Ticketek does not work with Firefox and other end of the world scenarios

Hammy Goonan

• 4 min read
Ticketek does not work with Firefox and other end of the world scenarios
Photo by Natã Figueiredo / Unsplash

Ticketek does not work with Firefox. What the actual fuck. 2 hours waiting on line to get a ticket to the footy only to be prevented from checking out. I tried Safari, same deal. Isn't there some sort of equal access provision? Surely we have standards. At least I'm not vision impaired and trying to do it with a screen reader.

Native Land Digital is the sort of thing that makes you feel like it's all worth it and the internet we once knew and loved still lives. It even has an API so you can always know whose land you are on.

I learnt about Native Land Digital during David Colls' talk on his EV trip planner app at PyCon AU last week. I mentioned last year what a wonderful conference it was with its militant inclusivity that means that everyone feels welcome to contribute. As always, there were lots of fabulous talks but one that really resonated with me was Christopher Neugebauer discussion of the current age of Open Source. Justin Warren also gave a talk on sustaining open source which is an excellent companion piece. There were, as always, many many excellent talks and you can watch them all yourself at your leisure.

And while we're discussing open source, there's a pleasing correlation between the use of swearwords and the quality of the code in open source software. Oh, and Lyon is migrating to Linux and OnlyOffice, which I obviously love, but is going to lead to some pretty interesting water cooler conversations.

Speaking of things that bring delight, female fairywrens sing to their eggs to teach them a song. If a cuckoo manages to get an egg into the nest, it's incubation period is too short an it won't have learnt the song so it ejected from the nest. Birds of prey are also being used to protect grapes at wineries in England. These are a few of my favourite things.

I finally got around to subscribing to 404 Media who are doing some really amazing reporting and well and truly deserve my hard earned. I though it would be worth mentioning that my current paid media diet includes The Guardian, Wired and Crikey. I've also just subscribed to Ette Media who are doing some really great work and you should definitely give a follow. It's a few hundred dollars a year and a good spread of independent and more 'legacy' media. Needless to say paying for journalism is more important that ever.

I'm going to try to write about AI considerably less here. We're all flooded with AI chat, and you probably have enough of it in your life. What I'm increasingly interested in is the economics of it and the growing number and volume of voices saying 'the numbers don't add up'. Ed Zitron has been banging this drum for a long time, as has Justin Warren. But more mainstream media outlets are starting to think about it.

So here are a bunch of links that are somehow related to the economics of AI, I'll do my best to keep AI comments to a minimum from now on:

My love of all things open source and self hosted continues unabated so I love this guide to over engineering a home lab. I also came across Codeberg as a nice open source alternative to Github. There are a few around, I believe I've mentioned others before but they are only going to get more an more important as Microsoft has folded Github into it's CoreAI organisation. Let the enshitification begin. Speaking of, this was a pretty neat solution to keeping bots from scraping your content using Nginx.

I love the self hosted alternatives for a wide range of reasons but a big one is that it means I remain more secure and private. Wired have a great guide to avoiding government surveillance. There's also this super intense Digital Defence site with details on how to keep yourself secure, the EFF has a guide as well.

I use a VPN semi-regularly, but perhaps I shouldn't be. My biggest worry is the data retention laws in Australia which I find excessive and terrifying, especially given the broad range of agencies that have access to that data. My VPN might be logging that, but at least my ISP isn't.

If you're Victorian (the Australian state, not the era, although they share a namesake), please take the time to let your local MP know that you support Victoria's historic treaty with our First Nations peoples. You should also shout loudly at the Australian Federal government over it's plans to make it even harder to access information on the government. It's quite pathetic and I expect a lot more from a Labor government. Without robust freedom of information laws governments are a lot harder to hold to account which one would think is a pretty key component of a functioning democracy.

Once upon a time, I thought the split headphone jack was about the romantic thing a person could give their partner. With the proliferation of Bluetooth, could a shared email address have taken it's place. And while we're on romantic gestures, there's almost certainly someone in your life who would love this list of 'practical betterments'. Send it to them, bring them joy.