Call me fickle, but just about a year ago, I was looking at the ebook-e-reader market and thinking that it was a waste of time, that paper books were here to stay for years yet and that it was far too expensive. Who in their right mind would pay $300 - $400 just for the reader, and then more for the damn books to read on it? Up until January, my only exposure to reading electronic books had been the Stanza app on the iPhone, and while it worked for reading short passages, it was woefully inadequate for full novels. Of course, a year is a long time in technology, none more so than 2010. First, the iPad came along, and I flip-flopped on the idea of buying that before finally caving. Initially I used it for games, videos, and all manner of internet browsing, before finally deciding to take it along with me on my daily commute. On the train, all those options were off the table - so I tried out iBooks, and found it amazingly readable. A pity then the iBooks bookstore is so overpriced, none more so than in Australia - paying more for a digital edition is just about the biggest rip-off I’ve heard of. There were some classics for me to catch up on, and I managed to churn through quite a few. There’s only so much archaic 19th century prose you can read before getting a little weary of it, and so I tired of it. And then came the Kindle… When the Kindle shows up in the post, you almost think there’s been a mistake. The box weighs more than the device, and seems absurdly oversized. When I say this thing is thin and light, there’s absolutely no kidding - it’s hardly thicker than 20 pages of a typical novel, and so easily held in one hand with its lightness. Turn it sideways, and it’s virtually gone. ...

This article prompted me to remember that I had a neglected blog: Blogging is Healthy: It’s no longer the white-hot center of controversy it was in 2005; now it’s part of the establishment, and if you look at the numbers from the popular platform providers like WordPress and Blogger, still growing quite nicely thank you. Freshness Matters: When you don’t update a blog, it gets stale fast. The natural tendency of the human mind to favor what’s fresh is reinforced by search engines leaning the same way. ...

Alan Kohler: …in Australia, the budget is in a wonderful position – heading back into surplus in a couple of years despite one of the world’s biggest and most successful stimulus programmes during the global recession. But you wouldn’t know it. Five billion dollars needed in flood recovery spending and … oh dear, we need a levy. Can’t possibly wait a year or two to go back into surplus. What would Tony Abbott say? ...

2010! I remember as a kid thinking 2000 was far away, and then a little older thinking by 2010 I would have this, or that, or the other thing over there. 10 years seems like a stupendously long time when it is as long as you’ve lived, or more than half your age. If you asked me what I’d actually done in a whole 12 months, I think about the only thing I could say without qualification was that I changed jobs. It really has disappeared in a blink - I started off the year thinking I was on the verge of buying a house. I had a decent paying job, I had a loan pre-approved, and I was hunting houses. I even went to an auction or two, and even put my hand up for bidding… and was promptly blown away, my budget puny in the face of the realities of the house market. ...

How Stuxnet inflitrated and frustrated Iran’s nuclear program: At Natanz, for almost 17 months, Stuxnet quietly worked its way into the system and targeted a specific component – the frequency converters made by the German equipment manufacturer Siemens that regulated the speed of the spinning centrifuges used to create nuclear fuel. The worm then took control of the speed at which the centrifuges spun, making them turn so fast in a quick burst that they would be damaged but not destroyed. And at the same time, the worm masked that change in speed from being discovered at the centrifuges’ control panel. ...