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This happened months and months ago but in April of this year, the Australian Bureau of Statistics released an update to its Regional Population dataset. As explained by Glenn Capuano on the consulting firm .id’s blog, Melbourne is now larger than Sydney when using Statistical Area Level 2s (but not when using the more commonly cited Greater Capital City Statistical Area). Nevertheless, this really shook me in a way I struggled to explain to, well, anyone. I suppose I didn’t realise how much the fact that I’m from Australia’s largest city is part of my identity. Now I don’t know who I am.
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I noticed that the version of Debian I’m using on the very virtual private server serving you this page is version 10 (unless you’re the one mystery person who signed up to read this as a newsletter). That’s now two releases behind and will stop being supported in June of next year. I hate upgrading Debian and the dread at having to do that made me look seriously into whether it’s possible to run Void Linux on a Linode instance. It turns out it is! I’m not totally sure I want to use Void to run a public server but as a rolling release distribution (Wikipedia), at least I’d never have to do a major system upgrade again.
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I briefly took John and Rowan out in the car on the weekend. It was my first time driving since the surgery and it went pretty well, I think. The last two big things on the list are flying and running. It’s now in single digits at night so there’s a pretty good chance the trip back to Australia happens first.
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About a week or so ago I noticed that the black bars that show up on a YouTube video when viewed on an iPad or an iPhone were, well, not black. It turns out this is apparently something called ‘ambient mode’. It’s incredibly distracting and baffles me as a product design decision. Fortunately, you can turn it off by tapping the settings gear on a video and digging down into ‘Additional Settings’. You might think this would only apply to the current video but it’s a global preference that persists across videos (but does need to be manually changed per-device).
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Speaking of YouTube, Harris Brewis released his long-awaited (by me, anyway) plagiarism video essay. At an incredible three hours and fifty-one minutes, I can’t honestly recommend it to anyone who isn’t a fan but if you are, it’s so good. As of this writing, it’s well on its way to 5 million views which I find incredible.
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I also quite liked Phil Edwards’ explanation of why Reebok lost the sneaker war. It’s a piddly 11 minutes so no reason not to watch it!
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I kind of spoiled the punchline for this by writing about my Replay 2023 playlist two weeks ago but Apple formally released their weird Apple Music Replay personalised-webpage-but-not-with-a-public-URL-you-can-actually-share-like-any-other-webpage… thing. Mine is dominated by pieces from the soundtracks to Only Murders in the Building making it a bit useless as a playlist but accurate as an artefact, I guess.
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It’s December and that means Christmas music! As a man of somewhat old-fashioned tastes, my favourite playlist this year is Apple’s ‘Sentimental Christmas’ (Apple Music).
