On the weekend we rode the scooter up to the Kintamani region. We took some beautiful photos of Mount Batur, went to some hot springs and had a nice lunch overlooking the mountain.






Hi, I'm Harrison. I currently work at me&u as a software engineer. I enjoy golfing, gaming and travel.
This morning when me and Emma were getting coffee there was a fair bit of commotion around our villa. It turned out it was a festival day for the village and many locals were gathering.
What was a bit sad and confronting was that the locals were engaging in cock fighting. There were maybe 20+ chickens either being held by a man or stuffed into a bag in the area. There was a small cage and the 2 chickens at a time were stuffed in and had a fight... I guess?
It was quite sad seeing how distressed the chickens were and there was a lot of blood all over the ground.
Cool that we witnessed a local tradition but also sad seeing the animal cruelty. I didn't take any photos.
I listened to this episode of Syntax and gave Zed a quick try (after updating) in the last 20 minutes. I've improved a lot since I last used it. I feel like this is pretty much usable out of the box for the large majority of the projects I work on. Could be something I use for work next week just as an experiment.
This combo of Jason Day and the Bryon Bros is so good. Once again Bryan Bros produce fantastic golf content.
The whole story of the Silksong's release is fascinating from a business perspective.
Here's a collection of photos from the past weekend in Ubud. I'm going to do a bit of a dump.
We went to:




















A couple more pictures from the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary and the Water Palace.






On Sunday last weekend we visited two waterfalls to the east of Ubud. They were both stunning.
We firstly went to the Suwat Waterfall which was ~30 minutes from where our villa is.





About a 10 minute drive from there was the Taman Sari Waterfall & Natural pool.





We've had some really good food in Ubud these past couple of days. Some notes:
I'm still playing Hollow Knight: Silksong and having an absolute ball with it.
I just conquered Mount Fay and it was an enthralling experience. I now have double jump! It really was a throwback to the mountain climb I experienced in Celeste which is surely where the devs got some inspiration from. The game is really a mis-mash of lots of other games and is a massive proponent of the everything is a remix idea.
Some other inspiration would come from:











