Watching this from Australia, it’s hard to overstate how strange it is: schools in Florida, Georgia and Colorado are installing pepper-spray drones built to ram an active shooter at up to 97 km/h. Nobody in the story proposes making the guns harder to get.

Nine schools so far. Each gets a storage box housing a plastic drone from Austin firm Mithril Defense, branded Campus Guardian Angel. A teacher hits a panic button. A remote pilot flies the drone down the hallway toward the gunfire.

Continue reading →

Dave Hughes went on a podcast, spent 90 seconds confidently rewriting Australia’s recent economic history, then dared someone to fact-check him. Someone did. It took about 600 words to correct 90 seconds of what the fact-checker called “economic fan fiction.”

Hughes is a television and radio personality and stand-up comedian. Lately he’s drifted into political and economic commentary, most of it aimed at the Federal Labor government’s tax policy changes. He’s understood to run a substantial investment portfolio of his own, like plenty of the policy’s other critics, largely exempt from the change thanks to grandfathering.

In the clip in question, Hughes slates previous governments, (always Labor), while dropping in “I might be wrong” and “I haven’t researched it” as he goes. Caveats are not the same as caution. If you haven’t researched something, the option not to broadcast an opinion on it remains open.

Continue reading →

A UK driving instructor’s leased Nissan sat off the road for three months this year, waiting on a single spare part. By the time it was finally repaired, she had spent more than £2,500 hiring a replacement dual control car, borrowed money from relatives to keep teaching and nearly lost her livelihood over a repair that should have taken days. The Guardian reported the case last week as a straightforward consumer complaint. It reads more like a warning.

The UK setting doesn’t matter. The same parts delays and the same insurance gaps are turning up in Australian driveways too, and mechanics here are already stretched thin before a missing part even enters the picture. If you own a modern car, two things in your policy now matter more than they did five years ago.

Continue reading →

To prepare minutes I recorded a not-for-profit board meeting this week - ninety minutes, soft audio, everything sensitive - and let Google’s new Eloquent convert it locally. Nothing touched a cloud server. Eleven thousand words, on-device, done.

The original Voice Memos recording on my iPhone was quite soft. Board meetings are what they are. But Eloquent handled it better than I expected - the transcript came back clean, the filler words and false starts were stripped out, and I had a working draft of the minutes within a short time. Further refinement with GPT-5.5 and the final document was done. (Yes I am flirting with other models. Anthropic token inflation is becoming an issue - a topic for another day).

Continue reading →

Every month SBS publishes a wall of text listing what is about to vanish from On Demand. Every month it mixes Studio Ghibli classics in with season 7 of some cooking show and a documentary about sharks, all sorted by date, none sorted by whether they are any good.

As I did in previous months I leaned on Claude to build a searchable and sortable page to make it easier to figure out what I really want to watch. SBS really should do this for their audience.

I pulled the full July list, stripped out the series and the reality TV, ran every standalone film past its IMDB rating and kept the ones at 7.0 or above. That left 94 films. The result is a single sortable, searchable page you can filter by rating, genre or leaving date.

Continue reading →

Rage is a product. Pauline Hanson has been selling it for thirty years, but she is no longer the only one running the operation. The buyers have got bigger, the money is flowing from further away, and the press is helping them do it.

Continue reading →

I just tasked Claude Opus 4.8 to extend a chart, first drawn by Axios, to show the comparative performance of US presidents in their term up to the equivalent of the end of May in their second year, as we have just passed that point for Trump II. The longer I looked at it the more it bothered me.

Continue reading →

The work I’ve been doing between Claude Cowork and Excel lately has been considerably more involved than what follows. But this example makes the pattern clear - and it captures exactly why the combination saves so much time and frustration.

I had a list of 20 ASX stocks in an Excel file. Two columns: ticker code and company name. I wanted two more: market cap and 12-month return, pulled from most recent data.

Continue reading →