Ah, it’s good to be back home, walking familiar trails once again. 😌

Dirt track going through bush with a kangaroo on the left side of the track facing away from the camera

Walked the Green Corridor, which runs along the old KTM Railway, with a few people from work. Really enjoyed it. Total distance was 17 km, which was a little rough in the tropical weather.

Walking trail going towards some trees with a sign shaped like a level crossing sign on the right with the label Woodlands.

🔗 So Many Default Apps

Seeing everyone blog (yes, actually blog) about their default apps over the last two weeks has been absolutely wonderful. Robb has been doing a fantastic job maintaining an index of these posts, and has now added a network graph showing the links between them. Works great.

A Few Thoughts On Using iA Presenter

Well the “big presentation” was today, the one I thought would be a good canditate for trying out iA Presenter. And after spending the last couple of weeks preparing for it, I’d thought it would be good time to give my thoughts on how it worked for me.

First, I must say that I can appreciate using an app that is opinionated. This is not a drop-in replacement for Keynote1: the app really does try and steer you towards a particular presenting style. They’re quite upfront with this: the example shown on first launch outlines how to prepare the slides and why writing out the entire presentation in full, while leaving slides as the role of accenting your points, makes for better presentation.

I knew this going in, so it wasn’t a big shock to me. Plus it’s easy to like an opinionated piece of software when you share that opinion yourself.

This flows naturally into the second thing that I like about iA Presentation, which is the Markdown support. Using Markdown to prepare the slides is wonderful, especially when you compare it to the point-and-click content-by-bullet-point interaction style you’d find in Keynote. That WYSIWYG styles is not for me, particularly when it comes to correcting style and alignment issues that only affects one slide that sticks out like a sore thumb when giving the presentation. Markdown only means iA Presenter is left to handle the layout, and that’s fine with me.

Now, it would be nice to have even more control over the slide layout and styling. iA Presentation has very limited support for this, and while I was preparing the slides, I kept finding myself wishing that I could do more of the finer things, like adjust the font size of a code block to avoid line-wraps.

There are some things you can do, such as choose whether elements should appear below or beside each other. This is done through the use of new-lines — or lack there-of — which is a style that didn’t really gel with me. It seemed like a concept that was a little undercooked. It also didn’t help that there wa no way to actually force a new line, to do something like space out content vertically.

I don’t know how this could be improved. Maybe having a way to specify a layout or styling that is separate from the implicit styling from the Markdown, sort of like slide-specific front-matter, maybe? If done in such a way as to avoid complicating things too much, it’ll probably be welcomed.

One other thing that would be good is to have more control over separating the layout of the slides from that of the exported speaker notes. You’re essentially writing long-form content, complete with headers that’ll appear on the slide. But putting a H2 header over a H1 header to start a section would look strange in a PDF export. It’ll look fine on the slide, but that’s becasue you’re stuck using header levels (h1, h2) to control text size. Because the content on the slide is interleaved with the speech itself, the order of elements that make sense on the presentation may note for the exported PDFs.

Although I guess the solution there would be just to open the presentation in a regular Markdown editor and export to PDF. But having a one-stop solution to that would be nice. So, I don’t know: having a way to separate the symantics of the header from the size they appear on the slide would work? (Maybe all I want is just HTML, 🤷)

So, what’s the verdect? Would I use iA Presenter again? Hmm, maybe. If I’m working on a presentation with a small number of slides containing simple visual elements designed to emphasise something, such things you’d find at TED talks or an Apple keynote, then yeah, I’d probably use it again. It’s a style of presentation that the app is clearly optimised for, and it does a good job for that. If I needed slides that were a little more informative in their own right, I’d probably consider something else. Probably not Keynote, but I’d consider one of the JS+HTML options.

But it’s a really nice app2 and a pleasure to use, so it’s probably worth checking out for your next presentation.


  1. Not to single out Keynote here. You can easily use Powerpoint or Google Slides as a drop-in replacement for this post. ↩︎

  2. I didn’t talk about the UI as I wanted to focus on the preparation aspects, but the UI is delightful. They put a lot of care into it, and despite being “just a text editor”, seeing the little things like having the highlight or carrat colour match the slide background colour is a really nice touch. Dare I say, almost whimsical. ↩︎

Wheels and bridges.

Singapore Flyer behind a road bridge with support piers shaped like a V.

One thing that thrills me about visiting somewhere new is seeing the little things you can also find at home, such as these pedestrian crossing buttons. They even make the same noises, although the patterns are slightly different.

A pedestrian crossing button, by a road, with instructions on how to use it listed above.

Morning walk around the southern end of Singapore. Love walking through the green areas of the city. Very quiet and peaceful. Also, the Singapore Flyer is to the east of the Downtown Core, not the south. 🤦‍♂️

Footpath surrounded by trees, with a branch to the left near the camera. A person is running away from the camera. There's a pidgon preening near the left.

Had the pleasure of taking the ferry to Batam, Indonesia to see how my employer builds hardware. Wow! It’s absolutely amazing. To see something become tangible like that. Certainly difficult to get that feeling in cloud software.

I don’t like these pod coffee machines for a number of reasons. Today’s reason is that it took me 5 minutes to work out how to turn the damn thing on. Guess which one of these is the power button. Hint: it’s not one of the obvious buttons. 🤦‍♂️

The top of a pod coffee machine, with two illuminated buttons, the power button that looks like a release for the water tank, and the top of the water tank itself

Greetings from Singapore. 🇸🇬

Singapore skyline at night with some plants slightly covering the foreground.

Resurrecting Untraveller And Finishing The RA-V Mission Posts

It’s been 10 years to the day when I had the opportunity to tour the Pacific as part of my job at the Bureau of Meteorology, the so call “RA-V Missions”. This last month or so, I’ve been writing about them in my journal, trying to get it all down before I forget. I had grand plans of publishing them on a travel blog, which I shelved a couple of months ago.

