New McGowan Cabinet Ministers elected:
Wanneroo MLA Sabine Winton and South West MLC Jackie Jarvis will be sworn in as Cabinet Ministers tomorrow, along with new Parliamentary Secretaries Jodie Hanns, Dr Jagadish (Jags) Krishnan, Meredith Hammat, Pierre Yang and Hannah Beazley.
The Premier will announce the allocation of portfolios tomorrow, with Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries to be officially sworn in by the Governor of Western Australia at a ceremony at Government House.
My friend and Hemispheric Views co-host Martin Feld continues to build his other excellent podcast, Really Specific Stories. The latest episode features a guest famous to many of us in Mac-nerd circles: Casey Liss, one of the hosts of the hugely successful Accidental Tech Podcast.
Casey references his experience as a guest on the show on his own blog.
Appearance: Really Specific Stories — Liss is More:
On this episode, Martin and I walked through my path into podcasting, starting all the way — and I’m not kidding — from when I was a toddler.
My friend Adam at omg.lol is building another special surprise for his customers.
I have taken the pre-alpha version for a spin:
A Weblog · Human-sized Services:
There are now three blogging services that I admire, all of which are run by humans - not corporations. Humans making websites was what made 1.0, back in the Netscape Navigator days, great. Blink tags, under construction logos, and multi-colour Times New Roman font.
The Elon-gate’d Man | Jared White:
Jared White mounts a solid argument as to where we have gone wrong with big tech celebrity, and talks about how me might be able to do better in the future.
with this maturity has to come broader awareness that Big Tech can’t simply act like 21st century echoes of the robber barons. Either the tech sector must demonstrate its ability to police itself and show good corporate governance and a willingness to let bottom-up creativity and entrepreneurship flourish in the marketplace of ideas, or we must call for increased regulatory scrutiny on all fronts.
Ed Zitron has published “The Fraudulent King”, a marvellous explainer on the latest happenings at Twitter, but at the same time, outlined what a petulant, unimpressive person Elon Musk is — and how the world now knows it.
There were so many great lines in this article, it was hard to know which to highlight as an extract:
…we are in the process of watching said timeline wholesale reject Elon Musk and his ideology.
Elon Musk walked into Twitter HQ carrying a sink; in hindsight it should have been a toilet, because Twitter is now circling the bowl.
Elon Musk eases return-to-office order - The Washington Post
One Twitter staff member said the numbers of employees seeking to leave had alarmed Twitter’s managers, who had formed “war rooms” to determine which employees should be asked to stay on.
Resignations and departures were already taking a toll on Twitter’s service, employees said.
Musk fires Twitter engineers after critical posts on Twitter and Slack:
Musk had already tweeted Monday that he had fired at least one engineer who publicly criticized him on Twitter. The latest terminations come in the wake of Musk’s decision to let go of about half of all Twitter employees in a bid to cut costs.
Some Twitter employees confirmed the layoffs on their verified accounts.
“Looks like i just got fired for s—posting too ✌️” one wrote in response to another person who said they had been let go.
Precisely two years ago today, I wrote this, in the context of Instagram.Blog of Drew - Own Your Content:
A personal website and domain name remains the most reliable way to avoid your content serving as feed stock for a commercial enterprise.
Today, it holds up in the context of Twitter.
The more things change…
Molly White, reporting on her brilliant site tracking all the happenings in the crypto/NFT world.
FTX files for bankruptcy, Sam Bankman-Fried resigns:
Aaaand there it goes.
FTX announced that it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States. Sam Bankman-Fried resigned as CEO.
I wonder how all the Diamond Hands crypto HODL bros are feeling.
There’s only one thing worse than a Ponzi scheme, and that is being the one holding the “asset” when the music stops and there is no next fool in line.
Update, 10 November: Now the official checkmark has been unrolled out. You couldn’t make this stuff up.
Twitter’s solution for ruining verification is another check mark - The Verge:
Twitter is rolling out another type of check mark to help distinguish accounts that users actually need to know are real. Although you can pay $7.99 per month for a blue check mark with the new version of Twitter Blue, select accounts for governments, companies, or public figures will get a gray “Official” check mark Twitter is on the pathway to full farce.
Can Elon Musk Make the Math Work on Owning Twitter? It’s Dicey. - The New York Times:
Last year, Twitter’s interest expense was about $50 million. With the new debt taken on in the deal, that will now balloon to about $1 billion a year. Yet the company’s operations last year generated about $630 million in cash flow to meet its financial obligations.
That means that Twitter is generating less money per year than what it owes its lenders.
I was welcomed as a guest on the podcast/YouTube show “Throwback Hoops” Episode 46 to talk Australian basketball. We covered women’s world, cup, NBL Round 1, and gave our predictions for the league’s awards. 🏀 🎙
Podcast link
If you have kids, you and they might enjoy the wonderful Like You – A Mindfulness Podcast for Kids. I’ve been a Patreon supporter for almost as long as Noah Glenn has been producing it. My kids fall asleep listening to Noah almost every night.
Like You is a mindfulness podcast for kids. We use breathing, affirmations, music, and imagination to explore feelings, relieve anxiety, encourage self-esteem, and grow empathy, all while having fun!
