Who pays the most for their military
“A fascinating way of answering the question of who pays the most for their military!” - spotted via Simon shows you maps - www.facebook.com/SimonGerm…
The Age's top 50 Australian films
I love a good list. I love a good movie. When The Age published their top 50 Australian movies of all time, I was ecstatic.
The only trouble with a list like this is that you want to do something with it. You want to track down the titles you haven’t seen, find out where they’re streaming, maybe fall down an IMDB rabbit hole at eleven on a Sunday night. That means cutting and pasting titles into JustWatch, opening new tabs, searching again. Tab after tab after tab.
So I’ve done that work once and put it all in one place.
Here is the reference list. Each of the fifty films comes with an AI-generated plot summary - no spoilers - and links directly to JustWatch AU for current streaming and rental options and IMDB for cast, crew and background. The list is searchable and sortable by year, director or title.
Update: As of today, 15 of the Top 50 are available to watch for $0 on ABC iView. I’ve added links to those. No idea how long they will stay on iView so do yourself a favour and watch them ASAP.
It used to look like this
Forty-three years ago I was being harangued by university tutors to go and use the computer. Not because it would make me a better writer. Because they couldn’t read my handwriting.
The “word processor” they had in mind was called DSR - DEC Standard Runoff. It looked like this:
(in RSS? You need to visit the web page to see the formatting)
The midnight vibe coder returns
I built my personal app, Felix, to solve a simple problem. When you browse as prolifically as I do, you need somewhere to stash things. Not a permanent archive, not a formal knowledge base. A medium-term holding pen where ideas wait until they’re useful, or proven not to be. The logic is straightforward: storage is cheap, human memory is not. So I bookmark liberally. Any time I think “I might need to come back to this,” in it goes.
Relentless productivity
This last week has shown me something I already suspected but hadn’t quite felt at full intensity: Claude Cowork is an extraordinary instrument for anyone who lives inside Office documents. (Word, Excel, Powerpoint).
The setup is simple but the implications are not. You create a project folder, point Cowork at it, and from that moment the work has a home. The folder holds the files, the instructions, the memory. If you keep it local and disciplined, Cowork stays anchored to what’s in there. You can extend it with connectors and browsing if you need to, but you don’t have to.
Battling the token budget
I’ve never been good at budgeting - just worked on having enough. Never overspent. But now things are different. If I was on a standard Claude Pro plan I’d been in deep overdraft. Even on Claude Max (5x limit) I am bumping up against it. But worth it to tap into some incredible tools. Good to use with this weekly budget as I can before it renews in 8-9 hours, however, my short-term session target (5 hours) is capping me.
Matt Round’s DataCenter.FM hands you the controls of a simulated server farm. Move sliders, flick switches, push servers, cooling, gas turbines and construction crews from a gentle whir to a screaming cacophony with flashing warning lights. Eight audio loops and 27 alarms do the heavy lifting.
What looks and sounds fun could go wild if you turn all the controls to 11. Leave it running too long and the AI might start deciding things for itself.
Sources:
Crank up your own server farm
Matt Round’s DataCenter.FM hands you the controls of a simulated server farm. Move sliders, flick switches, push servers, cooling, gas turbines and construction crews from a gentle whir to a screaming cacophony with flashing warning lights. Eight audio loops and 27 alarms do the heavy lifting.
Leaving SBS On Demand in May
Monty Python and the Holy Grail leaves SBS On Demand on 2 May. If that sentence doesn’t get you moving, nothing will.
This is the third month I’ve run the same process: feed Claude the SBS “what’s leaving” page, filter out series, cross-reference every standalone title against IMDB, keep anything rated 7.0 or above. Six parallel agents, four minutes, done. March had 57 qualifying films. April had 74. May has 71. Note: the numbers in brackets are IMDB ratings out of 10.
The coffee nap is a cheat code
AI has made me more tired than I’ve ever been in my career.
Not from overwork in the traditional sense. The hours are fine. The problem is the pace. I can iterate on an iOS app three times faster than I can actually test it. Claude ships a new build; I’m still tapping through the previous one. The work is compressing into a loop of generate, review, generate, review and the reviews are the bottleneck. My brain is the bottleneck.
A 20-minute coffee nap most afternoons has made a measurable difference. And the reason it works is genuinely interesting.
