Climate change making El Nino and La Nina harder to forecast

16 September 2025

Tom Saunders, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

Thanks to climate change and a rapid warming trend in our oceans, the historical record and current analysis of the two Pacific phases has become contaminated. El Niño, the warm episode, is being falsely observed, while the cool state, La Niña, is at risk of going undetected.

The two well-known climate patterns have a significant influence on weather, either making Australian summers dryer and warmer, or wetter and not quite so warm. Of course the impact of both systems is not limited to Australia, but across the Pacific ocean, and beyond. It seemed like it was only a matter of time before climate change began to have impact on these weather patterns.

Entries for final Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship open October 2025

15 September 2025

The fellowship was created in 2011 to honour the memory of late Australian writer and biographer Hazel Rowley, who died in the same year. Past recipients of the fellowship, which supports the work of Australian biography writers, include Mary Hoban, the inaugural winner, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Matthew Lamb, and Mandy Sayer, for her book Those Dashing McDonagh Sisters.

When Rowley’s sister Della, together with Lynn Buchanan and Irene Tomaszewski, established the fellowship, they envisaged it would run for ten years, but after fifteen have decided to call time on the award. The organisers however are reportedly open to other parties taking on the fellowship, and would be prepared to assist anyone willing to do so.

It is to be hoped this will happen. Literary awards and fellowships are vital in supporting the work of Australian writers, many of whose annual earnings are well below the average salary.

Smartphone ban sees NYC students talk, play cards, use Polaroid cameras, daydream

15 September 2025

New York City recently introduced a smartphone ban in public schools. While students are not barred from owning phones, they must store their devices away during school hours.

While it’s early days, students appear to be adjusting well to life without smartphones, even if it’s only for a few hours a day. School-goers have taken to playing cards, engaging in face-to-face conversation, using Polaroid cameras, and even daydreaming, a favourite activity of mine both during and outside classes, back in my school days.

Needless to say though, some students have figured out ways to circumvent the ban, with some using burner phones they have obtained. The school hours ban seems like a good idea, and being without a smartphone for a relatively short time daily is hardly the end of the world. Some enforced non-smartphone time, a small digital detox sort of thing, for everyone, doesn’t seem a half bad idea.

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Where no Star Trek syndication royalties have gone: to William Shatner

12 September 2025

William Shatner, the Canadian actor perhaps best known for portraying Captain Kirk, in the original series (TOS) of sci-fi TV series, Star Trek, claims to have not been paid a penny for the shows that screened in syndication. After the show’s original run, between 1966 to 1969, after which the series was cancelled, some TV stations began broadcasting re-runs.

It seems incredible to think that Star Trek might not have become the cultural phenomenon it is today (that is, numerous movies and spin-off shows), if not for those re-runs during the 1970’s, which ignited broader interest in the story.

I imagine none of the other (original) Star Trek cast members received any residual fees either. It seems no one gave any thought, at the time, to the notion of TV shows being re-screened after their original run concluded. Perhaps though cast members received compensation in kind, when negotiating their fees to appear in the later series of movies.

In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, Shatner also said he’d only ever seen a small number of the original TV shows, and none of the spin-offs. Of course the point can be made that there’s no use watching the shows since you were in them, and presumably know what happens.

But the experience of participating in a broadcast production, be it a TV show or a movie, is a world removed from viewing same. This is something Keir Dullea, who portrayed astronaut David Bowman, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, touched on at a special screening of the film, in Sydney, in 2006.

Dullea said all he could see — particularity during the close-up scenes where his character appeared to directly face the audience — were cameras, and production crew and equipment.

As a result, he said he didn’t get a true sense of the story until watching the finished product. This despite being right in the middle of proceeding at times. It can’t have been much different for Shatner. But we’re talking Captain Kirk here, someone whose perspective is a little different…

We must not let AI agents scare us off using em dashes in our writing

11 September 2025

Michael Bassili:

I really miss using em dashes in my writing. Ever since content creators started using ChatGPT to help (or supplement) their writing, em dashes have become indicators of AI use.

Something is really wrong — seriously — when people feel they have to stop using certain punctuation marks for fear of their work being considered to be generated by an AI agent.

I’m a prolific user of em dashes — as I’ve said before — and have no intention of doing away with them just because AI agents have the good sense to include em dashes in their output.

Bloggers might have been syndicating content with ICE not RSS

11 September 2025

Ryan Farley, writing at Buttondown:

Not many people talk about how or why RSS won the content syndication war because few people are aware that a war ever took place. Everyone was so fixated on the drama over RSS’s competing standards (Atom vs RSS 2.0) that they barely registered the rise and fall of the Information and Content Exchange (ICE) specification, which had been created, funded, and eventually abandoned by Microsoft, Adobe, CNET, and other household names.