This 3D Version of Tokyo's Subway System Looks Like a Labyrinth of Roller Coasters:
…by creating a 3D model of Tokyo’s tangled subway system, one which has brightly colored tubes swooping up and down, running over and around each other like the tracks of one of the craziest roller coasters ever.
I’ve appreciated the scheduling efficiency of the Tokyo subway system in the past, but this 3D impression of how all the lines interact is something else.
Last Week on My Mac: Security updates are down again – The Eclectic Light Company:
Howard Oakley is doing an amazing job at diagnosing and bringing to light (pardon the pun) issues involving macOS Content Caching Server:
Over the last three months, of the nine security updates to XProtect pushed by Apple, only one has been delivered and installed correctly through my Monterey Content Caching server, that on 4 August.
I’ve been getting back into Agenda as a work diary and daily tracker.
The app is brought to a new level of usefulness thanks to the ingenuity of Shortcuts developer Scotty Jackson.
Scotty Jackson:
This is all about my Rapid Log Shortcut, for use with the Agenda app … and my Agenda Daily Log Shortcut. The basic conceit of this Shortcut is that it appends provided input to note in Agenda.
Matt Birchler writing on his blog makes a succinct point.
Mobile games are a shit industry with shit companies making shit games that don’t exist to entertain, they exist to extract as much money as possible from a few whales who will spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.
Fun is not the point.
Matt nails it. This is why I enjoy playing games on Xbox and Switch, and get nothing from mobile gaming.
Maureen Dowd: Donald Trump, American Monster
Shelley’s monster, unlike ours, has self-awareness and a reason to wreak havoc. He knows how to feel guilty and when to leave the stage. Our monster’s malignity stems from pure narcissistic psychopathy — and he refuses to leave the stage or cease his vile mendacity.
Maureen Dowd truly is a great writer. I would love to be able to craft words in such a way.
Riccardo Mori really nailed it with his latest post, Raw power alone is not enough where he talks about how Apple has left its software to wither, while it has been busy beefing up its hardware offering. The article is full of juicy content, but I’ve pulled out the parts that resonated with me:
Without innovation in software, all we’re doing with these new powerful machines is essentially the same we were doing 20 years ago on PowerPC G4 and G5 computers, but faster and more conveniently.
Search Engines and SEO Spam - Initial Charge:
What I think I want is a search engine that only gave me results from small, independent weblogs.
More often than not I just want to find information from a normal person that’s writing about something because they care deeply about it. And that’s very difficult to find in search engines today.
I want the same thing that Mike Rockwell at Initial Charge wants: a search engine focused on nerds who blog about stuff they love.
Om Malik:
Instead of using technology and starting to flag downright criminal behavior, the company hums, and haws. They don’t need an oversight committee — they need a moral compass.
Am I being silly to suggest that Facebook and Purdue Pharma have much in common?
Colin Devroe is quitting social media:
I also spend an inordinate amount of time scrolling tweets, clicking links, reading threads, and darting between subjects like a kitten chasing a laser.
I love this analogy.
I think the cumulative effect on my brain since 2006 has been that my ability to focus has been effected. Not that I can’t focus. I can sit down and get into flow on a programming project more often than not.
Facebook Is Weaker Than We Knew - The New York Times:
But Facebook’s research tells a clear story, and it’s not a happy one. Its younger users are flocking to Snapchat and TikTok, and its older users are posting anti-vaccine memes and arguing about politics. Some Facebook products are actively shrinking, while others are merely making their users angry or self-conscious.
It’s hard to feel sorry for Facebook.
I’m a huge YNAB fan and a LaunchBar user. I often get jealous of Alfred users because the system of “workflows” in Alfred seems to have caught on better than LaunchBar’s “Actions”.
Righting that wrong has appeared @ptujec on Github. He has a number of LaunchBar Actions, notably two built for YNAB.
I found a bug in the script, raised an issue on Github and it’s already been fixed. Thanks!
I’m thinking about a transition from OmniFocus to Things. I’ve used OF since launch, so this is no trivial matter.
This line from a post by micro.blog user @40Tech resonates:
OmniFocus almost begs you to add projects and contexts.
I never seem to gain value from contexts/tags, but I add them every time, because nature abhors a vacuum.
My main area of doubt is templating. I’ve got a nice Drafts template built that populates a standardised OmniFocus project.
I barely scratch the surface with my use of BBEdit. I’m not a coder. I use it for a bit of Markdown text editing (when I’m not using one of the other myriad Markdown apps I own) and for doing other small pieces of text manipulation.
So when I saw that v14 was released, I figured I could skip the upgrade. Reading through the features, I was sure I could skip the upgrade.
“From this vantage, “Office Space,” the Gen-X slacker paean that came out 20 years ago next month, feels like science fiction from a distant realm. It’s almost impossible to imagine a startup worker bee of today confessing, as protagonist Peter Gibbons does: “It’s not that I’m lazy. It’s that I just don’t care.” Workplace indifference just doesn’t have a socially acceptable hashtag. "
Three Things Today | tyler.io:
So what is Three Things? Well, it’s a calendar that lets you schedule tasks on each day. It’s meant to be excruciatingly pragmatic and realistic about how life works. (At least my life.) It literally will not allow you to schedule more than three tasks per day.
This is a nifty little application. Pick three things. Do them. If you don’t, defer them. That’s about it.