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“Caseless”

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Years after buying my first iPod in 2023, I started carrying it around without a case and marvelled how slim it sat in my pocket and how beautiful its industrial design was. (I still have this gen3 iPod in my desk drawer, but it stopped powering on many years ago.) I realised at that time that there was no point in keeping this perfect object hidden away for its entire lifetime to be only used as a functional object.

Nonetheless, in the decades since (!!) I have generally used cases on my iPhone. I was very fond of the bi-fold wallet style case through the XS era, but phased it out because of the annoying way that a completely unfolded phone case obscured the cameras. (I still wonder — especially with the Pro Max sizes — why no-one makes a half height bifold wallet case which keeps the cameras clear at all times.)

Towards the end of my iPhone XS lifetime I once more started carrying it caseless, and it wasn’t too long before one of the children dropped it on tiles and smashed the back. This ruined the prospects of a battery replacement and by 2023 it was time for an upgrade.

With the iPhone 15 Pro Max, I’ve been very happy with the Apple MagSafe wallet. Except for the occasions that I leave it at home because it’s not permanently attached to my phone! By the end of the year our trains will take phone payments so no need for a separate metrocard, and I’ll be down to a single work ID card. My plan then is just to stick it to the back of the case somehow so it’s super slim.

But the iPhones are so expensive now — and justifiably so as they do last a long time — that I couldn’t live with the risk of a caseless $2000 slippery glass object in my grasp. I do occasionally drop my phone, after all. So I’ve been using an attractive Bellroy case for the last two years.

Recently the iPhone air was released and I picked up a model in store. I mean, physically. I didn’t buy one. It’s a very impressive phone, and it made the phone in my pocket seem awfully chunky with its case on. I think that experience flipped a switch in my head, as I’m now convinced that this phone — titanium edges and glossy white back — deserves to be appreciated for the industrial design work of art that it is.

So two years in, I’m now caseless. Will I drop my phone and desperately regret this decision? I hope not.

Chaos vs stagnation

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My professional life has been marked by almost continuous periods of chaos and change induced by organisational restructures. For my own recollection moreso than trying to map out anything notably historic, my career thus far has seen:

2013-2015: first years post-PhD, casual and fixed term teaching contracts, with employment uncertainty and variability from year to year
2016-2018: first years on a continuing contract, in hindsight the only years of stability but finding my feet properly in the academic world. First PhD students of my own commence. Complicated by reforms of professional staff organisation, centralising school staff to the faculty.
2019-2021: amidst curriculum overhauls across all engineering programs, we hit the COVID years, teaching reforms by necessity, and (some) staff departures. Further organisational change, centralising faculty staff to central units
2022-2023: ostensibly for efficiency, five faculties reduced to three (e.g., engineering and sciences merged), and five engineering schools reduced to three (e.g., mechanical and electrical engineering merged) bringing line management changes and other wide-reaching restructures
2024-2025: ostensibly for “bigger is better”, merger between University of Adelaide and UniSA announced, with incomprehensibly massive processes executed to launch a new University in 2026

Against the backdrop of changes at school, faculty, and University levels, academics have kept up admirably with their teaching and research commitments and ambitions. Most of our courses have never been better in their content and pedagogy. We have learned how to balance flexibility for students with engagement.

I pride myself in my ability to live with uncertainty and adapt to change, but I look with envy at my older colleagues who had a period of far greater stability through the 2000s and early 2010s. Critically reviewing my performance as an academic, it is hard not to conclude that the changing environment has limited my ability to build a strong research track record. But I’ve also chosen various roles that put me in places that are most affected by the changes. (Stepping up to be Director of Learning and Teaching in our school at the beginning of 2020 was ill-fated.)

To be effective academics, we need time to plan, reflect, and revise our approaches. We need headspace to continually broaden our perspectives, lest we get stuck in a single research track that leads to a rut or dead end. Organisational change does not foster time and space in this manner.

And yet, stagnation is unhealthy. Silos can lead to inequities, inefficiencies, and barriers to building critical mass. In the right context and with the right strategies, centralisation can bring true benefits. One example of this is a more robust staffing profile. With school-level staff, processes can be bottlenecked by a single staff member and organisational knowledge can be lost easily when staff move on.

Another benefit of centralisation is scale. As a school, we were limited to infrastructure projects that were modest in scale. As a faculty, far more impactful infrastructure projects have been undertaken, with excellent new facilities renovated or built from scratch.

