Monotype font licencing shake-down

tl;dr Don’t try to shake-down a typography nerd with your dubious, automated claims about his employer using unlicensed fonts.

How it started

It started with a LinkedIn InMail message (sanitised to protect privacy):

Subject: [Urgent] Font Software Licensing Review

Hi Ameel

I hope you’re doing well.

I’m [NAME] from Monotype and have been trying to reach you at [WORK EMAIL ADDRESS], but I’m unsure if my emails have been received.

Our team has identified Monotype font software embedded in the websites/apps of [YOUR COMPANY], but we couldn’t locate the corresponding licenses in our database.

Would you be able to share the correct email address so I can provide more details and documentation? Alternatively, you’re welcome to reach out to me directly at [SENDER’S EMAIL ADDRESS]

I appreciate your time and look forward to resolving this with you at your earliest convenience.

Best regards,

[NAME]

Business Development Representative | Monotype, Australia

I was puzzled by this for two reasons:

  1. This person had my correct work email address, but at no point had they sent me an email about this issue or about anything else. I checked. (Starting with a lie? Not a good look.)

  2. As far as I knew, my employer didn’t use any Monotype fonts on its websites and apps.

Always good to check

Just in case there was any merit to this claim, I did a quick review and found that I was right. In Australia we have one corporate website, one retail website, and one retail app (with iOS and Android versions) and all of those use our official font which, for better or for worse, is Open Sans.

Now, not only is Open Sans not a Monotype typeface, it is available under the SIL Open Font License (OFL) meaning we can use this typeface for literally anything except selling the font itself. So that couldn’t be what this person was talking about.

Screenshot of the SIL Open Font Licence home page. Text below the heading reads, “The widely used, community-approved, free, libre, and open source license specifically designed for fonts and related software: a solid legal framework for worldwide development, sharing, and improvement of fonts and related software in a collaborative manner.”

Next I checked our international retail websites and our project and partnership websites, since all of those have their own branding.

I found that on the websites we directly manage, we use these typefaces:

  • Roboto, available under the SIL OFL

  • Asap, available under the SIL OFL

So no issue there.

And on the websites our partners manage, we use these typefaces:

  • Public Sans, available under the SIL OFL,

  • Network Sans, a custom font created for the government agency that built the website this is used on so they wouldn’t need a licence, and

  • Proxima Nova, the only font that does require a licence, except that Monotype doesn’t sell a licence to it.

So no issue there either.

Promotional graphics displaying the Roboto, Asap, Public Sans, Network Sans, and Proxima Nova typefaces.

With those initial checks done, I reached out to our digital team (who build and manage our websites and apps) with a screenshot of the LinkedIn message I’d received and a summary of my investigation. I asked them how they wanted me to reply.

I needed to check with these folks first because my team and I only look after the corporate website. My employer’s overall digital presence – including the back-end of the corporate website – is managed by the digital team.

Turns out a couple of people from the digital and design teams had received identical messages from this Monotype “Business Development Representative”.

A few internal back-and-forth emails later we decided that:

  • Instead of all of us responding, only one nominated person from the digital team would respond.

  • But before responding, the digital team would do their own investigation into the fonts we use and the licences we own so we could verify everything was in compliance.

Of course that’s not how things actually went down.

Three-panel meme showing Oprah Winfrey pointing at members of her TV talk show audience apparently shouting, at least according to the text captions at the bottom of each panel, “You get a LinkedIn message!”

Fishing (phishing?) around

What the Monotype rep did next is kind of what a malicious hacker does when they’re trying to get someone from your company to click on a link that’ll install malware on your computer. Over the next couple of weeks, the rep messaged a dozen or so more people from different parts of the business, hoping to hook just one person who would reply to the scary message they were sending.

Now I’d already emailed my design, brand, and digital team colleagues to tell them about this mass-messaging campaign and our plan of action for it, but the Monotype rep expanded their campaign to include people from our procurement team, who I hadn’t thought to forewarn.

So not long after, I received a message from one of my procurement team colleagues who’d been forwarded that LinkedIn message from their senior manager with an instruction to deal with this. I explained to my colleague that, as far as I could tell, this Monotype campaign was similar to the domain name scams the procurement team is already familiar with. So please sit tight till our digital team colleagues have completed their audit and then we’ll figure out which one person should start the conversation with Monotype.

But, like any successful phishing campaign, the Monotype rep’s LinkedIn messages eventually reached someone who did respond. This was another person in the procurement team and, just to be completely clear, I don’t blame them for responding. They were just doing their job of protecting our business from potential copyright liability.

Being forced to deal with the issue

Since I’d handed this over to the digital team, I hadn’t kept track of how things were progressing. I was brought back into the discussion when our brand manager included me in an email thread between her and the procurement person who’d responded to Monotype.

I quickly brought this second procurement person up to speed with our earlier plan of action and then I looped in the digital team again. Turns out the digital team had completed their audit, found that we were in compliance, but had gotten busy with other work so no one had responded to Monotype. *sigh*

Screenshot from the TV series ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ showing the character of Captain Jean-Luc Picard sitting in the captain’s chair with his hand covering his face, typically referred to as a “face palm” gesture.

Now, of course, everyone was on the back foot because our new procurement rep had shared the PDF that Monotype had sent, listing all the places where we were using Monotype fonts without a proper licence.

And, to quote from the procurement rep’s email:

Supplier has confirmed two options:

Past Use License Agreement is used (PULA) to cover the usage for the period without a license if the software is to be removed.

Process the PULA with a Go Forward license agreement to allow compliant continued use of the fonts in use.

Reading that, I got this procurement rep to quickly convene a meeting with everyone involved, though it turned out the person from the digital team who’d done the font audit had gone on annual leave.

The rest of the digital team didn’t know anything about font licencing and this was the first time this procurement rep was dealing with font licencing as well. So, partly spurred on by their senior manager’s instruction to deal with this, the procurement rep was seriously considering paying the licencing fee that Monotype had asked for, just to make this whole headache go away.

This is where I jumped in and told everyone to hold up. I said I would take the lead on this internally and I would take over the discussion we were having with Monotype as well. The procurement rep, I think somewhat relieved to have this taken out of their hands, agreed.

Why did I insist on taking this over? Two reasons:

  • I’m a bit of a typography nerd so I know what I’m talking about and

  • a quick look at the document Monotype had sent over with the list our alleged copyright infringements had told me that everything the Monotype rep was alleging was wrong.

Screenshot from the film ‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ in which the character Luke Skywalker is saying, “Amazing. Every word of what you just said was wrong.”

Never send an AI to do a human’s job

An April 2025 blog post from Studio Twofold’s Jamie Walker titled ‘Unlicensed Fonts: The Hidden Risk in your Branding’ opens with:

Lately, we’ve seen a noticeable uptick in copyright issues related to both images and fonts. Several clients have reached out after receiving emails about fonts [an] agency used on their site years ago.

Naturally, they’re a bit rattled — and with good reason. These kinds of copyright claims can come with hefty fees if you’re found to be in breach.

Further down Jamie writes:

Smaller businesses can get caught off guard — and with AI now scanning the web for even the tiniest copyright infringements, it’s more important than ever to stay protected.

Think they’re only picking on the small guys? Think again. Even giants have been caught out – proving no one is too big to face the music (or in this case, the typography).

Basically, the reason so many organisations are getting out-of-the-blue copyright claims these days is because major copyright holders have started using automated, AI-powered copyright infringement detection software, of which there is a lot out there. *sigh*

Monotype seems to have used one of these products too, because the two fonts its report claimed we were using without a valid licence are:

Let’s take those one at a time, shall we?

Screenshot from the film ‘The Princess Bride’ in which the character Inigo Montoya is saying, “Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”

What’s in a name?

The first thing I did as I read the report was look up the Credit Cards font on MyFonts.com, Monotype’s online store front.

Credit Cards is a pictogram font that contains these icons:

Screenshot from the MyFonts.com website showing the glyphs contained within the Credit Cards font.

When I saw that I thought to myself, “Why would we want to use those icons in our apps?”

Next I read Monotype’s report in detail and saw this screenshot. This is from an analysis of our app’s payload and is the apparent proof that Credit Cards is being used in our smartphone apps:

Screenshot of a table in a PDF file showing a 70 kilobyte size font file with the extension TTF and the filename, “CREDC” followed by three underscore characters.

Having worked with a great many font files over the years, when I saw that filename I thought to myself, “Are we sure that’s actually the Credit Cards font that Monotype claims it is?”

So I checked. I did a web search for fonts with “credit card” in their name and very quickly found one called ‘Credit Card’ – singular – from K-Type. This is a regular text font (as opposed to an icon font) that looks like the raised text that’s printed on credit cards.

Screenshot from the K-Type website showing the description and sales page of a font named Credit Card. The description starts with, “Credit Card is an all capitals font for simulating bank cards.”

Now that I was something I could see us using in our apps.

Happily, Credit Card is free for personal use so I downloaded it and looked at the zip file. And guess what the filename of the font is?

Screenshot of software showing the contents of a zip file. A file among this list is highlighted. Its name is “CREDC” followed by three underscore characters. It has the extension TTF and is approximately 70 kilobytes in size.

Yup, the filename is CREDC___.ttf – which is exactly the filename that was in the app payload analysis from Monotype.

Seeing this, I reached out to my design team contact who then got me in touch with the person who manages our smartphone apps. From them I found out that, sure enough, the only font over and above Open Sans that we use in our smartphone apps is Credit Card by K-Type.

SCORE: Ameel 1, Monotype 0

Proxima Nova, really?

Unlike the Credit Cards font, our use of Mark Simonson’s Proxima Nova was never in contention. We clearly use it in one of our project websites. My employer didn’t actually build that website – we bought this under-construction project from another entity – but this website is very much our responsibility now.

