Interesting
- You must not have anything wrong with you, or anything different about you.
- If you have something wrong or different about you, you really need to correct it. You need to be able to pass under all circumstances.
- If you can’t correct it, or change it in any way, you should just pretend that you have. It’s not a problem anymore. Good news!
- If you can’t even pretend not to have corrected the situation, you should just not show up, because it’s very painful for the rest of us to see you in your current condition.
- If you’re going to insist on showing up, you should at least have the decency to be ashamed.
Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused. I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy Mother’s Day. J.
Listen to Really Specific Stories
Designing the iTunes Music Store: "Refer to the main.psd"
Hoo roo, Uluru, am I even supposed to be here?
For an interesting NASA and Apple-related fall down a rabbit hole, start with the origin of the name of “The Whole Earth Catalog” in 1966, skip forward to 1972 when a whole earth photo was made.
Then take a turn to one of Steve Jobs' favourite sayings “Stay hungry stay foolish” which he quoted in 2005 at Stanford in his famous commencement speech.
Ad then wrap back around to how the whole earth image as an iPhone wallpaper came to be.
Welcome to my brain, where I just think about this stuff.
I, for one, welcome our new British open web overlords
✈️ Flighty 3 is a private frequent flyers social network!
Why the rush to 5G?
On a per user basis, a 5G network is cheaper to operate than a 4G one. The technology is easier to maintain and more reliable. It’s not sexy. That’s something that is hard to sell to consumers, but makes a huge difference to telcos. There’s much more to this. The additional capacity may not be a pressing matter in New Zealand right now, but in time there will be more connections and 5G gives carriers headroom to cope with future demand. There may be future apps that can use the speed.
Did you notice the 5G mobile revolution? billbennett.co.nz
My new Kobo is better than my old Kindle, but barely
Apple Vision has been 'in development' for 28 years
AI and I just published a children's book: The Mountain Princess
The fascinating story of Castle Itter and the last European WWII battle
The genesis story of Apple computers
Netflix, One Tel, and me, a nostalgic love triangle
My mate Jay has made a documentary about remote knowledge workers, digital nomads, working around the Arctic Circle and I’m pretty damn jealous of those landscapes, the visuals, and the lifestyle! Check out the trailer!
Salon Tom Weston’s Five Rules of Being A Grown-Up:
Write one blog post every day that scares you
"He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers"
New data on how Americans drank themselves to death during the pandemic, by Christopher Ingraham
The Final Comeback of Axl Rose, by John Jeremiah Sullivan in 2006, referenced in the Rubesletter by Matt Ruby, today:
Axl has said, “I sing in five or six different voices that are all part of me. It’s not contrived.” I agree. One of them is an unexpectedly competent baritone. The most important of the voices, though, is Devil Woman. Devil Woman comes from a deeper part of Axl than do any of the other voices. Often she will not enter until nearer the end of a song. In fact, the dramatic conflict between Devil Woman and her sweet, melodic yang—the Axl who sings such lines as Her hair reminds me of a warm, safe place and If you want to love me, then darling, don’t refrain and Sometimes I get so tense—is precisely what resulted in Guns N' Roses' greatest songs…
And what does she say, this Devil Woman? What does she always say, for that matter? Have you ever thought about it? I hadn’t. “Sweet Child,” “Paradise City,” “November Rain,” “Patience,” they all come down to codas—Axl was a poet of the dark, unresolved coda—and to what do these codas themselves come down? Everybody needs somebody. Don’t you think that you need someone? I need you. Oh, I need you. Where do we go? Where do we go now? Where do we go? I wanna go. Oh, won’t you please take me home?
In 2022 I want to be a lot more deliberate about my inputs. Garbage in, garbage out. I’m continuing to craft my newsletters and subscriptions, detailed on my inputs page. Plus I’m now documenting books I want to read, books I am reading, and books I have read.
Small atomic changes should put make sure I’m walking down the right track.
Dear Me,
If, in future years, anyone asks you to give advice to your sixteen year old self… don’t.
Make your own unique messes, and then work your own way out of them.
See you,
Alan Rickman
I missed this New York Times piece on my hometown, Mackay in North Queensland, about how the mayor is almost single-handedly trying to turn the community around on climate change.
“Over the past year, Mr. Williamson, a fifth-generation Mackay local, has tried more outreach and education, meeting frequently with residents to discuss why the trees are needed, and whether a lighter mix of vegetation might be allowed for partial ocean views.”
If Mackay was going to be in the New York Times I always thought it would be because they ship about 100 million tonnes of coal out of the region every year.
