Cash strapped Australians yearn for the ‘happy’ days of COVID lockdowns

10 June 2026

Tangentially related to the previous post. Data recently published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) suggests some Australians felt better off during the COVID pandemic, despite lockdowns and other restrictions on their movements, than they do today.

In 2026 people are dealing with cost-of-living pressures, reduced real income, and the potential threat to their jobs from AI, among other things.

In contrast, during the pandemic, many Australians were the recipients of government UBI-like payments. Some were possibly also content with the prospect of not having to work, even if they couldn’t go too far from their homes.

Whoever could have thought some people might one day look on that difficult period with fondness?

Facebook spent billions on the metaverse and all they got was a new name

10 June 2026

A postmortem, perhaps, of the metaverse, particularly as envisaged by Meta, by Nick Heer.

A number of other big tech players also had visions of an all encompassing immersive, digital realm, but aside from sometimes considerable expenditure, not a whole lot came of it.

From where we are now, several years later, the connection between the COVID pandemic, and Facebook’s announcement they were effectively going all-in on the metaverse, couldn’t be clearer.

The world was in the midst of seemingly endless lockdowns, and stay at home mandates. The metaverse pitch was certainly persuasive. We couldn’t live in the real world, so how about instead a vast virtual domain? Who couldn’t help but be excited by the prospect?

I went as far as setting-up a metaverse tag here, which tellingly, hasn’t been used in three years.

But the world we find ourselves in, nearly five years later, couldn’t be much further removed from that of late 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of what was then Facebook, unveiled his vision of the metaverse.

But let’s give Zuckerberg some due here. He had known something big, something groundbreaking, was in our future, declaring three years earlier in 2018, that “every ten to fifteen years or so, there’s a major new computing paradigm.”

The thing of course is this new paradigm turned out to be something else all together.

The vinyl revival spreads to CDs, DVD, other physical media

8 June 2026

Some people are tired of streaming, says Iskhandar Razak, writing for writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

I’m not sure if it’s the actual process of watching, say, a movie online, or having to deal with streaming content providers, that’s fatiguing viewers, it sounds like a bit of both

I’m hardly the biggest consumer of small (not so small) screen media, it’s usually after nine in the evening before we lounge back on the sofa to watch something. The good news there, with such low consumption, is we only need to deal with one (subscription) streaming provider.

We’re fortunate to also have access to the likes of Kanopy, and iView, and their extensive repositories of movies and other shows. But I don’t even regard streaming as streaming, it’s simply a means by which to view a show or movie.

Others see things differently though. Some think streaming is too transient. They have come to miss owning physical copies of the films and shows they enjoy, and keeping them in a home library, sitting a on a shelf.

Surprisingly perhaps, the sentiment is not limited only to people with fond memories of watching movies on DVD‘s twenty-years plus ago. Many buyers of DVD’s and — incredibly — VHS cassettes, in 2026, are in their twenties.

It’s one thing to own all this physical media though, but a way to view it all is still needed. I assume VHS players, in working condition, are available. We still have a modest DVD collection, but need to hook up a small DVD player to a laptop, then to the TV screen, if need be, to watch them.

The DVD player, which isn’t much bigger than a DVD really, is fine. I’m not sure I’d be in favour of a larger player, and having to haul it around, let alone a VHS player. Plus a whole load of DVD’s and VHS cassettes. I’m having flashbacks to VHS cassette tape getting jammed in the player, and rental DVD’s glitching because of damage to the disc.

Streaming has made those particular playback hassles a distant memory. But that’s just the situation here. For others though, it seems owning a large collection of physical media, in addition to the required playback paraphernalia, adds to the viewing experience.

It has also offered a lifeline to some retailers of physical media, whose businesses were brought to the verge of collapse by streaming.

Other things, fun things, coming to Instagram, Facebook… for a price

6 June 2026

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:

For a few dollars per month, consumers subscribing to Instagram Plus ($3.99/mo), Facebook Plus ($3.99/mo), or WhatsApp Plus ($2.99/mo) will gain access to extra features, like profile customization, super reactions, and story insights, among other things.

In addition to these “other things”, Meta also says “more fun features” are imminent.

Too bad I removed all the Meta apps from my phone a while back. I still check in on Instagram and, occasionally, Facebook, through the websites, via my laptop. This has the bonus of restricting exposure to Meta products to work hours only. I don’t know how many, if any, of these new “plus” features will be available through the website though.

Is it smart for someone who writes in the general tech space, to evade these products? Probably not, but Meta is not the entirety of tech.

RELATED CONTENT

smartphones, social media, technology

Microsoft wants users to be addicted to Scout, their AI personal assistant

6 June 2026

Jason Koebler, and Emanuel Maiberg, writing for 404 Media:

An internal Microsoft strategy document says that the plan for its just-announced “Scout” personal assistant AI is to “make people addicted” to the tool before rolling out additional functionality, 404 Media has learned. “Three phases from addictive app to agentic platform,” the documentation.

Is anyone surprised? The big tech company has long been in the business of building not so much addiction, but rather dependency, on their products.