The problem for Monotype here was that it no longer sells licences to Proxima Nova. There was a time you could buy a licence to Proxima Nova from Fonts.com, which was Linotype’s online marketplace. But Monotype bought Linotype and eventually killed off Fonts.com and, some time after that (I don’t know when or why), the font’s designer stopped selling licences to Proxima Nova through MyFonts.com.

Screenshot from the MyFonts website showing a page with an error message that reads, “The font is no longer available for purchase”.

Of course learning this fact didn’t mean that I was just going to stop my investigation. I reached out to a person, who reached out to a person, who reached out to the design agency that designed (and still maintains) our project website. The design agency contact did their own investigation and quickly confirmed that, yes, they do indeed have a licence to use Proxima Nova on this site – one that they had purchased from Adobe several years ago.

SCORE: Ameel 2, Monotype 0

Closing the book on this whole affair

Armed with this knowledge, I got the procurement person to introduce me to the Monotype rep. The rep and one of their colleagues were very eager to talk, replying to this introductory email within fifteen minutes. They wanted to organise a meeting so they could finally get the font licencing agreement signed. Instead what they got was a long email from me in which I explained the situation in detail, complete with annotated screenshots like the one above :)

The Monotype rep chewed on this for a few days and then made one final attempt at getting money out of us. They agreed that they were currently unable to sell a licence to Proxima Nova, but it turns out Monotype is one of K-Type’s authorised resellers and [they] “currently cannot see the license on our files for this use” – meaning there wasn’t a record of us purchasing a licence to Credit Card from Monotype. So could we please “confirm if there is one that we for some reason are unable to see in our systems?”.

*sigh*

I wrote back and told them the reason Monotype doesn’t have a record of this licence is because we purchased a one-off Enterprise Licence directly from K-Type several years ago.

This was several weeks ago and I haven’t heard a peep from them since.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Graphic showing cracked green paint on pavement on top of which white coloured text has been overlaid. The text is a quote from Ben Goldacre that reads, “I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that”.

Two sides to the story

Despite my making light of the situation, I don’t actually hate Monotype for doing this. Using fonts without purchasing a proper license (or purchasing the fonts outright) is stealing and you absolutely should not do it.

The fact that font licensing can be a complicated issue is not an excuse; lots of things are complicated and we figure them out.

More importantly, I think the type designers and type foundries that create fonts should be fairly compensated for their work. Paying for fonts, or an ongoing licence to those fonts, is how you do that.

In short, you should pay for fonts and you should call out people and organisations when they use fonts without a proper licence.

(For completeness’ sake, I should say that I also don’t mind that Monotype used automated systems to find copyright violations. The internet is so large that it’s impossible to manually find all the people who have stolen your stuff!)

It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it

That said, I hate how Monotype’s business development people went about doing this. Much like the blatantly overzealous content blockers on YouTube, the Monotype reps who reached out to us didn’t even bother to verify whether the report their AI spat out at them showed an actual copyright violation or not.

I mean, I know why they didn’t double-check. Just like with scammers and phishers, this is a volume game, not an accuracy or fairness game. You bombard people with messages, scaring them with your (potentially unverified) claims, and eventually some of the thousands of people you’ve messaged will reply. You then rush these folks into paying a licence fee because your targets don’t have enough information about font licencing and, frankly, they just want the problem to go away. This is a shitty way to do business and it reflects poorly on your organisation.

Screenshot from the Nebula.tv website showing a documentary with the title ‘Nebula Sans’. The short description of this documentary reads, “The story of a font built on principle, free to use for anyone who needs it.”

You’re not making any friends

Not that reputation seems to matter too much to popular digital marketplaces – Amazon being the poster child for this. They’re big, they’re arguably enshittified, and all they appear to care about is making as much money as possible.

I mean there’s a reason why so many type designers urge people not to licence fonts – even their own fonts – from MyFonts and instead buy or licence fonts directly from designer and type foundry websites. And, barring that, buying or licencing fonts from smaller, independent stores like Fontspring instead.

This is also why TypeType and Fontstand offer font subscriptions that are alternatives to those from Adobe Fonts and Monotype.

And this is why, for example, the independent video streaming site Nebula was forced to design their custom Nebula Sans font. Nebula’s website and streaming apps used to use the Screen Smart version of the Whitney font from Hoefler&Co. But when Monotype purchased Hoefler&Co, the new Monotype licencing/royalty structure meant that a licence to Whitney was suddenly unaffordable to Nebula. Since paying that (apparently much) higher amount to Monotype wasn’t going to be financially sustainable, Nebula instead paid Paul D. Hunt, the original designer of the excellent Source Sans font, to modify his font so it would be a drop-in replacement for Whitney in all of Nebula’s digital products. And because Source Sans was released under the SIL Open Font License, Nebula also released Nebula Sans under this OFL.

If that’s how much effort folks are willing to make to to avoid using your company, you probably already know that you’re not very well loved.

Screenshot of a website banner that shows the date range, “November 6 – December 4” and reads, in fancy, bright-pink, all capital letters, “cyber sale” and, “shop now”.

What do do?

So what’s my take-away from all this?

  • Don’t use scammy tactics to scare people into purchasing your shit. And if you are going to use those tactics, at least don’t be wrong about it!

  • If anything like this happens to you or your employer, find the relevant nerd in your friend group or organisation and ask for their help.

  • If you can, avoid licencing fonts from Monotype. Get your fonts directly from the original designers and type foundries, or maybe from smaller, independent marketplaces like Fontspring (which has its big annual “cyber sale” on till 4 December, by the way).

  • If you’d rather avoid the hassle of font licencing altogether, then do what my employer did and pick an excellent, versatile OFL font and use that instead. Though, if you want to stand out from the crowd, please consider avoiding the most popular fonts on Google Fonts.

Oh, and while I’m far from an expert on typography, if you need a hand with anything font-related, please reach out. I’d be happy to help in any way that I can :)

Using Joplin to sync notes on Linux

In my last post I talked about being forced to drop Sync.com as my cloud file synchronisation solution when I moved to Linux because Sync doesn’t have a native Linux client. (I now use the excellent, cross-platform Tresorit, fyi.)

You know what I didn’t have to drop when I moved to Linux because it does have an excellent Linux client? Joplin, my open-source, cloud-synchronised note taking solution.

Screenshot of the Joplin website home page. A large graphic at the top of the page explains that "Joplin is an open source note-taking app."

The tools I use to stay in sync

These are all the tools I use to keep my thoughts, notes, lists, tasks, and bookmarks synchronised across my four primary personal devices (desktop computer, laptop computer, tablet, and smartphone) and, when needed, my two work devices (laptop computer and work smartphone).

Long, secure notes: Joplin

The primary tool I use to capture all my thinking, planning, researching, documenting, and cataloguing is Joplin (created and maintained by London-based developer Laurent Cozic).

I love Joplin because:

  • it’s free (though I support its development via a Patreon membership),

  • it’s open source (at least the desktop client is),

  • it’s cross-platform (yay Linux client!),

  • it lets you use a range of back-end cloud storage options to sync your notes (otherwise at heart it’s an offline-first note-taking app),

  • it lets you use Markdown to structure you text, and

  • it provides end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for all you notes.

Unlike a lot of other, and perhaps, more popular note-taking tools – the commercial kind that you have to pay for – Joplin isn’t trying to be the everything-tool for everyone. It does a few things, and it does those well. It is relatively uncomplicated and its apps are all lightweight.

I especially like that you can choose among a bunch of cloud storage options to store and sync your notes in the back end. I already have 1TB of space on OneDrive (through our Microsoft 365 Family subscription) so I use that to sync my notes. And since all my notes are end-to-end encrypted, I have no security or privacy concerns with using OneDrive’s cloud storage for this purpose.

(Joplin has since launched Joplin Cloud to provide its own back-end cloud note-syncing functionality. This back-end synchronisation server is the only part of Joplin that’s not open-source.)

Short, casual notes: Google Keep

I use Google Keep because it consistently has the fastest and most reliable note synchronisation. Also, its lightweight apps works brilliantly on Android, iOS, and the web.

Content in Keep is (surprisingly for Google) private, but I don’t save anything secret here because your notes can still be subpoenaed.

Kanban board: KanbanFlow

KanbanFlow is a simple, lightweight kanban board / project management tool from CodeKick out of Gothenburg, Sweden.

I don’t use this for project management though, I use it to maintain the lists of books, TV series, and movies I want to watch next. (I’ve written about this use case before, if you’re interested.)

If I did need a project management tool though, I’d switch to the paid version of KanbanFlow.

(Trello used to be my preferred kanban tool but its developers kept adding features I didn’t want or need, to the point that it was no longer a fun, easy, lightweight web or smartphone app to use. It got even more complicated to use after Atlassian purchased it and added it to their suite of team-oriented products.)

Screenshot of the KanbanFlow website home page. A heading at the top of the page reads, "Lean project management. Simplified." and, "Boost your personal or team productivity".

Shopping and other lists: Microsoft To Do

Nadia and I have tried a bunch of list-making apps over the years, but Microsoft’s To Do is the simplest, most convenient, and most reliable of the lot.

(Our Family subscription to Microsoft 365 is why this app was even an option for us in the first place, by the way.)

Bookmarks and read-later links: Pinboard

Pinboard is an incredibly simple, very fast, and super efficient, web-based bookmarking tool that lets you bookmark webpages and, importantly, tag them for easy indexing.

It also has an ‘unread’ tag that lets you use this as a place to store all your read-later links. My read-later app of choice used to be the now-defunct Pocket, but I switched to Pinboard a few years ago and never looked back.

(For completeness’ sake I should mention that I use Firefox and Vivaldi browser accounts to sync my day-to-day web bookmarks, browsing history, and browser settings.)

