It was worth staying up last night to watch the direct. There's so much news and makes for some very good blog content. I have thoughts:

• The prices are questionable, $114 (at JB Hi-Fi) for the new Mario Kart is way way too much, the console itself is also pretty expensive at $699 but also maybe around what I was expecting
• From Software doing an exclusive on the Switch is very interesting, there is a lot of disappointed PC only gamers right now
• The DK game looks like a lot of fun
• Hollow Knight: Silksong would have been a perfect launch game alongside Mario Kart and DELTARUNE, some time is 2025 is such a tease
• It was great to a younger generation of Nintendo employees leading the charge, the old guard is on the way out and it will be good for some new ideas
• Battery life seems to be a slight downgrade, see this IGN article

What was revealed, however, was the battery life. The Switch 2's internal battery is a Lithium-ion battery with 5220mAh, and this will allow for approximately 2 - 6.5 hours of battery life and a charge time of three hours when in Sleep mode. Nintendo noted these are "rough estimates" and that the "battery life will depend on the games you play."

This battery life is just about the same as the launch model Switch 1 as it boasted a range of 2.5 - 6.5 hours. On the other hand, the Switch 2's battery life is a downgrade from the three newer Switch models - Nintendo Switch (4.5 - 9 hours), Nintendo Switch - OLED Model (4.5 - 9 hours), and Nintendo Switch Lite (3 - 7 hours).

• The voice chat feature seems kind of basic but maybe it'll be good
• I think Elden Ring will be one of the first games I pick up
• I know its still a while off but I would have loved to see Haunted Chocolatier as a release game
• We seemingly got support from EA and Take-Two Interactive (with the 2K games), praying that the latest 2K golf game comes to the Switch 2

In just over an hour we'll have much more of an idea of what the Switch 2 is.

The Nate the Hate podcast had some excellent theories of games being released from each developer.

Some thoughts:

• From third parties I'd love to see Elden Ring and Cyberpunk 2077
• If GTA 6 appears it would break the internet
• A new Nintendo first party IP would be really interesting
• A new Mario Kart seems like a given at this point
• Better support from EA would be great, I want to be able to play the full FIFA (or whatever it's called now) in hand held
• Performance needs to be addressed in some regard, we need this system to have a fair bit of power
• Silksong won't break the internet like GTA but it would still be huge

This recipe was awesome. We had barramundi for the fish. Tasty and simple.

This guy is an absolute clown but he makes some good points.

See also this Reddit post:

The problem is on the demand side. Over the past 20 years there has been a big increase in investment demand for housing. Compared to first home buyers, investors are more likely to be richer and have higher incomes.

They have flooded into the housing market biding up the price and locking people out of the market.

What caused the rush of investors? It was the interaction of two tax concessions, negative gearing and the capital gains tax (CGT) discount.

In 1999 the then Howard Government introduced a 50% discount on the tax of capital gains. That means that if you owned an investment property for more than 12 months you got half the capital gain tax free.

This meant selling a house for more than you bought it was a great way to earn income. Negative gearing meant you could afford to bid up the price of houses and make a loss because you could write the loss off on tax.

Every home where an investor beats out an owner occupier means one less homeowner and one more renter. For people who can buy a home, the higher prices have meant bigger mortgages, paying more in repayments, and having less to spend on everything else.

The solution is to cut back negative gearing and the CGT discount. This will reduce investor demand for housing and make housing cheaper. It will also raise billions in extra revenue that can be used to build more houses, increasing supply.

The Labor Party know that cracking down on investor tax concessions will make housing more affordable, they took exactly this policy to the 2019 election. What they fear is the Coalition running a scare campaign against them.

But what both the major parties should fear is the growing anger of those trapped out of home ownership and those burdened with massive mortgages. More phony housing affordability policies that do nothing to fix the problem will only fuel voter disenchantment.

This is a road trip I'd love to do one day.

You might be concerned if you don’t have a 4×4.  The truth is, you don’t need a 4×4 for this epic outback road trip.  In this post you’ll see there is so much to see on the road from Darwin to Broome, even travelling with a 2wd vehicle.

I still feel like a 4x4 is the best way to do it.

This is not good for me.

I'm up to season 6 episode 13 and they rip the show away from me.

I might resort to just using the old school buy episodes on iTunes (or whatever it's called now).

This is definitely a bit of a mystery!

You’d think there’d be a certain kinship between decades-old websites, typeset in small-point Verdana, which stubbornly refuse to update their general layout and design.

There's some cross over there for sure.

We got an awesome look at Metroid Prime 4 in the direct but something more interesting for me was the virtual game cards.

