I lost three days in the middle of my week of Monday 17 to Sunday 23 February 2025 to annoying geekery: rebuilding my whole data backup system. Always make sure your backups are in good order, Gentle Reader, with at least one copy of everything in a different physical location.
So yeah that was annoying, and stressful. While the vast majority of the time was spent waiting for data to be shuffled around, one does then have a certain reluctance to do other work in parallel — because you have no backups! Anyway, it’s fixed now.
Podcasts
- The 9pm Nostalgia for Corruption with John Birmingham, posted on Monday but recorded the previous Friday. It was great to have JB back on after a gap of more than a year.
As I mentioned last week, I still have the first pilot of Another Untitled Music Podcast to post. The main blockage has been getting the music license, and that’s mostly down to my stress and fatigue levels and such.
This week I noticed a sentence in the license’s explanatory material that raised some important questions. I’ve put them to APRA AMCOS, the licensing body, but I have yet to receive a reply. Maybe I’m worrying about nothing, but I really don’t want this pod to be killed by some stupid music licensing glitch.
Hang in there.
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Articles
- The Weekly Cybers #56. ASIO warns of young people’s vulnerability to radicalisation, the eSafety Commissioner discovers that most young kids are already using social media, and AI continues to be rubbish when tested..
You can read my previous writing at Authory, where you can also subscribe to an email compilation of any new stories each Sunday morning.
Media Appearances
- I’m a little annoyed by this one. One of my shitposts was shown in the Talking Pictures segment of ABC TV’s Insiders on Sunday morning, at the 3m12s mark. I wish it had been one of my more intelligent comments, and in the main program. Not that I have much respect for this show.
Photos, Videos, Corporate Largesse
None of these. You can subscribe to my YouTube channel to be notified when new videos appear and when livestreams are scheduled. I am aware that several times now I’ve said I’d return to posting photos and videos properly.
Muskwatch
Everything is always about the vibe, and my vibe on the Musk vibe is that he’s now being seen as overstepping the mark big time. And as someone said to me, X is the new Slack, the new official workplace communications channel for US federal workers.
- From ABC News, “Donald Trump and Elon Musk are slashing spending, and some believe it’s going too quickly.”
- Unsurprisingly, Elon Musk’s mass government cuts could make private companies millions.
- A federal judge has denied states’ bid to halt DOGE and Musk’s work.
- Trump appears to contradict White House, says Elon Musk in charge of DOGE, despite court filings which say he isn’t.
- Musk gives all federal workers 48 hours to explain what they did last week in five bullet points, claiming on X that failing to respond before deadline will count as a resignation. Various agencies are already telling their employees not to reply, including Trump’s pick as FBI director, so this will be interesting to watch over the coming hours and days.
Some Interesting Links
- New Holland mouse rediscovered in part of Blue Mountains after two decades.
- David Tennant opened the BAFTA award ceremony with a rendition of 500 Miles, a cover of The Proclaimers.
- From Asianometry, How Indonesian instant noodles became a Nigerian sensation. The background is fascinating.
- From the Guardian, the final instalment in an incredibly important project: “More than 10,000 First Nations people killed in Australia’s frontier wars, final massacre map shows. ‘Horrendous’ eight-year long project has ended with final fact check, leaving a legacy ‘nobody can argue’ with, says researcher.”
- According to Wikipedia, “Motonormativity (also motornormativity, windshield bias, or car brain) is an unconscious cognitive bias in which the assumption is made that motor car ownership and use is an unremarkable social norm.” According to Professor Ian Walker (hah!_, “Our new study shows where this bias comes from AND how it makes people think they’re odd for supporting changes to the transport system.” The full paper is free to read: Why do cars get a free ride? The social-ecological roots of motonormativity.
- From The Verge, “The BBC’s library of classic sci-fi sounds is now available to sample“. And here it is. It isn’t free, but I’ve read the license and it seems to be reasonable to use, with no ongoing royalties.
The Week Ahead
It’s another of those weeks when I need to attempt to concentrate on work, particularly after this week’s failures, although Monday will be about administrivia and shopping and other loose ends.
On Thursday evening I’ll try to catch Australian-Chinese voters’ concerns and priorities from UTS:ACRI, the Australia-China Research Institute.
In theory there’s two more special-guest episodes of the Edict to come before the end of summer. Official Summer ends this Friday, though, so obviously that’s not going to happen — although I have put out the necessary feelers. Sorry, but I’m sure you’ll be able to handle the overrun.
Further Ahead
- Podcast recording for Another Untitled Music Podcast pilot two, 8 March 2025 (TBC).
It looks like it’s time for me to do some more medium-term planning, eh?
[Photo: Data markers or some such on Railway Parade, near Wentworth Falls, photographed on 6 February 2025. These recently-painted markers are a mystery to me. The main sequence in this section of the road is numbered 124, 125, 126 etc, spaced between 90 and 150 metres apart. But this one is numbered 3301. Any suggestions as to their origin? Maybe I should ask the Blue Mountains City Council.]