When we talk about centralised and decentralised models, there is a level of relatively involved. Now that have three engineering schools, is that the “correct” number? If centralising to a larger faculty was a good thing, why not go further? Organisations of different scales and scopes will naturally have different answers to these questions. More importantly, the time and place of when these questions are asked, and who is answering them, has as much influence on the result. The right question is “from where we are placed now, would a level up or down the centralisation scale help us?”
We shouldn’t get hung up on the theoretical questions but more the practical ramifications of change.

The next question to ask is “how much will a change affect us operationally?”. Power brokers want to effect change because it improves their CV and (I suspect) because they truly believe that their change is necessary for the long term health and performance of their unit. Sometimes they are right, other times the idea is good and the timing or execution is wrong, and yet other times the idea itself is misguided.

[I wrote this in February 2025 and just stumbled across the draft notes in October the same year. I’m hitting post so I can clear it, perhaps I should have written a proper conclusion though…]

Finance plans and finance apps — mainly Up and Stake — in 2025

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

After a few years dabbling in minor share purchases and slightly less minor ETF purchases as a way to build an investment portfolio, I realised that the all-in-one VDHG ETF was the best option for me. Vanguard are the professionals and there’s no point trying to reinvent their wheel.

So in late 2023 I started a fairly simple but effective system, splitting my fortnightly income into buckets of spending, saving, and investing. I use Up Bank, which makes automatic pay splitting like this really streamlined. (More thoughts on the Up app later.) Once enough money had accumulated in the investment bucket, I transferred it over to BankSA DirectShares, my shares platform until recently.

Why not just buy shares every pay cycle? Well, sometimes I did. But DirectShares charges $20 per shares transaction, so spending even small single digits’ percentage of the worth of the purchase seems significant when you might only see 5% or so growth in a mediocre year. Keeping the money in a bank account accruing interest for a while increases the benefit of a waiting. In fact, choosing an optimal purchasing frequency is an interesting optimisation problem — solved by the fantastic “Investment Frequency Calculator”.

Regardless of how well timed my purchases could have been, I was spending a few hundred dollars on brokerage fees with DirectShares. Furthermore, although the interface was actually quite functional when trawling back through records of purchases and sales, I always found the website and app to be reasonably clunky at the best of times, and busy and full of irrelevant cruft at others. After using the phone-only Up Bank interface, which is a true first class citizen on my phone (supporting Apple Wallet, naturally, but also other iOS interface features such as widgets), I slowly started to yearn for an equivalent experience when buying shares.

Which brings me to Stake. I heard about this from lurking in various Australian finance subreddits. It ticked all the boxes: cheap brokerage (only $3!), native app, CHESS sponsored, with the added bonus that it can handle US shares (my first very modest shares purchase was AAPL and I’m holding onto it for sentimental reasons). Nonetheless, shifting brokers is no walk in the park. There is annoying paperwork associated with shifting your shares from one broker to another. It took me a while to build up the courage to go through with it.

I was very pleased to discover that the process of brokerage transfer through Stake is almost as frictionless as one could imagine. They’ve really designed a worthwhile system. Stake makes it almost trivial to designate which broker I’m transferring from, provide the appropriate paperwork for ID checks, and indicate which funds to transfer across. But it’s not an instant process. It took a couple days to bounce the information from Stake to DirectShares, then I had to call DirectShares as one last security check (appreciated!), after which it took another couple days to finalise the transfer. Although this sounds lengthy, I found it a very seamless and trustworthy process.

Stake currently offer one full year of 100% brokerage discount to transfer an existing portfolio to them, so I can now buy shares as often as I like. Even after the year is up, spending $3 instead of $20 dramatically changes the equation and I suspect I’ll be able to continue purchasing shares fortnightly. The benefit of this, I believe, is the greatest chance of averaging out short term fluctuations. 26 purchases across the year minimises the chance I’ll accidentally buy in a significant dip — or more likely, minimises the chance that I’ll think too much at all about trying to time the market.

Update: One last step to this process was that a separate ComputerShares account was created as a new broker means a new HIN. I like to have dividends direct deposited in my main bank account (Up), which helps track income streams. This meant fully registering and setting up the new ComputerShares account, which is simple but takes a little time for the paper mail based authentication process.

Saving a few hundred on brokerage fees also got me thinking about interest rates. Up at time of writing offers 4.35%. This is good, but not great — the best rate on the market is 5.5%, albeit with some different terms and conditions how you achieve them respectively. (Interest rates can be compared via incredible resource provided by the “Accounts Leaderbook” online spreadsheet.)

