We awoke this morning to the surprise that Hebe had given birth during the night to a beautiful fawn crea:

Here's a short video of Hebe and her too cute to name yet crea:

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I had the pleasure of walking the track to South Cape Bay on January 2nd with my three sons, Morgan Kurrajong and his wife Michelle. It's a leisurely and rewarding 4 hour return walk that starts at Cockle Creek and ends as close as you are likely to get to the bottom of our continent:

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View South Cape Bay in a larger map

Some of the highlights are captured in videos below. I hope they do the impressive landscape justice. The first highlight we encountered was an echidna foraging for ants in this 1:01 video:

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Here's a 1:40 video of the boys trekking through the forest section:

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This 02:53 video shows my favourite section, a fern-rich forest floor with some fallen Eucalypus Regnans:

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From there the forest ended abruptly and you find yourself out on the swampy tea tree plains (02:21). The tea trees were also in flower which made the scene even more spectacular:

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Then we hit South Cape Bay itself. The video (01:01) doesn't really capture the scale but it does capture the force of the wind! The surf was truly monstrous. I've spent a lot of time in the surf and I was in awe looking upon those humongous swells. I also captured footage three intrepid women heading off on the 7 day south coast trek. So here it is, the bottom of our continent:

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On the way back we found the echidna foraging in the same location, so here's another 01:54 of gratuitous echidna video:

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You should get down here and do the track yourself!

It apppears I need to re-evaluate my SQL skills, Peoplebank Australia NSW are offering $950K for a SQL Database Administrator:

wow

I'm going to apply right now and suggest you do the same.

This is a great comic from SMBC on the problem with the "nothing to hide" argument on state surveillance:

Breathtaking. Surely there are legal ramifications for this:

This means that Nokia has deliberately been wiretapping all traffic that has been advertised as encrypted on Nokia handsets - including but not limited to banking, dating, and corporate secrets - and looking at your secrets in cleartext.

 

This means that Nokia puts itself between your bank and you, and presents itself as YourBank, Inc. to your phone. This wouldn't normally be possible, if it weren't for the fact that the phone had been specifically designed for this deceptive behavior, by installing a Nokia signing certificate on the phone.

 

Nokia has confirmed this behavior in correspondence with TechWeek Europe (my highlights):

What's most unsettling is that no techies inside Nokia leaked this before it went live.

Full Story: Death Twitches: Nokia Caught Wiretapping Encrypted Traffic From Its Handsets

Today was the the last day of my holidays. Connor and Ewan are back in Sydney and Hamish was playing at a friends house. The Sun was shining and it was a balmy 25C - perfect time for a kayak! I headed down to Roaring beach with the intention of kayaking to Dover, although Dover was further then I expected and a 40Kph Souwester came up that I was not prepared to battle in my tank. As it turned out, it was still over 8k's of paddling. Here's the Google track:

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The turning point in the track was a beach that got actual surf. The swell was sneaking in between the Port Esperence peninsula and Bruny Island and I caught a little ride which Google Tracks picked up. Pity it's only accessible by sea. I stopped in at lovely sheltered and secluded beach for a swim on the way back. It's marked as "Beach" on the above map. Here's a panorama shot of my new favourite place:

A little bit of steam engine hacking at Ken's shed last night:

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This technique floats my boat on so many levels. A completely new twist on guerilla gardening, coming to a wall near me soon:

Temperatures in Tasmania hit a record of just under 42C yesterday. As northern Tasmania burned, we headed down to Roaring Beach in the Huon Valley to ride out the heat with some swimming and kayaking:

Here's a short video of the kids mucking about in the water

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View Roaring Beach in a larger map