I received some of my annual medical test results this week and needed to redact my personal details before sharing them. Standard stuff - name, date of birth, Medicare number, address. But the files were JPEGs, not a Word document I could just edit. My first instinct was to upload them to Claude and let it handle everything. Then I stopped myself. Medical records. Cloud service. Maybe not. I have a full local LLM stack running on my Mac - Open WebUI fronting Ollama, with Gemma and Qwen among the models available.

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For two decades, every question started the same way: open a browser, type, hunt. Google built that world. That era is ending.

Since the World Wide Web went mainstream, every major behaviour pattern on the internet has been built around one fundamental act: the human search. Type a query, receive links, hunt through documents, form a conclusion. It was extraordinary. Billions of people sharing information across the planet, instantaneously. And it made Google one of the most powerful companies ever built.

Now watch it dissolve.

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Years ago I was endlessly lectured by ‘real designers’ that white space was ‘a good thing’. Not every surface of a page, screen or wall needs to be filled. Indeed you need empty spaces (white spaces) to let a design or scene to breath; to ensure that what you are presenting stands out. Here we have the opposite of ‘white space’. This blurry chap seems to want to fill every space with some gold swirlygig.

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As I prepared to race out the door this morning, I snatched up the hand-scribbled agenda for the team meeting and thought: “Oh, at a minimum, I should photograph this.” So I don’t lose the piece of paper. The next thought was: “Hey, I should send this to Claude.” Before I knew it, Claude had read it and turned it into a proper document - ready to throw into the stack for the day ahead.

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Geir Isene sat down at his computer last week and realised something unusual. Almost every program he touched - the window manager, the text editor, the file manager, the terminal, the email client, the calendar - was software he wrote himself. In a few weeks, with Claude Code as his engineering partner, he had replaced his entire desktop computing environment. All of it command line. All of it terminal-native. All of it his.

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“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…

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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.

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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)

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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.

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