Hartley Charlton, writing for Mac Rumours: Citing multiple people “directly involved” in making components for the headset, the report says that the scaling back of production began in the early summer. My take here is people thought Vision Pro was going to be the next WOW Apple … | Continue reading
Humane’s AI Pin, launched to less than flattering fanfare last April, may not have lived up to expectations of being an “iPhone killer”. But CosmOS, the device’s operating system, is something else altogether, says Om Malik, writing for Crazy Stupid Tech: An AI-focused operating … | Continue reading
Good Food have published their list of the twenty best cafes in Sydney, Australia. We eat at restaurants, but we live in cafes. Yes, but we don’t work in cafes. Or we shouldn’t. If we do though, then only for short periods of time, right? And for a minute I thought one place I oc … | Continue reading
David Heinemeier Hansson looks at why more people don’t migrate to Linux operating systems: The world is full of free invitations to self-improvement that are ignored by most people most of the time. Putting it crudely, it’s easier to be fat and ignorant in a world of cheap, empt … | Continue reading
There has been a ban on the use of smartphones at a school in Iceland since 2019. No prizes for guessing what the result was. A phone ban has been in place at Öldutún School since the beginning of 2019, and according to the principal, it has worked well. The school’s atmosphere a … | Continue reading
Jamie Zawinski, one of the original creators of the erstwhile Netscape browser, recalls the day the first version, Netscape 0.9, was shipped thirty-years ago, last week: According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in t … | Continue reading
Dave Winer, writing at Scripting News: One of the things that makes me want to see Automattic stick around and grow is that they have a really large codebase that has been scaled, debugged and maintained for over 20 freaking years. And the most important thing — they don’t break … | Continue reading
Sarah Manavis, writing for The Guardian: A survey commissioned by the Booksellers Association ahead of Bookshop Day tomorrow has found that gen Z and millennials are more likely to buy a book based on a bookseller’s recommendation — in person, in a bookshop — than older age group … | Continue reading
Mary Grace Descourouez, writing for Stanford Lifestyle Medicine: Additional studies found that adults who engage in excessive screen time or have a diagnosed smartphone addiction had lower gray matter volume. Gray matter is brain tissue essential for daily human functioning and i … | Continue reading
When it comes to political leanings, I’m probably centre/left. But I have a number of family and acquaintances who definitely lean more to the right. Of course, everyone is different, but certain of the mannerisms of the more conservative people I know are particularly distinct. … | Continue reading
HTML for people, by American software developer Blake Watson, is a helpful resource for people wishing to build their first website, with a simple text editor. HTML for people guides first time web designers through the process of creating webpages, to uploading them, to produce … | Continue reading
The Seoul based author is the first South Korean to be named a Nobel Prize literature laurate. Han Kang has written over a dozen novels since 1995, so if you’re a book reader, chances are you’ve seen at least one. The Vegetarian, published in 2016, won the International Booker Pr … | Continue reading
I’m not sure disassociated always rates as a personal website, with its informational content style. But it’s owned personally by me, and I personally write the content, so on that basis it’s a personal website. A lot of what I post are my thoughts on the many and various things … | Continue reading
ProRata is an AI chatbot that pays the content producers whose work is used to format answers to questions put to it. Yes, you read that correctly. The technology is being backed by American investor and entrepreneur Bill Gross, writes Fred Vogelstein, for Crazy Stupid Tech: But … | Continue reading
Wikipedia has created a task force to identity instances of poor quality, unsourced content, being generated by AI chatbots. The online encyclopaedia will still allow AI apps to compose articles, provided they do so in accordance with their policies: The purpose of this project i … | Continue reading
I’ve been trying out Hardcover, a social catalogue for book readers, founded by Adam Fortuna in April 2021. Like a few people I think, he was looking for an alternative to Goodreads (GR), which at the time was probably the big name in book social cataloguing. StoryGraph is one op … | Continue reading