Here’s a slice of web history I was unaware of until now: an alternative blog content syndication specification that was — for a short time — in competition with RSS.

That Microsoft, as one of the backers of Information and Content Exchange (ICE) syndication, quietly began using RSS, says a lot. A lot about RSS, and Microsoft.

Getting a Linux laptop to work with some help from Claude

10 September 2025

Vinay Keerth was able to sort out a range of problems after installing Linux Mint (LM) on his laptop, when he asked AI agent Claude for help. It makes me wonder why I didn’t think of using AI to fix some of the — admittedly minor — niggles I’ve experienced with LM since migrating last year.

For instance, I couldn’t get my laptop to suspend (sleep/hibernate) when I closed the lid, something the previous OS did without missing a beat. For a time though, in closing the lid, I assumed the laptop had gone into suspend mode, only to discover on opening it hours later that the battery was drained, and the laptop had shut off.

I worked around that problem by setting up a launcher, in the form of a desktop icon. To suspend my laptop I simply double click the launcher icon, then close the lid. The laptop usually runs for two to three weeks between reboots now.

The old OS could go for longer though. I don’t know what it is with LM, but after about three weeks maximum it just wants to reboot, and crashes, just as I open the laptop lid to resume a session. Maybe this is something I could get Claude’s help with.

But I don’t mind going through the crash/reboot sequence every few weeks anyway, as it gives me the chance to run system and software updates, some of which require a restart.

The only other niggle of note is setting time outs when the laptop is inactive. These can vary depending on whether the device is plugged into a power point, or running on battery. Despite setting the inactive period to thirty-minutes for either source, through the Power Management (PM) control, the screen locks after only ten minutes of inactivity.

Clearly some other setting somewhere is overriding the PM timeout values, so I’ll be seeing what suggestions Claude can make there.

Threads to allow extra long posts, does this really mean blogging is back?

9 September 2025

Jay Peters, writing for The Verge:

Meta is adding a new feature to let you add a bunch of extra text to Threads posts — no screenshots of text blocks required. Starting today, Meta is rolling out a tool that lets you attach up to 10,000 characters of text to Threads posts, giving you a way to build upon the 500-character text limit already available when making a post.

The feature will certainly appeal to people looking for a platform that allows them to publish blog-like posts with ease.

What really caught my eye though was the “blogging is back” byline appended to the Verge article. I’m not sure who would have written that, Peters, or an editor. Is blogging really back? Did blogging ever really go away? Is the Verge trying to suggest this new Threads feature will bring about a blogging resurgence? Surely the Verge, and their writers, are aware of Indie/Small/Open web?

Blogging has been back for sometime, if it even went away.

Techtember, a time to scale down your tech stack… if applicable

9 September 2025

September is the month tech companies launch new products, and encourage consumers to buy up, giving rise to the portmanteau Techtember. You learn something new everyday. But instead of increasing our tech stack of stuff, Andreas at 82mhz suggests we shed excess paraphernalia.

I like the idea, and I would if I could, but my tech stack pretty much consists of a laptop, a smartphone, and some headphones. That’s it. No router (we tether), no printer, nor smartwatch even… who needs one when you can check the time on your phone or lappy?

I sit here churning out copy daily, and all I have to my name is a laptop. Go on, laugh, I don’t mind.

Happy Techtember then to all who celebrate it…

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Mark Zuckerberg and why personal websites trump social networks

8 September 2025

Mark Zuckerberg, a lawyer based in the US state of Indiana, has been banned from Facebook (FB) numerous times because the social network thinks he’s impersonating co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

You couldn’t make this stuff up. Someone has the same name as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and therefore they are up to no good. You would think a social network the size of FB would understand people do share the same first and last names. It’s hardly a rare occurrence either.

Soon after I signed up for FB, back in the days when I used to be active on the platform, I had a friend request from someone with the same name as mine. Looking at the person’s FB page, I could see he had connected with a number of other people with the same name.

It didn’t seem much unusual in the early days, there was a bit of people-sharing-the-same-names friending each other going on. A bit of harmless fun, back in the days when FB used to be fun.

Having the same name as the Meta CEO is sometimes far from fun though, as Zuckerberg the lawyer can attest to. He often receives massages from people who believe he is the FB co-founder, some of which are threatening. But Zuckerberg the lawyer now has his own website.

This is a smart move as anyone in the Indie/Small/Open web space can tell you. While a social media company can delete an account more or less because they feel like it, doing away with an independently hosted personal website is a little more difficult.

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