I stayed home, not by choice. Got the unwelcome xmas gift of covid.

I have an inkling that there will be rumblings in the future from within govt here about outlawing things like Graphene OS and signal.

I have a mastodon account. Be lucky if I fired it up once a week. That’s a lot more than I ever used twatter/x. That I opened maybe 5 times when it first started. The super short form stuff just not my thing.

Mostly just to look at mastodon followed hashtags of photography. When I first got it I straight away put filters on stuff I wasn’t interested in before figuring out how to look at only followed hashtags.

So I’m forced to use windows at work like the majority of my industry.

The start bar is still a thorn in my side since we switched from 10 to 11.

Standard office set up is 2 x 1920x1200 monitors and a 1920x1080 laptop. Some just leave the laptop shut when docked.

I preferred having it on a stand and using the lap top screen real estate.

In windows 10 I could make a monitor the primary and have a start bar only on the laptop. Not being able to do that in windows 11 is fucking annoying. They also fucked up auto hide start bar, it’s always jumping up for bullshit I don’t care about and not hiding when it should. I gave in and accepted I can’t have those bottom few lines of screen real estate because they are Microsoft’s.

As an engineer I do sometimes get feelings of imposter syndrome. But then I look at what Microsoft did to the start bar in windows 11 and think well at least I didn’t do that.

You would hope they have more empathy than the ones who remove the R from their sticker.

Currently I think it’s the other way around. Before you are allowed to own one you sign a contract saying you will at every opportunity drive millimetres from the bumper of the car in front.

It just goes to show how out of touch politicians are.

As a parent of two primary schoolers. (Yeah yeah cliché qualifier) Things I’m more concerned about than social media:

1. Them never being able to buy a fucking house or afford any kind of living standard because apparently property market must go brrr. Everything they do is about propping up established home owners ensuring profits for the banks.
2. Corruption and lobbying
3. Doing fuck all about climate change and environmental destruction. Stop.fucking.clearing.vegetation.
4. Alcohol and gambling adds
5. Air quality / emissions from transport. Fuck Albo’s watered down vehicle emissions rules that are going to encourage more diesel SUV use. Diesel is next in line after pdfiles and religion for things I don’t want near kids.

As an Australian, it’s Irish accents that I struggle with the most.

Scottish I can deal with, probably from watching shows like Still Game and Burnistoun.

Most other UK accents are not to difficult to understand.

One odd thing, I was watching an USA wildlife documentary that was set in South Africa. I noticed they put forced subtitles on when ever the South African’s spoke in English. I found that bizarre as I’ve never had any trouble understanding when South Africans speak English.

The Telstra pay phone boxes near me now all have massive ridiculously bright screens displaying advertisements. For sure that is their primary purpose now.

Bad Santa

As far as laws regarding digital rights / freedoms go, we have no chance in Australia anyway as the major parties are all against them.

In fact the coalition has an even worse track record than labor.

Mostly because I fear the kids might get unfavourable treatment.

Our school principal reminds me of south park’s PC principal.

For my youngest I use pipepipe on an android tablet.

No ads.

No feed / recommendations.

Just the channels I subscribe to.

The final straw with stock android apps was years ago with my eldest when it showed an add for women’s g strings in the middle of a fucking educational video about cats.

Resisting the urge to send this video as a reply to the boot licking email my kids school sent to the parents regarding this bullshit.

It’ll be down to the golden triangle being north of the river. And maybe midland and armadale being south.

Map needs to be by post code.

Will be interesting to see if that changes when the millennial’s boomer parents die and pass on the wealth. I think it will further divide the have and have nots with the wealth concentrating in fewer hands.

Are you aware of Labor’s 2009 plan to censor the entire Australian internet? It didn’t succeed back then thankfully.

There is no way that they will stop at just the big social media platforms.

This is about control and further removal of being anonymous.

It’s not even a liberal vs labor thing. They both have a history of bipartisan support for this type of bullshit. See: metadata retention, assistance and access, identify and disrupt laws.

Not true at all.

If anyone thinks that conservatives are going to lower migration in the slightest, let alone slash it then you might be interested in a bridge for sale.

Conservatives answer to the business council and real estate lobbyists. Both of which love high immigration. Only need to see the liberal party’s record on immigration since John Howard.

Conservatives also love our housing market just the way it is.

Guessing you are using Google Chrime as your browser. If so switch to Firefox and ublock origin works.