I started a business! It’s called Boom! I set up people’s iPhones, or troubleshoot problems they’re having. There’s a website up, but I’m working to improve it with version 2. Let me know what you think.

Also, I’m doing this as a solution to my always starving/mooching. I am brilliant at what I do, so if you have friends, colleagues or family who could benefit from a guy like me sorting their iPhonage out for them, please pass on my details to them. In short: Tell your friends!

Boom! - Adelaide iPhone Support

FizzyGo.com

This is the site for a small non-profit record label that was founded to promote the work & music of the late Baterz. The newest addition to this site is a promo page for a three-disc compilation CD featuring friends of Baterz covering his songs. I’ll be building a full site for FizzyGo once this CD is in shops.

SoursobBobTribute.com

Some of you reading this may have heard about Soursob Bob before. He’s been playing shows around Adelaide for some time - he’s known quite well in the music scene here. Some of his friends decided to put together a tribute CD for him by covering his songs and putting them all on the one album. There were only a few of these CDs pressed and heaps of people were asking about them, so it was decided that the tracks should be made free online. You can download the entire album from that site.

This story is a few hours late, but here it is anyway.

The Maritime Union says it wants Darwin’s Port Corporation to move a Japanese research ship from Stokes Hill Wharf for today’s commemoration of the World War II air raids on the city.

[...] The union’s Andrew Burford says the ship’s presence could upset relatives of the dock workers killed in the attacks, when they arrive to lay wreaths this morning.

That is understandable. We wouldn’t want to be reminding these survivors of a horrific war-time event how awful it was. This is all about honouring & remembering the fallen, yes?

Air raid sirens will be sounded at two minutes to 10:00am ACDT this morning to mark the start of the raids, and there will also be guns fired and fighter jets swooping over the city.

Oh, THAT won’t freak any survivors out at all, nooo. Quick move the ship!

My friend Guillaume is putting this show on at the Grace Emily this Valentines Day (Saturday night). Do come along!

This koala survives the bushfire and drinks three bottles of water courtesy of CFA volunteer David Tree. There’s a video of it here as well. (Thanks to Sarah/Katie for linking me up)

Photo via Digg

I’m finding it hard to keep it together when reading about the Victorian bushfires. Yesterday, I donated a heap of clothes & furniture to the Salvation Army - hopefully some of it will get to the victims. 

Due to my employment status and lack of spare funds, I can’t afford to donate financially. If you are luckier than I am (and a hell of a lot luckier than the victims of this disaster), please consider donating to the following appeals.

• Australian Red Cross Donations: Phone 1800 811 700
• Australian Salvation Army Bushfire Appeal: Phone: 137258
• Bendigo Bank Bushfire Appeal
• Wildlife Victoria Bushfire Appeal

It’s that time again! I’m moving out of my beloved townhouse in College Park, and moving into Adelaide’s CBD. Moving day is tomorrow (Sunday), and right now I’m supposed to be packing, instead photoshopping up elaborate maps & blog posts.

My new place is in the west end of the CBD. I’ll have a housemate for the first time since I was living with Lukey. Rent is much more affordable, and everything will be within walking distance.

Now, I just need a job, and everything will be A-OK. :D

Update: I’ve finished the move, and am now in my new place. *awesome*

If you’re in contact with me regularly, then you’d know how much I’ve been whinging about the heat over this past week. I used a fan to keep cool most of the time… but I just found this story via Overclockers:

At home in Victoria the temperature has been above 44 degrees all week and they are forecasting another week of 40+ temperatures. Power is failing, trains have stopped running because tracks are buckling under the heat. It’s just scorching weather and it seems that the people are not the only ones suffering.

Check out these photos of a little Koala which just walked onto a back porch looking for a bit of heat relief. The woman filled up a bucket for it and this is what happened!

More photos after the break:

There’s a bigger version here.

This image was made by Mr Leunig, who works for The Age.

It was a dark and stormy night bright and sunny afternoon when my good pal Guillaume emailed me we with an idea for a poster for his band 2000 Men. It involved an infinite army of tanks using rock and roll as their weapon. I liked it, and helped him make the image. They might be using the poster quite a bit for their gigs this year, so you might see it stuck to a wall somewhere in Adelaide sometime soon.

Above is the poster. You can click it for a bigger version. Enjoy. :)

So here I am, on a sunny Saturday afternoon in August, in the back seat of a car that is driving on the Flinders Highway on the way to Port Lincoln in South Australia. I’m kind of on a working holiday - I’m visiting family in the area, as my work takes advantage of my location, I’ll be spending time there fixing computers and such afterwards. The trip is long, so I’m happy that i’ve bought my entire music collection in mp3, not to mention a small pack of mini-discs that should keep me occupied. 

