Field notes

A collection of work, writing, and ongoing documentation across my interests. Some pieces are finished explorations; others are in progress. All organised by theme rather than by state of completion.

These are the things I’m looking at carefully: how wine expresses landscape, what grows in this place, how systems work, what’s worth photographing, what falconry teaches us about our roots in nature. Some are polished; most are not. But they’re all examples of the same impulse – to look closely, to document, to try to begin to understand.

Browse by interest below, or explore what’s developing.

Wine & terroir

• From the blog
  Some key posts from my blog I want to highlight (Feb 2026)
• Syrah [OLD]: a tasting of three different Syrahs
  
• Wine regions and wineries [OLD]: a few random notes on wine regions and wineries I made years ago
  
• See all...

Food & food culture

• Growing & roasting coffee [BLOG]
  
• Melbourne restaurants: Centre Place, the Little Den & Shandong Mamai Mini [BLOG]
  A few informal reviews (2018) grouped into one
• Melbourne restaurants: Hawker Chan [BLOG]
  An informal review (2018) of Hawker Chan in Melbourne; I've since visited their Singapore restaurant (but not yet the hawker centre stand)
• See all...

Place, belonging, travel

• From the blog
  Some key posts from my blog I want to highlight (Feb 2026)

Photography & video

• Equipment notes
  Some notes on various cameras and other bits of photographic equipment I use
• Film & video aspect rations [OLD]
  This shows the different visual aspect ratios used commonly in film & television, as a visual guide
• Choosing a first SLR outfit [OLD]
  Some (now hopelessly outdated) notes on picking a first film SLR kit
• See all...

Botany, ecology, and environment

• On walking in the woods, New Year's Eve 2025 [BLOG]
  
• Autumn fragments [OLD BLOG]
  

Birds & falconry

• Merlin bird identifcation app (2026)
  Notes on the Merlin AI bird call identification app
• White faced heron, evening (2013) [OLD BLOG]
  Observing white faced heron (Egretta novaehollandiae), Adelaide - 2013

Writing

• The Green Man
  From long ago, when I thought I could write poetry [OLD]

Computing

• Installing and running Debian testing on a Sun Ultra 5 [OLD]
  Some notes made between 2007 and 2011 on running Debian on sparc64
• Samsung i5700 Android phone review [OLD BLOG]