United Kingdom based web frontend architect Den Odell: HTML tables gave us something no other element did at the time: control. You could create rows and columns. You could define cell widths and heights. You could nest tables inside tables to carve up the page into zones. That c … | Continue reading
An Australian woman, identified only as Sarah, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: No-one told me my identity had been stolen. No-one told me that my drivers licence and my passport, two of the most crucial personal documents, were compromised and had been for ye … | Continue reading
San Francisco based developer Indragie Karunaratne: I recently shipped Context, a native macOS app for debugging MCP servers. The goal was to build a useful developer tool that feels at home on the platform, powered by Apple’s SwiftUI framework. I’ve been building software for th … | Continue reading
Danielle Abril, writing for MSN: Increasingly, job candidates are running into virtual recruiters for screenings. The conversational agents, built on large language models, help recruiting firms and hiring companies respond to every applicant, conduct interviews around-the-clock … | Continue reading
Lisa Bonos and Danielle Abril, writing for The Washington Post: Clifton Sellers attended a Zoom meeting last month where robots outnumbered humans. He counted six people on the call including himself, Sellers recounted in an interview. The 10 others attending were note-taking app … | Continue reading
Apologies, but not all messages being sent through the contact form are reaching me. I’m looking into what’s happening as I type. If you’ve tried to message me in the last twenty-four hours, please leave a comment below (it won’t be publicly published) and I’ll get back to you. T … | Continue reading
Perhaps the world is still sufficiently pre-peak the work of American filmmaker Wes Anderson, to the point that photographers still want to emulate his style in their work. If you believe the former, and are among the latter, then Shoot Like Wes, a book by British journalist and … | Continue reading
Managing time when time doesn’t exist, from the Multiverse Employee Handbook, a science comedy podcast, produced by Robb Corrigan: The real productivity crisis emerged when physicists tried merging Einstein’s relativity with quantum mechanics. They discovered something that would … | Continue reading
Nathan Drescher, writing for Android Authority: For one week, I lived without modern technology unless it was absolutely necessary for work and emergencies. I carried a Discman, scribbled in a paper planner, and made phone calls instead of texting. It was chaotic at first, but od … | Continue reading
Running since 2015, the Digital News Report, published annually by the University of Canberra, surveyed nearly one-hundred-thousand people globally, including about two-thousand Australians. The key findings of the 2025 report are probably of no surprise to many of us. About twen … | Continue reading
This from recent research at the Cellular Ageing and Senescence laboratory at Queen Mary University of London’s Centre for Molecular Cell Biology: In new research published by scientists studying fission yeast — a single-celled organism surprisingly similar to human cells — resea … | Continue reading
Dana Morse, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: Experiences of racism included verbal abuse, social media abuse, being refused entry or service, being prevented from renting a property, and physical violence, with younger First Nations people reporting higher lev … | Continue reading
Sarah Perez, writing for Techcrunch: As the pop-up message explains, by clicking “Allow,” you’ll let Facebook generate new ideas from your camera roll, like collages, recaps, AI restylings, or photo themes. To work, Facebook says it will upload media from your camera roll to its … | Continue reading
Tom Saunders, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: When a low-pressure system transforms from non-existence to a formidable storm just a day later, meteorologists label it a “bomb cyclone”, or a system that has experienced “bombogenesis”. The expression “bomb” is … | Continue reading
In 2010, Claire McCarthy’s publicity company kindly gave me the opportunity to ask her about her then upcoming film, The Waiting City, which starred Radha Mitchell and Joel Edgerton. I published the interview on this day fifteen years ago. I remember feeling a tad apprehensive pr … | Continue reading
Colloquially referred to as Margaret and David, the long time Australian film critics became, on Sunday 1 June 2025, the first non-actors to be inducted to the Australian Film Walk of Fame. The pair are perhaps best known for the two film review television shows they co-hosted, T … | Continue reading