Samantha Cole, writing at 404 Media: The checkbox on the login page for WordPress.org asks users to confirm, “I am not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise.” Users who don’t check that box can’t log in or register a new account. As of Tuesday, that check … | Continue reading
Microsoft is doing away with their old basic, but useful, word processor, WordPad, which has been bundled with Windows Operating Systems for nearly thirty-years. It will not be a feature at all in Windows 11. Yet another reason to migrate away from Windows all together, perhaps? … | Continue reading
Frequent use of the Oxford Comma, also referred to as the Serial Comma, is — apparently — a tell-tale sign a written work was composed using an AI chatbot. The repeat use of punctuation mark is among seven indicators researchers at Cambridge University, in the United Kingdom, ide … | Continue reading
New York City based web designer, standards advocate, founder of A List Apart, and many other things, Jeffrey Zeldman: I stayed because I believe in the work we do. I believe in the open web and owning your own content. I’ve devoted nearly three decades of work to this cause, and … | Continue reading
No posts about sport, hardly ever, then two in a week. But the NRL football (rugby league) grand final (Penrith Panthers versus Melbourne Storm) is on this long weekend, and since I wrote about the AFL the other day, this seems right. More a personality/psychology post though: a … | Continue reading
Evan Sheehan, writing at The Darth Mall: I think Jeremy Keith is right, that all that really matters is having your own website. However big or small, however you make it, whatever you choose to put on it. I just don’t think that this is what the IndieWeb is actually focused on. … | Continue reading
Louis Menand, writing for The New Yorker. How familiar does this sound: Between 1998 and 2020, more than half of the independent bookstores in the United States went out of business. It was a similar story for personal websites and blogs, though definitely across different timefr … | Continue reading
This Halifax Examiner article, by Philip Moscovitch, which features a number of quotes by Matt Pearce, a Los Angeles Times journalist, recorded on a recent episode of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, has been doing the rounds. The upshot being hyperlinks, links from one webpage to … | Continue reading
Juice is the latest novel by Australian author Tim Winton, which was published yesterday. From this synopsis, Juice sounds like it blends elements of the Max Mad saga, with Winton’s own environmental and climate change concerns: Two fugitives, a man and a child, drive all night a … | Continue reading
I’m not very sporty as regular readers will have gathered. Of the approximate sixteen-hundred posts here at present, less than half a dozen are sport related. Of these, the majority relate to the Matildas, the Australian women’s football/soccer team, which I wrote during last yea … | Continue reading
I’m pretty sure the 1984 film, A Room with a View, made by James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, was my introduction to the work of British stage and screen actor Maggie Smith, who died last week, aged 89. I’d been trying to read the 1908 novel of the same name, by E.M. Forster, but w … | Continue reading
Google search does away with its cache, an archived copy of an earlier version of a webpage, but now links to the Internet Archive’s (IA) Wayback Machine copy instead. Try it on your own website, assuming it’s indexed by Google that is. On the search result, click the “more about … | Continue reading
Australian teachers in NSW, now have access to NSWEduChat, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool, intended to help educators get a grip on AI tools: The tool aims to provide additional support to staff in developing and delivering teaching experiences, easing workload de … | Continue reading
A few days ago, a group called the Social Web Foundation was launched. A coming together of “leaders of the open social networking movement“, the foundation aims to make “connections between social platforms with the open standard protocol ActivityPub.” Rather than me reinventing … | Continue reading
The iPhone 16, Apple’s latest smartphone, has arrived on shop shelves. There are four versions of the device: 16, 16 Plus, 16 Pro, and 16 Pro Max. In time all will feature Apple Intelligence, Apple’s artificial intelligence (AI) offering, which will be “deeply integrated” into iO … | Continue reading
Amazon, the online retailer and tech company, has directed all employees to return to the office by early January 2025. Presently workers are required to be in the workplace at least three days a week. In a recent companywide announcement, CEO Andy Jassy says he wants to do away … | Continue reading