Looking into other people’s vehicles as they over take my own, I see that there are quite a few people heading west for a weekend holiday. These people drive all sorts of cars; new Falcons, Commodores, four wheel drives (sometimes towing a caravan), and even the odd Audi. It’s amazing to think how much money we have as Australians. I mean, i’ve been working for a little over a year, and now here i am typing on a $7000 piece of hardware, while listening to a $800 music player, which plays music that would have cost me in excess of $500, and i’m also packing a $600 mobile phone. After a single year of working full time I own over $8900 worth of stuff. Australia is great like that. One can assume the other people taking holidays in their fast cars have been working much longer than i have. I wonder how much stuff they have? A house maybe? Other cars? Businesses? Corporations?

Hang on… the scene isn’t properly set yet:

If I were to take out my mini-disc headphones, then i’d hear talk-back radio scatching its way across the AM airwaves, and the smooth highway rubbing against the tyres. To my right is nothing but scrub land, which is host to red sand plains and many thousands of salt bushes that stretch out into the distance as far as the eye can see. I wouldn’t like to be lost out there on a hot day. Straight ahead is a city called Whyalla, and behind me is another small city called Port Augusta. The road is straight, and in it’s obscurity, the scenery looks nice, and somewhat peaceful. To my left, however, it is another story. Sure, it features similar scenery bar a couple of hills which hide the Spencer Gulf from view, but this piece of land has a significance that makes me ashamed to be an Australian.

In this piece of land, our government holds the hundreds of captured people who have fled their own country for whatever reason, looking for a better life here in Australia. These people are a mix of races, usually from the middle east, and some from asia. These people consist of entire families; Men, Women and Children. They arrived on leaky boats with no possesions whatsoever, as they’d given everything they had to get here. Some of the women arrived pregnant.

While doing some part time work for a newspaper over a year ago, a press release from the office of Mr Phillip Ruddock squealed its way into the office. The message? “Please stop referring to the ‘Detainees’ as ‘refugees’, as they are not refugees, they are detainees. Thankyou.” Next time  you’re fleeing persecution in fear of your life, remember to refer to yourself as a “Detainee”, and not a Refugee. Ok?

 This is Australia in 2003. We’re holding innocent people in a Detention Centre without charging them, or giving them a timeframe on when they will be released. No visitors are allowed, and no phone calls can be made from inside. Lawyers are forced to argue in the Australian court system so that the children can attend primary or secondary schooling in nearby Port Augusta. Other lawyers are arguing in higher courts to decide wether or not children should be held in a prison like confine at all.

I noticed clouds have covered the sky blocking out the sunshine.

The Baxter Detention Centre was established here almost a year ago now, after the media locked onto the attrocity that was the the “Woomera Detention Centre”. A similar place to Baxter, The Woomera Detention Centre sat outside of a town called Woomera, which basks in the hot desert sun during the day, and freezes in the clear nights. At first, there were no airconditioners in the facility at all. Imagine a 40 degree (104 degree farenheight) day without airconditioning. After a few months, some of the inmates or “Detainees” had had enough. Riots became common, and on one of the extreme days, some people had their lips sewn together. I don’t know if this was a symbolic protest, or pure insanity, but it clearly demonstrated a breach of  human rights - and lets not forget they were keeping children in with the adults inside this place. There were huge protests at Woomera, one of which saw the break out of several inmates, all of whom were later hunted down by the officials and returned to the Centre.

Eager to shift the problem somewhere else, our government moved the remaining refugees to Baxter. Baxter was said to be much better: it had air conditioning. It took weeks before there was a riot inside Baxter, and some of the “rooms” were burned in small fires started by those imprisoned in them. Some refugees were sent to prison for a few years as punishment. Hundreds of Australians have travelled from all over the country to protest outside the Centre over the last Easter long weekend. Of course, the limited and notoriously conservative Packer/state/Murdoch owned media made the protesters out to be the bad guys. I wasn’t there, but I would have liked to have been. A friend of mine who was there, got fined because he hadn’t registered his change of address on the back of his drivers license. As citizens of a democracy, we have a right to protest, and the police have a right to charge protesters for whatever they can to deter them from doing it again. (I saw a man get arrested at another anti war protest for chalking a peace symbol on the back of a bus. The charge was defacing public property.)

Locked inside the Baxter detention centre at this very moment, is a man who wonders how his family back home are; a mother, who is wondering if her sister is stil alive; is a child who wonders if thier father will be allowed to visit. As you read this, there are people locked up in a prison that you, as an Australian pay for, indefinitely. 

It has started to rain, and in between tracks on my mini-disc player, I can now hear the constant splash of the wet highway on the car’s tyres. It’s okay, i’ll just change tracks and listen to some more music. I wonder what will be on TV tonight?

This is seven seconds of me experimenting in Final Cut Pro.

I spent this evening updating the theme and back-end to failnews.org. I’m fairly happy with the final result, though I’m still not sure about that green background. 

