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Last week I drove up to Canberra for the fourth Everything Open conference the spiritual successor to linux.conf.au, this was fitting as the last time I was in Canberra was for LCA back in 2013. I did post about the first Everything Open back in 2023, and while I did attend the subsequent conferences in Gladstone and Adelaide, I didn’t write anything substantial up about those, I took the lazy approach of just tooting and boosting on Mastodon.

So now that it has been a few days, what are the topics that have stayed with me?

AI… of course…

There were a few talks about AI but there were also a number of ad-doc conversations. Unlike some of my co-workers, I didn’t encounter anyone that was exicted about AI. The mood was more cautious, while it could be a useful tool eventually or in specific circumstance, there is currently too much hype and slop.

The talks specifically about AI that I went to were:

• Roll for initiative: The battle against the beast of AI Slop from J Rosenbaum
• Peak Text: AI and the Golden Age of Libraries and Archives from Keir Winesmith

Keir Winesmith’s keynote provided two alternate meanings for “AI” that resonated with how I have been feeling:

• Archival Intelligence – in that it is only drawing from what we have already put into archives, you might get a response that is new to you, but it is not new to the person that previously wrote it
• Averaged Inputs – responses are what is statistically likely, so they will be at the middle of the bell curve, not bad and not good, just an average of what has been provided before

Another ongoing topic of these conferences is a blend of digital rights, community and maintenance, things that are getting harder and harder in this capitalist world:

• Own Your Online World: Protecting Privacy and Rights with Confidence from Gyle dela Cruz
• The unreasonable cost of open source contribution from Rob Norris
• Excited Developer Syndrome from Evan Kohilas
• I accidentally became a FOSS maintainer and all I got was this lousy insight into librarianship from Hugh Rundle
• README: The Developer’s forgotten love letter from Swapnil Ogale
• Reclaiming the open web: a story about big tech, platforms and millennial dreams of a connected web from Milly Schmidt
• Wabi Sabi Software: Caring for Imperfect Projects in Public from Sam Bishop
• The Magic of the Open Practice Library from Elise Elkerton
• Open Australia: Who we are, what we do, and what’s in it for you. from Donna Benjamin

A couple of these overlap with my views on AI, such as the exited developer can now generate shiny code faster but they will still not be around to deal with maintenance, some code may be generated but has it also been documented for those in the future to maintain?

While writing up this post I also looked back over some previous posts about conferences and I was reminded of the talks about rockstar developers at LCA 2017 in Hobart. While previously to get away with being a rockstar a person needed to have decent skills and the excitement/drive/obsession to churn out shiny things, now it is the AI models that are doing the heavy lifting.

As for how the conference itself was run, it doesn’t compare against the peak of LCA, but there was talk that it is gaining momentum. While nothing is set yet, there are moves towards Brisbane 2027. If that happens, I will be there.

However for now I need to ensure that my photos from the drive up, around and back from Canberra do not fall into the backlog…

I remember a time when upgrading my home computer was a thing. Technology was changing fast enough that there was a benefit to regularly upgrading hardware and software. That was twenty years ago, these days things are fine and just work for years…

Two weeks ago I upgraded my main home desktop, upgrading to a Ryzen 7 9700X in what I felt was a mid range system that would give me a decent upgrade for a reasonable amount of money. With a basic motherboard, 32GB of RAM (double the previous system) and a new 500GB NVMe boot drive I kept it under AUD1000. The case and other storage (mostly SSD) was reused from the previous system. So far it is mostly the same, but the place where I can tell a different is in how much more responsive Lightroom now is.

That previous system was put together in early 2019 based around an i7-8700 CPU, it was my first system with an NVMe boot drive which did make it feel quite snappy. Though the other storage was all still spinning rust so there were still noticable read delays in Lightroom just after importing images (I made sure to put the catalog and cache on the NVMe drive).

I had thought that this six and a half year gap was the longest I had gone between upgrades, but it turns out that this is the second gap of this duration with the previous upgrade to an i7-3770 being almost thirteen years ago.

This trend of long gaps has been going for a while, I need to step back another four and a half years to when I previously switched from a series of AMD CPUs over to Intel. I don’t recall what I did with that hardware, it is all long gone as I had no need to keep it around.

