipe name. For example, I just searched for dessert recipes with apples, cos we have a bunch right now.
For some recipes it even includes the page numbers and photos of the result. So fast and means instead of flipping, you have a shortlist of books to pull down.
I'm cooking the Spiced apple cake from Ottolenghi Simple tonight. Perfect for what I want after tonight's roast lamb.
Update: here's the cake. It was delicious.
Last night I finally got to see GoGo Penguin, a band from Manchester I've been following for 10 years. I've been hanging out to see them live the whole time. I love their music.
I dragged along my mate Gab who's more of a jazz head than me, particularly keen on the freer end of jazz and a bunch of the 70s smoother stuff. He was commenting that there were periods when the music seemed to be repeating without someone taking the lead.
Our conclusion is that this is techno music played on jazz instrumentation, not a more jazz sensibility. There were solos but the structure of the songs is much more like techno: big build up of tension followed by dramatic release ("the drop") with all the instruments working together to that end.
A number of the tracks incorporate complicated polyrhythms with Chris Illingworth playing two and sometimes (with delays and loops) three parts while Nick Blacka shreds like his life depends on it with the double bass. Incredible complexity and discipline.
Check out some videos of this band. They're awesome.
Last week Sydney hosted the first edition of South by Southwest located outside of Austin. Sounds like it was somewhat successful but I think it takes a while for people to understand what it was. I've heard stories of empty gigs and packed gigs, plus a lot of tickets and wristbands being given away.
I didn't manage to make it to anything until Saturday night. Life has been busy. Though given the vibe I saw, if they run it again I'd be tempted to get work to buy me the tech pass and buy myself a music pass then spend the evenings at gigs. A week of wall-to-wall gigs sounds great!
Los Bitchos
Saturday night there was a free event at The Factory in Marrickville, just around the corner from our place. Better yet it featured Los Bitchos, who I watched on the BBC coverage of this year's Glastonbury. How to describe their sound? Latin-afro inspired psych-surf fuzz? Or put more simply, the perfect sunny Glastonbury afternoon set when you've just picked up your first scrumpy and the hash cookie is starting to kick in.
Their set was awesome. Clearly these women love playing their music. The lead guitarist, Serra Petale the Aussie in the band, has the most intense facial expressions as she shreds. Totally lost in the music. Love it!
These New South Whales
My mate Michael suggested we head upstairs to see this local punk band I've barely ever heard of. There was a strong crowd of clearly die-hard fans. They had great energy but the sound in the room wasn't brilliant. I think I'd like to see them play their own set so I'll keep an eye out.
Coming up
This Thursday we're off to see GoGo Penguin and I am SUPER excited about that gig!
Last week we planned to travel down to our friends' property on the Far South Coast of NSW. It's a beautiful spot right on the coast with two beaches on the property and not far from the little town I grew up in.
The trip down was uneventful. Six hours of driving but the kids and dog were great and we made it there. This is the first time we've taken the dog here, under strict instructions to keep her under control to protect wildlife and stock on the farm.
Foxie loved running around on the beaches, hanging out. She really got settled in.
It's such a stunning spot. Our happy place.
Then on day 1.5, Tuesday, one of the kids spotted smoke on the horizon. This was a weird day for weather in early October: 33 degrees with a very hot wind. Earlier in the day we'd been at one of the beaches glad to be wearing wetsuits in the ice cold water, then the wind changed and we were blasted with a wind that felt like it was an open oven. Bad news for fires.
Popping down to the beach where we can get (slow) mobile reception, it looked like there was a fire up the road. Growing fast.
It was decided we'd head to the house on the farm with its satelite internet, television and power so we could keep an eye on it. We packed our dinner and planned to settle down to ride it out.
As we drove around the corner to the house, the alarm sound came on ABC South East with the news that for those up the road from us, Cuttagee and Barraga Bay, it was now too late to leave with the massive fire front bearing down on them. So we decided instead of waiting it out in the house we'd bug out to Tathra.
As we left the fire got scarier and scarier looking in the distance. With this kind of weather—especially that hot, dry wind—fires can move with insane speed and this one was evidently a big one.
We got to Tathra and it turned out in just a few hours the fire burnt through 5,000 hectares of bush and was wildly out of control. Bugging out was definitely the right move. We would have been safe and even if the worst had happened we could have popped down to the beach and been okay, but the stress of that would've been immense.
We spent a couple of nights down at a caravan park in Tathra. Had to get some emergency prescriptions for medication we'd left behind, bought some cheap clothes since we only had what we'd left wearing. We didn't even have our wallets: not something you need on a farm. Thankfully mobile payments!
This is going to be a rough Summer in Australia. After two days of huge rains, there's a lot of plant growth and we're going into an El Nino cycle which means low rainfall, high temperatures.
Lesson: always have a plan for a bug out bag and the moment anything looks iffy with what you need for a few days. Just shove it all in a pile ready to grab and go. Leaving was definitely the right decision.
We haven't had much luck with holidays this year. Our Bali holiday earlier this year saw us all get Bali Belly and spend much of the trip feeling miserable. We might have to plan a very low key holiday to get some actual downtime! This truncated holiday didn't feel particularly restful.
