Ten years ago this month Melbourne was in the grip of the Commonwealth Games. As I noted at the time, it was a good excuse to Blame The Games for any delay or anything else going wrong. (Including crowded trains.) But it was also a lot of fun. These photos are from the baton relay ... [More]
Category: Toxic Custard newsletter
Appears in the weekly Toxic Custard newsletter
From time to time I’ll refer to the Frankston line on Twitter with the abbreviation FKN. I’m not just trying to get a cheap laugh. Well okay, perhaps I am, but what people might not realise is that’s actually the official station code for Frankston. Good morning #Bentleigh. They're not lying about the 30 minute ... [More]
LED displays are quite common on public transport. For instance in Melbourne they are used for destination signs on many trains, trams and buses. They are also used for street Smartbus indicator signs, and for non-CBD railway station “PIDs” (passenger information displays) showing next train departures. While they are generally pretty easy to read, they ... [More]
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Ikea Billy upgrade
I bought some Billy bookshelves for the livingroom some years ago. I picked their beech colour… and then they discontinued it. While I love the look, and the reconfigurability of the moveable shelves and the fact that you can always buy more (well, except in beech, so not really in my case), I can’t say ... [More]
This point seems to come up for discussion online regularly, but I don’t know if the information is easy to find, so I thought I’d have a go myself. There are regular claims from those pushing it that East West Link (stage one, Eastern Freeway to Citylink) is needed to prevent traffic chaos. The problem ... [More]
Ocean Colour Scene played last night at Max Watt’s (formerly known as the HiFi bar — I assume the current name is a pun about loud music, rather than being named after a person). As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ve wanted to see them play live for decades, but this is their first ... [More]
Continuing my series of ten year old photos: February 2006. (As usual, you can click through any of them to view them on Flickr, where you can see each photo at a larger size.) Kangaroos near Seymour, snapped on a break during a PTUA Planning Weekend; they used to regularly happen up there. (Originally posted ... [More]
Liberal Caulfield MP David Southwick has a campaign running to get the Glen Huntly level crossing grade separated. I somewhat cringe at the “Blame Labor” rhetoric, but the rest of it I agree with completely. A 2014 report by VicRoads found the Glen Huntly Rd level crossing to be of the highest priority for removal ... [More]
You’d always hope that governments aim to minimise spending waste, and part of that is forward planning, so for instance you don’t do upgrades to something that is about to be replaced. Our local station at Bentleigh has received numerous upgrades over the past year or two. Some are part of the $100 million Bayside ... [More]
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Blog template
After the mess of the last attempt, and noting the large number of people reading on mobile devices (phones 39%, tablet 10%), I’ve switched to a plain but hopefully more mobile-friendly blog template. Here is a photo of some people doing geeky things to test the pictures. I’ll probably do some tweaking, but any feedback ... [More]
For the video editors in our family who need to move big files around, apart from internet upload speeds, I was also researching the fastest connection types for portable hard drives. Theoretical speeds: USB 2: 60 MB/s Firewire 800: 133 MB/s USB 3: 625 MB/s Thunderbolt 2: 1250 MB/s (USB 3.1 will apparently be up ... [More]
Not to pre-empt anything, but this year I expect to have two film and television students in the house. For this, I’m considering upgrading my Internet. We’re currently on iiNet Naked ADSL2+ costing $69.99 per month (for 1000 Gb of data, of which, to my surprise, we’re using about a quarter). Actually I’m paying an ... [More]