Enrique Rey, writing at EL PAÍS: Like all nostalgic escapism, the myth about a world wide web before the age of sarcasm (and the dominance of big companies) where everything was more sincere and simpler is a melancholic trap. The Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann wrote that when yo … | Continue reading
The Australian Indie Book Awards span six categories: fiction, non-fiction, debut fiction, illustrated non-fiction, children’s, and young adult, and last week the shortlist for the 2025 awards was published. My main interest is fiction, where Dusk by Robbie Arnott, and The Ledge … | Continue reading
The Body Mass Index (BMI), may, at last, be about to be shown the door. Health care experts from across the world have been calling for a new means of defining obesity, according to research published by The Lancet: We recommend that BMI should be used only as a surrogate measure … | Continue reading
Upcoming changes to Meta’s fact checking and content moderation policies might precipitate greater free speech in some parts of the world. But the removal of these checks and balances could trigger unrest and violence in other regions, say Libby Hogan and Natasya Salim, writing f … | Continue reading
What makes for a good blog? Merlin Mann, writing in 2008, the golden age of blogging if ever there was one, has a few answers to the question: Good blogs reflect focused obsessions. People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even five things. But, the … | Continue reading
I’m not really a fan of the band that was formed in Sydney in 1973, and is still going strong, but it seems odd that the house where founders, brothers Angus and Malcolm Young used to live, and founded AC/DC, was not worthy of preserving. For those not in the know, AC/DC are prob … | Continue reading
The director of Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, and the surely surreal Mulholland Drive, died on Thursday 16 January 2025. We shall watch Mulholland Drive, which is in the home movie library, this weekend in his memory. | Continue reading
The Free Our Feeds project launched a few days, prompted in part by changes to fact checking and content moderation policies across Meta properties, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. The goal of Free Our Feeds seems admirable, to prevent one person/entity having full co … | Continue reading
Lake Superior State University’s annual list of words and phrases we should cease using, was published recently. Among inclusions are game changer, era (you know why…), IYKYK (If You Know, You Know), and sorry, not sorry, which I can’t stand. Another term is dropped, but I don’t … | Continue reading
Research from Massachusetts General Hospital, I believe, in the United States, possibly underscores what many of us already suspect: that prolonged use of social media may not be the best: This kind of study cannot prove that your hours of doomscrolling is directly making you Tik … | Continue reading
PRINT’s annual list of the best book covers of 2024, features double the number of entries as 2023, one-hundred, up from fifty. Either a record number of books were published in 2024, or cover design has become so good more books needed to be included. Among inclusions is a cover … | Continue reading
Tim Carmody, writing for Wired: Because HTML looks easy and lacks features like formal conditional logic and Turing-completeness, it’s often dismissed as not a programming language. “That’s not real code; it’s just markup” is a common refrain. Now, I’m no stranger to the austere … | Continue reading
Justine Calma, writing for The Verge: Meta is essentially shifting responsibility to users to weed out lies on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, raising fears that it’ll be easier to spread misleading information about climate change, clean energy, public health risks, … | Continue reading
Tom Saunders writing for ABC News: Your average La Niña forms in winter, peaks in late spring, then gradually weakens through summer. However, the current edition has not played by the rule book — for only the second time in 75 years, its onset has arrived in the middle of summer … | Continue reading
Rambles.Net is an online magazine founded by Tom Knapp in 1999, and still going strong over twenty-five later. Knapp himself continues to contribute. Rambles is another example of Indie Web in its original inception; I think a Facebook page is the only hint of social media presen … | Continue reading
American engineer and product manager Den Delimarsky offers another way of looking at the core Indie Web tenets of owning your own website domain, and owning your own content. See yourself as a property owner, rather than a renter. If any of your online presence is on social medi … | Continue reading
Josh Ellis writes about buying a plate of cookies he had no intention of eating, from an entrepreneurial twelve-year old neighbour going door to door, who was selling them. Why would anyone pay out good money for something they’re not going to consume? Ellis describes the gesture … | Continue reading
From yesterday, 1 January 2025, the price of a ten-year Australian passport rose to four-hundred-and-twelve Australian dollars. That’s the cost of thirty-five pints of Victoria Bitter at the local pub. Happy New Year. As a comparison, the new price converts to a little over two-h … | Continue reading
Maxwell Neely-Cohen, writing for Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab: If you, right now, had the goal of digitally storing something for 100 years, how should you even begin to think about making that happen? How should the bits in your stewardship be stored with such a t … | Continue reading
The annual Hottest 100 countdown is part and parcel of the Australian music scene. Hosted by Australian indie radio station Triple J, since 1978, the poll gives listeners the chance to vote for their favourite music of the previous year. The countdown itself takes place on Saturd … | Continue reading
The concept of gravastars (or gravitational vacuum stars) is a fascinating alternative to the idea of black holes, although if their presence were ever proved, they would not rule out the existence of black holes. Proposed by Pawel O. Mazur and Emil Mottola some twenty years ago, … | Continue reading
Code is code, what difference does the font you choose in whatever app you use for coding possibly make? As long as the code works as intended, what does appearance have to do with it? But the conversation I found on the topic — which in fact started months ago — actually relates … | Continue reading
Literary writers at The Sydney Morning Herald canvassed critics, editors, and writers, including Jane Sullivan, David Free, Gyan Yankovich, and Beejay Silcox, to determine the best ten books of this century, or the last twenty-five years. Producing such a small list from a relati … | Continue reading
I’m talking about the Australian downtempo electronica music act, not the public broadcaster of India. In the hubbub of the silly season, I forgot to mention a new album, Tranquil Motion, was released earlier this month. Track it down on Bandcamp, or your favourite music streamer … | Continue reading
Xavier H.M., writing on his Mastodon page: Your neocities blog is cute but I can’t read the 5pt font and your cursor is the size of a bread crumb. The web page is loading so many gifs my computer sounds like a boeing 747. disassociated once, in a way, looked like a Neocities webs … | Continue reading
Dark energy does not exist, and the universe, while continuing to expand, is not doing so in a uniform fashion. In other words, the cosmos may look more like a potato, rather than a sphere. This according to recent research by astronomers and scientists at the University of Cante … | Continue reading
The introverts among us live almost permanently in a sort of internal exile, or a rich inner life, as Waleed Aly referred to it during the COVID-19 lockdowns. But the idea of getting away from it all, without actually going anywhere, is gaining traction more widely, writes Jacque … | Continue reading
Let’s flashback a year. Australian telecommunications company Telstra might have hit the right note with its Christmas theme advertising in 2023, by way of this ninety second commercial. The song excerpted in the ad is Oh Christmas, by Brisbane based duo Zefereli. Listen to the f … | Continue reading
Weather that is fine and not too warm seems to the Christmas Day weather forecast for most of Australia. But the days either side will be a different matter, writes Tom Saunders for the ABC: The tumultuous week of variability will commence with a wintry Monday for the south-east, … | Continue reading
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