Tranquil Motion, a new album from All India Radio

31 December 2024

I’m talking about the Australian downtempo electronica music act, not the public broadcaster of India. In the hubbub of the silly season, I forgot to mention a new album, Tranquil Motion, was released earlier this month. Track it down on Bandcamp, or your favourite music streamer.

I could use some tranquil motion right now…

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Australian music, music

The web today is not necessarily worse than the early web

27 December 2024

Xavier H.M., writing on his Mastodon page:

Your neocities blog is cute but I can’t read the 5pt font and your cursor is the size of a bread crumb. The web page is loading so many gifs my computer sounds like a boeing 747.

disassociated once, in a way, looked like a Neocities website. Or, more the point, way back in the day: GeoCities-esque. My websites of twenty-five years ago may have seemed like the work of a web designer trying to be artistic, but the way they were built presented problems to some visitors, particularly those with low vision. For example, much text on my early sites was rendered as images.

The facility to use alternative text, or alt-text, was always there, as far as I remember, but like a lot of visual web designers of the time, I did not make effective use of the facility. For example, if say I was posting a photo of a tree, the alt text would literally read “a tree”. I’d say nothing about where the tree stood. Along a road? In a park? Near a body of water? Nor anything else that would help describe the image more fully to people who had trouble seeing it.

As for blocks of text rendered as images — this to maintain complete design control across different browsers and operating systems — I probably supplied no alt-text, even though it would not have been difficult to do so. In other words, much of the content was invisible to some visitors.

And then we get around to font and cursor sizes that would suit an ant. For sure, it’s all fun, but doesn’t work for everyone. Those early days were more about aesthetics rather than accessibility. Today’s websites and blogs might look bland, might look all the same, but they are easier for a greater number of people to use, and, as a bonus, aren’t too demanding on our devices.

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design, history, technology, trends

Time, not dark energy, may be causing the universe to expand

27 December 2024

Dark energy does not exist, and the universe, while continuing to expand, is not doing so in a uniform fashion. In other words, the cosmos may look more like a potato, rather than a sphere. This according to recent research by astronomers and scientists at the University of Canterbury (UC), based in Christchurch, New Zealand.

As if that’s not startling enough, things become truly mind boggling when we look at the nature of time in a universe that may be devoid of dark energy. Time, you see, is moving at different speeds, depending on the location. Within our galaxy, the Milky Way, a clock ticks more slowly than one that might be situated elsewhere in an empty region of the universe, say the mid-point between our galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy, which is two and a half million light years distant.

The model suggests that a clock in the Milky Way would be about 35 percent slower than the same one at an average position in large cosmic voids, meaning billions more years would have passed in voids. This would in turn allow more expansion of space, making it seem like the expansion is getting faster when such vast empty voids grow to dominate the universe.

Because there is more gravity inside a galaxy than outside, clocks will be slower. This is a concept called gravitational time dilation, which Albert Einstein predicted when he published the theories of special relativity and general relativity, early in the twentieth century. Differences in clock speeds may not be surprising then, but the UC research illustrates just how stark these variations might be.

Pack plenty of books and take yourself into internal exile in 2025

27 December 2024

The introverts among us live almost permanently in a sort of internal exile, or a rich inner life, as Waleed Aly referred to it during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

But the idea of getting away from it all, without actually going anywhere, is gaining traction more widely, writes Jacqueline Maley, for The Sydney Morning Herald. This as 2025, and the greater uncertainty that many people are anticipating, looms:

In recent months, I have been reading about the concept of “internal exile” or “internal emigration’. The term comes from the Russian, “vnutrennaya emigratsia” and means a sort of travelling into oneself, to take comfort in small pleasures – often solitary pleasures of the mind, like reading, or listening to music, or gardening or making a pleasant home.

I’ll just be asking for you… Telstra’s 2023 Christmas advert

23 December 2024

Let’s flashback a year. Australian telecommunications company Telstra might have hit the right note with its Christmas theme advertising in 2023, by way of this ninety second commercial. The song excerpted in the ad is Oh Christmas, by Brisbane based duo Zefereli. Listen to the full length version here. It may not happen often, but sometimes the big corporates get it right.

