Hamburg, Germany, based web developer and long distance triathlete, Tim Teege is super keen to run a marathon the Moon. So much so, he wants you to ask any space agency worker type acquaintances you may have, to help him achieve his goal. Ask, and you shall receive, and the like. … | Continue reading
A statement of twelve guiding principles for an ethical web, recently published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The web is a fundamental part of our lives, shaping how we work, connect, and learn. We understand that with this profound impact comes the responsibility to en … | Continue reading
As a kid I loved the Tintin books. Although they might today be called a product of their time, I aspired to be like the intrepid boy-reporter, who seemed to do very little reporting. I have the red hair, and I write a blog so… Plus, I did write a few articles for a newspaper […] | Continue reading
The last few years have been bad for both producers and consumers of coffee. Extremes of weather in growing regions has resulted in diminishing coffee bean harvests, which has in turn pushed up prices. This is a topic I’ve been covering for a while here now, but it seems coffee i … | Continue reading
In the same way the brain structures of introverts and extraverts differ, the same can be said for voracious readers of book as opposed to those who struggle finish books. This according to Mikael Roll, professor of phonetics, at Sweden’s Lund University. The structure of two reg … | Continue reading
We’re twelve days out from the big one, and high in the silly season, as the brevity of recent posts here may allude to. Otherwise, the major highlight has to be the annual announcement of the PANTONE colour of the year. As I wrote two years ago, this was a big deal during my web … | Continue reading
I’m not sure if this horror re-imagining, trailer, of the Y2K “bug” will have a cinematic run in Australia, or is going straight to streaming. Two high school nobodies make the decision to crash the last major celebration before the new millennium on New Year’s Eve 1999. The nigh … | Continue reading
Henrik Karlsson worked for several years at an art gallery in Denmark. The work seems more varied, and entrepreneurial, than some of us might think: Ie. you don’t say, “This is my job and that thing is outside my area”—no, if the value you are trying to promote requires you to go … | Continue reading
The details are pretty scant at the moment. So far the flu-like disease killed close to one-hundred-and-fifty people in the south west of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in November. Infected people had flu-like symptoms including high fever and severe headaches, Remy Saki, … | Continue reading
At some point in 2025, Australians under the age of sixteen will no longer be able to operate social media accounts. I thought up to high school age, about thirteen, seemed sensible, but lawmakers decided otherwise. Anyway, I imagine the new regulations will require, eventually, … | Continue reading
This I wouldn’t mind seeing… a four hour documentary about Renaissance age artist and polymath Leonardo da Vinci, by American filmmaker Ken Burns. A 15th century polymath of soaring imagination and profound intellect, Leonardo da Vinci created some of the most revered works of ar … | Continue reading
The Australian Podcast Awards were held a few weeks ago in Sydney, on Thursday, 21 November 2024. The finalists and winners, with productions spanning thirty categories, can be see here. Podcasting is to broadcasting, what blogging is to publishing. It allows an individual, or a … | Continue reading
It almost seems inconceivable that, one year soon, deep space probes Voyager 1 and 2, will cease to function. At some point their on-board power reserves will be completely drained, rendering the vessels unable to collect data, and send it to mission controllers on Earth. We know … | Continue reading
M.B. Mack, writing for International Business Times: The incident took place in a Shanghai robotics showroom where surveillance footage captured a small AI-driven robot, created by a Hangzhou manufacturer, talking with 12 larger showroom robots, Oddity Central reported. The small … | Continue reading
The neologism, devised by blogger and author Cory Doctorow, just over two years ago, has been named the 2024 word of the year by Australian English wordbook, Macquarie Dictionary. This must be some sort of record, between the time a new word is coined, comes into popular usage, a … | Continue reading
This to finally spare us the time-wasting, sometimes totally irrelevant, tyranny of the “for you” tab. Chris Welch, writing for The Verge, says Meta has started testing a feature allowing users to select their preferred feed, be it “for you”, “following”, or even one custom made, … | Continue reading
