Sales of Australian author Charlotte Wood’s latest novel Stone Yard Devotional have enjoyed a boost, as a result of being both long and short listed for this year’s Booker Prize. The phenomena is sometimes called the Booker bump: Her publisher says that since winning the Stella P … | Continue reading
Twitter-like microblogging social network Bluesky is having its moment in the sun. We’ve all seen the multiple headlines of late heralding the arrival of another several million new members, most of whom have migrated from Twitter. The buzz is similar to that surrounding Mastodon … | Continue reading
The World Wide Consortium (W3C) has the emissions created by the internet in its sights… who knew just high web caused emissions were? The mission of the Sustainable Web Interest Group is to improve digital sustainability so that the Web works better for all people and the planet … | Continue reading
Australian author and journalist Katie Cunningham: My high school English teacher told me that good writing is the tenth draft of bad writing. I saw this in The Booklist, a weekly newsletter by the Sydney Morning Herald, the other day. Sometimes I feel as if I rewrite everything … | Continue reading
To mark the thirtieth anniversary of the 1994 release of Star Trek Generations, comes Unification, which kind of picks ups after the conclusion of Generations. But it’s also a whirlwind jaunt through The Original Series (TOS) universe. There’s a cameo by Gary Lockwood, of 2001: A … | Continue reading
Having barely touched their simple text editor, Notepad, in years, Microsoft has been laying on the modifications in recent times. A few months ago, they fitted out Notepad with an autocorrect and spell-checker feature. That’s fine for people wishing to use Notepad as a word proc … | Continue reading
Filmmakers James Ivory, the late Ismail Merchant, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who collaborated as Merchant Ivory, made over forty features between 1963 and 2009. I think you’d be hard pressed to find any well-known actor of recent decades who did not work with them. My favourite is … | Continue reading
I’ve ended up seeing a stack of movies featuring Irish-American actor Saoirse Ronan, over the years. Tracking all the way back to Atonement in 2007, I think. Maybe I’m not so much of a Ronan fan, as I am the movies she’s in. But it’s an impressive list of titles. The Lovely Bones … | Continue reading
Garrett writing on his Mastodon page: How do we make it easier for “everyone else,” the “normies,” all those “regular” folk who just want to get online, how do we reduce the friction required to get them to make their own little corners of the web? How do we make the #IndieWeb ea … | Continue reading
British author Samantha Harvey has been named winner of the 2024 Booker Prize, with her novel, Orbital, published by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Penguin Books. I don’t know how many novels are set on the International Space Station, I’m sure there’s a few, but Orbital is one of … | Continue reading
Things Magazine has been publishing lists of links for over fourteen years, and here’s the latest batch. I don’t exactly know where they source all their links from, which are all top quality, but it’s a process that must take a certain time. Next time someone tries to tell you p … | Continue reading
The third — and it seems, final — series of Heartbreak High, in the second inception of the gritty Australian high-school TV drama, is on the way. Set at the fictional Hartley High, in Sydney, Heartbreak High originally screened between 1994 and 1999. A rebooted version of the sh … | Continue reading
Pretty popular are sit/stand desks at the moment. I’ve helped a few people assemble them, when they’ve bought one for their home office. Good for your health, sit/stand desks, or so we’re told. Mainly because you’re not sitting all day while working. Some recent research however, … | Continue reading
So say psychologists at the Sydney based University of New South Wales (UNSW): Dr Poppy Watson, adjunct lecturer with UNSW’s School of Psychology, says while the idea warrants exploration, there is a lack of evidence showing excessive doomscrolling of social media is responsible … | Continue reading
For years I was excited by the prospect of a Star Wars sequel trilogy. This, long before what became episodes seven through nine, were even announced. I used to burn the midnight oil reading fan-written Star Wars EU plots and stories, that were published on various Star Wars foru … | Continue reading
Title Drops, by Germany based data visualisation designer and developer Dominikus Baur, analyses the number of times a movie’s title is mentioned during the story. It’s something that’s not always possible though. I’m looking at 2001: A Space Odyssey, as an example. Although if y … | Continue reading
Tyler Cowen, writing at Marginal Revolution, last July: Democrats and leftists are in fact less happy as people than conservatives are, on average. Americans noticed this, if only subconsciously. Cowen made a whole heap of observations — I’ve quoted but one — about the then upcom … | Continue reading
Just as it is becoming near high impossible to make a full-time living as an author, unless a writer’s work is regularly topping best-seller lists, the same increasingly goes for musicians. And their support teams. Gone are the days road crews, stage hands, recording studio worke … | Continue reading
On the eve of the US Presidential election, The New York Times has published a strongly worded dis-endorsement of Republican candidate Donald Trump. It’s short, succinct, and well worth reading. Unlike counterpart publications, including The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times … | Continue reading
Australian indie bookseller Harry Hartog has entered the literary prize fray with their inaugural Book Of The Year award. A shortlist featuring three titles, in three categories respectively, fiction, non-fiction, and children’s and young adults, was published a few days ago. No … | Continue reading
National Novel Writing Month AKA NaNoWriMo, is on this month, for better or worse. But if you’re a writer seeking distractions from various November happenings — I’m referring more to northern hemisphere inhabitants facing the onset of winter — and don’t want to write a novel, th … | Continue reading
American newspapers The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post, have come under fire for declining to endorse US Presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Their refusal to endorse Harris does not, however, from stem from a desire to back Donald Trump. Rather, both publications ha … | Continue reading
A recent poll of voters in Australia and New Zealand has found most would prefer Democrat candidate Kamala Harris to win the upcoming American Presidential election, over her Republican rival Donald Trump: “Fifty per cent of Australians say they’d vote for Harris compared to 26 p … | Continue reading
A police method of prosecuting people suspected of being responsible for committing a serious crime, almost reads like something from a crime novel: Police manufacture a chance meeting with the suspect, then offer them paid work of a non-criminal nature before introducing jobs th … | Continue reading
The time 30 October once fell on a Saturday. The stop here had been unintentional. Unplanned. But that’s how it is for a lot of these stories. I hadn’t been to this place before, yet here I was. At ten minutes to midnight. It would be Sunday in eleven minutes. Not twenty minutes … | Continue reading
Late American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick made his first feature, Fear and Desire, on a budget of a little over fifty-thousand dollars (US), in 1952. Almost thirty-years later, Kubrick had a budget of nineteen million dollars to make The Shining. I expect many successful filmmakers … | Continue reading
Mali Waugh, writing for The Age: I also think that keeping a written diary is not really done any more. I wonder whether part of this is that people are much more accepting of traditionally private things being put in the public domain. For the most part, this is a good thing but … | Continue reading
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