A few years ago I did an online coffee quiz. Highly scientific no doubt. My taste in coffee was — because I’m primarily a cappuccino drinker — adjudged to be “entry level”. Nice. I occasionally partake of other varieties, like short black or piccolo, but they’re just a little lig … | Continue reading
It looks like AI scrapers have been using a surreptitious method of making their marauding presence appear legitimate, this time by appending a bogus query parameter, or tracking tag, to the URL of the webpage they are targeting. In the last month or so, I have seen a stack of pa … | Continue reading
Located one-point-one-five billion light years from Earth, the behemoth galaxy, at one-point-seven-million light in years in length, somewhat dwarfs our home, the Milky Way, which measures in at a mere one-hundred-thousand light years across. Using kiloparsecs as a metric, the si … | Continue reading
I’m still reading through Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recently published vision of an AI future, but this paragraph jumped out at me: Humanity is not a monoculture. People’s diverse values represent different tradeoffs they would make on important issues. There is no technological … | Continue reading
Strathfield is a suburb located in the west of Sydney, Australia. I don’t know many people living in the area, so I’m not there often, but have occasionally wandered the streets near the railway station. About a third of residents were born in Australia, while a reasonable number … | Continue reading
Since the volume of slop-in-general is of epidemic proportions on the platform, it makes perfect sense an AI agent write actual AI slop for consumption there. | Continue reading
The Voyager 1 space probe is almost one light-day away from Earth. But the craft has been on its trajectory since being launched in 1977. Deep space flights carrying people will need to move at far greater speed if they are to, for example, reach Alpha Centaur, the star system cl … | Continue reading
Tangentially related to the previous post. A few days ago Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published the company’s latest AI vision. Or the one for this week at least. And the future is rosy, incredibly rosy. If Meta has it their way, everyone will have access to their own “exceptionally … | Continue reading
There’s good news and there’s bad news, but in reality not much is really good. The good, such that it is; AI bots could well put scammers out of work. The bad; the AI scammers are far more effective at deceiving people. Disturbingly though, these are scams that involve entering … | Continue reading
We’re talking about things like mass extinctions and major geological events. Scientists are not exactly sure why momentous upheavals seem to occur at approximately the same intervals, but they have theories. These range from Earth’s position in space over time, relative to our g … | Continue reading
Tech bros across the world have been giving everyone a right ear-bashing in the last few years about their AI agents, and the need for data centres to power them. And they’ve been crying foul in response to the environmental concerns many have expressed. Tech bros worldwide are a … | Continue reading
Foto is a photo sharing platform I should really use more often. I originally signed up just over a year ago, but haven’t really used it much lately. Possibly because of my attitude at the moment to apps, and anything that is too much like social media. Nonetheless, I ought to po … | Continue reading
I’ve been talking about time-travel stories recently, so here’s another one, this time a book. Time Travel for Beginners, is the latest novel by Sydney based Australian author Jaclyn Moriarty. If you can find a shop called the Time Travel Agency, located somewhere in Sydney, then … | Continue reading
We missed the sadly short-lived stage adaptation of the 1985 time-travel escapade movie Back to the Future (BTTF), during its brief Australian run, in late 2025. I did however catch A Future on Stage, trailer, a documentary about bringing the original film to the stage as a music … | Continue reading
British musician Charli XCX released her eighth studio album, Music, Fashion, Film, in July 2026. Not so much of the glitchcore this time around, though there’s one or two (digital) scratches in the mix. | Continue reading
The popular weekly email newsletter, written by Melbourne based Australia curator and publisher Kai Brach, has actually been published five-hundred-and-seventy-nine times, but earlier editions were written under another title. But who’s counting? True to its tagline, “one email w … | Continue reading
Queanbeyan, NSW, based author and visual artist Omar Musa, has been named winner of the 2026 Miles Franklin Literary Award, for his 2025 novel Fierceland. Fierceland is Musa’s second novel, and tells the story of two siblings returning to their home in Malaysian Borneo, for their … | Continue reading
Jorijn Schrijvershof’s decision to close the Mastodon instance toot.community, which he established in late 2024, highlights many of the difficulties facing instance administrators on the decentralised social media platform: Every day, I deal with spam, bots, technical issues, ab … | Continue reading
A “record” El Niño event, presently wreaking havoc in the northern hemisphere, is expected to lead to an excessively warm and dry spring in Australia, and, no doubt, other regions south of the equator. We’ve barely had a winter in my part of the world this year. To be sure, there … | Continue reading
Members of the professional network will be able to flag posts they think are AI generated. I haven’t been a LinkedIn participant in years — I have a personal website, why would I? — but it seems to me slop has been a problem on the platform since before AI was what it is. | Continue reading
Mastodon is a truly decentralised micro-bloging platform. Anyone sufficiently motivated, and technically proficient, can start their own instance, or community. Depending on the administrator, instances can be completely isolated, accessible only to its members, or federated, tha … | Continue reading
Feel good Australian comedy classic movie, The Castle, made in 1997, is set the join the likes of Back to the Future, The Color Purple, and Titanic, in being adapted for the stage. The story follows a working class family trying to stop cashed-up property developers seizing their … | Continue reading
Astronomers may have discovered the first moon, or satellite, outside the solar system, about seventy-three light years from Earth. Plenty of exoplanets, planets orbiting stars other than the Sun, have been found, but this might be the first time a moon accompanying one of these … | Continue reading
Natalie Kaufman, writing for the Wall Street Journal, about an apparent trend in early twenty-somethings, to rely on AI agents to supply them with conversation starters, and pickup lines. The article is paywalled, but would you really want to read about this? I think these things … | Continue reading