Did an extra-terrestrial intelligence attempt to message us in the distant past? Or did an Earth based radio telescope, nicknamed Big Ear, inadvertently eavesdrop in on a snippet of a conversation between two other alien civilisations? These are among some of the many explanation … | Continue reading
Goorie/South East Australian author Melissa Lucashenko has won the 2024 Mark and Evette Moran Nib literary award, with her 2023 novel Edenglassie. A work of historical fiction, Edenglassie, which links the past with the present, also won this year’s ARA Historical Novel Prize, In … | Continue reading
Sydney based Western Australian author Gail Jones was last week presented with the Creative Australia Lifetime Achievement in Literature award. Jones’ books have won the ARA Historical Novel Prize, Barbara Ramsden Award, and Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. They have als … | Continue reading
Australian author Jessica Au’s multi-award winning 2022 novel, Cold Enough for Snow, is being made into a film, says publisher Giramondo. No word yet as to who the lead actors will be, but production is scheduled to commence in 2025, and will be the debut feature of Jemima James. … | Continue reading
Online publishing platform Substack, founded in 2017, was all anyone could talk about by 2022. Writers were scrambling to jump on the bandwagon, having heard tales of six-figure revenues being earned by some publishers. Even though we’ve heard those sorts of stories before. I eve … | Continue reading
Sales of Australian author Charlotte Wood’s latest novel Stone Yard Devotional have enjoyed a boost, as a result of being both long and short listed for this year’s Booker Prize. The phenomena is sometimes called the Booker bump: Her publisher says that since winning the Stella P … | Continue reading
Twitter-like microblogging social network Bluesky is having its moment in the sun. We’ve all seen the multiple headlines of late heralding the arrival of another several million new members, most of whom have migrated from Twitter. The buzz is similar to that surrounding Mastodon … | Continue reading
The World Wide Consortium (W3C) has the emissions created by the internet in its sights… who knew just high web caused emissions were? The mission of the Sustainable Web Interest Group is to improve digital sustainability so that the Web works better for all people and the planet … | Continue reading
Australian author and journalist Katie Cunningham: My high school English teacher told me that good writing is the tenth draft of bad writing. I saw this in The Booklist, a weekly newsletter by the Sydney Morning Herald, the other day. Sometimes I feel as if I rewrite everything … | Continue reading
To mark the thirtieth anniversary of the 1994 release of Star Trek Generations, comes Unification, which kind of picks ups after the conclusion of Generations. But it’s also a whirlwind jaunt through The Original Series (TOS) universe. There’s a cameo by Gary Lockwood, of 2001: A … | Continue reading
Having barely touched their simple text editor, Notepad, in years, Microsoft has been laying on the modifications in recent times. A few months ago, they fitted out Notepad with an autocorrect and spell-checker feature. That’s fine for people wishing to use Notepad as a word proc … | Continue reading
Filmmakers James Ivory, the late Ismail Merchant, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who collaborated as Merchant Ivory, made over forty features between 1963 and 2009. I think you’d be hard pressed to find any well-known actor of recent decades who did not work with them. My favourite is … | Continue reading
I’ve ended up seeing a stack of movies featuring Irish-American actor Saoirse Ronan, over the years. Tracking all the way back to Atonement in 2007, I think. Maybe I’m not so much of a Ronan fan, as I am the movies she’s in. But it’s an impressive list of titles. The Lovely Bones … | Continue reading
Garrett writing on his Mastodon page: How do we make it easier for “everyone else,” the “normies,” all those “regular” folk who just want to get online, how do we reduce the friction required to get them to make their own little corners of the web? How do we make the #IndieWeb ea … | Continue reading
British author Samantha Harvey has been named winner of the 2024 Booker Prize, with her novel, Orbital, published by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Penguin Books. I don’t know how many novels are set on the International Space Station, I’m sure there’s a few, but Orbital is one of … | Continue reading
Things Magazine has been publishing lists of links for over fourteen years, and here’s the latest batch. I don’t exactly know where they source all their links from, which are all top quality, but it’s a process that must take a certain time. Next time someone tries to tell you p … | Continue reading
