Excellent — here’s your comprehensive shopping list for the 4-Week Natural Cholesterol Reset Plan. Everything below is grouped by category for easy shopping — this will cover breakfasts, lunches, dinners, snacks, and supplements.

🛒 4-Week Cholesterol-Lowering Shopping List

🌾 Whole Grains & Fiber Sources

• Rolled oats or steel-cut oats
• Barley or quinoa
• Brown rice
• Whole-grain bread or wraps (no added sugar)
• Psyllium husk (Metamucil or pure powder)
• Whole-grain pasta or soba noodles

🥦 Vegetables (load up — fresh or frozen)

Soluble-fiber + antioxidant rich:

• Broccoli
• Spinach
• Kale
• Brussels sprouts
• Carrots
• Sweet potatoes
• Eggplant
• Okra
• Zucchini
• Tomatoes
• Bell peppers (capsicum)
• Onions & garlic (fresh bulbs or minced)
• Mixed salad greens (rocket, lettuce, cabbage)
• Herbs: parsley, basil, coriander, thyme

🍎 Fruits

High in pectin and antioxidants:

• Apples
• Oranges
• Grapefruit
• Berries (strawberries, blueberries, raspberries)
• Bananas
• Pears
• Avocados
• Lemons (for water and dressings)

🥜 Nuts & Seeds

• Almonds
• Walnuts
• Pistachios
• Chia seeds
• Flaxseeds (ground)
• Pumpkin seeds

🫘 Legumes

• Chickpeas (canned or dried)
• Lentils (red, brown, or green)
• Black beans
• Kidney beans
• Edamame or soybeans

🧈 Healthy Fats

• Extra-virgin olive oil (main cooking oil)
• Avocado oil (optional, for higher-heat cooking)
• Tahini or natural nut butter (no sugar or hydrogenated oils)

🐟 Protein Sources

• Fatty fish: salmon, sardines, mackerel, trout, tuna
• Tofu
• Tempeh
• Eggs (limit to 4–6/week)
• Chicken breast or turkey (lean, optional)

(Try at least two vegetarian dinners per week.)

🥛 Dairy & Alternatives

• Soy milk or almond milk (unsweetened)
• Soy yogurt (unsweetened)
• Small amount of low-fat yogurt (if tolerated)
• Plant sterol-enriched margarine (e.g., Benecol, Flora ProActiv)

🍵 Drinks

• Green tea
• Herbal teas (chamomile, peppermint, rooibos)
• Sparkling water
• Black coffee (1 cup max/day)

🌿 Pantry & Spices

• Low-sodium vegetable or miso broth
• Turmeric
• Black pepper
• Cumin
• Paprika
• Chili powder
• Sea salt or Himalayan salt (minimal use)
• Apple cider vinegar or balsamic vinegar
• Low-sodium soy sauce or tamari

💊 Optional Supplements

(If approved by your doctor)

• Omega-3 fish oil capsules
• Psyllium husk powder
• Plant sterols/stanols capsules or fortified foods
• Garlic capsules or aged garlic extract
• Vitamin D3 (1000–2000 IU)
• Green tea extract (optional)

🧂 For Easy Meal Prep

• Extra-virgin olive oil spray
• BPA-free food storage containers
• Reusable water bottle
• Blender (for smoothies)
• Air fryer or steamer (for low-fat cooking)

Would you like me to break this list into weekly shopping lists (so Week 1–4 each has its own smaller, budget-friendly list)? That makes it easier to buy fresh produce only when needed and keeps food waste low.

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An interview with my grandfather Leonard James Laverty

Here’s a list of the points from the interview :

Transport in the 1920s–30s

• Limited transport options for pioneers.
• Main means of transport: horse (used for riding or as a pack horse).
• Wealthier families used buggies, which could carry 6 passengers.
• Roads were rough (like goat tracks), often blocked by fallen trees or cattle.
• Travelers carried axes, saws, chains, and shovels to clear roads.
• Early motor cars began to appear but were rare.
• No tractors — farm work was done with bullock teams (14–16 bullocks).
• Bullock teams hauled logs and timber to wharves for shipping to Sydney.
• Farmers shipped corn to Sydney, but after costs only earned about sixpence per bushel.

School Life

• Children milked cows before school (took 1–1.5 hours).
• Walked 2 miles barefoot to school, even in frost (shoes came later).
• Played on a slippery track home; injuries were common.
• School had ~35 children, one teacher, and one building.
• Classroom: blackboard, chalk (sometimes thrown at students), slates with slate pencils.
• Later used pen and ink with inkwells built into desks.
• Teachers used canes for discipline, though some students avoided it by helping teachers.

Home & Family

• Family of 8 brothers (1 died in infancy) and 4 sisters.
• House: large, well-built, 4 bedrooms with verandah, still standing after 100 years.
• Children shared beds (2–3 per bed).
• Blankets scarce — mother sewed corn sacks into quilts.

Farm & Work

• Family raised cattle, grew corn, later started dairying.
• All family members (except father) milked cows by hand.
• A good milker could milk a cow in ~3 minutes.
• Herds ranged from 30–100 cows; milking could take 2 hours.
• Milk separated by hand-cranked machine (separator) into cream and skim milk.
• Cream sent to factory for butter (collected by carrier with horse and wagon, not trucks).
• Skim milk fed to pigs and calves (taught to drink from buckets using a finger trick).