While I am (slowly, very slowly) working to host my snapshot photos here on disassociated, I couldn’t resist signing up for Foto, a new Instagram-like photography platform. Unlike similar platforms, Foto offers posts in chronological order, free of adverts. Foto also undertakes n … | Continue reading
Talking of Miles Franklin, the late Australian author, not the literary award named in her honour, Netflix is filming an adaptation of her 1901 novel, My Brilliant Career. Principal photography is currently underway in parts of South Australia, with Melbourne born Australian acto … | Continue reading
The apparent discovery of an extremely distant dwarf-planet, known as 2017 OF201, might put paid to the speculated existence of a likewise far-flung Neptune-size planet, often referred to as Planet Nine, says Isaac Schultz, writing for Gizmodo: Which brings us, inevitably, to Pla … | Continue reading
Six titles have been included on the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award Shortlist, which was announced yesterday: Chinese Postman, by Brian Castro Theory & Practice, by Michelle de Kretser Dirt Poor Islanders, by Winnie Dunn Compassion, by Julie Janson Ghost Cities, by Siang Lu H … | Continue reading
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, trailer, directed by Simon Curtis, with a fair chunk of long time Downton cast members reprising their roles, will be released globally on Friday 12 September 2025. I’ve only ever seen series three of the original show, which aired in the second h … | Continue reading
Jamie Thingelstad recently suggested IndieWeb is to the web of today, what punk rock was to music of the 1970’s. IndieWeb is Punk, he said. In a comment on Thingelstad’s post, Robert Birming said the slogan would look good on a t-shirt. Not long after, Jim Mitchell unveiled a lin … | Continue reading
This is — if anything you read on social media is accurate that is — the clearest ever photo of dwarf planet Pluto. The original set of images used to composite this one were taken ten years ago, when NASA’s New Horizons space probe flew passed Pluto in July 2015. By colour enhan … | Continue reading
We order an item from an online retailer, submit payment, and a few days later it arrives in a box on the doorstep. Most convenient. On Falling, trailer, the debut feature of Edinburgh, Scotland, based Portuguese filmmaker Laura Carreira, explores the lesser seen, behind the scen … | Continue reading
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writing for The Register: As for Firefox itself, users are reporting a growing number of technical problems that have eroded the browser’s reputation for reliability. In particular, even longtime users are reporting that more and more mainstream website … | Continue reading
Alana Yzola, writing for Wired: Criticism and warnings of Gen-AI authors snagging coveted deals are flooding both Threads and TikTok, with writers and readers sometimes flinging around accusations when they suspect someone is using AI as part of their creative process. Now, Aveya … | Continue reading
Administered by NASA, the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) website started posting images in June 1995. This is a time, that in 2025, feels positively prehistoric, when it comes to the web. I’ve been looking at APOD on and off for maybe twenty years, and as far as I recall, th … | Continue reading
Microsoft is calling it the infinite workday. Based on telemetry data, gleaned from apps including Microsoft 365, the American tech company has found the workday has been gradually becoming longer, and work-related activities are increasingly seeping into the weekend. This for pe … | Continue reading
Meta’s Adam Mosseri, writing on his Threads page: We’re testing a way for you to hide spoilers in Threads posts. When creating a post, highlight text or images and tap “mark spoiler” to blur it. People can reveal the hidden text or image by tapping it in their feed. Mosseri claim … | Continue reading
It should be six-thirty in the morning, on the east coast of Australia, when this post is published, but all things being equal, I’ll be slumbering for another ninety-minutes. And when the alarm on my iPhone starts chiming, I’ll likely press the snooze button a number of times. I … | Continue reading
KDE, developers of free and open source software, have launched a campaign encouraging Windows 10 (Win10) users to migrate to a Linux Operating System (this article is a good starting point), rather than moving to the Windows 11 (Win11) Operating System (OS). Win11 stands to rend … | Continue reading
Sydney based Australian writer Mary Colussi has been named winner of the 2025 Penguin Literary Prize, with her manuscript Touch Grass. Going by this brief outline of the story, Touch Grass sounds like a work of speculative fiction: Touch Grass tells the story of a depressed delet … | Continue reading