So despite wanting to keep my finance life as simple as possible, a 1.15% increase by moving my liquid savings (emergency fund) into a new bank account was worthwhile purely from a numbers perspective. I signed up for UBank and (a) it was super easy, (b) it’s really surprising how different it is to the Up app. In terms of user interface playgrounds, online banking might be very fertile ground. (This seemed more surprising to me than the marked differences between the DirectShares app and the Stake app, since those two are so vastly different in provenance that a comparison is hardly worthwhile.)

Recapping, heading into 2025 I’m now feeling good that:

I have a simple investment strategy that I can manage without much brainpower and won’t get distracted “tweaking” by introducing more diversification or adjusting splits.
I’m getting the best bang for the buck in brokerage fees and using a nice app to do so.
I’m earning as much interest as possible on my emergency fund.

There is one loose end around super concessional contributions, but that’s too annoying to try to discuss now for various boring reasons.

Finally, I’ve realised that I’ve been relying more and more on phone interfaces for finance matters. My phone is never far away, and is fast and easy. With apps well designed for the platform it feels an order of magnitude more productive (to me) than sitting down in front of a full-size computer, pulling up the websites, logging in, etc. (These are also the reasons why I’m terrible at using my digital cameras even though I have a couple that I really like to use.)

To further this phone-first approach (actually phone-only, considering some of these platforms don’t even have websites), I have been building a process to record my finances in a CSV file and visualise them using Python and Matplotlib. (Respectively using Easy CSV Editor and Pythonista.) I’m not quite ready to talk about this code and what it can do but I’m calling it “Net Worth Dashboard”.

What is funny about this after all the thinking and building of these processes, this scheme, sensibly, should now just require long stretches of patience as the payslips come in, the brokerage orders go out, and the portfolio creeps steadily upwards. You know, unless the world crumbles into unmitigated disaster for all sorts of highly conceivable reasons in the next few years.

Wet shaving

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In early 2022 I backed a Kickstarter campaign for a brass safety razor. I wasn’t a so-called “wet shaving” safety razor afficionado but I was hooked by the concept that you can buy cheap, steel (therefore recyclable), double-sided razor blades instead of expensive disposable plastic alternatives.

The economics continue to boggle my mind. In April 2022 I bought a pack of 100 Bic blades from Amazon for AUD$16. This pack is still going strong, with each shave costing me 16 cents (I shave at most weekly, so I don’t reuse the safety blades). Meanwhile, my previous supply of disposable razors via the Dollar Shave Club is currently running at AUD$6 for five blades. Let’s call it an even 10x more expensive, and they’re all made of plastic (except the cutting part of the blade itself, naturally) so contribute to landfill.

So the razors are cheaper going with a safety razor. How about the shaving soap? Well, there’s nothing which says you can’t use bog standard Nivea shaving gel with a safety razor. But the done thing is to buy a little cup thing and a bristle brush and lather up your own soap from a solid bar/cake of shaving soap. The cup and the brush can be expensive, but just like the safety razor itself they are one-time purchases.

For shaving soap, I splurged a bit and bought Tabac, which comes in a reusable ceramic bowl. In over 18 months it feels like I’ve barely scratched the surface, so the $25 refill seems like it will be similarly good value to the razors themselves. I really like the way this soap lathers up and can be generously brushed on – despite being frugal with it I always seem to have more than I need per shave.

Learning to shave with a safety razor wasn’t too much of a learning curve. I typically shave in three main passes. Apply the lather, and shave “with the grain” (downwards, basically). The safety razer is best with small, gentle, strokes – basically allowing gravity to pull the razor down and simply steering with the fingers. The second pass repeats the first, finishing up any thicker patches of hair which the first pass couldn’t get through (this wouldn’t be an issue if I shaved more frequently). The third pass shaves across the grain, and this pass catches most of the leftover bristles. If I get to this point with some patience left and no nicks, I will sometimes have the courage to run a fourth pass against the grain (upwards). I need to be careful here – my skin nicks easily and I’ve found from experience that any improvement in the closeness of the shave is often not worth it.

I’m not too extreme about trying to minimise waste but I do feel like it’s good to promote a more sustainable lifestyle. The safety razer approach fits my philosophy of a higher up front cost for good quality and long lasting equipment. It’s the opposite of the “Gillette” model and over time it is clearly cheaper and more efficient and sustainable.

The only problem… can’t take safety razor blades in a carry-on bag for air travel!