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Australia, Australian music, music

Snow and heatwaves: this is Christmas in Australia

23 December 2024

Weather that is fine and not too warm seems to the Christmas Day weather forecast for most of Australia. But the days either side will be a different matter, writes Tom Saunders for the ABC:

The tumultuous week of variability will commence with a wintry Monday for the south-east, even cold enough for brief snow on the Alps, followed just days later by a blast of hot northerly winds and potential catastrophic fire danger.

Presently, day time high temperatures on this part of the east coast are forecast to be relatively mild. With the exception of Friday when the mercury is predicted to reach thirty-six degrees Celsius. I think we’ll be spending most of that day deep in the shade somewhere.

Shoot for the stars: Tim Teege wants to run a marathon on the Moon

20 December 2024

Hamburg, Germany, based web developer and long distance triathlete, Tim Teege is super keen to run a marathon the Moon. So much so, he wants you to ask any space agency worker type acquaintances you may have, to help him achieve his goal. Ask, and you shall receive, and the like.

Not to put a dampener on Teege’s aspirations, I wonder if he’s read Rhett Allain’s Wired article on the subject:

You can’t go out and jog around the Sea of Tranquility—you’d just start bouncing and floating.

But, as they say, where there’s a will, maybe there’s a way. The laws of physics notwithstanding. Yet here, at the quarter way point of the twenty-first century, the act of somehow being able to run on the Moon, should really be Teege’s only significant challenge.

Getting to the Moon — in this post 2001: A Space Odyssey world — should be as easy as boarding what ought to be regular commercial flights to Earth’s satellite.

The journey might cost a pretty penny, but that’s what crowdfunding is for. Instead, however, in what’s almost 2025, about all we have in terms of reaching the Moon, is NASA’s troubled Artemis program, which seems like a re-run of Apollo, yet appears not to be going anywhere fast.

With 2025 essentially only days away now, I shouldn’t be so indifferent. Big shoot for the stars ambitions and goals are what we need right now. Especially for this particular new year.

W3C ethical web principles: web standards for a mature web

19 December 2024

A statement of twelve guiding principles for an ethical web, recently published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

The web is a fundamental part of our lives, shaping how we work, connect, and learn. We understand that with this profound impact comes the responsibility to ensure that the web serves as a platform that benefits people and delivers positive social outcomes. As we continue to advance the web platform, we must therefore consider the consequences of our work.

Comparable, to a degree, to the IndieWeb community’s core tenets. To me, the W3C’s ethical web principles seem like web standards for a more mature, established web, of the third decade of the twenty-first century. One objective of web standards was to build a web (specifically websites), that everyone could view and use uniformly, regardless of their browser, or platform (operating system). We have the technical side of the web down pat, hopefully, now it’s time to focus on ethics.

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The Tintin stories enter the public domain in 2025

18 December 2024

As a kid I loved the Tintin books. Although they might today be called a product of their time, I aspired to be like the intrepid boy-reporter, who seemed to do very little reporting. I have the red hair, and I write a blog so… Plus, I did write a few articles for a newspaper once. Sometimes people refer to me as a journalist (not always for flattering reasons however…).

So maybe I kind of, sort of, ended up like Tintin.

Anyway, the Tintin stories are among a batch of well-known cultural artefacts (could I refer to the Tintin comic books that way?) entering the public domain in 2025. The final, completed, story in the series, Tintin and the Picaros, was published in 1976, and creator Hergé died in 1983, meaning only some earlier Tintin works will enter the public realm for now.

But it makes me wonder. If the boy-reporter were still with us, would he still be writing for a newspaper? Or might he have capitalised on his considerable profile, and launched his own online publication. A super-famous blog. Such are the things I stay up late at night thinking about.

Coffee prices push toward fifty-year high

17 December 2024

The last few years have been bad for both producers and consumers of coffee. Extremes of weather in growing regions has resulted in diminishing coffee bean harvests, which has in turn pushed up prices. This is a topic I’ve been covering for a while here now, but it seems coffee is only going to get more expensive going forward:

On Wednesday, the price for Arabica coffee, the world’s most popular variety, hit its highest level in nearly 50 years, with a pound of beans (453.6 grams) listed in New York for US$3.20 ($5.02). The all-time high was US$3.38 ($5.30) for a pound of Arabica beans in 1977 due to snow destroying swathes of Brazil’s plantations.

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