Passwords and TOTP: Bitwarden, Aegis Authenticator

I use the amazing, open-source Bitwarden to generate, store, and sync all my passwords and the fantastic, open-source Aegis Authenticator to generate all my time-based one-time passcodes (TOTP).

Why sync notes in the first place?

Growing up I captured my notes, thoughts, and shopping lists using paper notebooks, notepads, and lined notepaper that I stored and organised in ring binders (complete with dividers and colour-coded tabs).

Once I got a job and stopped needing to carry ring binders around, I took notes on nicer notebooks from Moleskine, Leuchtturm 1917, and Field Notes. These paper-based methods saw me through my bachelors degree, masters degree, several jobs, and even my bullet journaling era (like in the scanned page above).

These days its easier to carry only a smartphone in your pocket instead of also carrying a notepad and pen with you everywhere. I’m more digital than most people, so it was inevitable that my note-taking would go all-digital sooner rather than later.

That switch happened in 2010 when I got an Evernote account and moved all my note-taking online. I loved Evernote because I could easily organise, index, and search through my notes. I could also access all of my notes, all of the time, regardless of where I was and which digital device I happened to be using.

The rise and fall of Evernote

Evernote was great in those early days so I signed up to a Premium subscription in 2012. I loved using it for everything from note taking, to cataloguing recipes, to saving blog posts and newspaper articles for later reading,

But as its desktop, web, and smartphone apps became increasingly complicated, bloated, and slow, the less I wanted to use it.

Evernote eventually went down the enshittification route so I dropped it altogether, as did many others.

Screenshot of an email from Evernote with the heading, "Keep Evernote on all your devices" that explains, "In 30 days you will be able to sync your notes to a maximum of 2 devices using Evernote Basic".

Short foray into OneNote and Google Docs

I tried Microsoft’s OneNote for a while because I’d bought a tablet PC and OneNote let me take hand-written notes (using the stylus) on its desktop version – like in the screenshot below.

However OneNote didn’t have cloud sync to begin with, and when that functionality did arrive, is wasn’t particularly good, so I stopped using this too. (It was also always slower than Evernote and too unstructured for my liking anyway.)

Screenshot from the OneNote app showing a page titled 'What We Do' that contains a hand-drawn diagram showing the water cycle from rain to ocean-runoff.

For a while I also explored taking all my notes in Google Docs and storing everything in a specific note-taking folder. This worked fine for some longer, more complicated notes, but it was never convenient for everything. Google Docs is optimised for document writing, not simple note taking, after all.

Settling down with Joplin and, at work, plain text files

Eventually I found Joplin, fell in love with it, and then migrated all my personal notes over in January 2020. I haven’t found, or even needed to look for, a better alternative since.

Funnily enough, a version of that notes-in-Google-Docs idea is what I ended up adopting for note-taking at work. For several years now I’ve been taking all my work notes in plain old text files that I edit using Notepad++ and store in my work OneDrive.

I use a combination of four text files:

  • tasks.txt, in which I maintain a list of daily, weekly, quarterly, and yearly tasks for myself and my team

  • coordination.txt, in which I jot down my meeting notes

  • projects.txt, in which I write notes about the large projects I’m working on

  • people.txt, into which I take notes during the one-on-one meetings I have with my manager and my direct reports

Every Monday I create new versions of those text files (with Monday’s date in the filename), deleting notes from previous weeks that I no longer need for my current work. This way my active files remain short and focused, and it’s still pretty easy for me to search through earlier weeks’ files if I need to find something older.

(I used to use Trello at work for tracking personal tasks, coordinating team tasks, and for managing team projects, but our IT team “rationalised” our suite of tools and now we’re stuck with Microsoft Planner which is…not great.)

Screenshot from OneDrive showing a list of text files in a folder titled 'Meeting notes'. The text files shown are called Projects and Tasks and they all have a date included in the filename.

Investigating alternatives (or not)

I said I haven’t felt the need to look for Joplin alternatives, and that’s true, but I did play around with Standard Notes for a little while. This is a paid service that I thought might be a good, E2EE alternative to Google Keep. Unfortunately it was slow to sync and its app was glitchy on my phone so I didn’t trial it for long.

And before you ask, I’ve never bothered with tools like Notion, Obsidian, Logseq, and their ilk. Those are all too complicated – they’re a “knowledge base”, a “workspace”, and other fancy descriptors like that – plus I feel paid apps like Notion will eventually go down the enshittification route, just like Evernote did. Notion is already touting itself as the “the AI workspace where teams and AI agents get more done together”. Ugh.

Happy days

To summarise, these are the tools I use:

Oh, and I use plain old text files (using Notepad++) for taking notes at work.

It’s taken me a while to get to where I am and I’m very happy with the set of tools I’ve settled on.

Do you have a primary note-taking tool? If so, what is it? I’d love to know.

[Photo walk] Around the northern suburbs of Melbourne, part 8

I’ve been wanting a wide-angle camera lens for a while, but I didn’t need one enough to justify spending serious money to buy it. [1]

Happily, the folks from TTArtisan released their AF 14mm F3.5 prime lens (21mm full-frame equivalent) with a Fujifilm X Mount a few months ago and I just bought one for myself when it went on sale :)

Here are the photos I took with this lens during a recent walk Nadia and took around the northern suburbs of Melbourne.

Public barbecue and gazebo in a local park

Wide-angle photo of a public barbecue and a rectangular gazebo that's covering a table and two benches. This barbecue area has been built right next to a children's play area.

Rope gym for older kids at a local playground

Wide-angle photo of playground equipment in a local park. The equipment consists of poles, bars, and ladders made out of metal with ropes and handles tied all around them, making for a challenging traverse across to the other side.

Bottom of the slide – wide

Wide-angle photo looking up from the bottom of a bright orange coloured children’s slide in a local park.

Bottom of the slide – tall

Wide-angle photo looking up from the bottom of a bright orange coloured children’s slide in a local park.

Closed community footy ground on a bright afternoon

Photo of the shaded veranda of a brick building at a local Australian rules football ground.

Closed canteen at a community footy ground

Photo of a shuttered-closed canteen window at a local Australian rules football ground.

Hadfield Hawks Canteen is closed post-season

Photo of a shuttered-closed canteen window at a local Australian rules football ground. A printed canteen menu has been attached to shutters on the side of the window, with the title, ‘Hadfield Haws Canteen Menu’ and menu item prices written in whiteboard marker.

Slow down

Close-up photo of a concrete footpath with a white-coloured ‘slow down’ warning painted on it.

Slow down your walking

Close-up photo of a concrete footpath with a white-coloured ‘slow down’ warning painted on it. The front of the photographer's black-and-white sneakers are visible in the bottom of the frame.

I really like this lens!

TTArtisan makes solid, low-cost lenses that have an interesting character that (a) I like and (b) works really well for the type of photography that I do.

I now have three TTArtisan prime lenses [2]:

And I’m super happy with all of them! Here’s to many more photos with this lens trio :)

[1] The Fujifilm 16mm prime lens costs around $570 on sale and the Fujifilm 14mm prime lens costs around $1,300 on sale. The TTArtisan 14mm prime lens, on the other hand, costs just under $200 when its not on sale!

[2] I’ll probably (almost definitely) also buy the TTArtisan AF 75mm F2 lens whenever it goes on sale :)

Using Tresorit to sync files on Linux

The ability to automatically synchronise files across devices via the internet (and also save a copy in the cloud) hasn’t been around for very long.

Heck, most people didn’t have multiple devices to sync files across till the early 2000s. And when we did get start using multiple devices, we used floppy discs, USB sticks, and external hard drives to move our files around.

Early forays: Dropbox and Google Drive

I started my file sync journey in July 2011 with Dropbox, but I moved quickly to Google Drive just two days after Google Drive launched in April 2012.

I upgraded to a paid Google Drive plan in May 2014, which gave me a massive 100GB of storage space. A few storage-space upgrades later and I’m currently on a 2TB plan.

I need all that space because, since 2004, I’ve been storing all my full-resolution camera and smartphone photos and videos on Google Photos (which is part of Google Drive). [1] And Google Drive is still what I use when I need to share large files with folks other than Nadia.

Screenshot of a 2012 email from Google welcoming the recipient to their new Google Drive account.

Private and secure: Sync.com

While I love Google Drive and its technology, it is not a secure place to store your private, sensitive, or secret files. So since December 2019, I’ve been using the excellent Sync.com to securely store and sync my files across devices.

Sync does end-to-end-encryption (E2EE), meaning your files are encrypted before they leave your computer using a passphrase only you know. That means no one at Sync can decrypt your files. Nor, for that matter, can a government that subpoenas your files or a hacker that steals your files from Sync’s servers.

I love Sync and have been using its paid, 2TB storage-space tier for almost six years. Unfortunately, Sync does not have a Linux client. So with my recent switch to MX Linux on my desktop, I needed to find a new, cross-platform cloud sync and storage provider.

Screenshot of the Sync.com website home page. A large graphic at the top of the page has the title, "Cloud storage built for privacy" and text that reads, "Sync keeps your files safe, secure, and 100% private with end-to-end encryption".

Cloud storage vs cloud sync

There are several great cloud storage providers you can use in 2025, but very few that also offer cloud sync functionality. What’s the difference between the cloud storage and sync?

With cloud storage your files are saved primarily in the cloud. This frees up space on your computer, such as a laptop with limited hard drive space, because once you add a file to your cloud storage folder, it gets uploaded to the cloud and then deleted from your local machine.

What you’re left with on your computer is a file link that will automatically download a temporary copy your file when you click on it and then keep this file open in a viewer, player, or editor. The instant you close this file, its new version (if any) will be reuploaded to the cloud and the version left on your computer will be deleted.

With cloud sync your files are saved primarily on your computers. These files are copied to the cloud and then synchronised across the devices that you connect to this service.

