Weekly Wrap 209: Nostalgia as winter falls, with Apple

St Stephens Anglican Church, Newtown: click to embiggenMy week of Monday 2 to Sunday 8 June 2014, at least beyond immediate work commitments, was somewhat limited by certain cashflow issues, but that seems to always happen when there’s a long weekend early in the month.

Still, the ebook project progressed nicely — and that will be announced properly in approximately a week. It’s not that exciting, though, trust me.

Articles

Oddly enough, both of these were triggered by the announcements at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). I found it quite funny that some people, even some alleged technology journalists, said there was nothing interesting to report because there wasn’t any new hardware.

There’s also the blog posts I wrote for Blogjune, which you may find interesting. Or not.

Media Appearances

5at5

Not quite a full week this week, though Friday’s was a bumper edition to make up for the gap. Why don’t you subscribe to 5at5?

Geekery

Corporate Largesse

  • On Friday I caught up with Michael McKinnon from AVG Technologies AU. We spoke about many interesting things, and he bought a couple of beers and dinner.

The Week Ahead

Monday is a public holiday for the Queen’s Birthday, but since she has neglected to invite me to her party — an administrative oversight I can accept, because she is a busy woman — I will be catching up with a friend instead. And then I shall return to Wentworth Falls.

Tuesday is a day of research and planning, unless a writing commission comes up. Wednesday is a day trip to Sydney for a lunchtime briefing by Brocade. Thursday is a day of writing. Wednesday and Thursday are days of writing. Friday onwards has yet to be allocated.

[Photo: St Stephens Anglican Church, Newtown, photographed from Camperdown Memorial Rest Park on 21 June 2003. I’ve decided that if I haven’t taken any decent photographs in the week covered by the Wrap, I’ll pick something from the same month in the past.]

[Update 10 June 2014, 1515 AEST: The Week Ahead edited to reflect a change of plans for Wednesday.]

Talking smartphone privacy on ABC Radio’s “Life Matters”

ABC logoA few weeks back, I had a conversation on Twitter with Natasha Mitchell, presenter of ABC Radio National’s Life Matters, about smartphones and just how much data they’re handing on to, well, all manner of organisations. This morning we came back to that conversation live on national radio.

Do you know what data you’re really sharing, and with whom, when you download and use smart phone apps? Companies are collecting as much as they can get away with, says Stilgherrian.

We spoke for 20 minutes and covered a lot of territory.

If you want to know more, then you can listen to my guest lecture at University of Technology Sydney (UTS), and then follow the links to more than 30 references.

The audio is of course ©2014 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and it’s served here directly from the ABC website.

Most popular posts of 2013

As we approach the end of 2013, I’m going to do my usual series of blog posts looking back at what actually happened on this little planet. This is the first, being a list of the most-read posts on this website.

There hasn’t been a lot to choose from in the last couple of years, because most of my writing is done elsewhere these days. That means some rather mundane pieces of writing, such as Weekly Wrap posts, end up on the list. That’s possibly an argument for abandoning this little exercise.

  1. Catchup posts within 36 hours was the most popular post of all, which makes no sense whatsoever because it’s routine administrivia. I suspect the visitor count has been artificially inflated somehow, though supposedly the traffic generated by spambots has already been removed.
  2. My tweets from TechEd Australia 2012’s keynote sessions, a post that was linked to from news stories that reported me having been banned from attending Microsoft’s TechEd conference. My own blog post on this issue is coming up at number 5.
  3. Guardian Australia not the droid you’re looking for, being my reaction against all the excitement generated in January 2013 by the announcement that there would soon be an Australian edition of this news masthead.
  4. My fish are dead: the black dog ate them (an explanation?), being my rather idiosyncratic announcement and discussion of the fact that I’d been dealing with a severe depression episode, published in July.
  5. Microsoft has banned me from covering TechEd, which is self-explanatory.
  6. Choosing my next media directions: you’re doing it, OK?, from May.
  7. Vodafone Australia’s new 4G network ain’t bad, being the write-up of my trial of the network which led to that conclusion.
  8. Weekly Wrap 152: LulzSec, Optus, radio and thinking stuff, which I suspect is only in the Top 10 because it mentions LulzSec.
  9. Weekly Wrap 155: Chemtrails, elitism and much thinking, ditto, chemtrails.
  10. Sydney Harbour “giant gambling den” bullshit reportage, from January.

Continue reading “Most popular posts of 2013”

Weekly Wrap 174: Newcastle, new events, new venues

Newcastle City Hall: click to embiggenMy week Monday 30 September to Sunday 6 October 2013 was dominated by my trip to Newcastle for the inaugural DiG Festival and Conference. Both the city and the event were well worth it.

I’ll be writing about the DiG Festival for Crikey today, so watch out for that, but I’m sure I’ll have more to say later.[Update 2000 AEDT: And here it is.] I’ll also be writing about Newcastle, because I have many thoughts.

Articles

I also wrote a 1000-word piece that’ll appear in a printed magazine that CSO will be handing out at some events between now and the end of the year.

Podcasts

None, but there’ll be a new Corrupted Nerds in the coming few days.

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

The Week Ahead

Monday is a public holiday in NSW, but not in Victoria, so I’ll be writing my story on the DiG Festival and Conference for Crikey and, perhaps, a piece that I’ve kept on the back burner for Technology Spectator.

I’m keeping Tuesday empty for some personal reasons.

On Wednesday I’ll head to Sydney for a lunchtime media briefing by Unisys, and I may stay overnight because on Thursday there’s the annual conference of the Australian Information Security Association (AISA). [Update 8 October 2013: Confirmed, I’ll be attending the AISA Conference and staying in Sydney until Friday.]

Friday and the weekend are currently unplanned.

[Photo: Newcastle City Hall, photographed at around 0730 AEST on 3 October 2013.]