Dave Winer is on the look out for old-school bloggers who have been writing since circa 2005, and are still going. Anyone who’s been blogging for twenty-plus years is certainly deserving of recognition, but let’s not overlook people are new to the game. If there were an award for … | Continue reading
Cape York Peninsula, Queensland, based Nukgal Wurra woman Wanda Gibson, has won the 2025 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, with her book, Three Dresses. Gibson’s win is the first time a children’s title has won the award. In addition, Three Dresses won the Children’s Literature … | Continue reading
In Moonboy by Anna Ciddor, Letty can travel back in time from the room in her present day house, to the same room in 1969, when it is occupied by a boy her age. Letty is able to relive the excitement of the Apollo 11 launch, but fears her jaunts through time might be changing […] | Continue reading
This year’s festival has events running from Sunday 18 May through to Wednesday 11 June 2025, though I understand the main event goes from Monday 19 May to Sunday 25 May. There’s too many highlights to list separately, but a few events caught my eye. The evening of Monday 19 May … | Continue reading
Manton Reece: But what if Apple has discovered that it’s not actually possible? AI is entirely new, with new requirements that stress the limits of hardware. Apple is attempting to cram a clever intermingling of data and Siri features into 8 GB of RAM. As a comparison, the larges … | Continue reading
Good morning, welcome to the new week, and mind-blown Monday. Today we’re discussing life, the universe, the rotation of galaxies, black holes, and everything. Data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has concluded about two-thirds of galaxies in the universe rotat … | Continue reading
Saturn’s moon count leapt a few days ago, after the International Astronomical Union (IAU) decided to classify an additional one-hundred-and-twenty-eight objects orbiting the ringed planet, as moons. It must be quite the feat of achievement for Saturn to boast it has the most num … | Continue reading
John Gruber, writing at Daring Fireball: What Apple showed regarding the upcoming “personalized Siri” at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis. The Apple that commissioned the futuristic “Knowl … | Continue reading
This is where we get the once-a-year chance to judge a book by its cover… the longlist for the 2025 Australian Book Design Awards (ABDA) was published last week (PDF). Among numerous inclusions (this is the longlist after all) are covers for Tim Winton’s latest novel, Juice, desi … | Continue reading
Small Things Like These, trailer, directed by Belgian filmmaker Tim Mielants, and starring Cillian Murphy, Emily Watson, looks like a drama/thriller not to be missed. Based on the novel of the same name by Irish writer Claire Keegan, and set in 1985, Murphy portrays Bill Furlong, … | Continue reading
The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (BLFC), a humorous literary award honouring terrible made up opening sentences to what will, presumably, be terrible novels, is no more. BLFC founder, Dr Scott Rice, who established the award in 1982, and had been running it with his daughter EJ … | Continue reading
Dave Winer: The Fediverse is impossible to use even for people who understand what it’s trying to do, and most people have no idea. The answer: Stop trying to reinvent Twitter. It wasn’t a great idea! And figure out what really works in a decentralized system. It requires some se … | Continue reading
Santi Ruiz’s article 50 Thoughts on DOGE, being the Department of Government Efficiency, headed up by Elon Musk in the United States, isn’t usually the sort of material I link to here, but his write-up offers this fascinating insight into social media: All of the above means that … | Continue reading
The weather’s not much to speak of, so maybe there’s no point being able to see what’s happening outside anyway. | Continue reading
A throw back Tuesday photo… throwing all the way back to New Year’s Day 2025, as dusk falls on a balmy mid-summer’s evening, at the Avenue Randwick, AKA Randwick Bowling Club, in another life. | Continue reading
I’ve always regarded disassociated as a personal website. Others might see it differently. For instance, I read a few of the IndieWeb blogs, and when compared with some of those people, my website is not personal. I don’t usually write “dear diary” like journal entries, although … | Continue reading
Canadian filmmaker Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 drama/thriller Wake in Fright, trailer, set in the Australian outback, is being re-released after being remastered by Australian film director Mark Hartley. Wake in Fright may not be a horror film in the conventional sense, but to be trapped … | Continue reading