Both types of services keep your files in sync, but only cloud sync creates local/offline copies your files and then keeps those in sync across multiple locations (ie your devices and the cloud).

I wanted a cloud sync solution, not a cloud storage solution. I have two 2TB solid-state hard drives and one 8TB spinning hard drive installed in my desktop, I don’t need to free up space here! Importantly, I always want a local copy of all my files.

So while I explored and trialled services like pCloud, Internxt, and Dropbox Advanced (which offers E2EE, though only in designated folders), among a few others, the only one that offered actual file syncing in Linux was Swiss Post’s Tresorit.

Screenshot of the Tresorit website home page. A large graphic at the top of the page had the heading, "Tresorit - secure file exchange & collaboration made easy" and a button that reads, "Try for free".

Before you ask…

Before you ask, yes, I could have “rolled my own cloud” using Nextcloud, either at home or with a third-party Nextcloud provider. Doing so was going to be too much of a hassle (plus an additional expense) and I didn’t want the responsibility of managing my own cloud storage.

I could also have used a tool like Cryptomator to encrypt all my files before uploading them to a service like Google Drive (where I already have lots of storage space). I tried this and it didn’t work very well on my Linux install, and I wasn’t going to trust my file sync with something that wasn’t bulletproof. Also, Google Drive only offers cloud storage on Linux, not cloud sync, so that wouldn’t have worked anyway.

Finally, I could have used rclone to encrypt and sync all my files using existing services like Google Drive as the back-end. The configuration and maintenance hassle of setting this up was too much effort. Also, this solution wouldn’t have given me the added functionality of being able to share files securely with Nadia.

Oh, and I couldn’t use something like Syncthing because that only does direct device-to-device file syncing and the devices I wanted to keep in sync weren’t going to be switched on and connected to the internet at the same time. That means I needed a solution with an intermediate cloud-storage step. (And with Syncthing I also wouldn’t have been able to share files security with Nadia.) [2]

The one service I would have used, had it been available for Linux, was Proton Drive since this offers both file sync and E2EE. Nadia and I are also on a Proton Duo plan so this wouldn’t have cost us any extra either. Unfortunately, Proton Drive’s native Linux app isn’t ready yet and probably won’t be ready for another year or two (it’s on the product roadmap but is not a priority).

Photo of a puffy, bright white dog on a leash. The dog is standing in a large, green field and is looking at another dog off camera.

Going all-in on Tresorit

So after weeks of research and testing of multiple tools and online services, I trialled Tresorit and then subscribed to an annual, individual SecureCloud plan with 1TB of storage space. Shortly after that, I signed Nadia up to one of these plans as well.

I have now synced my desktop computer’s Documents, Music, Pictures, Templates, and a few other folders to Tresorit.

On my laptop I’ve done a selective sync and synchronised only the Documents folder. This way the files that I use most often on my laptop, which are all in the Documents folder, are always in sync with my desktop. Meanwhile, all the other (usually larger) files that I don’t use as often are just a quick download away for when I need them on my laptop.

How am I liking Tresorit? I love it!

The initial file upload process took a while – I was uploading around 400GB of data, after all! – but I’ve been using Tresorit for almost two months now and its Linux app is rock solid and its sync speeds are good.

Overall, I am very happy with my decision and I’m glad I found a great alternative to Sync. Yes, I am paying a little more than I was for Sync (a Canadian company), but businesses in Europe tend to pay more taxes and also treat their employees better, and I’m all for supporting healthy, happy, sustainable workplaces :)

Would I recommend Tresorit to others? Absolutely! Especially if you’re after a great, cross-platform, cloud sync (and cloud storage) solution for yourself or your business.

[1] In 2004 this was called Picasa, with its Picasa Web Albums functionality. Google Photos succeeded Picasa in May 2015.

[2] I do, however, use Syncthing to sync files between my desktop and Android phone. These are mainly the FLAC and MP3 files I use to listen to high-resolution music on my phone.

[Photo walk] Around the city, part 1

I took these photos back in June but never got around to uploading them thanks to a bout of post-viral fatigue. Better late than never!

Dubai chocolate egg tarts at #1000 Bread on Swanston Street

Close-up photo of a tray of egg tarts in a bakery display window.

Cube croissants at #1000 Bread on Swanston Street

Close-up photo of a tray matcha cube croissants and blueberry cube croissants in a bakery display window. A small paper label stuck to the top of each croissant reads, “#1000 Bread”

Waiting for the Koko Black baristas on Swanston Street

Photo of a Koko Black coffee stand on the sidewalk of a metropolitan city. Two baristas are making coffee at the coffee machines along the back of the stand. In the foreground are a woman and a girl waiting for their drinks, with the girl gripping the back of woman's jacket with her hand.

Tram-track crossing on Swanston Street

Photo looking straight down at a metal plate embedded into the road surface on top of which two tram tracks cross each other at an acute angle. The photographer's white sneakers are visible in the bottom of the photo frame.

Tagged Silver Gull at Federation Square

Close-up, black-and-white photo of a bird with silver-grey wings with white head staring straight at the camera. A small plastic ring attached to the bird's left leg indicates that it has been tagged.

[Photo walk] Walking around the city and suburbs, part 1

Here are some photos from my recent walks abound Melbourne city and its various suburbs.

Life-size statue in a manicured garden

Photo of a manicured residential garden in which there is a full-size stone statue of a woman in traditional European clothes pouring water out of a bucket.

Reflecting the neighbouring building

Photo looking down at a tall office building with an all-glass exterior. A reflection of the less-tall, neighbouring residential building can be seen in the exterior of the first building.

Australian Ballet fashion capsule for Melbourne Fashion Week 2025

Photo of several high-fashion ballet costumes arranged on mannequins and other display stands in the massive foyer of an office building.

Cafe tables accommodating the slope of the footpath

Photo of two long, outdoor, wood-and-iron cafe tables and their accompanying benches. The tables are placed outside the building where the footpath is sloping downwards towards the street. The legs on one long side of the table are taller than the legs on the other side, resulting in the eating surfaces of the tables being perfectly horizontal.

Statues above the entrance of the Former AMP Building

Photo of the front archway of a 1920s office building with a pink Casterton granite and Sydney freestone facade. Above this entrance are statues of three adults and one child, with all three adults looking down to street level. The Latin phrase “amicus certus in re incerta cernitur” (meaning “a true friend is discovered in times of uncertainty”) is engraved on a plaque below these statues.

Looking through the hallway at the former Commercial Bank of Australia building

Photo of the hallway than runs through the middle of a baroque 1890s building with a Chicago-style facade and fittings.

Schoolboy at a bus stop, as seen through a wooden pallet

Photo taken through the bottom part of a wooden pallet, where the forklift's forks go. Behind the pallet is a wooden, cyan-coloured bus shelter with a single bench. Seated on this bench is a schoolboy, though you can only see his black shows, grey pants, and red-and-grey striped tie dangling between his legs.

No

Close-up photo of the white-coloured, all-caps “no” of a “no parking” sign painted on a road.

Why I picked MX Linux over other Linux distros

When I moved my desktop PC from Windows to Linux a few months ago, the Linux distribution I picked was MX Linux. In this post I explain why.

What’s a Linux distribution?

In case you’re new to Linux and don’t know what a “distribution” is:

A Linux distribution, often shortened to “distro,” is a packaged version of Linux that comes with the Linux kernel plus a collection of software and utilities that make the OS functional and user-friendly.

If you want to know more, here are a few resources to get you up started, with the quote above coming from the first one in this list:

Graphic showing the logos and titles of nine Linux distributions: Linux Mint, Ubuntu, MX Linux, Arch Linux, Gentoo Linux, Slackware, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE

How do you choose a Linux distro?

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of blog posts, articles, and videos on how to choose a Linux distro that’ll work best for you.

Here are two good articles:

And if you’re already familiar with Linux, here’s an excellent interactive guide (available in 19 languages, no less!) that walks your through the process:

Most of these resources ask you to consider a bunch of factors that will help you create a short list of distros to try.

Narrowing down the list of suitable distros

I used a combined list of those decision-factors to add and remove distros from my eventual shortlist.

My level of experience with Linux: intermediate-to-advanced. I have enough experience with Linux that I am comfortable diagnosing issues and looking/asking for help. This let me keep specialised and potentially complicated distros in my list.

Effort I want to make in building and maintaining my system: low-to-medium. Even though I can, I don’t want to do lots of tinkering and exploring with my operating system (OS). I just want my OS to disappear into the background while I do other things. Because of this, I removed most specialised and complicated distros from my list.

Package management preference, if any: ideally, APT. This let me remove all Arch-based distros from my shortlist, for example (though that was partly also in response to the effort question, above).

Operating system look-and-feel (eg for people new to Linux, we ask: Windows-like or Mac-like?): Windows-like, though highly customisable. Basically, I wanted to use KDE Plasma as my desktop environment. I kind of also didn’t have a choice because, unlike GNOME and Cinnamon, KDE does an actually good job with fractional scaling (eg scaling the whole screen up to 125%) and I needed this functionality for my laptop. [1]

Hardware compatibility requirements (especially if you have much older or much newer hardware): mixed. My desktop computer is only a year old, with an NVIDIA RTX4080 graphics card, so I needed a distro that could support recent hardware. This removed a bunch if distros from contention. My desktop is also attached to an ultra-widescreen monitor that supports high dynamic range (HDR) colour. I was hoping to find a distro that could take full advantage of this capability but, sadly, that was not to be and I’ve had to switch my monitor to its standard dynamic range (SDR) mode. My peripherals, on the other hand, are either older or more readily compatible with Linux so none of those were an issue. Finally, I wanted to run the same distro on my desktop and my laptop, but my laptop is an older (2021), refurbished Lenovo ThinkPad so that was never going to pose any compatibility issues.