Om Malik on the lethal and constant feeling of self-importance we walk around with:
“With all the conversation of breaking free from big social platforms, owning your own digital identity, and being independent, I have been asking myself: how can all of us who have slowly become online performance artists ever be post-social?”
Since March 2020 I’ve thought a lot about what it means for us to think we’re so self-important and what that means for us living in a community with a virus like the spicy cough.
I’m sure it’s not only me, but the moment a sense of self-importance enters my soul I start feeling sick. This photo of a chicken with a mullet often helps me get over myself.
“I used to think the top global environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought with 30 years of good science we could address those problems, but I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy – and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation and we scientists don’t know how to do that.”
– Gus Speth
West Philadelphia born and raised, and now rebooted, much more dramatically
Mavic 3’s 1x versus 28x zoom.
"More evidence suggests that nature does something essential for our mental health"
Hey Siri, please remind me of this every day
As Brisbane goes into lockdown - 6pm June 29, 2021
Tap your phone at Gold Coast bus stops to access my website
Running the numbers on great writing
This is one of those articles I think I’ll read a few times over the next few weeks.
“Everyone reacts, few respond.”
“McDonald’s Theory On How Best to Rescue Conversations” by Karthik Rajan
Homo sapiens won the evolutionary race because we were connected
record scratch freeze frame “Yup, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I got into this situation…”
America, our love story, and how we fell out of love
A shop displayed a sign announcing that they were “only excepting card payments at this time” and it’s really sitting with me hey.
‘Nice’ doesn’t sell ads
Guilty as charged
“A prank attempt went terribly wrong for a 14-year old boy from Boise, as he was raped by a 700-lb grizzly bear while walking around in the woods in a sasquatch costume.”
A podcast I first heard a year ago today still sits with me a year later, and I’ve listened to it maybe five times over. Cooking As an Art, With Jerry Saltz and Dave Cheng. It has almost nothing to do with cooking, or art, but more to do with life.
The future of music journalism is on (wtf) TikTok (sad face)
“TikTok music blogs have thrived during quarantine, and they’re helping to blow up new acts”
Simon Owens on 'the Substack problem'
Have you played the hottest new web game of 2021? School or Prison
Much applause to the people behind Pentax cameras for this seemingly crazy idea to not go mirrorless. The unpopular route is often not filled with riches of finance, but it is full with riches of art, joy, and soul.
This is a fascinating story about an Australia man with an illness discovering horology
Don’t let anyone tell you today is December 31st, 2020.
If you thought everything else that happened this year was scary, 2020 is going out with a bang with delightfully terrifying dancing robots from Boston Dynamics
Calling all true crime podcasters, I’m desperate to know the story of Henk and Lane and how the small Tasmanian town of Penguin got two IGA supermarkets next to each other.
2014 article on ‘Silicon Valley data’ being the new ‘Wall Street debt’
“Built by geniuses, both products end up being deceptively cheap, morally corrupting, and of questionable long-term economic utility.”
I try to avoid hot political issues here, but if Paw Patrol is a police officer, clumsy firefighter/paramedic, some tradies, & a pilot, how is it that they “always get the job done?” Surely they’d need a barista or a wedding celebrant or other assorted necessary type people.
“Life is short, like Joe Pesci.”
— Chance, the rapper
“One of the most significant facts about us may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one.”
I don’t like to boast on here, but I wanted to silence all the haters and the non-believers.
Yes, I totally can fit nine potato chips in my mouth at the same time.
Hello Coles, it’s modern news media here,
I hope you’re keeping well.
It’s the 26th of December, and now they’re ringing the last bells …
Bloke at the pharmacy tells me that this is the second highest selling fragrance in Australia this Christmas
The Damage Has Been Proven, So Why Are We Still on Facebook?
Quote I’m pondering thanks to Tim Ferriss’ pondering it …
“If we can forgive what’s been done to us… If we can forgive what we’ve done to others… If we can leave our stories behind. Our being victims and villains. Only then can we maybe rescue the world.”
— Chuck Palahniuk
Shop inside a regional Tasmanian town’s local shopping centre. The professional life coach on staff on Christmas Eve is wearing knock-off AirPods.
I’ve just watched an episode of The Wiggles where they’re singing about, and boating in, The Big Red Boat. In this episode Anthony is assuming the position of captain, which is confusing, because for the first time in the entire show this is clearly a place where Captain Feathersword was the most qualified person for the job.
Why is Captain Feathersword landlocked even when The Wiggles go on the seven seas?
What’s the real story with Captain Feathersword?