News aggregator website digg — styled with a lower case d, just like disassociated — was once known as the front page of the internet, before falling on hard times in 2010. Reddit went onto assume the front page of the internet mantle, but who knows, digg might be about to reclai … | Continue reading
An English school principal has had all mirrors removed from school bathrooms, after students took to lingering in large groups in school toilets, to look at their reflections. Anywhere else, it might be smartphones being blacklisted, but not at the William Farr Church of England … | Continue reading
Signs of Damage is the third novel from London based Australian author Diana Reid. The Kelly family’s idyllic holiday in the south of France is disturbed when Cass, a thirteen-year-old girl, goes missing. She’s discovered several hours later with no visible signs of injury. Every … | Continue reading
Aside from a co-worker, possibly a boyfriend, and the voice of veteran actor Jim Broadbent, British actor Sally Hawkins is about the only person visible in the twenty-minute short feature The Phone Call, trailer, made in 2013, by Mat Kirkby. In Kirby’s collaboration with James Lu … | Continue reading
Literary award season kicks off in Australia this year, with the announcement of the 2025 Stella Prize literary award longlist yesterday, at Adelaide Writers’ Week, in South Australia. A Language of Limbs, by Dylin Hardcastle Always Will Be, by Mykaela Saunders Black Convicts, by … | Continue reading
From Joan Westenberg’s recent article: why personal websites matter more than ever. SEO made it worse. SEO manipulation always favored platforms over individuals. There’s little doubt rampant SEO manipulation deprived bloggers, independent self-publishers, of many readers in the … | Continue reading
A forty-five second limit for Oscar acceptance speeches was introduced in 2010, but that doesn’t always stop the motivated. Or those who feel they need to acknowledge everyone who contributed to their award. Back in the day — seventy plus years ago — acceptances were usually only … | Continue reading
A 2023 article about the early days of the Linux operating system, written by Lars Wirzenius, who worked with Linus Torvalds, in the early 1990’s to develop the Linux kernel: After finishing the game, Linus started learning Intel assembly language. One day he showed me a program … | Continue reading
A not so common view of Sydney Harbour Bridge, as seen from the nearby suburb of Kirribilli. I’d taken a wrong turn while visiting the area several weeks ago, and while trying to get my bearings, looked up and saw the bridge poking over the top of the trees. | Continue reading
Aside from a two-year gap, from 2018 to 2020, I’ve had one or other of the iPhone SE handsets since 2016. A distinct feature of the SE models was their size. They were generally smaller than the other handsets in the iPhone range. I have big hands, prompting people to say to me, … | Continue reading
The American actor, who retired in 2004, and whose many credits included Young Frankenstein, The French Connection, Unforgiven, and my personal favourite, The Birdcage, died yesterday in Santa Fe, in the U.S. state of New Mexico. Hackman was found at his home along with his wife, … | Continue reading
Rocks on the shore of Gordons Bay, Sydney, as seen from Cliffbrook Parade, Clovelly, Sydney, Australia. | Continue reading
The IndieWeb doesn’t need to “take off”, by Susam Pal. It’d be great to imagine all those people who cling to social media — as if it were a life-support system — suddenly coming to their senses and launching personal websites. Owning their own content, on websites belonging only … | Continue reading
Maciej Cegłowski’s in depth (deep dive) articles on an array of topics are always worthy reading, even if I’m not always able to consume his pieces in one go. In his latest long form column, he takes on the prospect of sending an Apollo-like flight to Mars, complete with a human … | Continue reading
Being able to take the left-overs of a restaurant meal home seems like a sensible idea all around. Aside from dishes that, for whatever reason, may not be safe to eat later on, or the next day. While some dining establishments are averse to the practice, we’ve seldom had any prob … | Continue reading
Long time producers of the James Bond films, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, have agreed to sell the decades old film franchise to Amazon. The new arrangement gives the tech giant full creative control, and Amazon has already indicated they intend to “move beyond the franc … | Continue reading
