Last night I went to a 70th birthday party and ended up sitting next to Frank.

Frank used to work as a computer programmer, because this was the 1970s to 90s and people had normal job titles that described real things, instead of "full stack orchestration engineer" or "solutions architect".

Anyway Frank's employer was the Victorian Attorney General's department. He wrote, updated and maintained in-house software for managing the court system, trial documentation managements and so on using low level languages.

The point of this post is that there was nothing special about this period of history that made it possible for government departments to write and maintain their own software to solve their own problems then but not now.

The complete lack of any in-house capacity to do this kind of thing is a political choice. Frank is a reminder of that.

Whew. Biggest donation to date!

15 upcycled Dell Latitudes with 10th gen i7, 16 gigs of ram, and NVMe drives.

We partnered with a local program that helps families with Christmas presents, and they always want laptops.

This year, The Computer Upcycle Project was able to deliver.

Freaking love this work!

#nixbook #nixos #linux #upcycle

four levers to fight #enshittification:

• bring back antitrust laws
• better regulation of tech business
• tech workers must unionize
• interoperability is a must (required by law)

thanks @pluralistic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2e-c9SF5nE

Wikimedia Australia recently made a submission to the Senate inquiry into the Copyright Amendment Bill 2025, strongly supporting the introduction of an orphan works scheme and modernised remote learning provisions. These reforms are essential for improving public access to knowledge while respecting creators’ rights.

👉 Read our statement: https://wikimedia.org.au/wiki/Wikimedia_Australia_supports_proposed_reforms_in_the_Copyright_Amendment_Bill_2025

My dad who is 81 recently got into trouble cause the app where he pays his bills decided that his phone is too old.

He has a fully functional phone that’s a couple of years old but he now needs to throw it away because of software.

I think this is bullshit.

So, I’m one of the people Microsoft has been forced by the ACCC to email in Australia to offer a downgrade on their O365 Family subs (I'll eventually convince my family we don't need it) because they hid the option to take a version without CoPilot.

However, when you click on the link in the email to downgrade, rather than going to a page where you can do that, you go to a page where you are offered a new subscription to a single-user-only version.

Parsing the URL it goes to, it's pretty clear how to figure out what it *should* be, and you can complete the downgrade by changing the url to https://checkout.microsoft365.com/acquire/purchase?language=en-AU&market=AU&requestedDuration=Year&scenario=microsoft-365-family-classic&matchDuration=true&campaign=M365ClassicDowngrade&upsell=false

I’m fairly certain this is not what the Commission intended.

#microsoft #enshittification