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There’s a particular kind of political figure who seems to exist outside the normal rules of consequence. Not untouchable exactly, more like teflon-coated by a combination of low expectations and regional loyalty. Barnaby Joyce is that figure. This week he’s been on the telly again, making noises about abortion. Specifically, that women should not have easy access to it. That it represents a moral …

Someone posted about this in a local group recently and I nearly scrolled past it. Glad I didn’t. Compost Revolution is a social enterprise that partners with local councils to subsidise composting gear. We’re talking up to 80% off worm farms, compost bins, bokashi systems. Delivered to your door. You put in your address, it finds your local government area, and shows you what’s on offer through …

There’s a story doing the rounds that I’ve been thinking about since I read it, not because it’s complicated or politically loaded, but because it is so perfectly, cosmically awful that it almost loops back around to being funny. Almost. Someone’s dog, fresh from the groomer, couldn’t hold it on the way home. Fine. Dogs do that. Stressful car rides, nervous stomachs, it happens. But this …

There’s a painting doing the rounds that stopped me mid-scroll. Oil on canvas, 500 by 600, a street corner in Fitzroy catching what the artist calls “opening up.” Autumn light, a figure hunched near a doorstep, that particular Brunswick Street quality of looking lived-in and precious at the same time. It’s genuinely beautiful work. The kind of thing where you can feel the temperature in the …

There’s a change coming to Android that most people won’t notice until it’s already happened. Starting September 2026, Google will require every app developer to register with them, sign a contract, pay a fee, and hand over government-issued ID before their app can be installed on Android devices. No registration, no install. Not even via sideloading, which is just a word the industry invented to …

There’s a story doing the rounds this week about Illinois Governor JB Pritzker moving to suspend tax incentives for data centres. He’s pausing new applications through the state’s commerce department after the legislature sat on its hands instead of putting guardrails around AI-specific facilities. It’s not a full revocation, just a pause on processing. Incremental. Cautious. Very much the …

There’s a particular kind of frustration reserved for software that was genuinely useful, and then gradually wasn’t. Netdata used to be exactly what I wanted. Install it, point a browser at port 19999, and immediately get a dense wall of real-time graphs showing exactly what your machine was doing. CPU, memory, disk IO, network throughput. All of it, updating every second, no configuration required. For a …

There’s a specific kind of online moment that only makes sense if you’re already inside it. From the outside it looks like nothing. From the inside it’s genuinely delightful. This week, a well-known figure in the local LLM community starred a GitHub repository. That’s it. That’s the whole event. He starred llama.cpp, the foundational codebase behind most of the quantised models that …

There’s a particular kind of workplace theatre that never quite makes it into the onboarding materials. You learn it the hard way, usually while standing in a corridor holding a laptop, watching people who absolutely know what time it is pretend they don’t. Someone posted about this recently and it landed with me. They had a room booked, a presentation to give, twenty people waiting. The room was occupied …

There’s a particular kind of frustration that comes from paying for something you don’t understand. Not outrage, just a slow, grinding sense that someone somewhere is relying on your inertia. That’s the feeling a lot of apartment owners seem to be having right now, judging by the conversations doing the rounds online. Someone put up a post about their strata levies climbing 30% since COVID, with …