Software compatibility requirements (only really relevant if you’re a gamer, coder, multimedia creator, or other type of specialist user; or someone with specific accessibility requirements): gamer/multimedia creator. I wanted the ability to play games through Steam (nothing very new or resource-intensive) and the ability to do multimedia editing (audio, video, photography). I didn’t need a gaming- or multimedia-focused distro to do all this though, so these requirements didn’t add or remove anything from the list.

Default software preferences: none. I’m happy to install all the software I need (ie I don’t need my distro to pre-install anything for me), so this preference didn’t add or remove anything from the list either.

Distro community size (aka your potential tech support needs, because larger and more well-known distros tend to have more users, a wider install base, and more online answers to questions you might have along the way): medium-to-large. Because my desktop hardware is relatively new, I knew I’d need a bit of support for it, so I wanted a more tried-and-true distro. This eliminated a bunch of smaller distros. Though, as luck would have it, I’d end up eliminating almost all the super-popular distros for other reasons. Oh well.

System stability (which basically boils down the the choice between a super stable OS or one that gets more frequent OS and software updates): more stable than not. I like using the latest and greatest software and hardware, but I don’t need to do so. And while I didn’t particularly want to be on an Long Term Support (LTS) release schedule, which is typically on a two-year cycle, I also didn’t want to be on a rolling release, in which new features added as soon as they’re stable enough.

FOSS ideological preferences: no strong preference. I prefer to use free and open-source (FOSS) software over proprietary software whenever I can, but I’m perfectly happy to use proprietary software as well.

Big-tech ideological preferences: avoid big-tech as much as possible. I’m trying hard to stay away from “big tech” as much as I can – that term being relative in the Linux world. I don’t like larger companies that enshittify their products or try to throw their weight around in the community. This basically meant avoiding Canonical, and therefore all flavours of Ubuntu, and IBM-owned Red Hat, which makes only enterprise versions of Linux so none of their products were in contention anyway. (openSUSE is the only large tech company in the Linux space that I like.)

Willingness to pay: happy to. Almost all end-user Linux distros are free, but a couple charge an optional small amount to help fund their development and I’m someone who regularly provides financial support to the software and online services that I use. So when I came across a Zorin OS Pro – a very polished, very Windows-like distro that charges an optional one-time payment of AUD $78 – it jumped to the top of my list before being quickly eliminated because it uses GNOME and not KDE. Oh well.

Privacy preferences: consumer-level strict. Most Linux distros offer great privacy, but a handful connect to third-parties or collect telemetry data, meaning they have the ability to track how you’re using your computer. I absolutely do not want to use technology that tracks me, but I’m also not a privacy nut – meaning I’m not going to use Tails or Kali Linux, which I would say are “professional-level strict” with their privacy and security. This basically just meant that I eliminated all the distros created by Canonical.

Creating my shortlist

Since the KDE Plasma desktop environment is such a foundational part of my requirements, I first searched for the most recommended KDE-based distros [2] and came up with this initial shortlist – though each entry came with caveats:

  • Kubuntu. Kubuntu is a Canonical product so I couldn’t use it out of the box. I’d have to run some post-install scripts to get rid of snap package support and Canonical’s telemetry.

  • TUXEDO OS. This distro is made for TUXEDO branded computers but the OS itself can be installed on other computers as well.

  • openSUSE Tumbleweed. Tumbleweed is a rolling release, but it is a very stable one so I’m okay with that. However its package manager is Zypper (which uses RPM packages) and not APT (which uses DEB packages) so that’d be a bit of a compromise.

  • Fedora KDE. Fedora has a fixed release cycle (updated every six months) and uses the DNF package manager (which uses RPM packages) so not exactly what I was after. Also it doesn’t have great support for newer hardware and proprietary software. But this is a distro I used for many years on my old laptop, so it’s something I’m quite familiar with.

My initial shortlist was concerning because the first distro is created by Canonical (which I’m trying to avoid) and the last two distros use RPM packages (which some of the software I want to use doesn’t have support for), leaving me with just a single option – which isn’t a short list as such.

So after searching for more recommended KDE-based distros, and then going through the long list of factors above and slightly relaxing one or two of my requirements (ie allowing for less well-known and less frequently-updated distros), I added two other distros to my final shortlist:

  • Nitrux OS. Nitrux has a smaller install base and is based on Debian.

  • MX Linux. MX has a medium-sized install base and is also based on Debian.

The cool thing with both distros is that they’re based on Debian and not Ubuntu. There are many, many Debian guides and resources out there so, even if I couldn’t find a specific Nitrux OS or MX Linux guide for any issue I might have, there’s a good change I’d find a Debian-specific guide instead.

Oh, and before you ask: I didn’t shortlist Debian itself because of its slower, two-year release cycle. I wanted something with at least slightly more frequent releases, which MX Linux has with its point releases.

Photo of the silhouette of a person wearing a hoodie sitting in a dark room in front of several flat screen monitors that are displaying colourful lines of software code and text

Photo by Kevin Horvat on Unsplash

Testing my shortlist

The cool thing with Linux is that you don’t have to rely on other people’s opinions on which distro will work best for you.

Yes, you can watch a tonne of review and comparison videos, but you can – and you should – just run each distro off a “live USB” (aka bootable USB) and try it out for yourself.

You can then install all your distros – either one after the other or in all of them parallel on the same computer or same live USB – and play around with them for a bit before committing to the one you like best.

So that’s what I set out to do.

Happily (or unhappily, depending on how you look at it) just the live-USB step eliminated three of distros:

  • Fedora KDE wouldn’t even boot! I installed its bootable ISO to multiple USB sticks using different installers (Fedora Media Writer, balenaEtcher, and Rufus). These USBs booted-up just fine on my laptop, but none of them worked on my desktop. I don’t know what the hardware compatibility issue was, but I didn’t want to spend time figuring it out.

  • TUXEDO OS booted up properly, but it ran slowly and kept crashing – likely another, though different, compatibility issue with my desktop hardware.

  • openSUSE Tumbleweed booted, but it didn’t recognise my screen’s resolution and the OS installer wouldn’t launch from within the live USB. This didn’t give me much confidence in its ability to run on my desktop’s hardware.

As for the rest:

  • Nitrux OS I eliminated because it is planning to drop KDE Plasma in the future. I never even ran its live USB version.

  • Like Fedora’s KDE “spin”, MX Linux’s KDE version also didn’t boot. But I was told it was easy enough to install its flagship Xfce version and then just switch to KDE afterwards, so I didn’t immediately eliminate this option.

  • Kubuntu booted up easily and worked flawlessly. But I knew that if I was going to use it, I’d have to rip out its guts and modify how it worked. And, honestly, I didn’t have the energy to do that. I’d wanted my OS installation and maintenance to be easy, remember? So while I mostly-eliminated this option, I did keep it as last-resort compromise if literally nothing else worked.

Desktop wallpaper graphic depicting a forest and mountain range in which the MX Linux logo has been incorporated into mountains shown in the background

Getting MX Linux to work

To recap, after my initial round of testing and elimination, MX Linux was the last distro standing and I was determined to make it work for me.

So I installed the Xfce desktop version of MX Linux and, lo and behold, it worked perfectly and installed without a hitch. I immediately installed the KDE desktop on top of this, and that installed just fine too. Success!

But then I restarted my computer and it wouldn’t boot, screeching to a halt at the same spot in the boot-up process where the MX Linux KDE live USB crashed. Great.

The irritating thing was that the MX Linux KDE distro worked beautifully on my ThinkPad laptop, and even on my older gaming laptop with an NVIDIA GPU, so I knew the issue was with my desktop’s relatively newer hardware.

It took a couple of hours, but I finally figured out the problem: my desktop’s hardware absolutely does not support SDDM, the Simple Desktop Display Manager that launches the log-in screen. MX Linux’s Xfce desktop environment worked perfect because it uses the LightDM display manager. When I’d installed KDE on top of MX Linux earlier, I’d been given the option to switch display managers to SDDM and, since SDDM is the recommended display manager for KDE, I had said yes. *sigh* [3]

So I reinstalled MX Linux with Xfce, reinstalled the KDE desktop, but this time did not switch away from LightDM. And everything worked!

That’s where I am now: running MX Linux with the KDE Plasma desktop environment. Yes, the KDE Plasma that comes with MX Linux is the older 5.27 version (compared to its current 6.4 version) but everything runs beautifully and I’m loving my set-up!

MX Linux with a KDE Plasma desktop running on my computer with an ultra widescreen monitor (3840×166px).

Keeping MX Linux running

Has it been smooth sailing with MX Linux over the last few months? For the most part, yes! I haven’t wanted or needed to switch back to Windows 11 even once.

In fact, the Windows software I thought I’d miss the most works perfectly well on my set up via Wine (a Windows emulation layer that you can “install” Windows software in Linux).

The only issue I’ve had is with Linux software that relies on the systemd initialisation system to set things up. MX Linux doesn’t use systemd any more, though you can switch to its systemd version at boot time, if needed. But that’s okay, it was easy to find alternative software that didn’t rely on systemd.

It did, of course, take a while to get everything set up the way I like. But I took extensive notes and kept a detail log of every bit of software I installed and every configuration change I made, so I’ve been able to replicate this set-up on my laptop as well. Now my system is running exactly how I want it to on both computers.

To keep things fun, I did install openSUSE Tumbleweed on my older gaming laptop and I’m having fun playing around with that set-up – especially since that does have the latest version of KDE Plasma installed.

What next?

So what’s next in my desktop Linux journey? Not much on the OS side, actually. (Though I do want to keep playing around with openSUSE on my older laptop.)

All the work I need to do is on the software side, and that’s mainly finding Linux alternatives to Windows software and then using these alternatives till I’m as proficient as I was before I made the switch.

