The last couple of months have been some pretty intensive nights, some of the most solid, prologued work I’ve done for a while, resulting in:

A forum for users of card-slot expandable Macs, made relevant now that Apple has cancelled the Mac Pro as a product.

Happy birthday, absent friend. Wherever you are. 

Apparently some bot (or exploited people) network has been running fraudulent purchases through the Golgotha Graphics FastSpring store. The angle appears to be that because my books are relatively inexpensive, the purchase is small enough to not be noticed. If it’s successful, it marks a particular set of (stolen) credit card details as valid, so they can then be used for something larger.

The scale of it was pretty impressive, dozens of purchase attempts every minute, which I hadn’t known about because the system by default only notifies you when a payout is due, after a certain amount accrues.

I reported it to FastSpring, and it’s now in their hands; after all, they’re the ones with the big fraud detection network, etc.

It only took three months, but I finally have a new, new condition toolbox.

Wonders never cease.

So, here’s a small rant about poor customer service, the sort that’s just baffling where all you can contemplate is “who the hell thinks this is ok?”

On the 6th of February, I ordered a large, metal, multi-drawer toolbox from Sydney Tools. As pictured here:

The cost; $1050, plus delivery. So I was all-in for around $1100. There was a bit of organising to do, as the box was ordered from the Virginia (Brisbane) store, but being delivered from the Stafford (Brisbane) store, to a location in Brisbane.

I’d previously been to look at one of them at the Kunda Park store, and take some measurements off the baseplates for the wheels. The goal being to fabricate lower-height levelling feet, so it can be placed on uneven ground under a table.

There’s also a couple of hundred dollars invested in steel and heavy duty levelling feet to achieve that.

The day of the delivery arrived 10 days later, the 16th of February:

The bottom of the cardboard box was all mashed up, which made it hard to see (until the delivery driver had left) that the box has been smashed into by a pair of somethings. Those somethings appeared, suspiciously, to be the size and distance apart one would expect from a pair of forklift tines.

So, I called up the guy who I’d been working with at Virginia to discuss this, and he had to talk with management, and while they made a token offer of $100 refund to keep it, I declined, and said I’d like the box replaced with a new, undamaged one. To which he agreed.

We had to organise a date for the pickup and delivery of the new one, and so on the 16th of March a truck turned up again, to take the damaged box (which I had put the wheels on, as they had requested) back to Stafford, and (bafflingly in a second trip) bring a new one back.

My “new” replacement toolbox:

This one is in worse condition than the one I returned. It’s clearly a demonstrator they’ve had out and in use on the showroom floor for a significant amount of time. There’s a sizeable dent in the stainless steel top (whose protective film was missing), both the pre-attached side handles, which are supposed to be a user-fit part, have paint scraped off. On the back, there’s gouges through the powder coating all the way to the metal, which has already begun rusting. There’s scuffing through the topcoat to the red undercoat in multiple places on the sides. The caution sticker on the side has been torn, and the wheels have seen extensive use.

What sort of person thinks this is OK? Who looks at “we delivered a damaged product to a customer”, and thinks “we’ll send back a damaged, worn, distressed demonstrator as a replacement”?

Who thinks a damaged, secondhand, demonstrator product is a replacement for a warranty claim?

Seriously, at what point did “fuck the customer” become standard operating procedure?

The delivery driver hightailed it while I was on the phone to Sydney Tools to tell them that this wasn’t an acceptable replacement, which after he’d spent both deliveries complaining about the job, and trying to get us to do the actual moving of the product, demanding we climb up the waist-high hydraulic platform suspended in the air at the back of his truck, seemed a final “screw you” to me, the customer, who’d paid for all this in the first place.

Now, lest you think “this is just cosmetic” dear reader, again:

• it’s starting to rust, and
• it’s over $1000 of equipment, and
• it was bought NEW.

I didn’t buy a factory-second, or a demonstrator, or a secondhand product; I bought a new, pristine, in box product. All I want for my money, is to receive the thing I bought.

Occasionally my little rants catch the zeitgeisty breeze ;)

Continued from Part two…

This was actually finished several weeks ago, but I had to clear some stuff out before taking the photos.

So this is the completed frame, which acts as a support structure for the work, allowing it to be hung from something that isn’t the corner bolts, and providing a free-standing support, so it can be placed upon the ground, while keeping the circuit boards clear. It also provides end, and corner protection during moving.

Everything bolted together nicely.

That’s the biggest 2025 project complete.

This week seems to have brought a conclusion to several weeks of frustrating glitches with my display setup on my Mac. For reference, this is my setup:

Three displays:

• a middle main landscape 16:9 27″ display,
• left, and right portrait 16:10 24″ displays.

I run a single space for all three displays, so a single menubar in the middle, and the ability to have windows span across screens (useful when working on large spreadsheets). There’s also a piece of software, SwitchResX which slightly over-drives the resolutions of the side displays, so they match the apparent pixel density of the main display.

