The Alien comic books have been pretty good since Disney took over.

A small apartment block on Scarborough Beach Road recently put up a sign reading "Ben Roberts-Smith Beach Houses". Someone did some digging, and it seems to have been bought by a shell company owned by Hancock Prospecting: https://www.reddit.com/r/perth/comments/1ue2fj0/the_ben_robertssmith_apartments_in_scarborough/

So I guess if you want some war criminal themed accommodation near the beach in Perth, just ask Gina.

What do you do when your slop podcast hosted by a fictitious Oly Bennet (who sometimes seems to be Ollie?) hits the guardrails of the LLM that is generating the scripts?

Just feed the refusal message through the text to speech system and publish as normal. It's not really a problem if there's no human listeners.

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/dubai-travel-guide-current-safety-updates-and-future-attractions--70427324

If the reports are accurate that Anthropic was using LLM tools to write much of the Claude Code software, I wonder what the copyright status is of the leaked source code?

If there are portions that are not copyrightable, the only protection they would have had is trade secret. And that's not much use if they go ahead and publish the source.

I read this article title and thought "awesome! they're going to fix the horrible seats on the new trains!".

But it turns out the driver's seat is also horrible, and that's what they're replacing. No such luck for the passenger seating.

https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/labor-goes-back-to-the-future-to-replace-uncomfortable-c-series-train-seats-20260317-p5ofl8.html

Petrol stations in Perth follow an easy to understand price fixing cycle.

Each Wednesday, all the petrol stations independently decide that fuel should be expensive. The price then decays over the week until it hits its lowest point on Tuesday, after which the cycle repeats.

This has worked as reliably as clockwork, right up until the recent Iran war. It will be interesting to see whether the old cycle picks up again once things settle down.

The graph comes from the WA Government Fuel Watch website: https://www.fuelwatch.wa.gov.au/retail/price-trends

Seeing the reporting about this yesterday, it wasn't clear if this was a real threat or if it was a hoax intended to disrupt the Invasion Day rally.

It seems it it was a real explosive, but the wick fell out or failed. This could have gone so much worse than what happened.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-27/man-charged-making-explosives-after-perth-invasion-day-rally/106272888

And if you've never donated blood plasma before, it's worth noting that the compatibility rules for plasma are different to those for red blood cells: https://www.lifeblood.com.au/donors/blood-plasma-platelets/learn/blood/blood-types

While O- is the universal donor for blood cells, AB is universal donor for plasma. Since AB cells have both A and B antigens, the plasma lacks antibodies for each. So your plasma might be more useful than your whole blood in some cases.

Just did a blood plasma donation. They're doing festive bandages at the moment.

The Red Cross has been looking for plasma donations in particular in the wake of the Bondi shooting, so it is a good time to make an appointment.

Anne Twomey did an interesting video about the social media ban and how likely Reddit's challenge is to succeed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7CMHW1bl7U

RE: https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/115688155837169603

I hadn't realised the lobbying group behind the social media ban was portraying it as raising the minimum age from 13 to 16. Which is kind of weird, given that there was no Australian law banning social media for people under 13.

It is common for the terms of service for social media services to require users to be at least 13 though, but that does not come from Australian law. The services are generally run by US companies, so you'd think it is due to US law.

But US law doesn't ban under 13s from social media either. That cut-off seems to come from the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which is not specific to social media, and doesn't require banning children under 13. Instead, it imposes a requirement to gain parental consent and an obligation to protect the child's data. If a service has banned under 13s, that is a sign that they've decided that's all too difficult.

So here in Australia, we've skipped right past "online services have an obligation to protect the data of children" to "some online services should ban children".

#AusPol

And she's back again 😀

Good she's not hurt.

Looks like the Little Birdy set is delayed because Katy walked off the front of the stage 🙁

On the new BOM website, they've got two versions of the page heading: either "The Bureau of Meteorology" or "The Bureau".

It uses media queries to choose what to show. If the page is at least 48em wide, the short version of the heading is hidden. If the page is 47.9375em or narrower, the long heading is hidden.

So there is a 0.0625em range of page widths where both headings will be shown. At regular text sizes this range might fall between integer pixel widths. At large text sizes, it doesn't.

I donated blood today. This was my second time, so I knew what to expect and it went a bit smoother.

For a long time I was intelligible due to having spent a year in the UK during the mad cow outbreak. They changed the rules a few years back.

It was seeing @decryption post about donating that prompted me to get off my arse and book the first appointment.

I was trying to use the YouTube app on the Chromecast, and got an unexpected login prompt. Following it seems to indicate that Google doesn't trust Google's YouTube app?

I've been using my old pygpgme package as a way to keep abreast of modern best practice for developing and packaging #Python extensions.

It doesn't have very many users because I had mostly abandonned it for about a decade. On the plus side, that means I've got a bit more leeway to experiment.

The most recent experiment has been adding support for multiple interpreters and no-GIL mode. I did most of the work at the start of the year, but haven't released it due to trouble testing it.

The multiple interpreters work is relatively easy to test, since it mostly involved switching to new APIs: my existing test suite could verify the behaviour was the same, and I could use the new concurrent.interpreters module to instantiate my extension in a second interpreter to show classes were distinct, and were functional there.

Testing no-GIL is a bit more difficult. It's not clear how to test that I'm not misusing the API under the new rules. I think I've got things right, but I'm not sure. So I've been hesitant to make a release that claims to support the new mode.

And a bonus banksia menziesii

#WildFlowers #Photography

I took some photos of the wildflowers up on Wireless Hill on Sunday. It took a while, but it's no longer feeling so much like winter.

#WildFlowers #Photography

Transperth plans to turn on contactless debit card payments by the end of the year: https://www.wa.gov.au/government/media-statements/Cook%20Labor%20Government/Passengers-to-test-contactless-payments-on-Perth's-public-transport-network-20250911

They are currently recruiting people for a 50 person trial on the ferry, before expanding it to the bus service, and eventually the whole network.