It did take me a while to figure out my new file storage, back-up, and cloud-sync strategy though, but I’ll talk about all that in future blog posts :)

For now I’m just going to enjoy doing things on my computer while the OS fades into the background without spying on me and tracking my every move. Woohoo!

[1] I wanted to use the same distro on my desktop and my laptop. I had Linux Mint installed on my laptop for the longest time, but Cinnamon’s poorly-implemented fractional scaling was really starting to grate on me me so I’d gone back to 100% scaling. (When I scaled my screen up to 125% or 150%, YouTube videos wouldn’t play properly and playing those videos would max-out CPU resources.) I really like Linux Mint and would use it everywhere if I could, and since it’s basically a version of Ubuntu without all of Canonical’s crap shoved into it, it works perfectly on all my hardware. The only thing that stops me from using Linux Mint is that it no longer supports KDE. It now comes with its own Cinnamon desktop, which is based on GNOME. Yes, you can install KDE on Linux Mint afterwards, but I’d much rather use a distro that supports KDE officially.

[2] In case you’re wondering, these were the most-recommended KDE distros that I eliminated straight away for various reasons: KDE Neon because it isn’t particularly stable, nor is it meant to be; KaOS because it’s a rolling release, which I’d rather not use; and CatchyOS, EndeavourOS, Garuda Linux, and Manjaro because they’re all based on Arch.

[3] Fedora uses the SDDM display manager, which is potentially why its live USB never even booted on my desktop. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Photo walk] Webb bridge

My office is in Docklands and, super conveniently, the place I get my car serviced is in the corner of South Melbourne that’s a short walk from there. I got my car serviced yesterday so I took these two photos while crossing the Webb Bridge.

(I’ve taken several photos of, on, and from this bridge in the past.)

Scooting up the Webb Bridge on the Yarra River

Photo of a man in a dark blue suit wearing a light blue cycling helmet, sunglasses, and brown formal shoes. The man has a black messenger bag slung across his back. The man is riding an electric scooter up a cycling and pedestrian bridge that spans an urban river.

Pushing a pram onto the Webb Bridge on the Yarra River

Photo of a man in a brown jacket, black pants, and white sneakers pushing a baby in a pram up the incline of a pedestrian and cycle bridge that spans an urban river.

Suspicious sulphur-crested cockatoo

I spotted a sulphur-crested cockatoo on one of my walks and, since I happened to be using a long lens at the time, I stopped to take its photo.

The cockatoo has noticed me

Photo of a sulphur-crested cockatoo sitting on an electric transmission line. The cockatoo is looking over its shoulder because it has noticed the photographer taking its photo.

The cockatoo is suspicious of me

Photo of a sulphur-crested cockatoo sitting on an electric transmission line. The cockatoo has turned the other way and is making sure the photographer is standing still behind it.

The cockatoo has decided to keep a closer eye on me

Photo of a sulphur-crested cockatoo sitting on an electric transmission line. The cockatoo has turned itself to face the photographer so it can keep an eye on that human.

[Photo walk] Along a flood plain in the northern suburbs

Nadia and I try to take walks along various parts of the northern suburbs. This time we walked along a creek and floodplain.

The forbidden hole

Photo of a round culvert around a floodplain. Even though it is daylight outside, the interior of the culvert is pitch dark. A warning sign posted next to the entrance hole reads, “no entry” and “trespassers prosecuted”. Explanatory text above this reads, “lack of oxygen and sudden rising water”.

Floodwater culvert under a walking path

Photo of a set of large, rectangular culverts underneath a concrete walking path in a grassy area.

Looking through the floodwater culvert

Photo looking through a large, rectangular culvert that's underneath a concrete walking path in a grassy area.

The northern suburbs say We Luv U Gaza

Photo of a sound- and wind-dampening fence that's been erected along the top of a rise that's next to a floodplain. Spray painted on the fence is graffiti that reads, “WE LUV U GAZA”. In the background of the photo are high-voltage electricity transmission towers.

Flood-level markers along a creek in a floodplain

Photo of a series of white, graduated flood-level markers installed in the steep walls of a floodplain. Each marker is one metre tall and is painted white with black level-marks on it. Text next to these marks shows that the highest marker measures flood waters as high as seven metres above sea level.

A creek that’s on a flood plain

Photo looking down at a creek running through a grassy area. There are structures built along this creek to manage its flooding, such as a drain pipe that redirects flood waters via smaller creek into a flood retarding basin. A series of flood-level markers have been installed along the wall of this creek so observers can note the height of the floodwater.

[Photo walk] Around the northern suburbs of Melbourne, part 7

I took a few photos while taking a longer photo walk around the northern suburbs of Melbourne

A newspaper ring in the wall

Photo of a residential red-brick wall with a round section cut out of it so a rolled-up newspaper or magazine can be placed in it by the mail carrier. The wall and ring itself are out of focus. What is in focus is a bush that is growing in the garden behind this wall.

The garden behind the newspaper ring in the wall

Close-up photo of a residential red-brick wall with a round section cut out of it so a rolled-up newspaper or magazine can be placed in it by the mail carrier. The wall and ring itself are out of focus. What is in focus is a bush that is growing in the garden behind this wall.

Classic 70s/80s residential garage

Photo of the brick-lined front of a residential garage with an metal roller door that's been painted in an pink/peach colour that matches the surrounding brickwork. This paint has peeled in several places so the grey of the metal roller door is exposed.

Brake lights at sunset

Photo of the brake lights of a silver sedan that are being lit with warm, golden light at sunset.

Cherub fountain in a residential garden

Photo of a vibrant residential garden with a stone fountain that’s mounted on a stone pillar. Both fountain and pillar are made from the same pinkish stone. The fountain contains a statue of two cherubs, one playing the panpipes/pan flute and the other holding a fish. Were the fountain to be running, water would come out of the fish’s mouth.

Little Raven in a driveway

Photo of a Little Raven (a species of raven roughly 1cm shorter than an Australian Raven) that’s standing in a residential driveway. The photographer has taken this photo partly obscured by a bush so as not to startle the bird.

[Photo walk] Walking in the suburbs, part 1

Even now and then when running errands, commuting to work, or going out to meet friends, I take my camera with me. I then walk around whatever suburb I happen to be in, taking photos of whatever catches my eye. Over the last few weeks that’s been a brick recycling place and signs painted on roads and footpaths.

Brick recycling yard at sunset

Black-and-white photo of a line of standard transport pallets – the square wooden types that can be easily picked up by forklifts. Each pallet is fully loaded with layers of recycled bricks, the top layers of which have plastic wrap rolled around them. The pallets have been stacked four-high in a large outdoor yard, with several empty pallets on top of these already high stacks.

Office building at the brick recycling yard

Photo of a line of standard transport pallets – the square wooden types that can be easily picked up by forklifts. Each pallet is fully loaded with layers of recycled bricks, the top layers of which have plastic wrap rolled around them. The pallets have been stacked three-high in a large outdoor yard, with several empty pallets on top of these already high stacks. Also on this yard is a medium-sized wooden shed. A sign on the door of this shed reads, in all capital letters, “office”.

Watch for cars at the curb cut

Photo of a combined walking-cycling path that meets a road with a curb cut/ramp that is designed to let wheeled vehicles get on and off this path easily. A strip of tactile paving has been installed across the path just before the curb cut begins. A little behind that strip of bumps is a warning sign painted across the path in large, yellow, all-capital letters that reads, “watch for cars”.

Wat

Photo looking down at a pavement with a large, yellow warning sign painted across it. The full sign reads, “watch for cars” but the photographer has cropped-out most of the message so all that’s visible in the frame are the first three letters, “wat”.

No

Photo looking down at part of a faded sign on a road. All that is visible in the frame of the photo is the word, painted in white, all-capital letters, “no”.

[Photo walk] Weekend walks in the suburbs and the city

I took the first two of these photos at a community footy ground and the rest when I went to an Emerging Writers’ Festival event at narrm ngarrgu Library in the city.

Up close with a drinking-water fountain in a sports field

Close-up photo of the spout of a public drinking-water fountain in a large sports field. This water fountain has not been used in a while and is completely dry.

Nets behind the goals on a footy field

Photo of one end of an Australian Rules Football field in which tall nets have been installed behind the goal posts.

Stand behind this (line) at a tram stop on a sunny, rainy day

Photo looking straight down at a bright yellow line painted on the asphalt of a tram stop. An incomplete phrase written in black, all-capitals text on top of this line reads, “stand behind this”. Installed just behind this line is some tactile paving: a series of raised, white-coloured, reflective circles that are looking strangely bright in the harsh, eerie light making its way through the clouds on a sunny day. In the bottom of the photo are the front of the photographer’s white sneakers stepping on the first two rows of tactile pavement dots.

This way to the narrm ngarrgul Library, right next to Queen Victoria Market

Photo of a sandwich board placed on a pavement with a sign on the floor painted next to it. The sign on the floor contains an arrow and text that reads, “narrm ngarrgul Library and Family Service”. Text drawn with multicoloured chalk on the black sandwich board reads, “narrm ngarrgul Library, all welcome. Take one cookbook from your library, combine with fresh market produce for a winning recipe”.

narrm ngarrgul Library and Family Services, right this way

Photo of the corner of a brick building with two large, solid-letter signs on it. One has an arrow and reads, “library entrance” while the other is around the corner and reads, “narrm ngarrgul Library and Family Services”. Below this, a sign painted on the floor and a sandwich board on the pavement both also point towards the library entrance.

Side of Queen Victoria Market along Victoria Street

Photo of a wide pavement next to a large market. The pavement is completely covered by an awning that has lights strung up below it. Also attached to the awning are signs showing the names of the shops along the market. There are several sets of tables and chairs arranged on the pavement. The area is not very busy, though there are several people walking along the pavement.