The grief of time from before

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

There’s that thing how you can meet an old friend after years and years and it’s like no time has ever passed. Then there’s the other thing, when you don’t meet them again and then they have passed away, and the grief is as strong as if no time were between you.

I had a close friend for a little while, and we used to talk and talk. I think I loved her in my teenage way, the kind that puts down roots that never die, although they are so thin and spindly you don’t know they are there until you go and look for them.

I remember her with a boyfriend, and her not being happy with her boyfriend, and trying to make it right. I’m sure I made it worse. But they didn’t last. I always considered her like young royalty in the sense that she walked through life like she knew what she was doing and where she was going. And that she wouldn’t cast her eyes in my direction even if she was happy to share confidences over the phone.

After University, and 21st birthday parties, we all went our different directions and the distractions of new friends pushed out the loyalties of old ones. I imagine she was working hard, going out for nice dinners, I don’t know what – sparing as little thought for me as I for her. Years turned into decades, careers, adventures, middle age. And then, quite suddenly, shockingly, she was gone.

I realised that she was one of the stones of my foundation, propping up everything that has come since, and long taken for granted. The what ifs don’t even make sense as it has been so long. I always knew you and you always knew me. And without you in this world, it makes that one little bit less sense.

Stop The Madness Safari extension

Thu, 16 May 2024 23:51:23 +0000

Usually when I see people talking about browser extensions I think “oh neat, but I don’t want to fuss around with a complex set of configurations that becomes unportable over time”. Or I think “that’s cute, but I’m not paying a few dollars for a tweak I will probably forget about”.

John Gruber linked to Stop The Madness recently and again I thought it was interesting but not worth the mental hassle of integrating a new tool into my browsing habits. But I’m sitting on the bus right now, listening to music while catching up on some news. And as I scroll through the website my music fades away and some auto-play video has taken over. And my gosh do I do not want to be watching some tangentially related video on your site right now. Cue me leaving the webpage.

I remembered this wouldn’t be an issue if I had some kind of way to stop the madness. And the initial hook for the app — replace Arial with Helvetica! — is certainly a typography issue that I feel strongly about. I am now a Safari extension convert, and I’m quite impressed with the various features that Stop The Madness provides. Particularly happy that it uses iCloud sync to keep options configured across browsers on Mac, iPad, and iPhone (as long as you are happy using Safari everywhere, which I am).

Now I just need to remember to install it everywhere for all time…

Howto Python with forked sankey package

Sat, 11 May 2024 00:51:23 +0000

Over summer (a few months back) I finally started to learn Python in more detail. What started as a few bits and pieces to play around with my bank’s REST API ended up as a fork of a popular visualisation library that I built more features into:

https://github.com/AUMAG/ausankey

This package draws so-called Stanley diagrams like this:

Compared to what I’m familiar with (mostly Matlab and Lua), it’s been interesting to see what is similar and what is different. I like the OOP approach and the broad set of datatypes that Python and modules like NumPy and Pandas provides. On the hand, there is a lot to wrap your head around in the Python ecosystem, and the complexity of having different approaches (and even competing approaches) adds some mental overhead for a beginner.

Anyway, back to the visualisation package itself. My changes were intended to modularise the code, add (many) more configuration options, and wrap it up nicely so I could also get some experience with the Python packaging ecosystem. This involved a lot of fun getting ruff to like me.

To do this the main elements of the repo that I set up were:

Hatch as the build system (in hindsight I wonder if a build system with more critical mass would have been safer — I believe Hatch is newer and only maintained by a solo/small team)
GitHub actions for lint/CI/release to PyPi (I had previously set up Travis and this went well)
Documentation with mkdocs and Github Pages (I miss LaTeX for authoring but can’t argue with the accessibility of the online docs)
(Some) unit tests — these are a bit challenging because a lot of the code is focused around visual output

I’m particularly happy with the documentation approach, as the GitHub action generates the images dynamically. Good package documentation is something I feel very strongly about, coming from the TeX ecosystem.

Finally, another key element of this whole project was that I did all of it on iOS, mainly on iPhone. Once the pain of setting up the GitHub actions was out of the way, this has worked surprisingly well. I jump between Textastic as my main code editor, Pythonista as my main Python IDE for running examples/test scripts, Working Copy for version control and light editing tasks, and the GitHub app for monitoring actions.

This makes Python by far the easiest language I know of for teaching and playing around with — even someone without a PC can jump right in and do quite a lot. I wouldn’t want to tackle a larger programming exercise in the same way, but I managed to take this much further than I expected. Okay, part of that was just proof of concept — is it possible? Turns out yes — but the other part was that I have my phone on me most times. I could grab a coffee and fix a bug in my code. Sitting down at a computer feels more like a chore these days (blame work!!) and this brought back a lot of the fun of tinkering on a computing device.

