Local news for local people
2025 - General and miscellaneous articles - Page 1
There are miscellaneous stories in the archives.
Things that don't fit anywhere else.
Scammers won't take a break over Christmas. Here's how to make a plan with your family to stay safe
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HelloFresh and Youfoodz in court over alleged subscription traps
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Moron alert
Some cretin wasn't happy about a sign outside a pub saying that it is a non-smoking area so he tried to set the sign alight. He was so incompetent that he only managed to burn a small corner of a piece of paper enclosed in plastic. Failure at a job this simple is probably quite difficult. No photo of the other one because anyone so arrogant and self-important that they think that the laws which apply to everyone don't apply to them might become a bit aggressive when called out. She was the driver of as silver BMW M3 parked outside Foodworks. The car had no number plates on either end and didn't have that shadow of grime that lives behind plates and can be seen when they are taken off, so it can be assumed that it had never had plates on it at all. If I see it again I'll block it from leaving while I wait for the police to arrive. Are these morons offended by being called "morons"? Too bad if they are. There's that old cliché about caps that fit. |
There's always one, isn't there? Sometimes there's even more than one.No more call to cancel: the government wants to crack down on 'subscription traps'
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Asbestos in wind towers: A statement from TagEnergy
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A quick fix If you have tried to use the search facility here over the last few weeks you might have received a warning that data was about to be transferred over an insecure channel. This was caused by the omission of a single letter in the code used to trigger the search. This has now been fixed. I have seen at least three stories in the media which have claimed that this problem was a major contributor to the $98.1 million that it cost for the recent disastrous upgrade to the Bureau of Meteorology web site. As fixing it here took less than ten minutes I can only look back and think that I would be a lot richer today if I'd known how to charge millions of dollars to fix trivial problems during my career as an IT consultant. (Note - the problems that caused the cost of the BOM upgrade to explode had nothing really to do with this but it was a convenient excuse to use to blow smoke into the eyes of journalists who know little about IT.) PB |
A small change The category in the site history formerly called "Music" has been renamed to "Entertainment". It now includes comedy shows, plays, movies and other forms of entertainment as well as music. |
How do 'AI detection' tools actually work? And are they effective?
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Checking the site with various browsers The statistics gathered by the web server have shown that for most of the life of this site visitors have used one of three web browsers - Google Chrome, Firefox or Microsoft Edge. Recently there has been a surge in visits using Apple Safari. Because I like to check what the site looks like to visitors I decided to add Safari to the mix. There appeared to be no way to download the program from Apple's web site so I went looking for other options. The first download site that looked reputable had a download for Windows 10 and 11. Within seconds of clicking on the link Norton flashed up a message saying the download had been blocked because the file contained a virus. The second download site is actually very reputable indeed and the download of Safari supposedly compatible with Windows 11 went well. The problem came after installation, because the program couldn't display any web pages and this could be considered a significant flaw in a web browser. Investigation continued and it was found that the reason there is no download of Safari from Apple directly is because it now only comes with a Mac, iPad or iPhone and the only downloads from Apple are updates which only work if the software is already installed. The reason the version I'd found didn't work is because Apple haven't updated the Windows version of Safari since 2010 and it doesn't support the ubiquitous HTTPS:// protocol which encrypts the traffic between server and browser. (Chrome, Firefox and Edge won't display pages that don't use this protocol, although they will sometimes allow the user to continue after receiving a warning that it might not be safe.) But here's the real mystery. Windows 11 was release in 2021, eleven years after the last Safari update, and Windows 10 came out in 2015, so why are download sites saying that the version of Safari they offer is compatible? Imagine not being able to trust something you see on the Internet. The short version of all this is that unless I buy a Mac to use only for web browsing I can't tell what this site looks like in Safari. If it's horrible (and I have no reason to think it would be much different to the other three browsers) it's not my fault. I've just got to assume that the Safari users coming here have a similar experience to everyone else. |
Media release: Local leader to champion community for The Pines Wind Farm
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Petition - Fair Funding for Councils Hosting State Forests A large proportion of the land in the Oberon Local Government Area is owned by the NSW Government. All of it is exempt from paying council rates. A reasonable argument can be made for the exemption in the case of national parks. These parks provide a wide range of valuable services to the community such as camping areas, tourist attractions, wildlife habitat protection, wilderness preservation and just being nice places to be. Some have a modest admission charge (45 out of the 895 parks in NSW) which is waived for seniors and pensioners but many are free. (Locally, Kanangra Boyd and Abercrombie National Parks are free and it would be impossible to charge for entry to Blue Mountains without putting toll gates on the Great Western Highway and Bells Line of Road.) There is a small charge for camping which goes towards maintaining the toilets and fireplaces. State forests are very different. These are commercial properties where timber is grown for a profit, and you don't have to go too far from the Oberon shops to find a stand of pine trees. A large proportion of the heavy road traffic in the area is the transport of logs out of the forests and the trucks do a lot of the damage that is visible to other motorists and has to be repaired at Council expense. Anyone owning a beef cattle farm also sends trucks across the roads, but the number of truck movements is very much less and the graziers have to pay rates on their land. It is hardly fair that one form of agriculture has to contribute to the costs of the community but another does not. The owners of private pine plantations pay rates, only the government owned ones are exempt. There is a petition being raised to have this changed. The petition will only be presented to Parliament if it attracts the minimum number of signatures, so get signing. You can sign by following the link below. |