We're thinking about checking out Mount Butur in a couple of weeks.
There's a couple of options we're thinking around tackling it.
You can take a Jeep up the mountain which would be pretty fun driving across the volcanic rock. There's an Airbnb experience or a Seek Sophie option.
You can do it at sunrise or sunset. With sunrise you probably get a slightly better experience but it means a ~2.30AM wake up which is pretty brutal as it's around an hour drive to Kintamani which is where the mountain is. I'm not sure if I want to mess with my sleep schedule that much but it might be worth it for a 1 time experience.
You can also hike up the mountain which also looks pretty cool but would just be a different kind of experience. It seems like you hike up in a big group which I guess could be interesting.
I've been testing Helium browser over the past few weeks. It's a great option when I need something Chromium for whatever reason.
I always love looking at old Melbourne historical things.
The 1966 Melways has to rank as one of the coolest old Melbourne based resources you can find online.
It's fascinating looking at the map and seeing how much my local area (Bonbeach and Chelsea) has changed over the last almost 60 years. It's Map 97 for those interested.
You also can't go past this 1945 visual of Melbourne but in my opinion the Melways trumps this.
Not too much to report from Bali this week. I worked all week and then we moved to Ubud on Saturday afternoon.
We love our new place it has a nice big pool and stronger air con in our bedroom.
As I write this we're about to head out on a scooter chasing some waterfalls. I'll likely post those pictures next week.
There's an annoying bug with Google Maps that I've encountered a few times whilst being in Indonesia.
You need scooter directions in places like Canggu and Ubud. They differ greatly from car directions.
When I have a VPN on (set to Australia) Google Maps defaults to the Australian settings which I guess is fine in and of itself. However, for some reason scooter directions are not enabled by Australian Google Maps. So I get car directions which often take double the amount of travel time.
The only way to turn this no scooter setting off is to switch the VPN off and clear the app cache (or delete the app) which is very annoying. I just don't understand why Google can't just offer scooter directions when it knows I'm in Bali based on my long and lat (even if my IP is in an Australian location).
I watched Godfather 2 earlier this week and my goodness it is a good movie. Can't believe I hadn't seen it until now. The whole switching timeline thing is perfect and the drama and music is as good as the first movie.
I also watched a little bit of Godfather 3 and it stinks. It's a terrible movie and was clearly just a cash grab.
I'm a huge fan of lazygit and I think it's time I start using the other CLI tool from the same developer lazydocker.
I still need to use some kind of Docker engine to start the daemon; I'll still stick with Orbstack. Instead of using the Orbstack GUI from the command line I can run orb start and then lazydocker.
I can do all my normal Docker related debugging from inside lazydocker like starting, restarting, stopping and pruning things.
When I want to shut everything down I stop all the containers and then orb stop.
Over the last few days I've experimented with some vibe coding. I've completely redone my music, movies and games library pages as HTML tables with column filtering which is controlled by htmx.
It's a simple UI but I've done the whole thing off vibes. I didn't read the code I just let ChatGPT run wild, did a manual test locally and deployed.
For personal projects this makes sense but for production ready code that users rely on this is completely irresponsible.
Random thing: there is a bug in Safari on macOS for filtering the table columns. It sorts much much slower compared to a Chromium based browser which is super annoying.
On Sunday night we ate at a really delicious Chinese restaurant called YESHI.
We originally were going to order the mapo tofu as a main but they didn't have it available so we ended up going for the twice cooked pork belly.
This brought back a lot of memories from Beijing earlier this year as I'd ordered this dish a couple of times at the very incorrectly translated meat pie restaurant.
I really want to give this dish a crack and make it when I get home.
Going directly from the menu
TWICE-COOKED PORK BELLY, green pepper, fermented black beans, leek, ginger
and then giving this prompt this prompt ChatGPT
find me a recipe to cook this at home
TWICE-COOKED PORK BELLY, green pepper, fermented black beans, leek, ginger
I found this recipe which looks pretty much correct.
Over the weekend we had a sneaky trip to the Nusa Islands. We stayed on Nusa Lembongan for 3 nights leaving Thursday morning and returning Sunday afternoon.
We left Canggu early Thursday morning and got a taxi to Sanur which took around an hour. We then got on a boat across the Indian ocean to Nusa Lembongan. It's about a 30 minute ride. We booked with Setia Fast Ferry.
The boat was fairly smooth given it's exposed ocean. I can imagine there could be some big swell and the ride not being very pleasant on certain days.
When the boat nears Lembongan you hop onto a smaller boat when takes you to the main beach. There's no pier for the boats to dock at; it's just a beach landing. You step off onto white sands and crystal clear blue water. It's a magical (and old school) experience.
We then found ourselves a taxi and checked into our accomodation. We stayed at Komodo Garden in a beautiful lumbung style room.
There's no normal cars on the island; the taxis are all converted Suzuki trucks which have open air carriages. The roads have a lot of pot holes so it's a bumpy ride when you're riding in one of these. On a scooter it's much easier to avoid the holes.
We firstly walked to Dream Beach and had a quick swim. We then hired a scooter and drove to the main town for lunch. In the afternoon we went to the Sandy Bay Beach Club, had dinner and watched the sun set. The beach club was only a 3 min walk from our accomodation which was very convenient.
On Friday morning we woke up early to go on a snorkelling tour. We booked with Captain Coconut Snorkelling.
We went to 3 different locations the first of which was at a place called Manta Bay where we saw giant Manta Rays gliding peacefully in the currents. This location was packed with people and it was very choppy waves so whilst we saw the Manta Rays it wasn't a chill experience.
We then went to a place called Crystal Bay. It was a beautiful little bay with coral, heaps of fish and also a couple of turtles. I love turtles so much so they all get the honorary name of Boots.
We finished off at Mangrove Point which was the most chill spot of the 3. There was once again coral, heaps of fish and turtles and because there was so few people you could really take your time and just float along.
We went back to the hotel and in the afternoon did some exploring of Nusa Ceningan via the scooter. There was a beautiful spot called Blue Lagoon where we got some pretty photos before having a cooling drink because it was boiling hot in the direct sun.
In the evening we had dinner at Bar Riva which had a very Amalfi Coast vibe to it. We had an amazing panoramic view of Lembongan that almost seemed fake. Like a fake little island town and a fake volcano in the background.
We woke up early again the following morning and I had a surf lesson whilst Emma got a massage. I booked with Lembongan Haleiwa Surf Lesson.
I got taken out on a boat with a guide (with 2 other beginner surfers) to a break called Razors.
It was a beautiful little reef break where there was a section you hold onto a rope (connected to a pontoon) whilst you waited for your turn with the instructor. It really is helpful to have the instructor to know where to paddle to and also to get a little push onto the waves. I got about 5 waves and one really nice one where there was a little drop off. I found I could quite easily turn on the wave as it was a left hand break.
In the afternoon we once again headed to the Sandy Bay Beach Club and had a nice dinner whilst the sun set. It was a gorgeous way to end the little trip. It was so nice having a little walk on the sand in the dark and a little romantic dance whilst someone played live acoustic guitar.
The following morning we had a brief window of time to explore where we checked out Mushroom Bay and took photos of lots of cute dogs. We then got the boat back to Bali.









