The Adelaide Festival of Arts is a biennial event that includes all sorts of great stuff. Some of it's the sort of traditional artstuff you'd expect to see at an event like this, and some of it's a bit less traditional. One particularly nifty non-traditional artwork was the "Northern Lights" lightshow, which I attempted to photograph with my little ( Read more... )

I've had my eye on the Wii console for a while now, in a sort of "that sounds interesting" kind of way. The style of gameplay it seems to encourage (social, fun) appeals to me, and the fact that some of the games that it comes with tend toward the more physically active end of the range is a big plus. See, most of my daily activities tend to be ( Read more... )

I just got a phone call from the university ethics board - my ethics app has FINALLY been approved! *happydances all up and down the street* Now I can at long last start work on my data collection! Huzzah and hooray!

A few random moments from my week:

* Did you know that those cute friendly fishies known as Clown loaches come with hidden weapons that are sometimes called "slashers"? I knew this in theory; but today I saw them for the first time when my biggest (20cm) clown loach got Real Pissed Off when I netted her, and stuck out her slashers (cleverly ( Read more... )

I've been following the Ongoing Catalogue of Woe generally referred to as "RaceFail 09" since a little after it started. For those who aren't up to speed on that particular trainwreck, it began as a discussion on cultural appropriation and racism in fiction (particularly SF/Fantasy), and proceeded to rapidly go downhill from there in many ways soon ( Read more... )

The final death toll from my aquarium disaster is 12 fish out of a total of 27 - almost half of my fish died. But it turns out that the cause may not have been what I thought it was. I posted to the Planted tank forum yesterday evening asking for advice, and the consensus seemed to be that it's pretty much impossible to overdose CO2 with a DIY ( Read more... )

So I'm just about to waddle off to bed, and I glance at the fish tank. Something's looking a bit odd... the water appears slightly cloudy, and all the fish are gasping at the surface. Oh no! Clearly my home-made CO2 injection system's on the fritz. I yank out the CO2 line and do an emergency water-change, and while I do this I attempt to work out ( Read more... )

So I just took Martindale out for a spin in my new car. While we waited at traffic lights, I started twiddling knobs on the stereo. "Hmm, I wonder what happens if I press this?... Ok, it turns the sub-woofer on... and if I turn this knob here, I can turn up the subwoofer from ludicrous to ludicrous x2... x3... What happens if I turn it up to ( Read more... )

Inspired by the gorgeous aquascaping designs of Takashi Amano, I recently purchased some Riccia fluitans off ebay. Beautiful, delicate stuff - it's a variety of liverwort that normally floats on the water surface, but can be restrained and trained to grow over surfaces instead, producing a lush, gorgeous lawn-like effect in an aquarium ( Read more... )

I'm in the middle of a major aquarium geek-out at the moment. For those who don't know, aquariums range in tech level and style from "glass container with a fish in it, and if I'm lucky the fish won't die this week" through to fully automated mini-ecologies with levels of monitoring and control of environmental parameters that would set a space ( Read more... )