It’s true: a supermassive black hole is on a collision course with our galaxy. But the happening is at least two billion years away. And even then it may not be a black hole, but rather a “massive invisible object” thought to lurk within the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a smalle … | Continue reading
Matt Webb has been blogging for twenty-five years. What an incredible milestone. Obviously, much has changed in the realm of self-publishing since Webb started out in 2000. Back then, as he points out, we blogged as if we were using social media platforms like Twitter/X: So I wou … | Continue reading
If Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had made a deal with Russia three years ago, the war in Ukraine could have been avoided. According, that is, to United States President Donald Trump: This could’ve been settled very easily, just a half-baked negotiator could have settled … | Continue reading
One thing you can say for certain about American author David Sedaris is that he polarises opinion. Some people think he’s wonderful. Others are far less complimentary. Freelance Australian writer Annemarie Fleming, used to be a fan of Sedaris, until she saw him speaking during a … | Continue reading
Melbourne based Australian author Robert Lukins returns with a new novel, Somebody Down There Likes Me, a follow up to his 2022 book, Loveland. As with Loveland and his 2018 debut, The Everlasting Sunday, Somebody Down There Likes Me, is set outside Australia, this time in a town … | Continue reading
Ukrainian film director Oksana Karpovych’s documentary, Intercepted, which features phone calls between invading Russian soldiers and their families in Russia, has one of the starkest trailers I’ve seen in a long while. Phil Hoad, writing for The Guardian, described Intercepted a … | Continue reading
20 Hours for 20Talk. This fund raising event, taking place in Perth, Australia, on Monday 29 March 2025, has been popping up in my news feeds in recent weeks. Two hundred and fifty participants will spend twenty-hours in a space just two metres square, sans screens and devices. T … | Continue reading
Jack Cheng, an author based in Detroit, Michigan, in the United States, hosts a now fortnightly online get together called a digital mending circle: What, you ask, is a digital mending circle? A virtual co-working session for the kinds of oft-neglected maintenance tasks that accr … | Continue reading
Lucy Knight, writing for The Guardian: [] soon we may not see so many of these author blurbs — Sean Manning, publisher of Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint in the US, has written an essay for Publishers Weekly explaining that as of this year he will “no longer require authors t … | Continue reading
Becoming Led Zeppelin, trailer, a documentary made by Irish-British filmmaker Bernard MacMahon, is screening in Australian cinemas at present, and tells the story of the English band’s first two years, from 1968 to 1970. I listened to their 1971 rock classic Stairway to Heaven — … | Continue reading
David M. Webb, a retired investment banker based in Hong Kong, writes about closing his website, aptly named webb-site, which he launched in 1998, on account of terminal illness: I hope to reach 60 in August and all I want for my birthday is another one, but before I become more … | Continue reading
American actor Jesse Eisenberg played Meta/Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, David Fincher’s 2010 dramatisation about the founding of Facebook. The screenplay, written by Aaron Sorkin, was based on Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book, The Accidental Billionaires. Des … | Continue reading
A disturbing development in a twenty-five year old missing persons case sees a group of old school friends reluctantly reunite. All have reason to be fearful of the re-opened police investigation, and all are willing to do whatever it takes to ensure they are not incriminated. It … | Continue reading
Recent twenty-something finance graduate Annie (Natalia Dyer), who’s about to leave Philadelphia and move to Los Angeles for work, meets Tyler (Rachel Keller), and Danny (Danny Ramirez), who seem to be a couple, at a bar one evening. But neither Tyler nor Danny seem sure they’re … | Continue reading
The next time someone takes exception to your “bad language”, point them to this research: Swearing may also be a sign of intelligence, is associated with less lying and deception at the individual level and higher integrity at the society level, and may be a sign of creativity. … | Continue reading