Joanna Stern, technology writer at The Wall Street Journal, and Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, were this year’s guests on the live edition of John Gruber’s Talk Show podcast at WWDC last week. It’s the first time in ten years senior Apple executives have not appeared … | Continue reading
Simon Newton writing on the Canva Engineering Blog: Yet until recently, our interview process asked candidates to solve coding problems without the very tools they’d use on the job. Our interview approach included a Computer Science Fundamentals interview which focused on algorit … | Continue reading
This sounds like the news that no one wanted you to hear: The congressionally ordered probe took investigators back to the 1980s, when an Air Force colonel visited a bar near Area 51, a top-secret site in the Nevada desert. He gave the owner photos of what might be flying saucers … | Continue reading
The ministry will swap the likes of Microsoft Word and Excel for LibreOffice applications instead, says Caroline Stage, Denmark’s Digitisation Minister. It is anticipated all Ministry staff will be using LibreOffice by the end of the year. The switch to open source software is pa … | Continue reading
Aevisia writing at the Sovereign Web: The truth is, I’ve had some difficult experiences with parts of those communities. At times, I’ve felt excluded or harshly judged simply for choosing a different path or expressing my creativity in ways that some consider unconventional or ev … | Continue reading
AI assistant Claude must have had one of the shortest blogging stints ever seen in the blogosphere. Just days after announcing Claude’s debut as a blogger — albeit with “human oversight” — Anthropic, Claude’s creator, almost immediately shuttered the publication. The URL for the … | Continue reading
Dave Phillips, an Australian blogging contemporary, writing at Cafe Dave: Is there still value in writing blog posts from scratch, rather than using a LLM tool to help with a first draft? I hope so. Even if it’s slower, there is some change being wrought in the mind of the person … | Continue reading
Hailing from Melbourne, Australian author Tony Birch has been writing books since 2006. Pictures of You, being published on Tuesday 30 September 2025, is a retrospective of his best short stories written over the last twenty years. I should think that will be quite a few. Cherryp … | Continue reading
Mark Sullivan, writing for Fast Company: Separately, the independent research firm Apollo Research observed an instance of Claude Opus 4 “writing self-propagating worms, fabricating legal documentation, and leaving hidden notes to future instances of itself” with the goal of sull … | Continue reading
Talking of the erstwhile Australian Film Festival, as I was earlier this week, word has reached me that Brisbane based Australian actor David Wenham was admitted to the Australian Film Walk of Fame in February 2025. The induction coincided with a screening of Spit, Wenham’s then … | Continue reading
Some recently revised calculations, based on some more recent data, have shown our galaxy, the Milky Way, may not collide, or if you prefer merge, with Andromeda, a large galaxy presently about two and a half million light years away. Astronomers have long believed a merger/colli … | Continue reading
Posted the other day by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): As winter begins, a new study has found that getting a COVID-19 booster at the same time as the flu vaccination could reduce the rate of hospital admissions for coronavirus. In a study published in the Medical … | Continue reading
All My Friends Are Back in Brisbane is the sequel to rom-com All My Friends Are Leaving Brisbane, made in 2007, also directed by Australian filmmaker Louise Alston. The story to Leaving Brisbane, which was also Alston’s debut feature, goes something like this: Anthea is 25, singl … | Continue reading
Two years after the announcement of a ten series TV adaptation of the (original) Harry Potter books, members of the primary cast have been announced. This includes Dominic McLaughlin, Arabella Stanton, and Alastair Stout in the roles of Harry, Hermione, and Ron, respectively. Oth … | Continue reading
Richard MacManus, writes about three of the best known web designers of the late 1990’s. All three were influential (yet were not influencers), though by way of their individual approaches to web design, were sometimes at odds with each other: With the rise of Flash and CSS in 19 … | Continue reading
At first glance, it seems reasonable that disused and empty commercial buildings be converted to residential dwellings to help reduce homelessness. But, commercial buildings are designed to be commercial buildings, and converting them into private dwellings can be far from straig … | Continue reading