However that thirteen year old i7-3770 is still running fine as my parent’s computer, but it is about to be updated to the six an a half year old i7-8700. Partially because I have no other use for it, but mainly because it is supported by Windows 11. It will also be a good time to remove all the spinning rust which has been in that system for a loooong time…

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PS: Looking back through old posts I was reminded that at one point I did buy a dedicated GPU for Lightroom and did see a benefit from it, but these days I am happy with onboard graphics which support multiple monitors, it is a bonus if it might get used for Lightroom a bit. As I don’t play games I would need compelling evidence of a significant benefit before I would part with AUD500+ for a dedicated GPU.

Yesterday was the final day of the 2025 Melbourne International Comedy Festival and it is also ten years since I jumped in to going to live comedy.

In early 2015 I was six months in to working in the city and having to commute on the train. I was looking for things to listen to and I was put onto two Melbourne based comedy podcasts. Things escalated quickly as the host of one of those podcasts ran a Saturday afternoon comedy room, and then both of them had live podcast recordings on the Saturday and Sunday afternoon during the comedy festival. As I was now working in the city, it became easy to stay in and go to comedy shows.

Looking back at my calendar for 2015 I see that I went to 10 podcast recordings, 15 solo shows and 3 showcase shows.

Those weekend afternoon podcasts (more than the original two) became the foundation of my festival, also becoming a place to catch up with friends I had made because they also listened to the podcasts and you need something to do while waiting in line…

I won’t go through every year, but in 2019 that had grown to 19 podcasts and 45 solo shows.

A big difference for this year was that due to some podcasts ending and others not being available to do live shows I no longer had that foundation for my weekends. There was a single live podcast, but I made up for it with 52 solo shows. If I didn’t have to still go to work there were a number of late night shows that could have pushed that up above 60.

And now some miscellaneous observations:

• The weather was hot or warm, not the typical cold and rainy April in Melbourne
• I caught the train from my regular station 12 times and due to works I drove to a station on a different line 7 times.
• I drove in once because a late weeknight show finished after the last train.
• Last night was the only time I drove in because all the nearby train lines had works.

My sense of time is still broken as today marks five years since I started working from home. Broadly speaking my routine is still the same as it was a year ago.

Do I have any highlights of the last year?

• I got my first 3d printer and have incorporated that into my home automation projects
• I had solar and no gas for over a year, continuing to monitor my usage and keep an eye on what could change
• I liquidated the last of my computer collection, just keeping Apple IIgs related items
• I tackled some long overdue home maintenance projects such as building a new gate, painting the garage door, sanding back and oiling the deck, getting the garage door roof replaced and painting railings

I didn’t get out with my camera as much as I wanted, though I did spend a decent amount of time working through my backlog and putting up a few new albums on Flickr.

At the end of last year the decision was finally announced that the lease would be terminated on the Melbourne office, we would all be formally considered remote. In 2024 I only went in once to work (on a day we had an all office meeting with catered lunch) but I did use it a couple of other times, it was handy knowing I had access to somewhere in the city that was quiet and I knew would have a clean toilet… I still miss the random lunchtime conversations, but the opposite is true for the two hours taken up be the commute.

For a long time I have had a TV tuner in one of my computers so that I could record broadcast television to watch later. To handle the scheduling and recording I have been using a Java based program called DV Scheduler. I don’t recall if I ever knew the name of who wrote it, just that it was on a personal page of someone that worked/studied at the University of Sydney.

Today I uninstalled the program and removed the TV tuner from my computer. Not because of any problems I was having with it, but because it has been a full year since I have watched anything that it recorded.

As my recent lists of youtube channels and podcasts indirectly reveal, there is very little on broadcast television that I watch. When there are shows that I do want to watch I have been “watching” them on the relevant station’s “catch up” service.

I have a bit of regret in uninstalling DV Scheduler as it has been such a reliable program. Looking back I found that I first gave it a try fourteen years ago. I don’t know when it’s website was removed but the most recent capture of its website in the wayback machine is from 2016.

Oh well, time marches on…