TL;DR List of best health insurers in Australia based on publicly available statistics.
I recently decided to up my health insurance from the bare minimum required by
the government here in Australia. It proved quite difficult to find which insurer
is the best for my state. Now the “best” insurer is a loaded term. It depends
on your needs, your age and so on (and for that, you should see other resources.). But that’s the
matter of coverage. I wanted to know which insurer was the easiest to deal
with and actually cared about making members’ lives easier. You may be
thinking how naive I must be to think any insurance company cares about their
members, or any business for that matter. If that’s you, this is not the post
for you.
I decided to look at publicly available statistics instead of relying on anecdotal
reviews from people I know and those online. That’s because they are usually
biased towards the negative as happy people don’t usually go out of their way
to write a review (except me). I also wanted to know which insurer is the best
for my particular area. The result is in a Github
repo which I plan to add to over time as I learn more about various
related stats.
As a summary, here are your best options per state:
Over the past two years, I have gradually increased my use of home
automation in our small city apartment. I started with an IKEA TRÅDFRI
light and a button, and today have over 40 devices doing useful things,
saving electricity and making our living more pleasant. I won’t lie: I
have done a lot of this just for fun and learnt quite a bit in the
process. But if it doesn’t eventually result in utility or aesthetics,
then I get rid of it. I can’t stand keeping frivolous stuff in the long
run.
In this post, I’d like to describe the architecture of our home
automation and specifically talk about how a graceful degradation of
capabilities is crucial to the reliable operation of devices at home,
which itself has important safety implications. Unfortunately, most
people do not have access to a setup like mine, and it takes an industry
and perhaps regulation to streamline these fundamental capabilities into
smart home devices. On the other hand, if you have the time and the
skills, this post should have some useful tips.
I worked on a project where I dived deep into understanding how modern
color management works, including things like color spaces, ICC profiles
and more. As I learnt here and there, I decided to write this post, both
for my future self, and others who may struggle with some of the
concepts as well.
What is color management?
Color management deals with translating between representations of
colors across a variety of devices. Throughout this post, we’ll use
natural language as an analogy to describe various terms and concepts.
Why is color management needed?
Just as with language, one’s notion of the color “orange” can be
different to someone else’s. One person could be referring to the color
of a highlighter, while another can think of the skin of the orange
fruit. Extending this analogy further, not everyone speaks the same
language. Therefore, being able to translate is essential for a shared
understanding.
This post is about a GUI tool called pdfrankenstein that
fills a gap on mostly Linux machines where a powerful and easy to use
PDF annotator does not exist.
Adobe Acrobat® on Windows and Mac allow you to add text, drawings and
signatures to PDF documents. This is useful when filling forms or
marking notes to send back to someone. Such a tool with similar
capabilities and easy of use does not exist on Linux. The reason that’s
often cited is that PDF is a complex format and creating a general
purpose PDF editing tool requires far too much effort than can be
expected from an open source project.
Some of the sincerity slimed up on me
Cards wrote themselves and rifled me
Rigging the blast door to explore didn’t pan out this time
Rushed in, gobbled up and left me bottled up, that monstrous cub
To tell you the truth, I snort mousse
Rust seeps into cereals I produce
Rum may run rampantly down the drain, so let me think
I’ll leave a limb in the pipes to entice a drink
I’ve had my Tesla Model 3 for more than a year now. It has been an
absolute pleasure so far and I would not trade it for anything else at
any price including Tesla’s other offerings (yes, talking about S
Plaid). Model 3 just has the most beautiful exterior of any other car.
OK, let’s stop here because I can go on forever. But not without a photo
of Tin Can:
“Tin Can” is a reference to Major Tom’s
spaceship.
I live in the city and have a fixed broadband and 5G around but being
the tech head that I am, I had to sign up for a Starlink service. I
actually thought of uses, mostly for when traveling. I put down my
deposit in February and received my dish two month ago. I knew when I
signed up that I would need to make it work with my car and while I
waited, I crunched some numbers, with the assurance that should I
determine it won’t be feasible to run Starlink from the car, I can
simply cancel my order.
Model 3 can output 12A continuously on its accessory outlet (aka
cigarette lighter port). With a nominal voltage of 12.7V, that’s 150W of
continuous power, or 140W when taking into account the regulation losses
when stepped up to 56V needed by Starlink. Starlink’s own power supply
has a total maximum output of 180W. That doesn’t look too good until one
digs a bit deeper through forums and learns that Starlink’s user
terminal, called Dishy McFaltface, generates heat either as a result of
higher transmit power, or specicially to deal with cold weather and
snow. That’s where half of that 180W seems to go into. As luck has it, I
live in a warm climate so it’s unlikely that mine would consume as much
power. It’s also worth noting that with each firmware update, the
dish’es consumption seems to drop ever futher down (40W reported by some
users as of late).
TL;DR we need 90W of continuous power to run Dishy and have 140W
available from the car.
TL;DR tiny and easy to use USB-C
module to power everything; configure it anywhere, even
on your phone!
My
first attempt in using USB-C adapters as a power source was met with
great enthusiasm. It was just a breakout board for STUSB4500
autonomous USB-PD sink controller. It has since been picked up by Sparkfun
with a much better design (as you would expect).
Although sufficient, I wasn’t very happy with how much effort was needed
to program the chip. It required talking I2C which for me meant an
Arduino had to be available, connected to a computer with USB and a
whole bunch of jumper wires. I have since used Adafruit’s MCP2221A
breakout board and a Raspberry Pi but the process still has a lot of
friction. So, I set out to simplify the programming aspect of STUSB4500
and this post will take you through to what became fpx, a smaller and easily
configurable version of fabpide2.
This post is about a command line tool called pdftilecut which I wrote
a while ago that allows you to cut PDF pages into tiles in order to
print a large page on small form printers for instance.
A little background: for my wedding, we decided to make an art piece we
called “the portal”. It was basically a steam punk spaceship door with
an iris
window.
This thing took many weekends to get done and it was so much fun. Too
bad we didn’t have the space to keep it so we threw it away. It sat on
the background and every now and then would slowly open and show a
planet pass-by.