The third — and it seems, final — series of Heartbreak High, in the second inception of the gritty Australian high-school TV drama, is on the way. Set at the fictional Hartley High, in Sydney, Heartbreak High originally screened between 1994 and 1999. A rebooted version of the sh … | Continue reading
Pretty popular are sit/stand desks at the moment. I’ve helped a few people assemble them, when they’ve bought one for their home office. Good for your health, sit/stand desks, or so we’re told. Mainly because you’re not sitting all day while working. Some recent research however, … | Continue reading
So say psychologists at the Sydney based University of New South Wales (UNSW): Dr Poppy Watson, adjunct lecturer with UNSW’s School of Psychology, says while the idea warrants exploration, there is a lack of evidence showing excessive doomscrolling of social media is responsible … | Continue reading
For years I was excited by the prospect of a Star Wars sequel trilogy. This, long before what became episodes seven through nine, were even announced. I used to burn the midnight oil reading fan-written Star Wars EU plots and stories, that were published on various Star Wars foru … | Continue reading
Title Drops, by Germany based data visualisation designer and developer Dominikus Baur, analyses the number of times a movie’s title is mentioned during the story. It’s something that’s not always possible though. I’m looking at 2001: A Space Odyssey, as an example. Although if y … | Continue reading
Tyler Cowen, writing at Marginal Revolution, last July: Democrats and leftists are in fact less happy as people than conservatives are, on average. Americans noticed this, if only subconsciously. Cowen made a whole heap of observations — I’ve quoted but one — about the then upcom … | Continue reading
Just as it is becoming near high impossible to make a full-time living as an author, unless a writer’s work is regularly topping best-seller lists, the same increasingly goes for musicians. And their support teams. Gone are the days road crews, stage hands, recording studio worke … | Continue reading
On the eve of the US Presidential election, The New York Times has published a strongly worded dis-endorsement of Republican candidate Donald Trump. It’s short, succinct, and well worth reading. Unlike counterpart publications, including The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times … | Continue reading
Australian indie bookseller Harry Hartog has entered the literary prize fray with their inaugural Book Of The Year award. A shortlist featuring three titles, in three categories respectively, fiction, non-fiction, and children’s and young adults, was published a few days ago. No … | Continue reading
National Novel Writing Month AKA NaNoWriMo, is on this month, for better or worse. But if you’re a writer seeking distractions from various November happenings — I’m referring more to northern hemisphere inhabitants facing the onset of winter — and don’t want to write a novel, th … | Continue reading
American newspapers The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post, have come under fire for declining to endorse US Presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Their refusal to endorse Harris does not, however, from stem from a desire to back Donald Trump. Rather, both publications ha … | Continue reading
A recent poll of voters in Australia and New Zealand has found most would prefer Democrat candidate Kamala Harris to win the upcoming American Presidential election, over her Republican rival Donald Trump: “Fifty per cent of Australians say they’d vote for Harris compared to 26 p … | Continue reading
A police method of prosecuting people suspected of being responsible for committing a serious crime, almost reads like something from a crime novel: Police manufacture a chance meeting with the suspect, then offer them paid work of a non-criminal nature before introducing jobs th … | Continue reading
The time 30 October once fell on a Saturday. The stop here had been unintentional. Unplanned. But that’s how it is for a lot of these stories. I hadn’t been to this place before, yet here I was. At ten minutes to midnight. It would be Sunday in eleven minutes. Not twenty minutes … | Continue reading
Late American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick made his first feature, Fear and Desire, on a budget of a little over fifty-thousand dollars (US), in 1952. Almost thirty-years later, Kubrick had a budget of nineteen million dollars to make The Shining. I expect many successful filmmakers … | Continue reading
Mali Waugh, writing for The Age: I also think that keeping a written diary is not really done any more. I wonder whether part of this is that people are much more accepting of traditionally private things being put in the public domain. For the most part, this is a good thing but … | Continue reading