It's that time of year when it warms up here in Sydney and I start tinkering with my home automation to make life easier and cheaper.
Background
Our house is very well insulated: the old 1920s part of the house has double brick and good insulation in the roof, the new part of the house has hempcrete walls, good roof insulation and double glazed windows. The high thermal mass means the temperature can stay very stable. Just closing the house up on hot days goes a long way to keeping it cool, but sometimes it needs a bit of help.
There's got a 6kW solar system on the roof and a Daikin wifi-connected air conditioner in the lounge room. On hot, sunny days when we're exporting lots of power to the grid and getting paid a pittance for it, I want to pre-chill the house below the usual comfort level so that when the sun goes down we keep the house closed up and turn the air con off but keep comfortable.
Home Assistant Helpers
I created two Helpers in Home Assistant, a dropdown called "Air con mode" and a numeric called "Air con target temp". The dropdown has "Manual" and "Power-driven cool" modes.
The logic I want is that when we're exporting more than 1kW of power and the air con is in "Power-driven cool" mode, drop the set temperature of the air con by 5 degrees. When we don't have excess, set it to the actual target temp. So we set the target to our comfort level, usually 24º, but when we have excess power cool it quite a bit lower.
Discussion
Adjusting the set point means we're not hard switching the air conditioner off and on, so we don't have to worry about hysteresis and the like. When someone switches the kettle or oven on, drawing lots of power, it silently switches to "keep it at the comfort temperature" and then will automatically switch back when more power is available.
By contrast, my shed/office air conditioner is a fair bit dumber so I just have it on a wifi switch to turn off and on under similar conditions, but I use a five minute average of the power and also have a condition set on the temperature so it's not flipping on/off too often.
I could probably set the excess power threshold and the amount of adjustment as Helpers too, but they're hardcoded here for now. In Winter I might do a similar automation, though there's usually a lot less excess power at that time of year.
Home Assistant Automations
The logic requires two automations that run every minute each. One for when there is excess power, one for when there isn't.
Automation for when there's excess power
alias: "Air con: Power-driven cool excess power"
description: ""
trigger:
- platform: time_pattern
minutes: "*"
condition:
- condition: state
entity_id: input_select.air_con_mode
state: Power-driven cool
- condition: numeric_state
entity_id: sensor.envoy_current_net_consumption
below: -1000
action:
- service: climate.set_temperature
data:
temperature: "{{ states('input_number.air_con_target_temp')|float - 5 }}"
target:
entity_id: climate.daikinap26021
mode: single
Automation for when there's no excess power
alias: "Air con: Power-driven cool no excess"
description: ""
trigger:
- platform: time_pattern
minutes: "*"
condition:
- condition: state
entity_id: input_select.air_con_mode
state: Power-driven cool
- condition: numeric_state
entity_id: sensor.envoy_current_net_consumption
above: -1000
action:
- service: climate.set_temperature
data:
temperature: "{{ states('input_number.air_con_target_temp')|float }}"
target:
entity_id: climate.daikinap26021
mode: single
Shed automation with a simple switch
This one uses a 5 minute average and also checks that it's uncomfortably warm before turning the air con back on. I actually leave this one running all the time: it checks that the door is closed so I'm okay using excess free electricity to keep the shed at a reasonable temperature even if I'm not in there.
alias: Shed aircon automatic on
description: ""
trigger:
- platform: time_pattern
minutes: "*"
condition:
- condition: or
conditions:
- condition: state
entity_id: input_select.shed_air_con_mode
state: "on"
- condition: and
conditions:
- condition: numeric_state
entity_id: sensor.envoy_current_net_consumption_5_minute_average_linear
below: -500
- condition: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.shed_door
state: "off"
- condition: numeric_state
entity_id: sensor.shed_weather_temperature
above: 25
- condition: state
entity_id: input_select.shed_air_con_mode
state: Excess power
action:
- service: switch.turn_on
data: {}
target:
entity_id: switch.shed_aircon
mode: single
Busy week for gigs! Last night was the Yeah Yeah Yeahs at the Hordern Pavillion. Amazing band, visually stunning sound. Karen O has a pretty unique stage presence.
Their sound and show is definitely on the "art school" end of the spectrum, but that means great visuals. They were a lot of fun!
Back in the 1990s a unique music scene formed in Newcastle, a small industrial city a few hours drive or train North of Sydney. A bunch of lads were making extremely aggressive hardcore techno on crappy Amiga computers. Noisy 4- and 8-bit samples, distorted kick drums and nasty, nasty samples. It was brilliant. Check out Nasenbluten for a taste.
One of the protagonists and the founder of one of the seminal labels, Bloody Fist, was Mark N. So when he popped up playing at a Swarm rave I had to go.
Loads of fun. We also enjoyed sets from Luke Snarl and Vic Zee.
This great garage punk band popped up in my Discover Weekly feed this week and I've been smashing their stuff ever since. Spiky, energetic guitar with sharp, witty, insightful lyrics. I really like these guys. Sprints from Dublin.
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