New interactive map shows how flammable your part of Australia is right now
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How social media fuels payment app scams
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Wow! Make that WOW!! At the 2021 census there were 5,580 people of all ages in the Oberon Local Government Area (4,624 over the age of 15). The number now will almost certainly be bigger, but not by an enormous amount. The intended audience for Oberon Matters is the population of the Oberon LGA, plus maybe the diaspora of people who used to live here but have moved away and still like to keep in touch with what's going on in the town. In October, 3,760 people visited the Oberon Matters web site on at least one occasion. Many, of course, come more than once to read the weekly updates. It is over 80% of the adult population of the LGA, so it can probably be called a success. Thank you to everyone for supporting the site. Now I'm off to do a happy dance around the office. |
It's Insta time
In another life I created an Instagram account that now has well over 200 followers. I have never posted anything to it. So why do people follow it? Maybe because every notification email from Instagram makes you scroll past a list of accounts you should follow before getting around to telling you that someone has commented on your account. This makes it all a bit less useful than it could be. The account at Instagram was closed at the end of May, 2026. It served no useful purpose and the time spent posting there was wasted. |
If you look at the bottom of this page you will see that Oberon Matters is now on Instagram. This will be used the same way as Facebook - to announce updates to the web site, not where the action happens. The possibility of using X as well was investigated, but despite ticking boxes to say that the only input from elsewhere should be News and selecting the news outlets that might be of interest (AP, BBC, ABC (Australia),CNN, ...) the first three things to appear were a post demanding the "death" of the United Nations, a well-funded climate change denial group announcing the terror of net zero and an account calling itself "R3tards from Australia" seemingly attacking a class of people. A swim in one of the tanks at the Sewage Treatment Plant would have been more pleasant.How do Triple Zero calls actually work? A telecommunications expert explains
Note: Even if 000 is working there can still be problems. Recently I needed an ambulance and had two calls to 000 drop out after connection. The people at the Emergency Call Centre have access to the owners of all phones in Australia (including mobiles) and mobile phones can be located (the phone knows its GPS location all the time, which is how they know what weather to show you, and the carriers can identify the towers they are near). Knowing my name, my home address and that my mobile was in Oberon, the ECS contacted the local police to check on me. I was told this by the local sergeant when he saw me on my way back from the hospital. Good to know. |
A bit of housekeeping good news The search facility on the site has been fixed, sort of. It's at the bottom of every page and takes your search words and comes back with a Bing search. Bing updates the index at least once a week and usually drops by within a day of the site being updated. Try it.
Note - if you love Google and hate Bing that's your problem. Things work the other way around here. An update that allows choosing a search engine will come when there's time to do the programming. |
Local news is dwindling globally. Here's how other countries are trying to fix it
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You're likely not as immune to scams as you think - here's why
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Pines Wind Farm update
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Battle for the bush? Ignore the noise - most farmers like renewables
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Editorial - Getting your story into the media There were protesters outside the Black Springs Community Hall at the Pines Wind Farm event mentioned above. They of course have every right to protest and make their views known. One protestor however crossed a line by challenging and insulting me. The challenge took the form of questioning my qualifications as a journalist (thirty years in papers, magazines and online) and the insults were accusing me of bias and saying I was angry when I reacted by referring to the quite clear statement of neutrality on this site. Some words of advice for people who want to get their stories into the media:
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How long does a DA take? Everyone complains about how long it takes for a Development Application to find its way through a council's bureaucracy, but how long does it really take? A candidate for one council in the latest elections stood on a platform of immediate approval of DAs as soon as they were submitted with no examination by council staff, but most people would consider this a bit dangerous, or maybe even a bit silly. The NSW Department of Planning issues a league table each year showing the DA performance of councils across the state. For the 2024/25 year, Wingecarribee Council (52,709 residents) got the record at an average of 239 days from application to approval. At the other end of the scale, Brewarrina (1,356) took an average of 15 days. It could be that the time to approve DAs is related to how many come in. So how did Oberon (5,580) compare? The average delay here was 113 days. If there is a direct relationship between population and DA processing time then Oberon should take 25 days (compared to Wingecarribee) or 62 days measured against Brewarrina. This looks like a case where the teacher would write "Could do better" on the report card. (Populations are as at the 2021 census.) |
New report reveals glaring gaps between Australia's future needs and science capabilities
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Moron alert
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