disassociated

A recent poll of voters in Australia and New Zealand has found most would prefer Democrat candidate Kamala Harris to win the upcoming American Presidential election, over her Republican rival Donald Trump:

“Fifty per cent of Australians say they’d vote for Harris compared to 26 per cent who say they’d vote for Trump,” says David Talbot, director Talbot Mills Research. Support for Harris among Kiwis is identical at 50 per cent while support for Trump is a little lower than in Australia at 22 per cent.

The same polling however revealed men aged under thirty would be more likely to back Trump than Harris. Support, meanwhile, for Trump among women in the same age group, is “minuscule”.

Interest in the US election is running high in Australia, as is often the case. This gives some weight to the notion that the election is not only national, but also global, a point Guardian writer Cas Mudde made four years ago:

US presidential elections are not just national elections; they are global elections, too. Although the US presidency is not as all-powerful as many people think, it is certainly, both inside and outside of the US, the most powerful elected position in the world.

A police method of prosecuting people suspected of being responsible for committing a serious crime, almost reads like something from a crime novel:

Police manufacture a chance meeting with the suspect, then offer them paid work of a non-criminal nature before introducing jobs that appear to break the law. Through a series of interactions over several months, the sting makes the suspect believe they are being adopted into an organised crime gang with powerful connections to corrupt police, government officials and even judges.

Long story short, police — undercover officers — go about extracting a confession, or admission of guilt, from a suspect they believe committed a crime, but do not have sufficient evidence to place charges. The so-called “Mr Big” technique, which originated in Canada, has resulted in numerous convictions. Legal experts however are concerned some people may be wrongly convicted, as a certain pressure is put on would-be suspects to confess.

The time 30 October once fell on a Saturday. The stop here had been unintentional. Unplanned. But that’s how it is for a lot of these stories. I hadn’t been to this place before, yet here I was. At ten minutes to midnight. It would be Sunday in eleven minutes. Not twenty minutes earlier, the taxi I was riding home in was almost outside of where I lived, when I asked the driver to take me over to Bondi Junction. The vehicle had sped efficiently through the late night streets of Sydney’s eastern suburbs, and delivered me here.

Now I sat at the bar. Counted myself lucky to find a seat, in this overcrowded room. Irish and British backpackers, who called this place their home away from home, went about their revels oblivious to my presence. I tried to figure why I was here. I split my attention between two television screens, one to my left, the other to my right. To my left, the Shawshank Redemption was screening. It was my first time watching the jailbreak classic. It looked good, but I couldn’t hear a word of it.

To my right, a game of International Rules football was screening. Peil na rialacha idirnáisiunta, to refer to the game by its Irish language name. Based on Australian Rules football, the Irish variant made an equal amount of sense to me. But then something else caught my eye. Someone whom I thought was alone, but couldn’t possibly be. A girl sitting at the far end of the bar, by herself. What’s wrong with this picture, I asked myself. This woman cannot possibly be alone. Her boyfriend must be nearby. Playing pool perhaps. Or something.

Two hours later, the girl, who as it turned out, worked at the bar and had been on a short break when I first saw her, walked up to me. What, she asked, is happening at the far end of the bar? You’re not paying the least attention to anything else in here. I pointed at the television screens. Nice try, she said, with an air of confidence that was disarming. How do you know so much, I asked, how could you have even noticed me in this room, where people were almost hanging from the rafters?

Oh, that’s easy, she said, you’ve been at it since ten minutes to midnight, there’s no missing it. We may be the best part of one-hundred kilometres from that room on this day, but we go back every now and again. It’s where the story began, and I’m always waiting for what happens next, because sometimes I have trouble paying attention to anything else.

Late American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick made his first feature, Fear and Desire, on a budget of a little over fifty-thousand dollars (US), in 1952. Almost thirty-years later, Kubrick had a budget of nineteen million dollars to make The Shining.

I expect many successful filmmakers move along a similar budget trajectory. But it sounds like Kubrick was boot-strapping to the max, during the production of Fear and Desire:

I then found out how much feature films were being made for, you know, millions, and I calculated that I could make a feature film for about $10,000…by projecting the amount of film I’d shoot, figuring that I could get actors to work for practically nothing. I mean at this point I was the whole crew, cameraman, assistant cameraman, you know, director, everything.

As a comparison, 2001: A Space Odyssey, made in 1968, and easily my favourite Kubrick movie, came with a ten million dollar price tag. Over budget, and almost a year and half behind schedule, but worth every cent. Watch this trailer for 2001, made in 2018, and tell me I’m wrong.

Mali Waugh, writing for The Age:

I also think that keeping a written diary is not really done any more. I wonder whether part of this is that people are much more accepting of traditionally private things being put in the public domain. For the most part, this is a good thing but also sometimes disgusting, like when people share their nose job recovery pictures or their recipes for microwaved brie.

