The bicycle cake 🚲

I baked a birthday bicycle banana cake *ding ding*

For this year, the options were bicycle, tent, or scuba diving. We recently came back from our first time bike camping so I thought WHY NOT?

I had two possible minimum viable products:

• Tent: formed from a square cake cut along the diagonal, or
• Cake with a bicycle drawn in icing

I spent a few minutes on Wednesday night sketching out a design. The wheels were made from 23 cm diameter cake pans so I had to get the remaining bits at the right scale.

The sketches.

Thursday night was spent baking. I found out that ovens can only fit two cakes at once... not three. Whoops. On the plus side the smell attracted the housemates and we had a good yarn.

Cooling the cakes on chopsticks because multi-purpose tools are the best

Friday night was spent cutting the shapes and icing it. I had to wait for the cake to cool before cutting or the pieces would have fallen apart.

Putting the pieces together

Saturday was the grand reveal. Happy birthday 🎉

The finished product with my actual rear bike light. Don't worry, I have a brighter rear light too

Visualising Australia's radio communication links

Mark Hansen suggested I create the Aussie version of his NZ wireless map, so I did 💁

Please interact with the map by clicking on icons and zooming in and out. Sydney Tower sure has a lot of radio links!

The full screen version is available here.

Instructions and code are available in my Github repository.

Tech used: PostgresSQL, Visual Studio Code, Google Fusion Tables

I found a ladybird on my seedlings

Comparing if two tables have identical content

Have you ever wanted to know if two database tables were the same? Perhaps you made some changes to a query and wanted to know if the result was still the same.

I was essentially looking for a way to diff two tables in Hive SQL, and used:
(TABLE a EXCEPT TABLE b)
UNION ALL
(TABLE b EXCEPT TABLE a);

Volunteer gardening at Cabramatta High School 🌱

I volunteered at Cabramatta High School yesterday as part of their annual Green Day. It sprinkled for about 5 minutes but the rest was overcast. Perfect for gardening! Students from their Environ Club also helped out. All up the school has 1.5k students and they also have an Intensive English Centre which includes students which are migrants, refugees, and international students.

My group helped weed and mulch their Peace Garden:

I’m most proud of this area. We weeded, pruned, and mulched this section:

The clouds started looking ominous which also meant the photos look a bit dark ☹

We mulched both these areas:

Which involved some ingenious ways of moving mulch:

We also had a trailer which was moved BY HAND, by their teacher. He then proceeded to pull the trailer back to the mulch stash with about 10 kids at the back.

It was a great day and I learnt some neat gardening tricks!

Unlimited marigold

I removed some of the dead marigold flowers i.e. deadheaded them, and collected their seeds. I didn't realise how easy it was! The seeds were smaller than the ones from the packet, probably because the pot I have is smaller than recommended.

Left: a dead marigold head. Centre: removing the petals. Right: Marigold seeds

Next step... germinate from seeds!

Using a wick to water plants while away

I had a four day weekend and used an old cotton t-shirt and some 3 L milk bottles to keep my plants hydrated. It's the same trick I used while I was away for two weeks in December.

Day 0: I was in a rush so was only able to set up a few pots

The basil and capsicum are growing heaps! The marigold seeds will be ready to be harvested soon.

Day 5: Most plants were hydrated