Thanks to David’s help at @blot I now have a cool tags view of my posts on that site.

A new look, logo, and website for Fastmail

Today, we launched a refreshed look for Fastmail, with a new logo, app icon, colors, and website.

I like the new typeface. The envelope keeps reminding me of a crown though, which is weird.

Micro.blog successfully imported my Instagram archive. This site is fast becoming my life stream. I’m owning my content.

Nobody Wants to Buy Vocus

Vocus’ share performance over 3 yearsVocus’ share performance over 3 years

Poor Vocus, it must be in bad shape.

From Bill Bennett:

Last week Australian energy company AGL withdrew its A$3 billion takeover offer for Vocus. This came only two weeks after Swedish private equity firm EQT halted its $3.3 billion transaction.

Bill goes on to reflect that as currently structured, Australia’s broadband market may not enable companies to make a reasonable profit:

All of which says bad things about the state of retail telecommunications. The private equity investors have looked and seen there is no quick path to profit.

More patient, longer-term investors like AGL, who have access to the magic formula of adding power sales to a broadband subscription don’t think it looks viable either.

The Australian telecommunications industry reminds me of how our aviation industry was in the 1980s and 1990s. Carriers would arrive, make losses, destroy shareholder value, and disappear. Now, instead of aeroplanes, it’s communication networks.

Same as it ever was.

I’m experiencing the existential crisis that is all too familiar to many a blogger… what goes on this blog of mine and what goes on the other blog of mine? 🤔

Atlassian declares 'The M&A process is broken'

Atlassian is an interesting company that possibly doesn’t get the kudos it might deserve. As an Australian, I have admiration for seeing one of ours hit it big internationally. Atlassian and Canva are probably the only two Australian companies that immediately spring to mind as having won big in the international IT space.

I’m impressed that Atlassian continue to walk the walk in regard to their world-view and values. This is evident in their now public approach to mergers and acquisitions. They are trying to reduce the angst and power imbalance and increase the fairness and focus on outcomes.

From their blog post announcing the release of a new public term sheet to support merger and acquisition deals:

one thing has become very clear to us about the M&A process – it’s outdated, inefficient, and unnecessarily combative, with too much time and energy spent negotiating deal terms and not enough on what matters most: building great products together and delivering more customer value.

There is plenty of ego in the IT world. The ‘bro’ culture permeates, and it promotes ego and ‘winning’, rather than value creation and shared successes.

In an effort to reduce this unnecessary friction and increase trust, we’re doing something that, to our knowledge, no company has done before: we’ve crafted a new M&A term sheet and we’re making it public.

So much time is wasted through replicated effort. The software world is built on the reuse of frameworks. Not having to re-invent the wheel each time a new project begins is how great advancements are realised. What Atlassian are doing here is providing a fundamental public framework for mergers and acquisitions. Spend less time, money and effort doing things that have been done before and instead focus on getting the deal done and realising the value that prompted the M&A in the first place.

The reality is that because of the leverage that many buyers exert over sellers, certain “market” terms have evolved to buyers’ advantage, even though, based on the data, it’s simply not necessary.

Another example where pure laissez-faire markets are wonderful in theory and damaging in reality. Market power is a thing that is readily exerted. This creates a culture of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ where the real focus should be on having the reason for coming together create a win for all. This doesn’t need to be a zero-sum game.

I hope this new approach to M&As catches on, and less money is spent on wasteful lawyer fees and negotiation and everybody can end up with a better outcome at the end of the process. The market will be better off, customers will benefit, and the stakeholders to the deal will both be better off with less of the angst, stress and ill-feeling that can arise at the end of a protracted M&A process.

Thanks for your kind words, micro.bloggers. On a day when our dear pet left us, it’s nice to have positive responses. So different - and so much better - than the snark I might expect on other networks. I love this place.

Today we said goodbye to our gorgeous Airedale Terrier, Indi. Loyal friend for 14 years. She will be missed.

I’ve decided that I’m not going to renew my Lightroom subscription when it comes due. I’ve just gone through and brought all the photos that were on the Adobe Cloud back to my local NAS. I just don’t do enough photography anymore to justify the expense.

He’s almost over the flu now.

OpenDNS & Dynamic IPs

I have changed my DNS provider to OpenDNS. I have been using CloudFlare DNS and have nothing but praise for its speed and stability. However, with kids in the house, I need the additional network filtering and site-blocking that OpenDNS can deliver.

For OpenDNS to work it needs to be kept abreast of my home’s IP address. My ISP doesn’t provide1 a static IP. While my dynamic IP doesn’t change often, any change that does occur prevents the OpenDNS filtering from working. What’s more, it’s a non-visible problem. There are no error messages that pop up alerting of a problem. The filtering just stops working.

OpenDNS know this. They offer an app that runs in the background to monitor and update the OpenDNS service with the current dynamic IP address. However, that app isn’t nice. What’s more, I don’t like the idea of the network filtering being dependent on a laptop device that might not always be available on the network to perform the update.

Enter Raspberry Pi

I have a Raspberry Pi that provides ad-blocking throughout my home network with the brilliant Pi-Hole. Given it’s already important role in my network configuration, I decided the Pi should also be responsible for monitoring any changes to my dynamic IP address.

A bit of research led me to discover that ddclient was the tool for the job. It’s not installed by default on the Pi, but can be installed through the GUI package manager or on the terminal with:

sudo apt-get install ddclient

Once installed, I progressed to follow this solid step-by-step guide on how to configure ddclient with OpenDNS.

Success

The end result is that I now have ddclient running as a daemon process on the Raspberry Pi. It launches upon reboot and checks my IP address every 1 hour.

The best part is that I don’t have to run the very ordinary OpenDNS Updater app on my Mac.

  1. That is, I’m too cheap to pay for.↩︎

Well, this is a good reason to completely leave Google. It’s not sending me 2FA codes to my devices, and my attempt at recovery failed. So, I guess no more access to my Google account?

Thanks @cleverdevil for your “On This Day” extension for micro.blog.

Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-FiveSlaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this because it seems one of those books that should be read before one dies. So it goes. The worldview (universe view?) of the Tralfamadorian’s resonated with the reading I have done recently on stoicism. Perhaps that was always as it was meant to be?

I am glad to have read this book. but will have to contemplate more on what it means for me, who is currently living in an existence in a different era.

View all my reviews

Yes! I got my Hugo/Netlify site up and running. I’ll go run my victory lap now.

I was defeated by the combination of Hugo, git and Netlify. C’est la vie.

I’ve discovered this site by Bryce Wray. I have no idea if it’s already widely known, but it’s new to me. I like the writing.

I succumbed and bought iA Writer for macOS.

So Many Markdown Editor Options

The search for the right Mac Markdown editor is like a quest for the Holy Grail. There are many options, but finding the ideal fit is a challenge.

It got to the point where I had to do an audit of the options that exist on my computer, and consider which one might be best for my needs.

The list I came up with is, in potential order of preference:

A special mention:

Picking a Winner

I thought I would end up choosing BBEdit. That’s why I typed this post in the app. But in usage, I think the winner might be MultiMarkdown Composer.

Hey micro.blog friends, you’re a coercive bunch! I think I’m going to have to run with iA Writer! Is there a way to get x-callback URLs to render as tapable links though?