Now I wish I had similar workflows set up for my LaTeX code.

Bike vs Car #1

Thu, 09 May 2024 10:51:23 +0000

This showed up in Facebook, artist unknown (to me):

Caption along the lines of “Metaphor of using SUV for commuting with one person in the vehicle”.

Now that two of my kids are in school I ride into work regularly again. I’m still using a single-speed bike that I bought off a friend almost ten years ago, and have tinkered with in only minor ways.

I like the sprint-coast rhythm of riding a single speed bike, but being overtaken by even a moderately competent rider with a set of gears does make me wonder how much quicker I’d get around if I had a more “normal” bike. I would like to get a bike where I can sit upright while riding. Certainly not efficient, but a nice feeling ergonomically.

I’ve never owned a car, but now getting to the point in my adult life where having two cars in the family might start making our lives a fair bit easier. On the other hand, I do vastly prefer not using cars where possible (hence the opening image), and I suspect if I bought a car it was sit idle for most days of the week. That doesn’t seem efficient or fiscally sensible.

It’s interesting to compare how many taxis you could catch simply for the cost of car registration and insurance. But would getting the kids to sports games on the weekend really make sense in a taxi?

Check back with me in five years. If I can make it that long without a car I’ll probably last forever without one.

“Refresh”

Thu, 02 May 2024 23:51:23 +0000

I first started with a “blog” website in, oh, 2005 or something. When I reread my words from that time, I don’t always specifically remember the actual act of writing them — but it is almost shocking to me how similar in thought process the me from 20 years ago is to me now. I wonder if I have changed much. I’m older and (hah) perhaps more experienced, but I feel that the general approach to thinking might be something that is frozen quite early on.

Over time, my blogs proliferated because I thought there was benefit to keeping each channel focussed on particular content. I also enjoyed playing around with new website technologies. So I spent some time writing about LaTeX things, about engineering things. Again rereading, I’m really thankful to my old self for preserving these snippets of activity. It reminds me of all the (hopefully) useful bits and pieces that I’ve put together over the years.

Looking back, I’m disappointed I wasn’t able to keep up with writing publicly — part of this was due to a busy family and work life. Another part of it was spending too much time (in hindsight) on social media. The final part was around workflows. I’ve now realised how important it is for any task in life to have systems in place to reduce the friction of completing the work as much as possible.

Once upon a time I used MarsEdit to write posts for Blogger and everything “just worked”. At some point I didn’t maintain the workflow and it crumbled into dust when I upgraded my Mac. I thought bringing all of my writing into a GitHub repository would help here, as I could then access the interface from anywhere (I’m currently writing this on my phone), but that coincided with life getting crazier.

I’ve finally reconnected to the repository with the domain and have been spending more time doing code development on iOS (hopefully I’ll get the chance to write about it).

So from now on, although I hate to promise anything, I hope from here to be able to put my thoughts back out into the world.

I've been busy

Sat, 29 Apr 2023 13:32:23 +0000

I stumbled upon the fact that this website hadn’t been updated since 2019 and wanted to write a few words. I think I had plans in 2019 to write more, and then 2020 happened. My work life exploded as the impact of COVID-19 was felt through so many different facets of everyone’s lives. This was not a short term blip. My experience working at a University was surely not unique — juggling online teaching, the uncertainty of student engagement and rapid changes to processes, working out how online exams could work without rife cheating, the effect of losing staff members in an already resource constrained environment, and the long lasting ripple effects.

In the mean time, I’ve been wondering about what to do about a website like this. Do I still have the time and energy to write? (The past evidence is not great, but there’s always the future.) Is a website like this just totally old-fashioned now? It’s interesting to think that any of the writing I’ve done in sites like Twitter and Facebook is essentially emphemeral, and while it’s possible to trawl through posting histories there it’s not the same as having a written archive like this website provides. I have this hopelessly sentimental feeling that one day it would be nice to look back on this tiny slice of creativity in my life.

So on balance I remain hopeful that I can stabilise my work-life balance, and spend some more time writing here. Recent work experiences have made me yearn for doing more generative creation rather than process driven documentation. I’m not too sure what that will look like and where I can manifest such work — is it more active research output at work? Or is it more actively creative time spent outside of work? — but I’m trying hard to step back from what feels like a continuous state of being overloaded.