New NBN hardware
Today was the day set for changing my National Broadband Network hardware. Or at least, that's what one of two conflicting SMSs from unidentified mobile phones said. OK, it's probably legitimate, but I woke up in the middle of the night with the horrible thought that it might change my network configuration, including the routing of my /24 (192.109.197.0/24), probably something that people wouldn't think about for residential customers. After all, the presumed reason for the change was to remove old hardware, not only in the residence, but also on the wireless tower. And that could involve upstream changes. Called up Aussie Broadband and was connected to Hayden after only 12 minutes' waiting.
Long Links
Welcome to the first Long Links of this so-far-pretty-lousy 2026. I can’t imagine that anyone will have time to take in all of these, but there’s a good chance one or two might brighten your day. Unclassified Thomas Piketty is always right. For example, Europe, a social-democratic power. Lying is wrong. Conservatives do it all the time. To be fair, that piece is about the capital-C flavor, as in the Canadian Tories. But still. Clothing is open-source: “If you slice the different parts off with a seamripper, lay them all down, trace them on new fabric, cut them out, and stitch them back together, you can effectively clone and fork garments.” From Devine Lu Linvega.
More denoising
I've more or less put my attempts to find good denoising photo processing software on hold. None of them did close to what I wanted. But there are still issues that I can address. One is a free set of “presets” from ON1 that I haven't got round to looking at yet. More and more it seems that presets are the way through the maze of settings, but it's also a matter of searching, something that I don't like to do. Another is what I already have: DxO PhotoLab. I'm sticking to release 5 because there don't seem to be any improvements in newer versions significant enough to pay the full price to upgrade.
Threads’ margin is the Eurostack’s opportunity
This week on my podcast, I read “Threads’ margin is the Eurostack’s opportunity,” a recent post from my Pluralistic.net blog, about the tactics that digital sovereignty advocates can deploy to counter Meta’s (further) enshittification of Threads. The funny thing is, the OG App creators were just following the Facebook playbook. When Facebook opened up to... more
What do people do when they edit Wikipedia through Tor?
Note: I have not published blog posts about my academic papers over the past few years. To ensure that my blog contains a more comprehensive record of my published papers and to surface these for folks who missed them, I will be periodically (re)publishing blog posts about some “older” published projects. This post is closely … Continue reading "What do people do when they edit Wikipedia through Tor?"