Socialising leads to longer life, but what about introverts?

15 October 2025

Dana G. Smith, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald;

People who have strong relationships generally live longer, and the unicorns known as “super-agers” — older adults who have the memory abilities of someone 20 years younger — tend to be especially outgoing. On the flipside, chronic loneliness raises the risk for cognitive decline and even early death.

Introverts — such as yours truly — are not hermits, they simply prefer more time by themselves. On occasion I’ve wondered if having only a small number of acquaintances might impact my health and well-being, considering long life and good health is associated with having numerous social contacts. But surely if introverts are content then there cannot be any adverse health outcomes?

Loneliness is of course a different matter, and can afflict anyone, introvert or extrovert. I suspect extroverts might struggle more here than introverts though. An out-going person who is lonely may well see their health suffer as a result.

But I sometimes wonder about introverts residing in aged-care facilities. What awareness do the staff have of introversion? Are introvert residents coerced into participating in social activities because they are deemed “too quiet”, “too self-isolating”, for their own good? It seems to me forced socialisation would be, more than anything, detrimental to their well-being.

I think caveats need to be included with research that claims strong relationships are essential for a long healthy life. That might be the case for some people, but not everyone.

Vale Diane Keaton, star of Annie Hall, First Wives Club, and many more

15 October 2025

American actor Diane Keaton died a few days aged 79.

Keaton will be remembered for many things. Her collaborations with Woody Allen. Her performance in Manhattan Murder Mystery was a stand out to me, but there were many more. Annie Hall (of course), The Godfather, First Wives Club. Even Father of the Bride, where she was the perfect foil to Steve Martin’s somewhat trite portrayal of a father of a bride to be.

The big screen will not be the same.

ISP customer hompages lists, the first web directories of the early web

10 October 2025

Via Jelloeater on Bluesky, Jeppe Larsen’s early memories of the web, from the late 1990’s:

I remember the ISP was called get2net and it came with both email and web hosting. The last bit was particularly exciting as get2net had a listing of all homepages made by its customers on their website, which was an absolute fantastic way to discover other HTML enthusiasts and of course contribute with my own handcrafted HTML manually uploaded via FTP. The web was a lot more personal, filled with handcrafted websites where people mostly just wrote about themselves and their hobbies.

My ISP in the late nineties also had a list of customer’s homepages (Internet Archive link). One of the earliest iterations of a web directory perhaps. I frequently perused the list, visiting each site regularly for a time. Some pages were not dissimilar to what you’d see on Geocities. Avril & Andrew’s home page (Internet Archive link), is one I clearly recall, on account of the easy to remember URL.

But it wasn’t just customers checking out each other’s websites.

At one point the splash page (remember those?) of my website featured a violin. I have no idea why now. I’d put a purple tint on it, with Photoshop, and liked the way it gleamed on the white background of my site. Anyway, there was some problem with the site and I’d had to call, on the phone, a landline no less, the ISP.

You didn’t get through to a call centre back then, you spoke to the people who owned the company. I forget their names, but I usually spoke to one of two somewhat sarcastic guys.

Having explained the issue, and being put on “hold” while whoever had taken call went to investigate, I heard him say to his colleague, “yeah, I’ve got violin guy on the phone…”. The colleague responded, saying something like, “oh, purple violin guy?” You wouldn’t see that sort of… familiarity today.

Despite the snarky attitude, I was pleased no end to be actually speaking to non-acquaintances who looked at my website. Occasionally the “webmaster”, the person who looked after the servers, would also reply — usually in the middle of the night — to some of my support emails.

Something else that would never happen today.

The ISP was taken over several times during the time I was with them, growing with each buy-out. The customer homepage list vanished, along with the two original staffers, whom I never spoke to again. I sometimes wonder what became of them, the ex-ISP startup founders, the then nocturnal webmaster, along with Avril and Andrew, and where they are now.

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Robotic self-driving vehicles a threat to gig-economy food delivery work

9 October 2025

Robocart, a US company, has been developing self-driving vehicles that have the capacity to deliver ten different customer orders in a single run. The service, which the company plans to launch in Austin, Texas, later this year, will see customers pay just three-dollars per delivery, pricing many people will find attractive.

But Chicago based cybersecurity and network infrastructure expert Nick Espinosa warns that such a service stands to eliminate the roles of many food delivery drivers (YouTube link), working on behalf of companies such as Uber Eats and Door Dash.

Earlier this year, I was hearing stories about Australian web and app developers taking on food delivery work, as AI apps are doing the work they used to, for a fraction of the cost. While many of these people will be able to re-skill and eventually find new work, what will they do in the meantime, if casual work begins drying up?

NASA plans to send four people around the Moon in 2026

8 October 2025

The astronauts, who may depart as soon as February 2026, will not land on the Moon though.

