The shopping receipt sitting on my kitchen bench tells a story that’s becoming all too familiar. Desiccated coconut, that humble baking staple, has jumped from $2.70 to $4.00 at Coles - a staggering 48% increase. Looking at the prices across our major supermarkets, it’s the same story: Aldi at $3.90, Woolworths matching Coles at $4.00.

This might seem like another example of supermarket price gouging, but digging deeper reveals a more complex story. The Philippines, a major coconut producer, was hit by six devastating typhoons in just 30 days last year. These natural disasters didn’t just destroy crops; they took hundreds of lives and devastated communities. It’s a stark reminder that behind every price increase, there’s often a human story we don’t see on the supermarket shelf.

The housing debate took an interesting turn this week when a property investor with 26 properties tried to blame immigration for Australia’s housing affordability crisis. The irony wasn’t lost on anyone, but it highlighted a deeper conversation we need to have about property distribution in our country.

Living in the inner suburbs, I’ve watched perfectly good houses sit empty for months or even years, while desperate renters compete for increasingly scarce rentals. Within a kilometer of my home, I can count at least ten vacant properties - some waiting for redevelopment, others seemingly forgotten by their investors. It’s a pattern repeated across Melbourne, where approximately 50,000 properties are tied up in short-term rentals like Airbnb.

The internet never ceases to amaze me with its peculiar discoveries. This week, social media has been buzzing about an unexpected cleaning hack that’s both fascinating and slightly concerning: using Irish Spring 5-in-1 body wash as a bathroom cleaner.

Looking at the before-and-after photos flooding my feed, I must admit the results are impressive. People are claiming this humble body wash transforms grimy bathtubs into gleaming sanctuaries with minimal effort. The procedure seems straightforward - apply the product directly, cover with plastic wrap overnight, and give it a light scrub in the morning. The results speak for themselves.

The scenes at Cranbourne’s newly opened Panda Mart this week have been nothing short of chaotic. Picture this: a 200-meter queue stretching to the main road, frustrated shoppers yelling at each other, and staff eventually forced to close the store’s doors. The whole situation reads like a Black Friday horror story, except this isn’t even a sale - it’s just Thursday in suburban Melbourne.

The store, essentially a physical manifestation of online marketplaces like Temu, promises rock-bottom prices on everything from kitchen gadgets to party supplies. But watching the mayhem unfold, I’m struck by a deeper concern about our society’s relationship with consumption and value.

Looking at the latest browser drama unfolding, I’m getting flashbacks to the Internet Explorer days. Microsoft’s recent move to disable uBlock Origin and other extensions in Edge feels like history repeating itself, but with a fresh coat of corporate paint.

The tech landscape has shifted dramatically since those early browser wars. Edge, built on Chromium, was actually becoming a decent browser. But Microsoft seems determined to follow Google down the path of prioritizing advertising revenue over user experience and privacy.

The phrase “those who control the past control the future” has never felt more relevant than it does right now. Watching the systematic removal of government data from federal websites sends chills down my spine, especially given my background in IT and data management.

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has become our modern-day Library of Alexandria, preserving countless web pages that would otherwise vanish into the digital void. But unlike its ancient predecessor, this library has something powerful on its side: distributed backups and a community of dedicated digital archivists.

Finding myself deep in Reddit threads again today, discussing storage planning tools of all things. The tech community never fails to surprise me with the creative solutions they develop for everyday problems. This time, it’s a simple yet effective storage calculator that’s sparking quite a bit of interest.

The tool in question helps plan RAID configurations and storage setups - something that might sound mundane to the average person, but for those of us who’ve spent countless hours juggling hard drives and calculating storage configurations, it’s surprisingly exciting. Working in DevOps, I’ve lost count of the times I’ve needed to quickly validate storage configurations or explain capacity planning to stakeholders.

The tech world is buzzing with DeepSeek’s latest open-source contributions, and this time they’ve unveiled something that’s particularly close to my developer heart - a new distributed file system called 3FS and a data processing framework named smallpond. Having spent countless hours wrestling with various storage solutions throughout my career, this announcement genuinely excites me.

Remember the early days of big data when Hadoop’s HDFS was revolutionary? Those were simpler times when spinning disks were still the norm. Now, DeepSeek has introduced a file system specifically designed for modern hardware - leveraging SSDs and RDMA networks to handle the intense demands of AI workloads.

Reading about someone’s last day at work after being made redundant brought back memories of similar experiences in the tech industry. The familiar scene played out - the awkward HR meetings, fake sympathetic faces, and that strange liminal space between being employed and not.

The tech industry, particularly here in Australia, has seen its fair share of redundancy waves recently. Major players have been “restructuring” (corporate speak for showing people the door), often with very little warning. The story shared online today feels particularly relevant - that final walk through the office, the perfunctory HR meeting, and yes, the traditional raid of the stationery cupboard.

Looking at my phone notifications this morning, I spotted the latest ING interest rate announcement. They’re dropping their savings rate to 5.40% from February 28th. While this isn’t exactly shocking news in our current economic climate, it got me thinking about the increasingly complex dance we’re all doing with our banks these days.

Remember when having a savings account was straightforward? You’d deposit money, and the bank would pay you interest. Simple. Now we’re juggling multiple accounts, tracking transaction counts, and planning our spending patterns like some sort of financial choreography.