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Canberra has always had a great skateboarding scene. We host one of Australia’s more significant annual weekend skateboarding events, Belco Bowl Jam and the other festivities around it: We also regularly have free “Learn to Skateboard” sessions at a grassroots volunteer level at local skateparks: View this post on Instagram A post shared by Canberra Skateboarding Association (@canberraskateboarding) Local skaters consistently produce awesome skate videos ( See @ParliamentaryZone or @VXPals on Instagram )....

Let me preface this post by saying that if you’re trying Linux for the first time, install Fedora. Fedora strikes a great balance of new features, stability and a “just works” factor. I’ve been using Fedora as my daily driver for years and the main reason I switched to Arch is because I wanted the Arch DIY installation experience, imperfections and all. That said, here goes! I installed Arch Linux on my Thinkpad P14s Gen 1 ( AMD )....

For a while, I was daily driving Fedora Linux on a Microsoft Surface Go Tablet/Laptop hybrid. The hardware with Linux is a brilliant experience, but I needed some bigger screen real estate and more RAM for my work, so I had to invest in a real laptop to replace it. I began to feel bad about the Surface Go 2 gathering dust. I figured it has enough power to host a few services and podman containers in Linux for my modest home server requirements ( Plex, PiHole, File Server, SSH Jumpbox etc....

I recently decided to set up PiHole in a Podman container for network-level blocking of DNS requests to some of the nasty stuff on the internet. For a long time, I’ve never bothered with such a thing, but these days I’m sharing an internet connection with my family, who use the home internet connection from a whole range of devices. To manage Linux containers on my humble home server, I prefer Podman instead of Docker because it’s daemon-less and doesn’t need to be run as root....

I’ve always felt drawn to the ethos of both Skateboarding and Open Source software. When Rodney Mullen did his TED talk a few years ago, he touched on similarities between the two when he compared skateboarders to Linux kernel hackers. Since then, I’ve pondered about all the other common ground between the two. Community Skateboarding and Open Source both thrive when people come together and collaborate. Linus Torvalds was a student who was tired of paying for UNIX, so he started writing a free operating system as a DIY hobby while releasing the source code to the community....

Pirate Bay uptime has always been an issue because of the of the pressure and legal issues that they’re constantly dealing with. This can be frustrating when it’s down but you just want to find a torrent for some legal Linux ISO’s or public domain content from their extensive torrent index. Worse yet, for us in Australia a whole bunch of domain names for Pirate Bay and mirrors are blocked by our government....

Sometimes tricks happen or unlikely spots get skated that are so ridiculous that it probably won’t ever happen again. Here’s a few old clips from local Canberra spots and parks that still blow my mind when I watch them. Grant Taylor - Scrivener Dam Drop-in Source: Grant Taylors “Nike SB Chronicles Unplugged” part https://youtu.be/GsdAArPhckg No footage or photo can do really do this spot justice. The dam is huge and before this happened a lot of people wondered if a drop-in was even possible....

The ideas you come up with to keep yourself amused when you’re really bored or isolated. I can’t go into the specifics of who and where but I was in a situation recently that involved working 12 hour shifts back to back for weeks inside a shipping container office with nothing but some Linux workstations on an air gapped network. No internet, no phones, no electronic devices of any kind except those workstations....

UPDATE: This post was written 7+ years ago and a LOT has changed. TAMS is now TCCS. The old CSA website doesn’t exist anymore. I’m keeping this up for historical purposes, but I’m also writing some newer content soon. I’ve tidied up some formatting but kept this post content unchanged. In my town (Canberra, Australia) we’re spoiled for choice when it comes to skate facilities. Belconnen is the biggest park in the southern hemisphere and five of our parks have lights that operate every night....