Their flight sounds like it will be similar to Apollo 8 in 1968, which yielded this incredible photo, taken by William Anders. The Artemis program will potentially pave the way for a longer term human presence on the Moon, which is a worthwhile goal.

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In the end days of Windows 10, Windows 7 enjoys a resurgence

8 October 2025

Taras Buria, writing for Neowin:

Windows 10 support is ending in only two weeks, and with a new month here, Statcounter has new data about the Windows market and how different versions perform. This month, the data is rather odd: Statcounter reports that Windows 10 dropped to a seven-year low, while Windows 7 is experiencing a sudden influx of users.

Support for Windows 7 ceased in 2020, interestingly, eleven years after the arrival of the Microsoft made operating system (OS). But now, according to data collected by web analytics service Statcounter, there has been a significant increase in computers running the obsolete OS.

What, has some organisation suddenly begun making W7 widely available for download?

Or, has someone figured out a way to make many thousands of devices running Windows 10 look as if W7 is their OS? Or has the data Statcounter collects somehow become scrambled?

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Vale Patricia Routledge: Mrs Bucket has left the building

7 October 2025

British actor Patricia Routledge died at the age of ninety-six last week. I came to know Routledge through her role as Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced bouquet, it would seem), in the BBC produced TV sitcom Keeping up Appearances, which ran from 1990 to 1995.

I think the show screened in Australia a little after that time.

I’m not much of TV watcher, but I’d come home one day, flicked on the TV, and there was her show. Hyacinth, originally from a working class family, believed her place was near the top of the pecking order, not the bottom. Her attempts however to scale the social ladder were frequently thwarted by her sisters, and brother-in-law, who were quite content with their working class lives.

I made a point to tune-in each week, and ended up seeing a series or two of the show. After production ceased in 1995, Routledge was frequently asked to reprise her role as Hyacinth, but refused. Speaking later, Routledge said she wanted the show to go out on a high. A good call.

Keeping up Appearances starred numerous well known British actors. Clive Swift portrayed Hyacinth’s hen-pecked husband Richard, with Shirley Stelfox, and Judy Cornwell, as her sisters Rose and Daisy, respectively. Geoffrey Hughes played Daisy’s husband Onslow, and Josephine Tewson was cast as Liz, Hyacinth’s jittery neighbour.

Although Routledge was opposed to continuing the show, a prequel film, Young Hyacinth, with Kerry Howard in the titular role, was made in 2016, which was set about forty years before events of Keeping up Appearances.

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Trailer for One More Shot, a time travel comedy by Nicholas Clifford, with Emily Browning

7 October 2025

If you’ve ever wanted to travel back in time so you can put something right, then One More Shot, trailer, the debut feature of Melbourne based Australian filmmaker Nicholas Clifford, staring Australian actor Emily Browning, might be for you.

It’s New Year’s Eve 1999, and Minnie (Browning) discovers a bottle of tequila, Time Traveling Tequila no less, is able to transport her back to the beginning of NYE party she’s at, with each swig. For some people, going that far back in time could possibly just be enough to put the world to rights.

From what I can tell, One More Shot is going to straight to streaming (the way I prefer things) in Australia on Sunday 12 October 2025.

Michelle de Kretser, Rick Morton, among 2025 Prime Minister’s Literary Award winners

7 October 2025

de Kretser, who’s novel Theory & Practice (which I’m currently reading), and Morton’s book, Mean Streak, about the previous Australian government’s controversial Robobot debt recovery scheme, are respective winners of the fiction and non-fiction categories.

Others recipients, who were announced last Monday, 29 September 2025, include The Other Side of Daylight: New and Selected Poems, by David Brooks in poetry, and The Invocations, by Krystal Sutherland in young adult. See the full list of winners here.

Windows 10 support extended free for some users but only delays inevitable

7 October 2025

Windows 10 (W10) users, in Europe and the United States, have been offered a one-year reprieve by Microsoft, manufacturer of the ten-year old operating system (OS), before product support was slated to cease on 14 October 2025.

Previously, anyone wishing to continue using W10 had been told they’d need to pay a subscription to do so. The move is good news for people running older devices, which may not have been able to support Microsoft’s successor OS, Windows 11 (W11).

But the twelve months of free support comes with a catch, W10 users must create a Microsoft account to receive the updates. I was a long time Windows user, until the winter of 2024, but flat refused to create a Microsoft account, each time I either bought a new computer, or moved to a new Windows OS.

The idea of having all manner of my data sitting on Microsoft servers did not appeal to me in the slightest, so I always opted for a local account. I have no such concerns with Linux Mint, my current OS, thankfully, as user accounts are all local.

The biggest catch though with W10’s one-year support extension, is that it only buys time. A little bit of breathing space. I doubt Microsoft will offer any further extensions, come October 2026. Unless a “lite” version of W11 is shipped (unlikely), owners of older computers will need to either buy a new device, or consider migrating to an OS that will work on their present computer.

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