Thanks to a good kick up the arse from noisypoppy, Failnews now has it’s own twitter profile, the lastest version of Wordpress, and plugins linking twitter to the blog directly. 

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Mac OS X 10.5.6 Combo Update (668 MB)

Mac OS X 10.5.6 Update (372 MB)

Then of course, there are the OSX Server updates. Combo here, update here.

Let me know how you go during and after the install in the comments. As mentioned earlier, the change log is after the break.

What’s new in 10.5.6?

• Improves reliability of Address Book syncing with iPhone and other devices and applications.

• Improves the reliability of AirPort connections, including improvements when roaming in large wireless networks with an Intel-based Mac.

• Improves reliability of synchronizing files on a portable home directory.
• Fixes an issue in Mac OS X 10.5.4 and 10.5.5 in which managed users may not see printers that use the Generic PPD.
• Client computers that use UUID-based ByHost preferences now respect managed Screen Saver settings.

• Addresses an issue that could cause an encryption alert to appear in the chat window.
• Setting your iChat status to “invisible” via AppleScript no longer logs you out of iChat.
• Resolves an issue in which pasting text from a Microsoft Office document could insert an image rather than text.

• Includes general improvements to gaming performance.
  
• Includes graphics improvements for iChat, Cover Flow, Aperture, and iTunes.
• Includes fixes for possible graphics distortion issues with certain ATI graphics cards.
  

• Includes overall performance and reliability fixes.
• Improves Connection Doctor accuracy.
• Fixes an issue that could cause messages identified as junk to remain in the inbox.
• Fixes an issue that could cause Mail to append a character to the file extension of an attachment.
• Addresses an issue that could prevent Mail from quitting.
• Improves reliability when printing PDF attachments.

• Contacts, calendars, and bookmarks on a Mac automatically sync within a minute of the change being made on the computer, another device, or the web at me.com.

• Improves Apple File Service performance, especially when using a home directory hosted on an AFP server.Important: If you are using Mac OS X 10.5.6 (client) to connect to a Mac OS X Server 10.4-based server, it is strongly recommended that you update the server to Mac OS X Server version 10.4.11.
• Improves the performance and reliability of TCP connections.
• Improves reliability and performance for AT&T 3G cards.
• Updates the ssh Terminal command for compatibility with more ssh servers.

• Improves printing for the Adobe CS3 application suite.
• Improves printing for USB-based Brother and Canon printers.

• Addresses an issue in which a parentally-controlled account could be unable to access the iTunes Store.
• Includes general fixes for time limits.
• Resolves an issue that prevented adding allowed websites from Safari via drag and drop.

• Fixes issues that could cause Time Machine to state the backup volume could not be found.
• Improves Time Machine reliability with Time Capsule.

• Improves compatibility with web proxy servers.
  
  

• Includes Mac OS X security improvements. See this website for more information.
• Addresses inaccuracies with Calculator when the Mac OS X language is set to German or Swiss German.
• Improves the performance and reliability of Chess.
• Improves DVD Player performance and reliability.
• Performance improvements for iCal are included.
• Fixes an issue when running the New iCal Events Automator action as an applet.
• Adds a Trackpad System Preference pane for portable Macs.
• Improves compatibility with smart cards such as the U.S. Department of Defense Common Access Card.
• Updates time zone data and Daylight Saving Time rules for several countries.

Borrowed ruthlessly from Apple’s support pages.

Sony have just launched their new Second Life rip off called Playstation Home. The idea is, you walk around as your virtual self in a virtual world. You have your virtual pad, virtual friends, virtual clothes - but everything costs real money.

While exploring the shopping precinct, I saw how expensive it was to dress your character in new threads. I mean, I just can’t justify spending a couple of dollars on pretend attire. So, I did what any bored Playstation user would. I started to protest.

It’s easy to do. Characters in this world have a number of dances to choose from. I chose “Rock” which involves punching your fist into the air. Then I started to shout slogans like “SONY IS RIPPING US OFF! FREE CLOTHES!” and “I’d rather go naked than wear non-free virtual clothes!” Others started to join in, until we had an unruly mob. “SONY = THEFT” “FREE CLOTHES FOR ALL!”

The protest is ongoing. If you’ve got access to Playstation Home, pop on down and join the picket line. The photo is bigger after the break.

click for full size

Former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top administration officials are responsible for abuse of detainees in US custody, a bipartisan Senate report says.

I can’t wait till he’s behind bars, or dead. I’d write more but the lyrics to this song have already been written.

Check it out. The moon is smiley. Apparently this happens once every 13 years. Lucky us.

Click here for the full size version.

It’s free entry. Hope to see you there!

I’m playing rock bass for my good mate Guillaume Thursday night at the Exeter. If you feel like checking it out, come and have a look in. We’re good chaps.