James Mason's Blog -or- The Journal of Contemporary Lunacy

Just a few extra photos that didn't fit into any of the larger galleries I published via iPhoto. Flinders St. Station by night A charming (but smokey) side-room in a Williams St. pub The Royal Exhibition Building viewed from Carlton Gardens Hotel view by day   ... and by night  A few shots from the 88th floor of the Eureka Tower - the reflective glass didn't make for the best photos, unfortunately, but the view was amazing: Queen Victoria Gardens Fern Gully just outside the Botanic Gardens  Several photos from inside the Royal Botanic Gardens:     Looking back at the CBD from South Wharf Twilight view of Sydney while coming in for landing The aforementioned galleries are: NGV International (including Masterpieces from the Hermitage) NGV Australia

Some very striking portraits - the gallery has certainly built up an impressive collection. There's a real mix of styles as well, something for almost everybody.

I'm a fan of dark chocolate. Like a lot of people, I was eager to believe that eating it had health benefits. Unfortunately, much like a nut wrapped in chocolate this turned out to be a small truth wrapped in a larger lie. Or, a raisin in a bucket of codswallop if you prefer... It’s a myth that darker chocolates always have the most flavanols. Dark chocolate does contain more chocolate liquor than milk chocolate; however, flavanol contents vary considerably depending on the bean’s journey through all stages of chocolate production. Though flavanols are abundant in the fresh, raw cocoa seed, how the seed is handled from tree to finished chocolate matters a great deal.  Through conventional handling and common manufacturing processes such as fermentation, drying, roasting and alkalization, the natural flavanol components are readily destroyed. Because of these variables, the cacao percentage marked on a chocolate’s label isn’t a reliable guide to flavanol amounts.  Though darker...

Now that Extra Zoom Levels and 32bpp are in Trunk and there are complete NewGRF sets that fully support both available, OpenTTD suddenly looks like a whole new game. Normal zoom level And now zoomed all the way in All the little details come to life Even in wide-open areas This is OpenTTD 1.5.1, with the following NewGRFs installed:

The timing all lined up courier-wise and I wound up with a few new toys to play with over the weekend - a shiny new laptop and yet more storage. That's some nicely arranged cabling right there    I'd been promising myself a new laptop for a few years now - I'd been nursing along an old eMachines running Debian with a moving platter disk and a failing battery. Rather than spend money applying lipstick to a pig (as it were), I opted to just go for something new. Plus, the old one was heavy enough to cause shoulder pain after carrying it around for a short period, whereas the MacBook Air is light enough to barely notice. Setup and ready to go To carry everything around I grabbed a nice STM Sequel shoulder bag - compartments for everything and beautifully put together. There's a padded compartment for a laptop, another for a tablet, a spot for a phone, a pocket for cables and then another pocket for whatever else.   I picked up the Lacie d2 d...

After a few years without having to think about it, I decided to dip my toe back into the murky waters of Zone Based Firewalls recently. Luckily, I'd written enough notes and comments in my previous configs that only a small amount of searching and reading was needed before I got back up to speed. In that vein, here's a very basic starter ZBF config (for when I forget again in six months *derp*)... Create an ACL to hold any firewall exceptions: ip access-list extended aclFirewallExceptions  permit tcp any any eq 56881  permit tcp any any eq 10022 Then, add the ACL to a Class Map: class-map type inspect match-any cmFirewallExceptions  match access-group name aclFirewallExceptions After that, the Class Map is added to a Policy Map: policy-map type inspect pmWanToLan  class type inspect cmFirewallExceptions   inspect  class class-default   drop The policy map is then applied to the relevant Zone Pair: zone-pair security zpWanToLan source WAN de...