The Windows operating system (OS) started out, possibly, once, a long time ago, as a good OS. Little by little though, users became ever more addicted/dependent on the OS, through numerous lock-ins and lock-outs. Only when Windows 11 arrived did people realise just how dependent, and trapped, they’d become.

DuckDuckGo sees user uptick following Google plans for an AI search box

4 June 2026

Search engine DuckDuckGo has experienced a noticeable surge in users in recent weeks, says Rebecca Bellan, writing for TechCrunch.

Many of these new arrivals are concerned about Google’s proposals to significantly change its search experience, through the use of AI, something I think is being called AI Mode.

DuckDuckGo said U.S. app installs went up 18.1% week-over-week on average during the May 20 to May 25 period, compared to May 13 to May 18. The company said that growth was sustained for six consecutive days and peaked at 30.5% on May 25. On iOS, the rate of install is even higher, with week-over-week growth hitting a 33% average, peaking at 69.9%.

In addition to its regular search engine, DuckDuckGo also offers a completely AI-free search option.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin, coming to the big screen

4 June 2026

The news we’ve been waiting for. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, the 2022 novel by American author Gabrielle Zevin, is to be adapted to film.

Daisy Edgar-Jones, who starred in the screen adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People, has been cast in the central role of Sadie Green, a games designer.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow sadly remains on my TBR list all these years later. Maybe I’ll get to experience the screen adaptation of the story instead.

As an aside, and I don’t by any means know the ins and outs here, but I’m surprised it’s taken so long for this to happen, given the interest in the novel when it was published.

Dickover: a name for annoying website call-to-action popups

1 June 2026

John Gruber, writing at Daring Fireball:

You know what a dickover is, even if you didn’t know what to call it (until now). If you use the Internet, you encounter them every day. They’re popovers, but dickheaded. The web is absolutely lousy with them, and mobile apps present them too, with increasing frequency.

I’ve written before about my frustration with these popup box thingies, that present on the screen, before you even know what website you’re on. But dickovers — is there a way we can ratify this as the official name for them? — have been around for a long time, decades by now.

But it makes me wonder: is the blogosphere to blame for their prevalence today?

Popup boxes, in the form of a separate browser window, that usually carried advertising of some sort, were a scourge of the early web. Eventually, browsers allowed users to block them. But the call-to-action popups that followed, are something else. Not so easy to block out.

They began appearing on some of the blogs I read regularly, usually as a means to goad readers into signing up to a newsletter. In response, I’d ceased reading the blog if an RSS feed wasn’t available.

Maybe this is why I remain averse to newsletters. I’m subscribed to maybe half a dozen, tops. Tell me though call-to-action popups, AKA dickovers, didn’t escape from the old/early blogosphere, only to run rampant like a virus, infecting a large, and growing, number of websites?

RELATED CONTENT

language, technology, trends

AI: you cannot live with it, you cannot live without it

1 June 2026

Daniel Jalkut:

My take on AI is, essentially, everybody who’s against it is too against it and everybody who’s for it is too for it.

From where I sit, somewhere in the middle of this, that’s the way it looks.

Could a super-Earth called Hestia be better than planet Earth?

30 May 2026

You won’t find Hestia, a super-Earth planet, on any of the charts, for this is a body imagined by Kurzgesagt. But Hestia, on paper at least, is a super-Earth in more ways than one.

No polar regions are present, ditto continents, though there are a multitude of medium size island land masses. The planet also sports shallow oceans, and an atmosphere far denser than Earth.

Combined, these conditions make Hestia an ideal spawning ground for all manner of complex lifeforms, including, possibly, intelligent life.

This would-be super-Earth also orbits in the habitable zone of an orange-dwarf star. The Sun meanwhile is a yellow-dwarf. Proxima Centauri, the next nearest star to Earth, is a red-dwarf.

Orange-dwarfs represent — at face value at least — a happy balance between the two. They are usually highly stable, and boast long lifespans, up to seventy-billon years, compared to about ten billion for stars such as the Sun.

A planet particularly conducive to life, hosted by a stable, long-lived star, increases the likelihood of intelligent life coming into being. Red dwarfs also have long lives, upwards of one trillion years, but that doesn’t always make them the ideal host for potentially life bearing planets.

Hestia also comes with four moons. Imagine a night sky adorned by not one, but four moons? What more could anyone want in a planet?

While such a place might make for an ideal life-friendly environment, it probably wouldn’t be suitable for humans. The surface gravity of a super-Earth can be up to three time that experienced on Earth. We might be able to adapt that sort of force, but it would be heavy going.

Multiple moons might also pose problems, depending on their proximity. If they are too close, the host planet may see more boisterous ocean tides, and increased seismic and volcanic activity.

Then there’s the matter of Hestia’s thirty-six hour day, something that might take some getting used to. But, if we’re trying to find life elsewhere in the universe, planets like Hestia, orbiting in the habitable zones of orange-dwarf stars, are what we should looking out for.

RELATED CONTENT

astronomy, exoplanets, science

1 2 … 223 NEXT