The popular weekly email newsletter, written by Melbourne based Australia curator and publisher Kai Brach, has actually been published five-hundred-and-seventy-nine times, but earlier editions were written under another title. But who’s counting? True to its tagline, “one email worth opening, every week”, Dense...

Queanbeyan, NSW, based author and visual artist Omar Musa, has been named winner of the 2026 Miles Franklin Literary Award, for his 2025 novel Fierceland. Fierceland is Musa’s second novel, and tells the story of two siblings returning to their home in Malaysian Borneo, for their father’s funeral, having lived...

Jorijn Schrijvershof’s decision to close the Mastodon instance toot.community, which he established in late 2024, highlights many of the difficulties facing instance administrators on the decentralised social media platform: Every day, I deal with spam, bots, technical issues, abuse reports, and user conflicts. Much...

A “record” El Niño event, presently wreaking havoc in the northern hemisphere, is expected to lead to an excessively warm and dry spring in Australia, and, no doubt, other regions south of the equator. We’ve barely had a winter in my part of the world this year. To be sure, there’s been one or two cooler days, and...

Members of the professional network will be able to flag posts they think are AI generated. I haven’t been a LinkedIn participant in years — I have a personal website, why would I? — but it seems to me slop has been a problem on the platform since before AI was what it is.

Mastodon is a truly decentralised micro-bloging platform. Anyone sufficiently motivated, and technically proficient, can start their own instance, or community. Depending on the administrator, instances can be completely isolated, accessible only to its members, or federated, that is, interconnected to all other...

Feel good Australian comedy classic movie, The Castle, made in 1997, is set the join the likes of Back to the Future, The Color Purple, and Titanic, in being adapted for the stage. The story follows a working class family trying to stop cashed-up property developers seizing their home. The producers of the film,...

Astronomers may have discovered the first moon, or satellite, outside the solar system, about seventy-three light years from Earth. Plenty of exoplanets, planets orbiting stars other than the Sun, have been found, but this might be the first time a moon accompanying one of these bodies has been located. But there’s...

Natalie Kaufman, writing for the Wall Street Journal, about an apparent trend in early twenty-somethings, to rely on AI agents to supply them with conversation starters, and pickup lines. The article is paywalled, but would you really want to read about this? I think these things are best learned through experience,...

AusAlert is a new, nation wide, emergency warning system being rolled out by the Australian government. Should there be a crisis or disaster of some sort, authorities will be able to send warnings to mobile phones in the vicinity. The alerts, which will be heralded by a short, but loud siren sound, are designed to...

The basic, free, verification badge, differs from the more familiar, paid for, Meta‌ Verified blue badge. To qualify, applicants need to satisfy a number of requirements, including having a Facebook (FB) account that is in “good standing”. They will need to record a short video, which will be compared to selfies...

I like the idea of Webmentions, a protocol informing a blogger, website owner, that another blog/website has linked to them. Similar to pingbacks, Webmentions aren’t just another tech-gimmick though. In 2017 they were adopted as a recommendation by the W3C, the international body publishing standards for the web....