2025 Emerging Writers’ Festival event at narrm ngarrgul Library

Photo of a sandwich board on a pavement. A sign painted on the pavement next to the sandwich board contains an arrow and text that reads, “narrm ngarrgul Library and Family Service”. Pasted on the sandwich board is the posted for the Emerging Writers’ Festival being help between 11 and 18 September 2025.

[Photo walk] Along the Yarra River #5

It’s been months since I’ve posted any of my photos here, so here’s me catching up :)

This batch is from my first photo walk after recovering from my latest bout of post-viral fatigue. I basically walked from my office in Docklands to Flinders Street Railway Station, and I did that by walking along the Yarra River (as I have several times before).

Checking her phone outside Southern Cross Station

Photo of a woman in a champagne coloured puffer jacket standing in a small urban park next to a train station. The woman is looking down at her phone. In the photo the woman has been taken through the glass railing of a balcony and some rectangular bicycle hoops.

Dirt-caked road signs under an elevated train line

Photo showing three large road signs erected on metal poles. The signs are next to a massive concrete pillar with a stone facade. This pillar is one of several that are holding up a series of elevated train lines that cross over the roads that run beneath. The signs read, from top to bottom, “Flinders St” (the cross street at this intersection), “Docklands” (the suburb to the right of this intersection), and “Marvel Stadium” (the point of interest to the right of this intersection).

A wall of take-away coffee cups

Black-and-white photo of a wall of disposable, take-away coffee cups arranged on a cafe window sill.

Get your coffee here!

Black-and-white photo of a coffee cup with, “Coffee here!” written on it along with a smiley face. The coffee cup has been placed on a cafe window sill.

Blue-on-Blue with the Melbourne Aquarium sign

Photo looking up at a large, blue neon sign in the shape of two stylised fish. The sign is mounted on two tall, white poles on top of a large building. The darker blue of the fish stands out against the lighter blue of the sky behind it.

Sun reflecting off Eureka Tower in Melbourne

Photo of a tall building in the middle of a large city. One window of the building is shining brightly as the sun reflects off it. The photo has been taken from underneath a set of railway bridge, with a train crossing one of the bridges in front of the photographer.

Sign on a shipping container in Banana Alley

Photo of a torn, bright yellow sign on a rusted shipping container that reads, in all-black, all-capital letters, “Caution, 9'6" high”.

Waiting to depart from platform 4

Photo of a woman wearing a bright yellow jacket sitting in a commuter train at a railway station platform. The photo has been taken through a brick passageway that separates the platform this woman’s train is on and the platform that the photographer's train is on.

Switching (mostly) to Linux

Three months ago I wrote about how, for my personal use at least, I’ve changed office suites, moving from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice.

I’ve now made a corresponding change to my primary desktop operating system, moving from Microsoft Windows to Linux – specifically from Windows 11 to MX Linux with the KDE desktop environment.

Screenshot of the MX Linux website homepage

Why the change?

My reasons for the switch are pretty straightforward: I am increasingly unhappy with the decisions Microsoft is taking around Windows.

For example:

  • I’m tired of having unwanted large language model (LLM) chat interfaces and other artificial intelligence (AI) functionality integrated into Windows and Microsoft software with no ability to opt-out or turn this functionality off.

  • I’m wary of the telemetry that Microsoft adds to its products and the monitoring it does of all its customers.

  • I’m exhausted by the constant tinkering and unasked-for “improvements” Microsoft keeps making to its operating system (OS), giving their OS no chance to settle and stabilise.

Overall, I’m angry about big tech’s technology lock-in and the ongoing enshittification of their products and services.

Why Linux?

Fortunately, Linux [1] takes a far different approach from Microsoft.

For example:

  • Linux is mostly community driven and its developers are much more open to feedback from users.

  • There are many competing implementations of the Linux operating system – meaning there a great many Linux distributions to choose from – so it is difficult for any single group or organisation to lock-in its users and then enshittify its products and services.

  • Modern Linux is surprisingly user friendly, which makes it relatively easy for most people – even power users – to switch to this as their primary OS.

That said, it helps that I’ve been using UNIX and Linux for almost 30 years [2], so the idea of moving my life over to Linux was a lot less daunting to me. Quite the opposite, in fact, since I’ve really enjoyed the process of learning and experimenting as I’ve made the move :)

What now?

I’ve almost completely migrated my day-to-day computing life over to Linux and, over the next several weeks, I plan to write posts about:

  • Why I picked MX Linux over other Linux distributions

  • How I’ve had to reorganise the way I store, sync, and back up all my data

  • What steps I took to make the switch from Windows to Linux

  • What I’ve learned about specific Linux applications along the way

For now let me just say that I’m super happy with my move and I’m really enjoying my computing life right now :)

[1] Or GNU/Linux, if you want to get into that naming controversy!

[2] My earliest experience (circa 1996) was with IBM AIX, FreeBSD, and Red Hat Linux. Since then I’ve tried many, many, other distros, with Fedora (KDE desktop), Linux Mint (Cinnamon desktop), and openSUSE Tumbleweed (KDE desktop) being my favourites.

Coming back from post-viral fatigue

After not posting anything here for three months, I’m back!

Why was I away for so long? I got a cold and, shortly after that, caught some viral infection or the other. (It wasn’t COVID, Influenza, or RSV; I checked and was also independently tested.)

The time I was absent from here is the time I spent recovering from those illnesses and the post-viral fatigue that followed.

Photo of a medical centre waiting room with comfortable chairs, side tables, and inspirational/advertorial posters about the medical practice hung on the wall.

Post-viral fatigue?

I’ve had COVID-19 only once (at the start of 2024) and that infection seriously messed up my immune system. [1] Now when I get even a mild cold or viral infection, instead of feeling unwell for a few days, I get knocked down hard for, like, six to eight weeks. [2]

During those weeks I tire easily and I get a massive headache every time I concentrate on something for more than an hour or so. That means the most I can do is sit on the sofa, take frequent naps, listen to music, read a book, or watch TV. [3] Anything more than those simple activities requires concentration. I can’t check my emails or browse my RSS feeds, I can’t drive for too long in heavy traffic, I can’t even cook anything more complicated that a fried egg. It is not a fun time.

This was the second bout of post-viral fatigue I’ve been through, so at least this time I knew what was happening. Last time (back in May/June 2024) I kept trying to live my life as normal and almost collapsed from exhaustion while walking the dog! [4]

Road to recovery

Sadly, all you can do when you’re suffering through this type of fatigue is rest, so that’s what I did.

Once you’re a little better, you start gentle physical and mental exercise, ramping this up as you get stronger. I did that too. [5]

Happily, this approach worked – like it did last year as well – and now I’m pretty much back to normal.

I still have some stuff to organise from my end – which I am very much looking forward to blogging about, by the way – but that shouldn’t take too long, so posting will resume here shortly.

Yay!

[1] Regular influenza infections also mess with my immune system, but those effects last only a few months. The effects of the ‘spicy flu’ infection have lasted for a year and half so far. *sigh*

[2] Because my immune system is weak these days, I also catch colds and various types of viruses much more easily. Wearing a high-quality, well-fitted, 5-ply, medical face mask helps – and I do wear one whenever I’m in a medium risk situation – but that’s just a single line of defence against infection. And it doesn’t help that I’m often the only person in a room who is wearing such a mask.

[3] On the up side, I used this time to read a lot of books; catch up on a lot of movies and TV shows; and listen to a lot of music on my new audiophile-grade sound system :)

[4] When this happened I called Nurse-on-Call to get some immediate advice and then I went to see my GP the next morning. My GP got me to do a battery of tests (just in case) but those all came out normal and so post-viral fatigue was declared the cause. Turns out this type of fatigue has become much more common in the “post-COVID” era. Most people who suffer through this fully recover in about six weeks, but if the symptoms last for more than six months, then you might be looking at long COVID or chronic fatigue.

[5] Frustrated by doing nothing but consuming media all day, I figured the way I should gently exercise my brain is by creating media instead. For me that meant finally learning how to play bass guitar :) I’m now halfway through the Beginner to Badass course from BassBuzz. That is an excellent course. 10/10 would recommend.

Photo of the body of an all-black electric bass guitar resting on a guitar stand in a living room in front of a shelf of books.

My word processor usage history

I’m always looking for an excuse to create a graphic, and now that I’m also looking for an excuse to play around with LibreOffice Impress, I figured I’d document all the word processors I’ve used over the years, since those were my gateway into using full office suites.

(In case you missed it, in my previous post I explained why I’m dumping Microsoft Office for LibreOffice.)

Randomly, while doing research for this post, I was surprised to learn that Microsoft Word isn’t even the most popular word processor in the world. That crown goes to Google Docs which has almost three times as many users as Word does!

It’s been fun learning how to use Impress, especially since I am such a PowerPoint super user. It’s been frustrating at times, sure, but still fun :)

Anyway, here’s the graphic (created in Impress and exported as a PNG).

Timeline graphic (similar to a Gantt chart) that is titled ‘My word processor usage history’. It shows a list of all word processors used from 1987 to 2035 in a list, with usage bar charts labelled by year next to each row. The chart data is as follows: WordStar 3.0 (DOS) 1987–1990; WordPerfect 5.1 (DOS) 1992–1993; WordPerfect 6.0 (Windows) 1993–1994; Word for Windows 6.0 1994–1995; Word for Windows 95 1995–1997; Word 97 1997–2000; Word 2000 2000–2003; Word 2003 2003–2006; OpenOffice.org 2.0 2005–2006; Word 2006 2006–2010; Google Docs 2009–2025; Word 2010 2010–2013; Word 2013 2013; Microsoft 365 v15 to v17 2013–2025; LibreOffice Writer 7.0 2020–2023; LibreOffice Writer v24.0 to 25.2 2024–2025.

