I’m grateful for the opportunity to share my wedding celebrant story, my passions, my heart, and to also talk videographers and audio from an audio tech point of view on the Wed Co podcast today.
We lost our three favourite wattle trees in the storm ☹️
One of the redeeming features of our home when we bought it was that there was a great space for a veggie garden and some animals.
So we got some help to clear the old veggie patches and to flatten it out ready for spring.
But while we were away in Queensland some big winds came through Tasmania, and although our area was one of the least affected, that wind tore three of our favourite wattle trees down.
Just missed our cute little garden shed, thank god!
Apparently wattle trees have about a twenty year expiry date and these three were ready.
Qantas’s ears were burning
Well, that was Swell
I made the 4am alarm to catch the 2024 Swell Sculpture Festival before sunrise this morning and as always it was a treat. Something that stood out to me, and I don’t know if it was new this year, but much of the art was priced. Some of the sculptures were on the way to $100,000! If you can create art and put a price on it, and earn that price, then you’re doing a thousand times better than I who simply places his art on Unsplash and Pexels in lieu of doing the hard work of making art that people want, putting a price on it that represents value and effort, and putting it to market. More power to the artists who can exchange their art for good money, society will be better off for it. These are the pieces that captured me, one in particular was interesting, the “Personal Space Elevator”.
Wild how we use the same bowl for popcorn and vomit
I would personally donate money to keep the Raygun fire burning
All the News Fit to Print Is Not All the News
For the past week, a globally well-known person has been on the Gold Coast for a reason unrelated to their popular life as one of the world’s foremost YouTubers and technology reviewers. Instead, they were here to represent the USA in the World Ultimate Championships, with their mixed team eventually walking away with gold medals in the finals.
But you’d never know Marques Brownlee was competing on the Gold Coast unless you followed MKBHD, because the closest the Ultimate Championships got to any kind of media coverage was in Newcastle, where a local Ultimate player had been chosen to compete. A global championship of a future Olympic sport – allegedly under consideration for Brisbane 2032 and LA 2028 – and the only way you’d know about it is if you happened to walk past the Runaway Bay sports fields.
The simple fact of the matter is that “the media” is not compelled or required to report on or tell the story of every little thing that happens in our community, even if it’s supported and sponsored by local and state governments or the national carrier.
I’m reminded of when a law that I had a hand in creating passed. I expected there to be a news article about it that I could share with colleagues.
But either no reporter was in parliament at the time, or if they were, they deemed this change to how Australia operated not fit for print.
There’s something interesting about the news that you might not have noticed yet: every night, the news bulletin is the same length. The newspaper is a similar number of pages each day. And more so with printed newspapers, where there need to be ads sold by the sales team before there are pages waiting for stories.
People often complain that their organic reach on social media is lower than it used to be. Despite the conspiracies surrounding Instagram and reach, the main contributor to the drop in numbers is the increase in creators and content, while the number of hours in our day has stayed the same.
There’s a lot of quality life happening outside of newspapers, magazines, blogs, algorithms, interest graphs, TV, or radio.
There are many great restaurants not on any list, and so many good cafes that don’t appear on Google when you search “best café near me.” Billions of valuable, valid, and important stories never get shared by the news.
A lot of life happens in the margins, and that’s where I’m trying to cast my eyes—towards the unseen and the unheard. Not only because there’s good there, but because the systems we live in, the societal scaffolding we’ve built, won’t go there.
I have friends in Gold Coast media whom I could have called to tell about MKBHD and the championships, but that story wouldn’t have reached the top of the editorial pile. Not enough interest, not enough clicks, not enough views to report on a story like that. He’s just a tech reviewer. It’s just frisbee.
The media isn’t evil or bad, but the laws of physics and capitalism means it can’t tell every story. That’s our job – yours and mine.
Along with a social media age limit I’d like to see the app icons and splash screens changed to shocking images of people depressed, public servants dancing, or phone notification screenshots overflowing with replies featuring the opinions of strangers.
Look, I might not be your favourite person, but at least I’ve never tried to sell you a MLM, or a course that promises you that you can make lots of money without any effort.
A drive through Outback Queensland yesterday
“I try to think what questions I’m not asking” - Benedict Evans
Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer’s suicide, by Yashvardhan Jain:
It took Cohen over four years to write Hallelujah. It was a process filled with agony, writing over eighty verses, stuck in a cycle of writing and discarding. In one of the interviews Cohen gave later in his life, he talks about this torment.
And this which always encourages me in creating my own art:
And Hallelujah, the first song on the LP’s second side, went unnoticed. Nobody cared. It seemed Hallelujah was fated for a quick extinction and would disappear into the void like most music, like a ‘broken Hallelujah’.
Deleting Overcast
I lost a friend in software today as I delete Overcast from my iPhone. A ten year relationship ended because life’s too short to use annoying apps.
For software that I’ll often use a lot, on most days, the developer changed so many fundamental ways the app worked that it went from an app I loved dearly for a decade to the most annoying thing on my phone.
Enacting sleep mode, something I’d do as I drearily fall asleep in a hotel room away from my family had been buried away.
Streaming, something I didn’t realise I used that much, because really annoying. Streaming barely worked before the upgrade - if I was sent an Overcast episode listen link from a friend it would almost never play on first try - but then to lose the feature was really annoying.
It became an exercise in re-learning how to walk, but I’d never had an accident, I was just subjected to an updated and poorer experience.
Plus iOS 18’s beta cycle hasn’t been kind to Overcast either, which is totally my cross to carry, but it’s still impacted the upgraded use experience.
So I had to decide whether the Overcast audio engine was worth staying for, and decided I could live without. (Tim Apple: please feel free to buy Overcast and integrate the audio engine into Apple Podcasts.)
So little did I know that Apple Podcasts has actually gotten a lot better recently.
The podcast transcription is a feature I really like, and anyone I share podcast links with and from uses Apple Podcasts so shareability of podcasts is so much easier as is clicking links from podcast websites.
Every podcast website has an Apple Podcasts link, none have an Overcast link.
Before the Overcast update it was a fringe decision to be on a third party podcast app. After the update it was a liability.
Life’s too short to be confusedly thumbing through podcast apps trying to figure it all out again.
Why blog about it? Because I can’t review about it.
I’m a Remarkable tablet user and was excited to see what they launched today but I’m out of the live stream already. Colour e-ink and a bigger screen aren’t on my list of desired changes.
Better, much better, Remarkably better, software is needed.
Anyway, how cute is it watching every tech founder today wanna be Steve Jobs.
Took an early morning photo walk around the host city for the 2032 Olympics, Brisbane, and the new Star (casino name TBC probably if the regulators do their job) casino.
Brisbane’s looking nice tonight
I’ve got a genuine interest inst in the new Pixel phones. Genuinely curiosity if they’d feel nice in hand, how the UI feels, how it works. Maybe they’re a real competitor to the iPhone.
But sampling the product is nigh impossible. They’re on display in shops but covered in security accessories that stop you from folding the folding phone or holding it in hand, plus this one in particular set the alarm off if it was picked up.
I wonder what the cost of loss of sales is compared to stock loss due to theft? Also, it sucks that we live in a world now where theft is so common.
If you actually get Oasis tickets today, start planning emotionally for the excruciating wait for them to play Wonderwall as they walk off stage for the 20th time as everyone starts chanting encore once again.
Hey Siri, define my last four years and five months in a reply by Nilay Patel
