The week of Monday 16 to Sunday 22 February 2026 took me another week closer to my move back to Sydney. I got lots of little things done in the background, but I don’t have much to show you — apart from the links to Interesting Things.
As I explained two weeks ago I’m moving from the Blue Mountains to Campsie in Sydney in the second half of March, after having been in the Mountains for 15 years.
Thanks very much to the people who at the time of writing have now kicked in around 92% of the crowdfunding for The 9pm Stilgherrian’s Dramatic Decamp to Campsie. I’ve just added a rough timeline to that page.
Podcasts
- I’ve uploaded the first full episode of Another Untitled Music Podcast to Mixcloud. All of the existing episodes are already on YouTube. We still plan to resume recording new episodes in March.
Articles
- The Weekly Cybers #105. Meta isn’t trying to be addictive says Zuckerberg, OECD ranks Australia #2 for digital government, KPMG staff use AI to cheat in an exam on using AI, and are you as bad as I am at spotting AI-generated faces?
Photos, Videos, Media Appearances, Corporate Largesse
None of these. You can subscribe to my YouTube channel to be notified when new videos appear and when livestreams are scheduled.
Some Interesting Links
- “In a blind test, audiophiles couldn’t tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud — ‘The mud should sound perfectly awful, but it doesn’t,’ notes the experiment creator.”
- Passport to Progress (1957), a government propaganda film about the importance of “New Austraians” to the nation’s development. New and old working side by side on steel production! New ways of living, such as “open-air cafes selling cappuccinos”! Nevertheless, everyone in this short film is white.
- Meet Marie Tharp, the woman who mapped the Atlantic from her living room.
- From Alasdair Beckett-King, You Can’t See Memes on the Radio.
- More weirdness in Mount Gambier.
- Some excellent photos of one of my favourite buildings, the Nakagin Capsule Tower, Tokyo. Alas, it has been demolished.
- This week’s suggested follow: It’s a podcast this week, What Did You Do Yesterday? with sports broadcaster Max Rushden & comedian David O’Doherty. The format is simple: They have a guest, and they interrogate them about what they did yesterday — and nothing else. I’ve been picking and choosing the quests I’m interested in, so I don’t know whether they’re all good. And I have yet to listen to their mid-week episodes when it’s just the two blokes chatting. But I think it’s worth exploring.
The Week Ahead
Monday is once more about planning and administrivia. As I said last week, there’s a lot of loose ends for me to get my head around, if that’s not a mixed metaphor. And a bunch of tasks will need to fit in the unallocated portions of this week.
[Update 25 February 2026: On Tuesday there was an apparent electricity outage on the Wentworth Falls property, and by the middle of the day it was still down, so I headed downtown Sydney for two nights. It turned out that some of the installation had been mislabelled and the fault was elsewhere, but no one knew that at the time. The end result, however, was that Tuesday and Wednesday nights are being spent in Sydney. So I won’t be coming down again on Saturday.]
On Thursday I’ll post another old episode of AUMP to Mixcloud. Friday sees The Weekly Cybers newsletter as usual.
On Saturday I might head to Sydney for the Campsie Lantern Festival. Given that I’m about to move to Campsie, I guess I should pre-celebrate my arrival? But I’m still not sure that I want a late night this weekend, and I want to save money. I may delete this paragraph later.
Further Ahead
- The 9pm Edict recording with Dr Alice Gorman and Rami Mandow, early March 2026 (TBC). This will be another space-oriented episode, originally timed to coincide with NASA’s Artemis II mission, although that’s now delayed until at least April.
- Detailed inspection of the Campsie apartment, 3 March 2026. The settlement date isn’t until 13 March, but this will give Snarky Platypus and I the chance to make some more detailed plans. It’s all very exciting!
- Sydney Day, 10 March 2026, for the one-month checkup after I was given a vaccine, or maybe the placebo. Full details were posted the other week.
- The 9pm Edict recording with Johanna Weaver and Zoe Hawkins from the Tech Policy Design Institute, 11 March 2026. If you’re a supporter with a TRIGGER WORD or a CONVERSATION TOPIC for this episode, please let me know by 2pm AEDT on Tuesday 10 March. The finished podcast will be posted by Friday morning.
- Takashi Wakasugi’s Wabi-Sabi Comedy, Sydney, 16 May 2026 (TBC). I saw Takashi’s work-in-progress show back in December, so it’ll be interesting to see how it all comes together.
[Photo: Please be enjoying a 1926 Fashioned, consisting of Maker’s Mark bourbon, peach schnapps, bitters, and a slice of dried orange. Photographed at Charlie Chan’s Bar in Haymarket, Sydney, on 17 February 2026.]