I recently decided that my 1980′s website needed upgrading.
I contacted a company and was told I had to pay half up front which I did. I was then emailed the Terms and Conditions which I signed and was then asked for the rest of the money.
Yes, I did pay it, what a fool!! [...]

This has come across my desk and will no doubt be of interest to some.
Douglas Hanahan, PhD, is Director of the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (Suisse de Recherche Expérimentale sur le Cancer, ISREC), and Professor of Molecular Oncology in the School of Life Sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (Ecole [...]

Speaker Dunne has the thrilling news that we can now petition the Legislative Assembly online!
“Petitioning parliament has long been an avenue used by citizens to have their say and it has always been a feature of the ACT Legislative Assembly,” Mrs Dunne said.
“ACT residents will now be able to add their names to petitions from [...]

The Australian National University is letting us know about their latest achievement:
A team of Australian scientists has developed a powerful microscope using the laws of quantum mechanics to probe the inner workings of living cells.
The team, a collaboration between The University of Queensland and the Australian National University, believe their microscope could lead to a [...]

Government news has a story on moves to charge for online access to the Style Manual.
Desperate gouging or reasonable cost recovery?

Paywalling the style manual
Sensible cost recovery
We’ve already paid for it!
View Results

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Apparently the National Broadband Network got turned on in Gungahlin this morning.
Anyone on it wanting to share how joyful your life now is?

I have been a fan of services like freecycle that lets people give away stuff they don’t need or want for free, and others to obtain those items. Some while ago I discovered Yepgot,
Yepgot is a service which lets you lend out things you have in return for money, and borrow things you need for [...]

Andrew Leigh has announced the Civic rollout of the National Broadband Network:
In around 12 months’ time, people in Civic will be able to start connecting to the National Broadband Network. The map shows that NBN fibre is being rolled out Civic, Acton and parts of Braddon which will allow more residents access to faster, affordable [...]

The National Broadband Network is only weeks away from a rollout to around 14,000 homes in Gungahlin. It heralds a shiny-bright future of super-fast connection speeds amid promises to “transform Australia as much as the telegraph, railways and highways did for previous generations”.
But this dream has been nothing more than a nightmare for a group [...]

ANU is celebrating another astronomical win:
Professor Ken Freeman from The Australian National University has been awarded the American Astronomical Society’s top prize.
The prestigious Henry Norris Russell Lectureship was awarded to Professor Freeman in recognition of a lifetime of seminal contributions to astronomy, including his work on the structure and dynamics of our Galaxy and [...]

Saw this tweet from Commander Hadfield up in the International Space Station.
Cmdr_Hadfield Chris Hadfield
Canberra, capital of Australia. If you zoom in you can see the circle around Parliament House. pic.twitter.com/p7V6GOKU
I can’t see the road he’s talking about, but I located LBG.

Although it’s a long way from Canberra, the bushfire that tore through the Warrumbungle Mountains, Coonabarabran, on Sunday night is having a significant effect on a lot of Canberra people. Siding Springs became Australia’s premier visual astronomy observatory site after the decision not to rebuild Mount Stromlo Observatory, destroyed in the January 2003 bushfire.

It appears [...]

View Larger Map
In case you haven’t seen you can now see 3d Canberra buildings and terrain in Google Earth.
That’s right, the next level of peering over your neighbours fence can now be done in all its 3D glory.

I’ll confess to being a bit torn by this Vlog.
It’s screamingly pointless and narcissistic, yet strongly local, and features a killer set of star trek memorabilia in the background.
It occurred to me that the form was much like that of Garfield Minus Garfield. Is the emptiness in fact art?
I’ll leave that for readers to decide.

I [...]

Hi there Rioters,
Given the current fire dangers affecting our region I thought people might be interested in this site I just came across. Dubbed ‘Australian Bushfire Map’ it appears to aggregate information from various state and rural fire services. The value is that you don’t have to navigate between the various state based sites individually [...]

Our understanding of how technology impacts creative production and education is undergoing disruption from the learning to code movement. The prevalence open source digital tools and the successes from Silicon Valley have shown us that aspiring entrepreneurs can launch companies from simply writing on a computer.
What we lack is widespread education of coding, and in [...]

 
One of the great benefits flowing from the $30 annual membership fee of the Canberra Astronomical Society is that you also get free use of the society’s 350mm (14″) telescope up on top of Mount Stromlo. A scope worth more than $10,000, with some gorgeous Nagler eyepieces, in an observatory with a roll-off roof. For [...]

