Living in Darwin now

Ant mound on the way up to Litchfield NP

I took a job at Charles Darwin University, working in the Centre for School Leadership, Learning and Development.

We moved up here in March, and have settled into a very large house in Wanguri, on the North side of Darwin.

Our lounge room

We have native bees in our brickwork!

Stingless, native bees, make tasty honey

Our shipping container arrived a couple of weeks ago, and we've finished unpacking it, and are feeling much more comfortable now. Unfortunately my bike of 13 years was stolen from the front yard within a week of unloading it.

Unloading the container

We live very close to Casuarina Shopping Centre, which has all the mod cons, including a Philippine food store that serves Sunshine her fav, halo halo.

Halo halo at Casuarina Square

Sunshine has scored a job in a local design company, and Eve has found a day care that she likes.

We're all liking Darwin much more than we thought, with lots of swimming pools to visit, including free ones with water slides (Leanyer pools), and amazing national parks to visit. We all visited Litchfield National Park in March, but it was technically still inside the wet season, so swimming was limited. We'll definitely be going back out there, but on days when crowds won't.

Florence Falls, very crowded

Wangi Falls not open for swimming

Yesterday I was invited fishing in Kakadu, and caught 3 barramundi all over 60cm! Kakadu has very impressive rock formations I'd like to explore, and many rock art sights as well. Its a bit more of a committed trip though. It can be done in a day, but multi day if family comes too.

My first barra

The days are cooling off a bit now.. lovely mornings but the days still warm up. We caught the tail end of the wet season, and that was very hot. Not looking forward to the next one! Luckily we have a small pool in our backyard, to help with the cooling off. It will need ice in it on the very hot days though.

Leanyer Pools

Our backyard pool

Climbing in the Northern Territory

http://climbingnt.net.au

Peak Oil Jacket

Prototype 001

These past few months, I've been designing a jacket, working with Julio Valdes in Sydney to develop a pattern, and get a prototype made up, ready for on-demand making. Here's photos of prototype 001. Its made of black oilskin, lined with ventile, and then kangaroo leather on the hood brim and cuffs. There are a few things not shown, such as the RiRi and splash resistant zippers I plan to use, as well as the flaps with press studs to shield the main body zipper.

Julio Valdes

Once I get the design, pattern and materials right, I plan to sell the jacket, made to order, in a variety of materials, from all Kanga leather, to recycled canvas. Although this particular version is pretty heavy weight, it is designed for outdoor activity like skiing. For those who are more worried about weight than they are about durability, there will be a light weight version made from single layer ventile.

Max

I'm working on pants, bib and brace over alls, shirts, feather down jackets and wool mid layer jackets. The designs will be open source and simplified to support DIY makers. The materials are natural, and the cuts for active wear. I hope to start marketing the first jacket by the end of the year, after I've finished fully testing the designs and materials in the field, through an Australian winter scrub.

Good advice and review of crowd funding

Crowdfunding Revolution: Should I Do This? - Core77

While traveling around Australia, who edits Wikipedia and Google places?

My family have been driving through the Victorian and New South Wales alps the past few days, and I've noticed fantastic historical information is often held in unexpected places. Like in pubs, usually hanging all manor of historical artifacts, most notably early settler photographs, but equally as interesting, the trophies and symbols of the sport and industry in the area. I sat in a few, eating my angus steak, and feeding little Eve the chips, and sometimes asking the publican what the background to the images were.

"Oh!" she'd say, "that's the big snow of 52" or "thats the 1902 VFL team, yeah I don't know what the name was of the black fella in the front, no one wrote his name down!"

In these towns there was nearly always an individual, association or information centre who was the local authority, and almost never was it a library or out-of-towner.

This had me thinking about who Wikimedia Chapters target when they run workshops. It seems to me that galaries, libraries, archives and museums have a limited amount of motivation beyond cataloging certain forms of information, and not much in the way of the forms of information I saw on walls. Pubs, historical societies, tourism information centers, and the like, have something more in the way of motivation, esspecially to inform their visitors about their towns. And slowly, more and more of them are becoming reluctantly aware that Wikipedia (and it's information reformatted into Google Maps, Facebook, and personally printed travel guide books) serves that motivation well. With their smart phones updating their locations, navigating roads and discovrring back country, reviewing what they see, eat, do, and where they stay, tourists are using new forms of information to find their way.

I might be running a Wikipedia and Commons training session in Hobart in a few weeks, and if I can, I think I'll try and target these people more. If such work ever was a paid gig, it would be a lovely way to travel around Australia, teaching towns folk about editing the big wikis, and helping them to improve articles about their towns and significant sites, then moving on to the next town.

Maybe Australian towns will be more open to this in a couple of years. We are after al, expecting to see a stronger internet culture developing off the back of nation-wide broadband connectivity.