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Hierarchical Navigation Bar

As you should be able to see above, I’m experimenting with a two-level navigation bar.

Originally this was going to be “Blog”-style posts vs “Site”-style pages (mostly uni stuff from my old RMITCS site), but it’s morphed into “Blog” vs “Projects”. Hopefully both of them will get more varied content in the future.

I’m not really happy with the style from either a aesthetic or technical point of view and may create my own lightweight Nikola style for the site, with some nicer multi-level navigation. In particular, I would like to get rid of all site-wide Javascript dependencies, with just the occasional game or similar form-interactive pages that use JS.

Videos of my Final Research Presentation

While looking through some old USBs I’ve discovered a recording of the final presentation of my Honours Research in late 2014. I had believed this was completely lost, like the video of my BSDCan presentation which was not successfully recorded due to technical issues.

The video files have been put on my ZFS research page. The orignals are shot in profile on a 2013 era smartphone and the volume is very low - I might to try and clean them up a bit, but very glad to have the files regardless.

Small Site Retheme, and some File Size info

Inspired by some Solarpunk Lemmy discussion especially Smolweb.org I had a look at the overhead of my Nikola site theme and was suprised by how heavy the JS and CSS was even though it was barely doing anything.

Thus, I’ve switched to the lighter base theme for both my personal site and Research Site. These still contain (post-compression) 9.5 KB of CSS and 4.1 KB of JS, which still seems quite excessive but it’s a big improvement for minimal effort on my part.

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Experimental Braised Cabbage

Inspired by the Fallow Chefs’ confit caramelized cabbage, I made a vegan braised caramelized cabbage for dinner tonight, with pearl barley and split peas then finished in the stock. The recipe was improvised and not recorded exactly but the results were amazing.

The cabbage came out very sweet and caramelized, like the confit method appears but less buttery. Texture was nice, soft enough that the inner layers could be cut with a fork but not mushy.

I’ve written up the process below as best I can remember it.

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Microwave Baked Onions in Tomato & Basil Sauce

This is an easy recipe that can be a side dish as half an onion, or the main meal with more halves and the addition of some extra grains/pasta/etc to soak up the sauce. No animal products or gluten required.

Serves 3-6 (half or a whole onion) and costs about AU$2 (as of November 2025).

Based on the “Baked Onions” recipe in an old Family Circle Kids Microwave Cooking book I had as a kid.

Microwave Baked Onions in Tomato & Basil Sauce

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didyouknowthatyoucanhaveonlysixty-threecharactersinadomainlabel.net is moving to didyouknowthatyoucanhaveonlysixty-threecharactersinadomainlabel.dylanleigh.net

To save US$20 per year on a domain name for a 20 year old joke, I’m moving the three sentence index page at http://didyouknowthatyoucanhaveonlysixty-threecharactersinadomainlabel.net/ to a subdomain of this site, http://didyouknowthatyoucanhaveonlysixty-threecharactersinadomainlabel.dylanleigh.net/ . There’s a redirect in place at the old site for now, but I’ll probably let the domain expire when it is due for renewal.