By the way, this isn’t the first office suite-related chart I’ve created. Here’s one from 2013 about how you can track my career progression through which parts of the Microsoft Office suite I use the most: ‘My Career Progression Through Microsoft Products’.

It’s also not the first time I’ve written about my history with Office products. Here’s one from 2018 celebrating twenty years of using PowerPoint: ‘20 years since my first PowerPoint presentation’.

Switching (mostly) to LibreOffice

I love Microsoft Office and I consider myself a power user of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but it’s time to start disentangling myself from the Microsoft ecosystem.

I’ve already made good progress on the operating system (OS) front, with Linux Mint as the primary OS on my laptop. But I’m now taking things up a notch by making LibreOffice my primary office suite.

Why now, though? This meme explains it best.

Photo of a teenage schoolgirl pinned up against a wall by the bell of a massive tuba that is completely enveloping her head. The bell of a tuba is the big, round bit at the front from where the sound comes out. This tuba is behind held by another schoolgirl who is standing in front of the first one. Text overlaid across the girl at the receiving end of the tuba reads, “Me trying to do a basic task I’ve managed to do every day without incident for many years”. Text overlaid across the tuba reads, “AI” (that is, artificial intelligence). Text overlaid across the girl holding the tuba reads, “Every organisation on Earth”.

Shove Copilot into everything

Yes, Microsoft is shoving Copilot into all parts of its Office productivity suite.

When you open a blank Word document, you get asked what you want to write. #RevengeOfClippy

Screenshot of a Microsoft Word window with a red arrow annotation pointing to a Copilot prompt above the blank word document. The text in the prompt reads, “Describe what you’d like to write”.

When you write some text in Word, the Copilot icon follows you down every single line of the page, hovering creepily just off the left margin.

Screenshot of the text in a Microsoft Word document with a red arrow annotation pointing to the Copilot icon hovering immediately off the left margin of one of the lines (the line that the cursor is presumably on).

When you’re working in Excel, that Copilot icon is with you in Every Single Cell.

Screenshot of the cells in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with a red arrow annotation pointing to the Copilot icon hovering off the top-right corner of the selected cell.

And when you’re in PowerPoint, Copilot is not only in the menu bar (“New Slide with Copilot”), its icon also hovers off the top-left corner of each slide, messing with your slide zoom level.

Screenshot of a Microsoft PowerPoint window with red arrows annotations pointing to two things. The first is a new button in the toolbar next to the ‘New Slide’ button. This new button reads, ‘New Slide with Copilot’. The second is a Copilot icon hovering off the top-left corner of the blank slide.

All this reminds me of that scene from the movie WALL-E in which the captain of the evacuee ship Axiom comes to the realisation that AUTO, the ship’s AI autopilot, has been hovering ominously over the shoulder of all the past captains and is, indeed, the antagonist.

Screenshot from the animated film WALL-E. The scene shows the bridge of the spaceship Axiom, specifically one of the walls of the bridge on which there is a row of holographic portraits of all the ships captains. Hovering over the left shoulder of each captain is AUTO, the ship’s autopilot AI.

Wait, does this mean you hate AI?

No, I don’t hate AI.

AI is cool and I’ve enjoyed using aspects of it for many years. Heck, I’ve been a fan of AI since I took Introduction to Artificial Intelligence in my computer science undergrad back in the late 1990s. I even got an A- in that subject :)

What I hate are these things.

Desperate tech giants

I hate the AI bubble we’re currently going through. It was caused entirely by tech giants that are desperate to gain (or at least not to lose) their first-mover advantage.

These tech giants are throwing stupid amounts of money at getting their brand of AI in front of everyone in the hopes that they get to be the ones to make billions of dollars off this revolutionary technology in the future.

They’re also stealing all the intellectual property they can get their hands on and are consuming ridiculous amounts of energy while doing so – all in an effort to work harder, not smarter, and hoping that this approach will give them a leg-up in the short term.

Well fuck them.

Throwing shit at the wall

The inevitable outcome of this desperation is tech companies throwing shit (AI-powered apps, features, tools, and functionality) at the wall (which, in this metaphor, is us) hoping that some of it sticks and that people actually find something they want to use.

This is much like the “killer app” madness from a few years ago when hordes of tech bros were scrambling to make an app so useful that it would justify people’s ongoing use of their platform – which they would then eventually attempt to monetise. The same is happening now with standalone AI apps (like all the generative AI ones) and AI functionality added to existing apps (like adding Copilot in Microsoft Office).

Everything is branded AI now

I hate that everyone is jumping on the AI bandwagon.

AI has been through several hype cycles and, when there’s money to be made, every algorithm is suddenly said to be based on AI.

Of course each hype cycle has historically been followed by an ‘AI winter’ during which the term AI becomes so toxic that people start calling their work other things – like ‘machine learning’ and ‘neural networks’ and other such euphemisms.

But for now, the bandwagon effect means that algorithmic functionality that Microsoft offered a few years ago under a different name is now being called AI and then shoved in our faces.

LLMs are maths pretending to be language

The AI tech that’s led the charge in the current hype cycle is large language models (LLMs).

The problem with LLMs is that:

  • they aren’t actually intelligent;

  • they don’t genuinely understand what you’re saying, asking, or implying;

  • they make mistakes, like, all the time;

  • their outputs can be biased one way or another by their creators;

  • they can’t be contained and controlled (ie they can be jail broken surprisingly easily); and

  • people believe them.

Importantly, LLMs aren’t the be-all and end-all of modern AI. They’re a hammer that everyone has gotten a hold of and, boy, isn’t everything they’re trying to do now starting to look like a nail?

The beatings will continue until morale improves

All that said, the thing that shits me the most as far as Microsoft Office is concerned is the lack of choice in all these AI “upgrades” we’ve being blessed with. We never asked Microsoft to add this AI functionality to their software and there is no way to opt out of it or disable it.

So fuck Microsoft specifically.

Goodbye, old friend

I’m sad to be using less of Microsoft Office. It’s a great tool and I’ve been happy to pay an annual subscription for it for the last twelve years (I signed up the instant it became available in Australia in 2013!). But there is a limit to how much enshittification I can take before I walk.

I’m not going to cancel my subscription though. I’ll probably still need bits of Office at some point in the future. Also, I have a family subscription and the other people on the plan need this for their work.

And I’ll still be using all of Microsoft Office at work.

But going forward, for my personal usage, I will use LibreOffice for all my document, spreadsheet, and presentation creation needs.

Hello, new friend!

I love learning how to use software that’s (relatively) new to me and, eventually, becoming a power user of it. That is very much what I intend to do with LibreOffice.

So let the fun begin!

PS, this isn’t the first time I’ve written about hating Copilot in Microsoft Office. Here’s what wrote about six months ago, before I realised that Microsoft wasn’t going to let this go and I decided to make the switch to LibreOffice: ‘Copilot’s integration into Microsoft office is really shitting me’.

Also, if you’re interested, I created a chart that shows my word processor usage history, from Word Star 3.0 for DOS in the 1980s to today :)

Around the northern suburbs of Melbourne, part 6

Over the last few weeks I’ve been listening to music on my walks instead of taking my camera with me. Things have been super busy at work and I’ve needed that time to clear my head.

These are the photos taken the handful of times I did go out with my camera – which all happened to be around sunset, funnily enough.

Bench and veranda transplanted from a castle, perhaps?

Photo of a well-work wooden bench with wagon wheels instead of legs that’s been placed in a large stone veranda in front of an otherwise unassuming weatherboard house.

Keeping an eye out for intruders

Photo of a dog that has stuck is snout out of the gap left by a missing slat in a white wooden gate.

Keeping a nose out for intruders

Photo of a dog that has stuck is snout out of the gap left by a missing slat in a white wooden gate.

A crow at sunset

Photo of a crow sitting on the top of a utility pole. The sun is setting in the background, casting a golden-orange glow in the sky, so the crow, the pole, and the tops of the trees that are visible in the frame are all in silhouette.

Poking out of the driveway

Photo taken along the length of a residential footpath, with the front fences and walls of houses running along the right side of the frame. Jutting out from one of the driveways are the rear bumper and the boot of a black car.

Scratches on the plexiglass of a bus stop shelter

Photo of two large panes of transparent plexiglass that make up the back of a bus shelter. Through the plexiglass you can see a house. But scratched onto the plexiglass, and visible due to the sunset in the background, are several scratches made by people. None of the writing is readable, though a five-pointed star and some letters of the English language can be made out.

Not quite what a traffic cone is for but, hey, whatever works to make things more safe!

Photo looking at the part of the driveway that curves around the back of a house. Parked on that driveway is a small trailer that you can hitch behind a car. The coupler / locking ball / hitch at the front of the trailer has been covered with an orange traffic cone, making it highly visible to anyone walking or driving on this driveway.

Rainbow lorikeet taking flight from a tree

Photo looking up at a bright, multicoloured bird that is taking off from a tree. This has resulted in the bird appearing blurred compared to the rest of the tree.

Cat chilling in the front garden

Photo of a black-and-white cat sitting in a residential garden. The photo has been taken through the upper vertical bars of a white metal gate.

Cat in the front garden

Photo of a black-and-white cat sitting in a residential garden. The photo has been taken through the upper vertical bars of a white metal gate.

Keeping an eye on its territory

Photo of a large, red-and-white dog sitting on a paved driveway behind a tall chain link fence towards the back of a house. The dog is calm, but is very focused on the photographer who has stopped at the bottom of the driveway.

Making sure the dog that just walked by stays out of its territory

Photo of a large, red-and-white dog standing on a paved driveway behind a tall chain link fence towards the back of a house. The dog is standing on alert, making sure the dog that was just walked in front of its house stays out of its house.