The main purpose of this setup, is so I can splay all the palettes of my main work applications out over multiple screens, and get everything salient visible at once; all the properties of something are glanceable, and alterable, without having to navigate down into docked palettes, etc. If I need a menu and don’t want to travel back to the top of the middle screen, Many Tricks’ Menuwhere puts the menu as a floating palette under my mouse pointer.

The problem manifested as booting the computer to find my desktop wallpaper had reset to the operating system default, forcing me to reconfigure it… for three displays, and seven spaces for each set of displays. Twenty one separate image or colour choices to configure after each boot.

Thinking the problem may have been an issue with the system finding the directory of my user account on the PCI SSD I boot off, I tried moving the desktop pictures to a SATA SSD, which I knew to be mildly more stable within macOS (it’s seen as an internal disk, whereas a SSD blade on a PCI card is seen as external).

That didn’t really solve it, so I tried something drastic – deleting user and operating system caches. That was a disaster, and resulted in the system experiencing terrible instability; kernel panics every couple of days, in a system that had only had perhaps one a year.

I bit the bullet and reinstalled the operating system in place, keeping my user account and applications. This basically refreshes all the Apple-supplied software, clears caches etc. That sort of worked, in that it changed the nature of the problem.

Now the issue was that when the system would wake from sleep, it would have trouble opening communication with all the displays. These screens are on the end of 7m DisplayPort cables, plugged in to DisplayPort to Type-C adapters, connected to the Thunderbolt ports on my Mac Pro’s main GPU. Waking from sleep would see the login UI jump from screen to screen, as the main screen seemed to struggle to power up in response to a signal.

I knew the main screen worked on its own, because I’d reinstalled the operating system with just it connected. However, one symptom of wake was really odd; in the screen dancing, one of the screens was showing the OS default wallpaper, rather than the one which should have been shown. This hinted a problem was that there was a screen detach event happening, and part of the process was the system “seeing” a new screen configuration, and treating one screen as a new entity, unknown to it so far. After the screens stabilised, and I logged in, the telltale signs of screen detach events were evident – palettes from Affinity applications all messed up on the main screen, because Affinity lacks the ability to recover from screen configuration changes.

I’d eliminated software issues, disabling various tools that interact with displays, that left only hardware; my suspicious fell on the adapter dongles.

On Amazon, I found a UGreen Type-C to DisplayPort 2,1 adapter. A wonderful piece of gear, with a braided cable, and compact metal DisplayPort end. I bought one, put it on the main display, the problem went away. I bought two more, put them on the other displays, the problem stayed away.

This appears to have solved all the problems. It’s hard to fathom an adapter dongle failing, but maybe the old ones (from the same company who supplied the DisplayPort cables) were just an older, less capable technology.

Either way, it seems to be fixed now.

When the invader comes, we burn our fields to deny them our grain.

We must learn to thrive in the ashes of the scorched earth; the earth we scorch, to deny it to those who would take from us that which we have, not to use it for themselves, but to take it from us.

Only by demonstrating the worthlessness of what we have; its replaceability, our ability to go without, our ability to make do, our ability to create anew for ourselves, do we take away the incentive of the invader. Only by demonstrating that what we have has no value in being taken, because the value is us, do we show the pointlessness of trying to take what we have.

That is the lesson of Adelaide Writer’s Week, the lesson of Bendigo Writer’s Festival, the lesson of the Venice Biennale & Creative Australia, and several years before that, the Sydney Biennale.

As long as we, as artists, and as an arts community show that we value our festivals as institutions, the right wing will attempt to take them from us, and through controlling them, dictate the art we make. Not because they want it for themselves, not because they have art they want to exhibit, but to take the venue from us, to make our art serve them.

Whether it’s George Brandis suggesting artists who refuse fossil fuel sponsorship for their work (or refuse to exhibit in events sponsored by the fossil fuel industry) should be denied grant funding, or that grant funding be 50/50 co-funded with corporate interests (to guarantee the availability of artswashing opportunities), or a writer’s festival cancelling the appearance of a Palestinian author, the result is the same.

If we participate in an event that has been compromised, that has asked or demanded compromise, we are compromised.

As Louise Adler so succinctly put it:

The raison d’être of art and literature is to disrupt the status quo: and one doesn’t have to be a student of history to know that art in the service of “social cohesion” is propaganda.

We must maintain our integrity, by withholding our participation, by withholding our consent. As soon as we allow ourselves to be bought, as soon as we cross that picket line, as soon as we break solidarity, we are forever tainted.

Festivals die, let them. Let them be ephemeral. Instead of investing 20 years in a single institution, invest in making a new institution every year. Become so good at building from scratch, that the scorched earth contains no fears. Build Yurts, not castles, so that when the invader comes, you can in strength say:

“Weep.” That is your answer from the Scythians.