I kind of keep a dairy — but it’s more a listing of the day’s happenings — on some of my socials pages. In fact, my diary-style posts are just about the only content I publish on those pages.

But I doubt handwritten journaling has declined because people necessarily want to make details of their lives and thoughts more public. It’s simply because, no brainer, easier ways to keep a dairy have come along: the web, personal websites, blogs, social media, etc.

I couldn’t see myself starting a handwritten dairy at this point though. It would be more work. Another mouth that would to be fed content. It’d be too much like having a second website. Plus, paper diaries would be more stuff to haul around. It’s like I say: one personal website is enough.

Hartley Charlton, writing for Mac Rumours:

Citing multiple people “directly involved” in making components for the headset, the report says that the scaling back of production began in the early summer.

My take here is people thought Vision Pro was going to be the next WOW Apple product, and units would fly off the shelves, as they (eventually) did with the iPhone. But Vision Pro, based on pricing alone (leaving aside lack of content, and use thereof potentially being socially isolating), was always only going to appeal to a relatively small group of consumers.

Of course, there’s nothing yet official from Apple, as I type, so the news remains unsubstantiated, even though word of the production cuts have been widely reported.

Humane’s AI Pin, launched to less than flattering fanfare last April, may not have lived up to expectations of being an “iPhone killer”. But CosmOS, the device’s operating system, is something else altogether, says Om Malik, writing for Crazy Stupid Tech:

An AI-focused operating system is agent-driven instead of application-driven. The agents — tiny bits of software — replace traditional apps. That’s faster and more intuitive. You don’t say, “I need to start the calendar app so that I can make a date,” you just tell the machine to make a date and the agent does it.

Word has it HP is interested in licencing CosmOS, so all may not be lost for Humane.

Good Food have published their list of the twenty best cafes in Sydney, Australia.

We eat at restaurants, but we live in cafes.

Yes, but we don’t work in cafes. Or we shouldn’t. If we do though, then only for short periods of time, right? And for a minute I thought one place I occasionally go to, had made the cut. But there’s a slight variation in the spelling of their names. Besides, I’m doubt I’m in Sydney enough to be ending up at any of the Good Food top twenty cafes.

David Heinemeier Hansson looks at why more people don’t migrate to Linux operating systems:

The world is full of free invitations to self-improvement that are ignored by most people most of the time. Putting it crudely, it’s easier to be fat and ignorant in a world of cheap, empty calories than it is to be fit and informed. It’s hard to resist the temptation of minimal effort.

I run Linux Mint, possibly the most user-friendly Linux distribution AKA distro. For some reason, who knows, Mint reminds me of when I used to tinker with CGI scripts. I’m not talking about CGI as in computer generated imagery, but common gateway interface. In the days of old, CGI scripts helped make personal websites a little more interactive. They could do all sorts of things, but were widely used to power contact forms and guestbooks.

Web designers would hunt around for a CGI script that might aid them to do something or other on their website. In the same way a, say, WordPress publisher today would search out plug-ins. Once a suitable script had been located, they’d then go about configuring it, obviously provided their web host supported CGI scripts. While most scripts came ready to use, they usually required tweaking. Care needed to be taken doing this, because a misstep could render the script useless. Or worse.

For the first ten years I had a website, I hosted it at a smaller operation based in Sydney, NSW. They had a “sandbox” arrangement in place, where CGI scripts could be loaded, and if something went wrong, isolated, without bringing the whole server down. I haven’t used CGI in a long time now, but the configuration experience seems comparable to Mint. It’s mostly setup and ready to run, but still needs tweaks here and there.

But that’s enough to put off some people, even those who would like to move away from, especially, Windows operating systems. It’s unfortunate, but entirely understandable. Most of us just want to push the button, and see something happen.

I should conclude this discussion by making mention of the webmaster — a person, not a team, they were too small for that — at my long gone old web host. I’d often email the support people with questions about some difficulty configuring a CGI script, and he’d respond. My questions must have been too much for the regular support crew (er, duo), and would be forwarded to the guy actually looking after the servers.

He’d send replies at like three o’clock in the morning with suggestions on what to do, which always helped. Remember we’re talking the late nineties here, but this sort of thing said a lot about the earlier days of the web: it often felt like it was all happening during the middle of the night. But emails from the webmaster themselves: that has to be something you’d probably never see today, a hands-on person, instead of a customer service rep, taking the time to help out.

There has been a ban on the use of smartphones at a school in Iceland since 2019. No prizes for guessing what the result was.

A phone ban has been in place at Öldutún School since the beginning of 2019, and according to the principal, it has worked well. The school’s atmosphere and culture have changed for the better, and there is more peace in the classroom.

Hardly surprising. Students are able to bring their phones with them, but in the normal course of events, they must not be used during school hours. Smartphones weren’t around when I was at school, and for that I am thankful… it seemed like there was plenty else to worry as it was.