Piccolo, an app that helps plan your daily coffee consumption

26 May 2026

Piccolo, by Australian app developer Josh McKinnon, tells you what time you can enjoy your last coffee each day, based on your nominated bedtime. Sounds like the coffee drinker’s friend to me.

Most apps just add up milligrams. Piccolo runs a one-compartment pharmacokinetic model — the same maths clinicians use — over every drink you log. Each coffee is absorbed to a peak about 45 minutes in, then decays at your half-life (5 hours by default, and adjustable). Stack a few drinks and the curves add up, giving you the one number that matters: how much caffeine is active right now.

Still in development, and presently available only on iOS 26 (iPhone) by the looks of it, you can try out the Piccolo beta through TestFlight.

On a two coffee day, I can usually get away with the final cuppa at about four in the afternoon, if taken with food, usually in the form of late lunch.

I might still be up for another eight or nine hours, but anything after four, and on an empty stomach, is not the best for sleep for about twelve hours. Unless I get out walking for two to three hours, something that usually happens everyday.

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WordPress 7 shipped with new AI features, where are they hiding?

25 May 2026

The latest version of WordPress (WP), seven, which shipped a few days ago, comes with, according to the accompanying release notes/marketing copy, a number of AI features.

I’m yet to see even one of these, despite installing version seven last week now. The only noticeable difference I can discern — to date — is a change in some of the hyperlink colours on the dashboard.

I’m not interested, by the way, in activating these AI “enhancements”, just curious as to why I can’t see them. I was expecting the interface to look all new when I logged back in after running the update, but as I say, barely anything has changed.

Presumably the powers that be are leaving WordPressers to opt-in to the AI features themselves — the way it should be — rather than foisting them upon us. Works for me, I have no use for them.

On the other hand, it might be some combination of plug-ins, or edits to WP code I’ve made (though that’s rare for me) that are somehow blocking out the AI options.

Whatever is happening: long may it last. And if this is all a dream I’m having — and the AI features are there, but I just can’t see them — then no one wake me up.

The Miles Franklin Literary Award 2026 longlist

25 May 2026

The longlist for the 2026 Miles Franklin award was published on Wednesday 20 May 2026, and includes the following ten titles:

Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah
Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts
Fierceland by Omar Musa
First Name Second Name by Steve MinOn
I Want Everything, Dominic Amerena
Little World by Josephine Rowe
My Heart at Evening by Konrad Muller
Salt Upon the Water by Lyn Dickens
Tenderfoot by Toni Jordan
You Must Remember This by Sean Wilson

Presented annually, the Miles Franklin award recognises Australian novels of the highest literary merit. The shortlist will be announced in June, next month, with the winner being named in August.

If you’re looking for reading ideas, literary award longlists make a good starting place, and are for me, a de-facto TBR list. I need more hours in the day to keep up with the resulting reading though.

The Vanishing Wild, a book by Justine E. Hausheer

23 May 2026

The Vanishing Wild, written by Queensland based science writer and photographer Justine E. Hausheer, was published recently. It was the introduction to the book’s subject that caught my eye:

Australia is a country celebrated for its wildlife, yet native species are in crisis. In the last 200 years, Australia has lost more biodiversity than any other developed nation.

That is not an impressive achievement. What on earth are going here in Australia?

The Serpent in the Grove, winner of the Commonwealth Prize, written with AI help?

23 May 2026

Congratulations to Trinidad and Tobago based writer Jamir Nazir for taking out the Commonwealth Short Story Prize this year, with his work, The Serpent in the Grove.

Since being named winner though, suggestions have emerged that the work is the product of an AI agent. When asked to assess the story, a number of other AI agents (how else would you check?) concluded The Serpent in the Grove was likely written with at least some AI assistance.

Prize organisers say they do not use tools to seek out the use of AI in submissions, considering the short story prize is for unpublished works. I see the logic in this argument, because anything parsed by an AI agent is probably only going to be regurgitated by the same agent later on, somewhere else.

The Commonwealth Prize operates on the principle of trust, say organisers. Here be another minefield of AI making that we need to tip toe our way through.

Psychological distress in parents possibly behind low Australian birth rates, not smartphones

22 May 2026

Sixty percent of Australian parents reported experiencing psychological distress, according to the results of the Parenting Today survey, conducted late last year by the Parenting Research Centre.

It has been suggested the impact on the mental health of parents in Australia is contributing to current record low birth rates here.

Psychological distress and poor mental health, are not however the only factors dragging down births both in Australia, and elsewhere in the world. Cost of living pressures and expensive housing are also playing a part. As is, possibly, smartphone usage.

Earlier this week Tyler Cowen, at Marginal Revolution, posted birth rate data from ten countries which generally show a prolonged, and clear, decline in birth rates across the twentieth century.