But while I was updating my journal, I was wondering if anyone else would find it interesting. Probably not, really: I don’t know if people enjoy reading about other peoples work trips (I can go either way, myself).

But in the off-chance that someone out there will find this story intriguing, I decided to resurrect my travel blog and publish these (moderately edited) journal entries.

If this ends up being your cup of tea, I hope you enjoy it. I may add some other trips to the site down the line (including the ones that were on the old one). I’ll let you know here if I do.

It was in my day you had to download what you wanted to read, watch, or listen to before you got onto a plane.

I’m wondering if peoples love of a piece music has less to do with the music itself and more to do with positive associations with it. By today’s standards Phaedra should be completely unlistenable, and yet it’s remains one of my favourite albums in my collection, chiefly because of associated memories of listening to it amongst beautiful scenary.

Then again, it’s also a great album from the technical sense. Despite being very abstract, there’s still a lot there to tickle your ear, so to speak.

So maybe it’s a bit of both.

Trying out the image generator in ChatGPT (which I think is just DALL-E). A few friends of mine will get this reference.

DALL-E image generated using ChatGPT. Prompt: an image of a griffin playing bocce in the park with two other people.
Prompt: an image of a griffin playing bocce in the park with two other people.

I’ve been watching a lot of retro-computing YouTube videos recently and I find it amazing to think that much work involving a computer back then was to prepare something destined to be printed out. How things have changed. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve used a printer this year.

Found this on the footpath during my afternoon walk (almost too late I might add). I’m guessing it’s a blue-tongue, based on its size and markings.

Suspected blue-tongues lying in the sun on a footpath

One last day trip today. Went down to South Gippsland to do part of the Great Southern Rail Trail. Entered the trail at Koonwarra and walked for an hour towards Meeniyan, before turning back.

The rail trail path crossing a road, with a road sign saying Great Southern Rail Trail arranged in a St Andrews Cross to resemble a level crossing cross-buck The rail trail running through a glade surrounded by pine trees

This is an older part of the trail, so unlike at Leongatha, there’s not a lot of rail infrastructure remaining. There are still some old telegraph poles though, which makes for interesting photo subjects.

A run-down, disused, telegraph pole with a stay thats leaning to the right An upright disused telegraph pole beside the trail on a bridge. Some trees and green hills are in the background

The trail now goes all the way to Loch so after lunch I entered the trail there and walked along it for another hour or so. You can get to it by crossing the suspension bridge at the memorial reserve.

The entrance of a suspension bridge, with the towers roughly 3-4 metres high, and an information plaque to the left. The scene is in shade from what might be oak trees The rail trail approaching the South Gippsland Highway which crosses the trail and a creek via a bridge The trail in an eucalyptus forest

The day was a little warm but otherwise very nice. Some stormy weather was beginning to form near the end. I managed to stay dry, but it slammed into me during the drive home.

It’s incredibly difficult to get a good photo of a Crimson Rosella. They’re quite skittish. But managed to get this shot before it flew away.

Crimson Rosella perched on a metal rail

I’ve started using Notion for my personal notes. It’s still early days, and I haven’t moved all my old notes from Obsidian yet, but so far I’m finding it quite good for this. I still use Obsidian for work but I think the more structured features that Notion has, like databases, etc. could come in handy. It’s a little closer to my ideal note taking app, which allows for both structured and unstructured data.

Structured features begets structured notes so I’m trying to put a bit more effort into arranging my notes than I did in Obsidian. I’ve put together some sections, sort of in a Johnny.decimal lite style, where the more permanent notes will live:

Screenshot of sections in Notion, organised in a Johnny.decimal style, with Administration, Projects, Work and Personal as top-level major sections

Being able to set coloured icons and header images for notes is a nice touch. Sort of allows me to re-live the days of Google Inbox when they added a nice header image for travel documents:

Header image of a note about Canberra, showing the War Memorial

I’m also quite impressed with the mobile app. I used it yesterday when I was out of mobile range, and not only was I still able to access my most recent notes, I was able to add new notes which eventually got synced when data was available. I didn’t test this too much and I really should as it would be good to know whether I’ve got access to most (all?) of my notes off-line.

I do miss Obsidian’s Daily Notes though. That was a nice feature for the more incidental things. But truth be told, it ended up being a dumping ground for notes that really should’ve been filed somewhere. Maybe a nice Notion feature is to add daily notes that will “disappear” after two weeks unless their moved into another section. That way you’re forced to file it or it’ll get archived/deleted.

Dare I say that it’s like “stories for notes”1? 😉


  1. Maybe there should be a “stories for jokes about stories”: any joke referencing a feature that was popular five years ago should automatically get deleted. 😄 ↩︎

🔗 Please, Expose your RSS

100% this!

It was only a year or so ago that I found out that RSS discovery was a thing (coincidentally-but-probably-not-really it was also a year or so ago when I first read Manton’s book which mentions this).

Before that, if there was a site I wanted to subscribe to, and there was no RSS link on the page itself, I wouldn’t bother. Apart from thinking that I needed the link to the RSS feed to subscribe, I also got burned so often by sites that didn’t even have RSS that I just defaulted to assuming there was no way to read their site in my feed reader.

Browsers are getting better at surfacing this though. Vivaldi now shows an RSS indicator in the address bar when it detects that the site has one. But it’s small, and I’m usually not looking at the address bar after entering the URL, so it’s easy to miss. Really, nothing beats putting a link on the site itself.

Now, if you escuse me for a second, I just need to check that I’ve got a link to an RSS feed on my site…