I’m guessing a few people had a sleepless night on Monday/Tuesday, after getting hold of the new Sally Rooney novel, Intermezzo, at one of the midnight release events earlier this week. Book reviewers, meanwhile, were probably lucky enough to score an advanced reader copy (ARC), … | Continue reading
Sara E. Teller, writing for Legal Reader: The research, published in BMC Medicine, focuses on the use of video games, particularly the well-known Tetris game that has been around for decades, to help reduce intrusive memories, a core and sometimes debilitating symptom of the cond … | Continue reading
American writer and researcher, Gwern Branwen: But how can I not want to write a book? And I get it: writing a book is sacred and unquestionable, the ultimate achievement for Western intellectuals — better than being arrested in a protest (because you don’t have to get sweaty), b … | Continue reading
Applying for a job, going through the interview process and what not, is much like walking on eggshells. Take one wrong step, and all your efforts may be for nothing. Even something as seemingly innocuous as the way you like your cup of coffee prepared, could be your undoing: I w … | Continue reading
There’s the challenge. There’s the adventure, the pioneering spirit, of setting off to another planet. Not everything is, or should be, easy. But are those really the right reasons for wishing to establish a human colony on the fourth rock from the Sun, Mars? Mars does not have a … | Continue reading
Tomorrow, Tuesday 24 September 2024, is the day Sally Rooney fans have been waiting for. That’s when the Irish author’s fourth novel, Intermezzo, is published. And from what I (and everyone else) can gather, anticipation is at fever pitch. The good news, for some Australian fans … | Continue reading
Data the nearly fifty-year old deep space probe was returning to Earth earlier this year, was getting all scrambled up. But dutiful mission controllers sorted that out. This despite Voyager 1 being so far away that it’d take a day to reach, assuming we had a vessel that could tra … | Continue reading
Professional social network (assuming there’s such a thing) LinkedIn has started collecting user data to train its own AI bot. No surprise there. They’ve apparently auto opted all members in, whether they like it or not. No surprise there. Rachel Tobac, CEO of SocialProof Securit … | Continue reading
Photography exuding the aesthetic of American filmmaker Wes Anderson, is on show in Australia at the Accidentally Wes Anderson exhibition, in Melbourne, until early November 2024. “Accidentally Wes Anderson: The Exhibition” is a journey through more than 200 of the most beautiful … | Continue reading
I’ve always thought setting up a podcast show would be fun. But, you know, I have no proper recording equipment, nor any idea what sort of subject matter such a “show” would feature. So the idea has sat dormant all these years. But yesterday, I learned about NotebookLM, Google’s … | Continue reading
Amelia Nierenberg, writing for The New York Times: The intention of Sweden’s policy — and others like it — is to cut down on distractions, promote healthy development and help preserve the innocence of childhood. But some experts wonder if the guidance — however well-intentioned … | Continue reading
Chevalier College, an Australian high-school near the NSW town of Bowral, about a ninety-minute drive south of Sydney, will allow some senior students to study from home one day a week. The decision follows a year-long trial of the scheme. The school argues the traditional five-d … | Continue reading
Thomas Germain, writing for Gizmodo: Nostalgia for a button that a lot of people probably haven’t heard of might seem absurd, but Google’s cache function was a foundational solution to one of the web’s earliest problems. As the web transformed into a more stable infrastructure, c … | Continue reading
Instagram (IG) owner Meta is moving to make the social media platform safer for users under the age of sixteen, and introducing a host of new parental controls: Today, we’re introducing Instagram Teen Accounts, a new experience for teens, guided by parents. Teen Accounts have bui … | Continue reading
Apollo 13: Survival, a Netflix produced documentary, trailer, recounts the story of what was meant to be the third Apollo crewed landing on the Moon, in 1970. An exploding oxygen tank in the body of the command module craft, on-route to the Moon, however spelt the end of the land … | Continue reading
Sydney based Australian author Charlotte Wood has gone through to the shortlist of the 2024 Booker Prize, with her novel Stone Yard Devotional, which was announced on Monday 16 September 2024. If Wood were to win the Booker Prize this year, she would become the first Australian a … | Continue reading