Year: 2020
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Rumination 69: It’s All Leek to Me

Continuing the retail-focused theme for rumination this week—let’s face it, I overthink a lot stuff at the shops—Natasha and I made a quick trip to Aldi on the weekend, after we had visited Coles and Country Grocer, where we buy our fruit and veggies. I’ve long been a fan of the Aldi checkout experience, as…
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Rumination 68: Beware the Bagging Area!

My last rumination was inspired by a trip to the shops and so is today’s. (To be honest, my next one will also refer to a recent shopping experience.) In general, shopping centres and supermarkets offer wonderful opportunities to observe the weirdness of society. During our most recent trip to do buy groceries, we were…
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29. Mass versus Niche

Niche communities, identities and communication channels—they are a sign of the great diversity of interests, views and cultural groups in our society… but they can also be a sign of fragmentation. In a world that’s brimming with super-specific feeds, tailored content and targeted advertising, could some mass media actually offer a better way of engaging…
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28. A Potted Computing History with Special Ordinary Guest Andrew Canion

These days, most people take their devices for granted. As an antidote to this, I speak with fellow Microblogger and tech hobbyist, Andrew Canion. We share our early memories of computing, our current preferences, touch-typing origin stories and how we both ended up choosing the Mac as the hub of our digital lives. Last, we…
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Rumination 67: Tailor-made Absorbency

Whenever I do the grocery shopping with Natasha, she often has to hurry me along as I spend time too much shaking my head at some of the ridiculous marketing, packaging and product installations that can be found around the supermarket. We all know that this environment is constructed to encourage us to buy stuff…
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27. Stillness

This week, I discuss the true purpose of technology education, according to Postman—somehow weaving my favourite sci-fi series into it—then conclude by ruminating on what it means to be still. Notes
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26. Bibliophilia

I explain my early research into the world of niche tech podcasting and discuss an uncontrollable urge that many people experience: the desire to buy more books than can ever actually be read. Notes
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The Wonder of Choice

Inspired by Myke Hurley’s semi-recent tweet about how he ‘likes choices’ in his computing, I thought that I’d share the latest development in how I use my iPad Pro as a kind of secondary desktop, when not in pure tablet or laptop form. With the release of the new 11- and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models…