An uptick is apparent in some nations during the baby-boom, which followed World War II, through to the 1960’s. The overall downward trend in birth rates obviously predate smartphones, and possibly even expensive housing, though.

New Google AI powered search box poses a threat to website traffic

21 May 2026

The AI generated result summaries on Google searches, that we’ve become accustomed to recently, sound like they will be a thing of the past when a new search… experience is rolled out shortly.

Because your curiosity doesn’t always fit into keywords, we’re also introducing the biggest upgrade to our Search box in over 25 years — now completely reimagined with AI. This intelligent Search box puts our most powerful AI tools right at your fingertips, making it easier to ask your questions.

Blame the upgrade — the first in a quarter of century — on our boundless curiosity then.

One can only imagine the impact the new search results will have on website traffic. Particularly if links to the sources of information used to compile search results are not shown.

Emma Roth, writing for The Verge, notes that people will still be able to see “traditional” search results by clicking/pressing on the “web” tab on the search page.

I wonder how many people will select that option, as my guess is the majority of searchers will probably be satisfied with the default AI generated results.

Apple Intelligence bolsters accessibility features, aiding people with disabilities

21 May 2026

From the Apple Newsroom:

Apple today previewed a suite of accessibility updates that use Apple Intelligence to bring new capabilities to features users rely on every day, including VoiceOver, Magnifier, Voice Control, and Accessibility Reader. Apple also announced on-device generated subtitles for uncaptioned video content coming to the Apple ecosystem, as well as a new feature for Apple Vision Pro users to control compatible wheelchairs with their eyes.

The promised enhanced accessibility features, to be rolled out across a number of Apple devices, seem like they could make a positive difference for people with disabilities.

Apple Intelligence is the name Apple gives to the suite of AI technologies they are developing.

It might be argued there are not a great many favourable applications of AI technology, but these initiatives could well be an exception.

Falling birth rates and smartphones: a technology as malevolent as AI?

19 May 2026

Om Gupta, writing for India Today:

The researchers believe smartphones fundamentally changed how young people interact with each other. More time shifted online, while face-to-face socialising declined. According to the study, this reduction in in-person interaction may have contributed to lower fertility rates. The pattern appears to extend beyond just the US and UK. Financial Times analysis found that birth rates in several countries began falling sharply around the same time smartphones became widely adopted.

Gupta cites research published a few days ago by the Financial Times (paywalled).

I doubt the blame for the reported decline in birth rates globally can be placed wholly at the feet of smartphones, but it’s not unreasonable to believe they are playing some role.

It’s hardly empirical proof, but increasingly I need to sidestep people walking along the footpath who are focused only on their smartphone, almost oblivious to the presence of anyone else. If people can’t go without phones during a short walk from one place to another, when are they ever supposed to focus on other things, let alone meeting, and interacting with others, face-to-face?

I’m a smartphone user the same as everyone else, and couldn’t begin to imagine managing without one. But if indeed it is the case that smartphones are contributing — at least partly — to falling birth rates, shouldn’t we be alarmed?

In recent weeks we have been witnessing a growing, at times hostile, backlash against AI technologies. People are angry and fearful. They are concerned by the threat AI poses to their livelihoods. Of the three epoch-defining shifts in technology — to use the words of John Gruber — in recent decades, being the web, smartphones, and AI, it is the last, AI, that is seen as malevolent.

Or the more malevolent.

But if birth rates are falling across the world, and smartphone usage has something to do with that, can we continue to regard these devices as anything less than pernicious?

But pointing the finger of blame at smartphones is the easy part. What to do about the problem, if that’s even how the situation can be described, is far from straightforward.

It somewhat feels like we are painting ourselves into a corner, if we haven’t already, with, really all three of these epoch-defining shifts in technology.

CSS is hard because it solves hard problems

18 May 2026

Julie Evans recently re-wrote her website’s Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and took the fight to the stylesheet language as it were:

So I decided years ago that I wanted to react to “CSS is hard” by getting better at CSS and taking it seriously as a technology, instead of devaluing it. Doing that changed everything for me: I learned that so many of my frustrations (“centering is impossible”) had been addressed in CSS a long time ago, and that also what “centering” means is not always straightforward and it makes sense that there are many ways to do it. CSS is hard because it’s solving a hard problem!

Oh, the fun, and untold lost hours, trying to centre something, without breaking the page layout.

But I would like to delve more deeply into CSS, because the language has become many hundreds of times more vast than when I starting working with it in the late 1990’s.

The last time I came close to doing any heavy lifting was four years ago, when I completely rewrote the HTML and CSS here. As ever though, I was working to do the job as quickly as possible, so I could get back to writing content here, day job, everything else there is to do, etc.

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