Nest, who recently reinvented the thermostat for the 21st century, are at it again with the smoke alarm: To improve safety, Nest had to find a way to thwart false alarms, which lead people to tempt fate by disconnecting their units. The company’s solution is the pre-alarm heads-up. Nest Protect detects the problem before it reaches alarm-triggering levels and informs you, deploying its reassuring yet authoritative prerecorded human voice. Users can forestall the full-scale siren of the alarm with a wave of a hand under the device. This “gestural hush,” detected by motion sensors in the smoke detector, gives them some time to deal with the offending situation. When the air returns to normal, the voice delivers an all-clear message and the device glows green. ...

Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg drives a taxi for a day, doesn’t reveal who he is until the passenger gets an inkling. Fascinating to see the attitudes on display, and how comfortable and casual things are. Can’t imagine that happening with any of the Aussie PMs since Hawke.

My internet was slow yesterday. I’m blaming Abbott already. Where’s my real NBN? As you might imagine, even knowing with what’s coming, I’m not a happy camper following the election. The Coalition romped home, and no matter how much lipstick you put on the pig that was the result for progressive parties, the shambles in the Senate or the infighting that’s engulfed Labor afterwards1 is all just a bad situation. ...

As Australians should express it: don’t be a fucking idiot on Saturday.

Scott Morrison comes to the defence of Fiona Scott’s “Asylum seekers clogging the M4” comment: “We’ve had 50,000 people turn up over the last five years,” he said; “in addition to that we have 20,000 people who have been released into the community under the government’s policies and they have principally been released into south-western Sydney and in Dandenong area in Melbourne and other places. Proving this is purely about the presentation rather than the actual issue, Morrison neglects to mention the 50,000 asylum seekers over 5 years represents only 5% of the 883,626 migrants that have been granted settlement in Australia over the same time. They’re not all living in Bondi and St Kilda, Mr. Morrison. ...