Simon Rumble’s blog

We finally made it beyond the immediate surrounds of the hotel and out to Ubud where we visited the legendary Ibu Oka for Babi Guling, roast suckling pig.  it was... sensational!

A great example of how arbitrary our current Internet censorship is, and it's the model for the new censorship regime.  Somehow describing in detail how to make hash brownies is not "detailed instruction in drug use".

So the flight to Bali was relatively uneventful.  Surprisingly Louis was fine on the flight.  He'd developed a snotty nose the night before the flight, so we were expecting the worst, but in the event he slept, played a little and was generally very good.

Over the last few months I've had a number of hardware problems with my MythTV server.  The machine itself locked up fairly regularly, and there's been big problems with the driver for the dual-tuner card that had previously worked flawlessly.  I finally got the shits with it and bought a hardware PVR on Saturday, the Beyonwiz DP-Lite.

I've held off buying an off-the-shelf PVR because they've tended to be pretty poor.  The UI of the Beyonwiz is quite primitive, and very very confusing in parts, but it's good enough.  I wouldn't recommend it for my parents though.

You'll note I didn't buy my employer's PVR product. It has one significant limitation for me: while it has two tuners, only one can be used to schedule recordings. The other is reserved for live TV viewing, which to me is a huge lack of insight into the way you use a PVR.  Hopefully that will get fixed in one of the coming software updates.  It certainly has a vastly better UI than the Beyonwiz and the movies service is quite attractive.

There's a few things I miss from MythTV beyond the UI.  The browser scheduling interface is a lot more flexible than IceTV + Beyonwiz.  With MythTV you can ask it to record a single episode of a programme each week, which means it can shuffle the recording to a repeat in a non-peak time if there's a conflict for a tuner.  This device doesn't do that at all.  I also miss the automatic ad skipping, but that's less of an issue because we only really watch ABC and SBS.

Dear deluded fools left-wing ALP voters,

I have a bunch of friends who perversely vote for the Australian Labor Party while professing views diametrically opposite those the party actually implements. None of my friends supports offshore detention of refugees.  Most of my friends support real action on climate change.  Yet some of my friends continue to vote for the ALP, and some are even card-carrying members.

Challenged on this, they often murmur something about having to be in power to effect real change. Peter Garrett has achieved one thing and one thing only since joining the ALP, and that is to provide the perfect response to that justification. "You mean like Peter Garrett?"

So to those of you, read this short piece:

The reason the ALP keeps lunging to the right is that it thinks its main competition is the Liberals, and it’s trying to appeal to their voters. For the same reason, the more serious the competition it gets from the Greens (by ALP voters abandoning it for the Greens, the same way swinging voters abandon it for the Liberals), the more it’s going to have to compete for progressive votes – which means the ALP starting to actually listen to you! It means the ALP proposing policies with which you might actually agree.

 

This will not happen if you just vote ALP regardless of what it actually does.

 

Isn’t a vote for the Greens a wasted vote?

 

(discovered via Mareike Hardy's Being a woman won't win my vote)