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There’s a post doing the rounds on r/australia this morning, a young woman sharing a photo of her leg from a few years back, the scar left after they cut a melanoma in situ out of what had looked like an innocent freckle. She posts this every year, apparently, as a PSA. Get your skin checked. Don’t assume you’re too young. Don’t assume the mole is fine because it looks fine.

I’ve been dipping into r/AussieFrugal again, partly for the bargain tips, partly because it’s a good barometer of what’s actually annoying people at a household level. This week it wasn’t grocery prices or electricity bills that had people worked up. It was a bloke, forty years old, who has never needed a credit card in his life and now has to get one just so Steam and Apple will believe …

Fell down a Reddit hole yesterday, r/CleaningTips, of all places. Not my usual haunt, but a post caught my eye and I ended up reading the comments for longer than I’d like to admit. A cleaner, fairly new to the trade, had quoted $500 for a post-construction clean on a three-storey condo, plus $100 for the garage. Written quote, clear scope, homeowner signed off. Standard stuff. Then she got in there and found …

There’s a story doing the rounds this week that hasn’t got the attention it deserves, probably because “strata enforcement” is not a phrase that makes anyone’s pulse quicken. But stick with me, because it’s a genuinely infuriating bit of journalism, and it says a lot about how we do regulation in this state. The Age did a deep dive into Consumer Affairs Victoria’s handling of …

Been down a bit of a rabbit hole this week, the kind that starts with one Reddit thread and ends with you closing forty tabs at midnight wondering if you should cover your webcam with something more substantial than a Post-it note. The thread was on r/privacy, about a security researcher who built a map of every Flock Safety camera location in the US, pulled from a leak in Flock’s own database. Flock makes …

There’s a story doing the rounds about a company called Flock, which makes automated licence plate reader cameras that have quietly gone up on poles all over the US, and now increasingly here too. A security researcher built a detailed public map showing where these cameras actually are. Flock’s response was to try and get the map taken down. Not the cameras. The map showing where the cameras are. I read …

Someone on r/selfhosted posted something this week that landed harder than they probably intended. Paraphrasing: they got into self-hosting for control, and now they’re more paranoid than when they were just handing everything to Google and Dropbox. Backups, updates, exposed ports, drives quietly dying in the background, the general sense that somewhere out there a bored teenager in a different timezone is …

I fell down a Reddit hole yesterday, the way you do, and ended up on r/LocalLLaMA reading a thread about someone running a 256GB Mac Studio with an M5 Ultra chip, trying to squeeze usable speeds out of a model called GLM-5.3-Flash. Not exactly light bedtime reading. But stick with me, because underneath the acronyms there’s something genuinely interesting going on, and it says a fair bit about where we’re …

Spent a chunk of my weekend reading through r/auscorp, which is a bit like doom-scrolling but with better production values. There’s always a resignation-or-termination saga to gawk at, but the one that actually stuck with me was from a 40-year-old IT worker who got his start in the early 2000s doing the jobs nobody senior wanted to touch because they refused to learn email. He was asking, genuinely, whether …

Choice put out a report yesterday saying grocery prices are up 7% across Coles, Woolworths, IGA and Aldi. Not over a year. Over three months. I read that on the train and then spent the rest of the trip doing the maths on my own shop, which is a genuinely depressing way to pass twenty minutes. The comments under the story on r/AusFinance did what these threads always do: split into two camps that talk past each …