Food & Cooking

• Cooking done on wood stoves and camp ovens.
• Homemade bread baked every second day.
• Butter churned by hand with a butter churn.
• Grew their own vegetables (corn, pumpkins, potatoes, melons, etc.).
• Sweet corn (called “mai” from Aboriginal name) cooked with corned beef.
• No electricity or gas in the bush.

Entertainment

• No TV or electricity.
• Played mouth organ, fiddle, and held “surprise parties” with music and dancing.
• Used kerosene or grease on floors for dancing.

Toilets

• School: pit toilets (deep holes, lime added, never emptied).
• Toilet paper not available — newspapers used instead.
• Home: pan toilet outside, used in all weather.

Clothing & Supplies

• Clothes ordered from Sydney stores via catalogues (e.g., David Jones).
• Orders sent by post; delivery by ship took 1–2 weeks.

Childhood Memories

• Best memories: swimming, fishing, shooting pigeons and turkeys (not protected back then).
• Brothers often brought home game for food.

Would you like me to condense this further into a short summary (like a one-page school report style), or keep it as a detailed bullet list like above?

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AI LLM Village

What happens when you give a bunch of LLM’s a task to make money and work together :

Web Scraping Coles Prices

Did a bit more work on scraping Coles prices and saving them into my database :

Currently this page I define a list of products, it will display the price per day for each product on a line chart with a separate line for the grand total of these products.

I’m going to add in the ingredients for my Longevity Stew, a recipe I used ChatGPT DeepResearch mode to generate, I asked it to generate the healthiest meal it could that I could prepare in my InstantPot pressure cooker that would cover all the essential vitamins and minerals a person requires, it then spent 10 minutes researching and also writing python scripts to calculate amounts etc, you can see the recipe here, I added some additional optional toppings for extra nutrition :

https://alexlaverty.github.io/nutrient-dense-instant-pot-meals-for-longevity-2

Now using the Coles price scraper I can also optimize this recipe for cost, when best to purchase these ingredients when they’re at their lowest price.

I also intend on feeding this data into AI to help me identify patterns of how Coles fluctuates their prices.

“Based off all of our conversations…”

If you’ve used ChatGPT for a long time, it’s always fun to prompt it with requests that start with :

“Based off all of our conversations….”

for example :

Based off all of our conversations write an about.md for my Jekyll blog

About Me

Hi, I’m glad you’ve found your way here.

I work in big data engineering by day, building scalable platforms that handle massive amounts of information. But outside of work, I’m passionate about exploring ideas and projects that connect technology, creativity, and the natural world.

This blog is a space where I share my journey—mixing experiments in coding, AI, and automation with reflections on surfing, bonsai, permaculture, and off-grid living. I enjoy building things from scratch, whether it’s a Django app for kids’ education, a minimalist flat-file blog system, or a game that simulates rainwater harvesting and solar-powered living.

I’m also a dad, and a big part of what I create here is with my son in mind. I want to leave behind stories, tools, and experiments that he—and maybe others—can learn from, play with, and build on. From surfing at the beach, to tending a bonsai tree, to coding a learning app, life is an ongoing practice in curiosity and creativity.

What You’ll Find Here

• Notes on projects in progress (web apps, games, coding experiments).
• Reflections on nature, resilience, and calm—from permaculture to surfing.
• Resources and ideas for learning and teaching kids with tech.
• Personal writing I’d like to pass down over the years.

This blog is my long-term notebook—a place to archive ideas, share experiments, and document the journey of learning, building, and living a little more intentionally.

If any of these things resonate with you, I’d love to have you along for the ride.

Based off all of our conversations generate an image of what you think I look like

This is what chatgpt generated and I think it’s pretty close, tall, thin, Macbook Pro, by the beach surrounded by nature :

Based off all of our conversations generate me an image of a Scout patch

Similarly Chatgpt created a Scout patch for me based off my interests

Microsoft Teams Ocean Office background

This is the background I use in Microsoft teams

I asked Google VEO to animate this image for me, I was hoping to use an animated version of this image as a video background in Microsoft Teams, my prompt was :

“animate this image, water should gently go in and out, trees should gently sway in the breeze”

It looks great and is what I want, however I don’t like the fact that the camera angle is panning and zooming in. I asked Google VEO to redo it but the “camera is fixed, do not pan the camera, do not tilt, do not zoom, only animate the water and trees”, however after 3 attempts every response has the video angle moving across the screen which is just going to look weird and distracting in teams calls… oh well will have to attempt again later in a future update.

Using Google VEO to animate the boys playing Fortnite

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Was having fun using Roo Code to work on this website but I seem to have blasted through the free tier of multiple LLM providers so now Im back to using the UI to code.

Cant wait for the day when you can run a really good local model with unlimited use.

Did some vibe coding today with Google Gemini Pro, created some python code that will scrape Coles prices from their website and write them into a local database. Then a Streamlit Web UI to display the products and the prices by day. Have added a table that will display all the products and their prices per day and then colour code the cell backgrounds so that the cheaper the price the greener the colour, the more expensive the more red it will be, the goal with this code will be for the products that I regularly buy figure out the cheapest time to buy them, base off other price charts I’ve seen Coles regularly raises and lowers prices in a rhythm.

If you install the “Coles Trend” Chrome plugin and then browse a product on the website you can see the historical price of the product, you can see how they increase and decrease up and down on the same price :

While working on this I also came across the website : https://www.grocerize.com.au/

Which looked pretty good comparing Woolworths and Coles prices, but when I went to sign up it wants you to pay a subscription, so instead I will build my own and opensource the code.

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Honda have released a new Honda Prelude

I still like the model Prelude I used to drive better, similar to this one

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