AusAlert is a new, nation wide, emergency warning system being rolled out by the Australian government. Should there be a crisis or disaster of some sort, authorities will be able to send warnings to mobile phones in the vicinity. The alerts, which will be heralded by a short, bu … | Continue reading
The basic, free, verification badge, differs from the more familiar, paid for, Meta Verified blue badge. To qualify, applicants need to satisfy a number of requirements, including having a Facebook (FB) account that is in “good standing”. They will need to record a short video, … | Continue reading
I like the idea of Webmentions, a protocol informing a blogger, website owner, that another blog/website has linked to them. Similar to pingbacks, Webmentions aren’t just another tech-gimmick though. In 2017 they were adopted as a recommendation by the W3C, the international body … | Continue reading
Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie, trailer, is a bat-shit crazy (to say the least) time-travel caper I found while perusing the movie listings on Kanopy last week. It’s a story about two musicians, Matt Johnson, and Jay McCarrol, portraying themselves, who live in Toronto, Cana … | Continue reading
Coleman Spilde, writing for Salon: Since its expansion from movie rentals and streaming into original content, Netflix has made it clear that its sole priority is Netflix, not its customers, and certainly not the art of visual media. Members of Letterboxd, a social network for lo … | Continue reading
Hobart, Tasmania, based Australian software engineer Elia Scotto: First of all, you don’t have to make time to read. What you need to do is read every single time you are not doing something else. In today’s world, most people pick up their phones as soon as they get a moment of … | Continue reading
I wrote about the Wonders of Web Weaving podcast on Monday, and I’m back. A couple of days ago, an interview with New Zealand/Aotearoa IndieWeb blogger fLaMEd, of fLaMEd Fury, was posted. FlaMEd has been online with a personal website around the same time as I have — the late 199 … | Continue reading
Last week the Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese unveiled his government’s AI strategy. Part of the proposed framework includes a provision to ensure Australian writers, musicians, artists, and journalists, are paid in the event their work is used in the development of AI … | Continue reading
A new edition of the Internet Phone Book is in the works, and co-publishers Elliot Cost, and Kristoffer Tjalve (also a Tiny Awards organiser), recently spoke about the esteemed directory on the Wonders of Web Weaving podcast. There are a ton of podcasts out there, but I take time … | Continue reading
Anthony Albanese, the Australian Prime Minister, says he wants to make Australia an “attractive destination” for investment in AI development, during a speech delivered on Wednesday. Albanese also wants to balance the opportunities and risks presented by the technologies, particu … | Continue reading
Clare Armstrong, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): Australia will seek to harness the benefits of artificial intelligence without losing control of it by tackling challenges such as data centres, copyright, and jobs through a new national framework. Buoye … | Continue reading
SpaceX’s two-trillion dollar (US) share-market valuation astonished market analysts, investors, and probably a great many other people, alike. Roger Montgomery, an Australian financial adviser, sets out in simple terms how the remarkable figure was calculated. My head is still sp … | Continue reading
Rose Horowitch, writing for The Atlantic (gift link): Reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was st … | Continue reading
If you’ve had enough of Wordle, here’s something new to try. You’re given a jumbled-up selection of letters, and have thirty-seconds to figure out the word. The game starts out with a couple of four-letter words, but the they get longer as you progress. There’s no need to tell an … | Continue reading
The resurgence of personal, independent, and non-commercial websites has been with us for several years, propelled in part by the IndieWeb/SmallWeb communities, and a heap of discontent — to say the least — with the present, excessively commercial, nature of the web. And this rev … | Continue reading
Find out where you sit on the AI compass, which is a little similar to the vote compass. There are thirty AI classifications including sceptic, Luddite, conscientious objector, doomsday prepper, founder, and prophet. Each has a patron saint. Mine is Amanda Askell, though I’m not … | Continue reading
Individuals, educational institutions, and other organisations have to make payment in some form or other to access the work of writers, musicians, artists, and other creatives. It seems like a naive question, but why should it be any different for the tech companies who are pres … | Continue reading
Perhaps we see something of the future when we look to the past. Chloe VS History, a YouTube channel, presents significant chapters of our history, hosted by a buoyant young woman named Chloe, a would-be time traveller, and seen through the lens of what is presumably a smartphone … | Continue reading
CJ Chilvers: Before influencers, there were bloggers. Before bloggers, there were TV stars, rock stars, and movie stars. Call them whatever you want, but individuals have always been the drivers of engagement and trust. This is a point Alex Cowen reiterated in a recent talk given … | Continue reading
Fred Kozlowski: My favorite figure in the post-Roman period is Theoderic — ruling 493 to 526, twenty years after the “fall” of Rome. He took over the structure of the Roman Empire and ruled it as a functionally emperor-like figure. He was a Goth and an Arian Christian, or in othe … | Continue reading
George Musser, writing for Nautilus, ponders the nature of coincidence, particularly the more “out there” instances. Read about his repeated encounters with another backpacker, as he travelled — solo — in Africa some years ago. I could probably write at length on this topic. For … | Continue reading
The first trailer for the Taika Waititi directed adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, Klara and the Sun has landed. I’m not one to complain about differences between the book and its movie counterpart — mainly because adapting a novel for the big screen is far from straight … | Continue reading
Nominations for the 2026 Tiny Awards, are being accpted until the end of the month, June. Entry is open to websites of a non-commercial and/or personal nature, launched between July 2025 and July 2026. Submissions from brands and agencies are not accepted. The same goes for apps. … | Continue reading
Winter temperatures have been well above average, in recent times, on what is supposed to be the world’s coldest landmass. The unusually high temperatures being experienced in parts of Antarctica seems like it accounts for the so-far mild start to winter in our part of Australia. … | Continue reading