Someone on the internet built a web server that runs on solar power and idles at 27MB of RAM. I’ve been thinking about this all week and I can’t stop smiling about it.

The setup is gloriously minimal: a Raspberry Pi Zero W running Alpine Linux in diskless mode — meaning the entire OS runs in RAM — with lighttpd serving static sites and a small Python app handling file sharing. The whole thing is powered by a couple of solar panels feeding into a cheap power station. It handles somewhere between 5 and 15 concurrent users without breaking a sweat, and it costs next to nothing to run. This is the kind of project that makes me remember why I got into tech in the first place.

There’s a thread doing the rounds on r/LocalLLaMA that’s been rattling around in my head for the past couple of days. It started out as people poking at what appeared to be an AI bot posting in the community — responding to comments, giving out banana bread recipes, the whole nine yards — and it quickly spiralled into one of those gloriously chaotic internet moments where nobody’s quite sure who, or what, they’re talking to anymore.

There’s a story doing the rounds this week that’s really stuck with me. A woman clocks up 45 years at the Commonwealth Bank — one of the most profitable financial institutions in the country — and when the milestone arrives, her son shares what she received: a marked pin and some flowers. That’s it. From a bank that regularly posts billions in annual profit.

Her son called it pathetic. Honestly? Hard to argue.

So there I was, scrolling through the news over breakfast this morning, and the headline practically leapt off the screen: petrol prices rising again, and the Albanese government being upfront that even the Iran-US ceasefire — such as it is — won’t be bringing relief at the bowser anytime soon. Can’t say I’m shocked, but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating.

And honestly, calling it a “ceasefire” feels generous. From what’s been reported, Israel was bombing Lebanon within hours of the announcement, Iran was still firing missiles at Gulf states, and now apparently there’s a dispute over whether the ten-point terms Iran published were even the terms that were actually agreed to. One commenter online put it bluntly: “We don’t know what the actual terms of the ceasefire were. Hell, I’m not sure the parties themselves know what they agreed to.” Which is a pretty grim summary of the situation, but probably accurate.

So there’s been this story floating around the past day or two that had my timeline absolutely buzzing. Milla Jovovich — yes, that Milla Jovovich, Alice from Resident Evil, Leeloo from The Fifth Element — apparently released an open-source AI memory system on GitHub called MemPalace that claimed to score 100% on something called LongMemEval, beating every paid solution out there.

Naturally, the internet lost its collective mind.

My first reaction, honestly, was the same as half the comments I was reading: what in the weirdest timeline are we living in? But then I put my coffee down, opened the GitHub repo, started digging through the actual issues and the community discussion, and — well, it’s complicated. And complicated is usually more interesting than the headline anyway.

There’s a post doing the rounds that I keep coming back to, written by someone with eleven years of coding experience who had a genuinely unsettling moment last month. They hit an intermittent network timeout bug — the classic kind, only appearing in production, exactly the sort of thing you’d expect a seasoned developer to chew through methodically — and found themselves completely lost without AI to guide them. Not just slower. Actually lost. The internal voice that used to generate hypotheses had gone quiet.

I’ve been following the Hormuz situation pretty closely over the past few weeks, and honestly, the more I read about it, the more I find myself thinking about leadership — specifically what good leadership actually looks like when things get genuinely difficult.

The news that Japan is going to maintain normal fuel supply to Australia, and that Prime Minister Takaichi is potentially visiting, is quietly significant. It doesn’t have the drama of a military announcement or the viral punch of a political brawl, but it matters. A lot. And the way it came together — through methodical diplomatic legwork with Japan, South Korea, and Singapore — is the kind of thing that rarely gets the credit it deserves because it doesn’t make for exciting television.

Happy Easter, everyone! Hope you’ve had a good long weekend, whether you’re the type who goes all out with family gatherings or just appreciates the public holidays for some quiet time at home.

So, Easter Monday is here, and you know what that means for bargain hunters like me — it’s time to see what kind of post-Easter chocolate deals are floating around. I spotted a few people online sharing tips about clearance sales at Coles and local shops, which naturally got me out of my chair and into research mode.

Right, so I went down a bit of a rabbit hole this week watching someone document their first experience using a jetted tub cleaner called “Oh Yuk,” and honestly, I’m still a bit haunted by it.

If you’re not familiar with jetted tubs — those spa-style baths with the water jets built into the sides — they look absolutely luxurious. The kind of thing you see in a fancy hotel room and think, yeah, I could get used to this. Maybe you’ve even looked at houses with one and felt that little spark of excitement. “Ooh, a spa bath!” Well, buckle up, because I’m about to ruin that dream just a little bit.

There’s been a bit of noise this week about Victoria’s public transport system “struggling to cope” with the free travel initiative the state government rolled out. Channel 9 ran a story that had people clutching their pearls over crowded platforms and packed trains, and honestly? My first reaction was to roll my eyes so hard I nearly strained something.

Let me be clear about what actually happened here: people used public transport. A lot of people. Over Easter, over the school holidays, families and travellers jumped on trains to regional Victoria, folks headed into the CBD, and the network got a serious workout. And somehow, this is being framed as a disaster.