For those seeking to escape the scorching heatwave about to pound down on us by going to the coast, a couple of words of warning:
1. The bluebottles are in biblical proportions if the wind is coming in right. I took the above shot on North Broulee on New Year’s Day.
2. The reason I couldn’t share [...]

The linux.conf.au have announced the father of the internet is coming to town to speak at ANU.
Australia’s premier open source conference, linux.conf.au, are very proud to announce the fourth and final keynote speaker for 2013. Sir Tim Berners-Lee is best known for inventing the World Wide Web in the late 1980s, and is now the [...]

If you like your iron big and local (and really who doesn’t) then this video posted by NCINationalFacility is for you:
The Fujitsu Primergy cluster high-performance supercomputer was constructed at the National Computational Infrastructure in late 2012. Located at The Australian National University, the machine has:
57,000 cores = 15,000 home PC’s
160 terabytes of RAM = [...]

The SMH has the details on a big hack of staff and student data at ADFA by the moderately famous Anonymous affiliate known as “Darwinare”:
The university said almost all of the stolen passwords were historical and could not have been used to access emails or other personal information.
However, it warned students to be wary of [...]

From the SMH:
“The ACT government should drop its plans for a cycling city and look instead to get Canberrans commuting to work on Segways and electric scooters, according to the Planning Institute of Australia.
The institute wants the city’s bike lanes upgraded into mini-highways for “personal mobility devices,” and traffic laws changed to allow the use [...]

Over the last couple of months my mobile Internet coverage for both phone and iPad has really deteriorated especially in the evenings. I live in Queanbeyan and the coverage in my house is now restricted to a small area of one room and even that is patchy. Especially in the evenings. I work [...]

In a nice piece of good news Canberra’s StageBitz have been awarded a Anthill 2012 Cool Company Award in the X-Factor category.
StageBitz is a company that earns ultra-cool points for innovating, and for sharing its innovation.
Making a movie? Putting on a play? Need to keep track of a styrofoam miniature of Stonehendge? Perhaps you [...]

For some organisations outsourcing the work to India or the Ukraine just won’t do.
So what locals can do quality smartphone apps at a good price?

Hey All,
I just got an awesome Galaxy Note 2 to do some development on, and to my extreme delight, I found it has NFC capabilities. For those who haven’t heard of NFC, its an extension of RFID technologies, which allows for wireless data transfer over a 10cm range. Obviously, I had some good fun scanning [...]

[ 29 November, 2012; 4:00 pm; ]

This just in:

Professor Ian Chubb, Chief Scientist of Australia, will this week launch a popular science book at UNSW Canberra that doesn’t explain the great mysteries of the universe, but instead tackles in easy-to-understand terms the science behind the objects and phenomena we encounter in everyday life.

From understanding why detergents work better on [...]

What does the hive think about the best shops to buy PC bits and pieces in Canberra?
I know best prices can be found on the web but I want to talk to someone about my purchases.
I’ve had a bit of hit and miss at JBs.
Any views on Officeworks ?

The ACT Legislative Assembly website has a shiny new welcome message from new Speaker Vicki Dunne.
It’s the usual motherhood statements with a note that she’s the first member of the opposition to be in the big seat.
And then the bad news:
In coming months a new, redeveloped website will be launched which aims to improve [...]

There is little in this world as sad as Government and politicians trying to tap into the zeitgeist. Be it school kids bussed in for government organised “flashmobs” in the name of awareness raising, or “poetry slams” in public libraries with no booze of scoring.
But to that sad, sorry list of flabby failure the ACT [...]

Simon has sent in a cracking shot of this morning’s eclipse:
Shot from my back deck (in Macarthur) using a welding mask over the lens.
Got your own? Send it in to images@the-riotact.com .

Content Group have youtubed a video shot from their Civic office:

Kazza the blank one has sent this in:

Some new ones from Snoop 848 taken [...]

The Australian National University is celebrating their new big iron sweeping to the top of the Australian charts:
The National Computational Infrastructure’s new Fujitsu Primergy Supercomputer has debuted at number one in Australia, and number 24 in the world on the TOP500 list of best supercomputers, released overnight.
The result, announced at SC12, an annual Supercomputing Conference [...]