So essentially you could be:

• At a friends house with 2 Switch's on the same WiFi
• Friend A can share a game with Friend B like it's a cartridge even if the game was bought from the Nintendo eShop
• Friend B has 14 days to play the game

This does open up a decent amount of flexibility with sharing games.

So I guess there's a Switch 1 direct tonight! A week before the Switch 2 full reveal. Crazy stuff from Nintendo.

Will there be Metroid news? Silksong? The possibilities are endless.

I would love to do this driving holiday one day.

It's a big swath of this country that I've never seen.

Why doesn't the AFL just go all in on opening round. Make it a rivalry round and have the best possible games on with the biggest possible attendance and TV audience. This would work:

Thursday
GWS vs Sydney (SCG)

Friday
Collingwood vs Carlton (MCG)

Saturday
Brisbane vs Gold Coast (GABBA)
Hawthorn vs Essendon (MCG)
Dogs vs Melbourne (Marvel)
Port vs Adelaide (Adelaide Oval)

Sunday
Richmond vs North (MCG)
St Kilda vs Geelong (Marvel)
Fremantle vs West Coast (Optus)

Note that I did kind of shaft Richmond here. They no longer get the season opener with Carlton.

There probably is a strategic reason why you don't put all these games on at the same time but I still think it would be awesome.

I do not want to harp on the Siri situation, but I do have one suggestion that I think Apple should listen to. Because I suspect it is going to take quite some time for the company to get the new Siri out the door properly, they should do what was previously unthinkable. That is, open up iOS to third-party assistants. I do not say this lightly. I am one of those folks who does not want iOS to be torn open like Android, but I am willing to sign on when it makes good common sense. Right now it does.

Clearly this would be a good thing for iOS.

Google clearly knows that they have a massive with Gemini right now and you can look no further than their decision to heavily advertise on Apple-centric podcasts. In recent weeks they’ve sponsored The Talk Show, Upgrade, Connected, and ATP. One of the best ways to go after Siri is to capture Apple fans and observers.

I know Apple would be averse to this, namely because of the potential for losing a massive amount of Siri users in the meantime while they get their act together. But it would do two things: it would mitigate some of the damage with customer relations while they wait for the new Siri and it sets a new bar for the Siri team to have to exceed. There would not be any room for failure and they need to be under that kind of pressure.

I've noticed this move on the Apple centric podcast advertising front and it's ballsy by Google.

Sure, AI-assisted developer tools can be used to generate native iOS apps, but they’re not nearly as good at this as they are at generating e.g. React, whose developer experience advantage predates the LLM wave and has only since accelerated. While Mobile Safari can run webapps quite well, and native apps can be built using React Native, those clearly aren’t strategically ideal for Apple

So iOS apps may increasingly be built using Cursor, and perhaps a larger percentage of them end up being built using React Native. And yet iPhones remain massively popular, so what’s the problem as long as they’re being built?

The wall that you’ll hit when actually trying to distribute them:

Yes to all of this. Distributing is an absolute pain in the ass.

There could be a Netlify for iOS and Android but Apple and Google won't let it happen.

I've had this turned off for a while...

Lenin's quote that "there are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen" is getting a solid workout these days, but last week there was a single day on which decades happened. It was Tuesday, March 18.

Microsoft and a Swiss company called inait announced they were collaborating to commercialise inait's digital brain technology.

I totally missed this digital brain technology.

Whilst this whole column is extremely bleak it is the reality we face.

This is beautiful was also probably extremely expensive.

Pretty interesting news coming from my high school.

Sheezus.

On our Jetstar flight from Melbourne to Sydney (the first flight of our honeymoon) the bag with our clothes and toiletries was lost.

We waited at the luggage conveyor belt and when everyone else had left due to getting their bags we went

uh ohh

our bag wasn't coming.

We went to the lost luggage help desk in Sydney and we had basically no help. We were told to

get help when you get to Ho Chi Minh City airport

The Sydney Jetstar staff member at the help desk didn't know if the luggage would be delivered to us by courier to the hotel or if we'd need to go back to the airport ourselves again to pickup the luggage.

It sadly turned out to be the latter which was painful as we missed going on a food tour on Emma's birthday. We sat in traffic on the way to the airport instead. Not ideal.

The lesson from all of this: always remember to pack AirTags in each bag. We were silly and forgot to put AirTags in. This way we at least would have known instantly where the bag was and not be unsure for multiple days post flight.

Whilst this version of BOM is just the mobile app as a web app it's 10x better than normal web app BOM.

You also don't get this message every time:

The Bureau of Meteorology website does not currently support connections via HTTPS.