Since 2016, Facebook Messenger has allowed the option for end-to-end encrypted messages, and in 2023, they were established as the default.

This has caused some issues with people exporting Messenger data for archival or viewing purposes. It is a lot quicker to search for information when the data is local, and it is better practice to do so.

Aotearoa New Zealand has run eResearch symposiums and conferences since 2010, with the 2025 conference held in Christchurch, co-hosted with Genomics Aotearoa, New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI) and REANNZ. The first day, a "Carpentries Connect" event, was held at Canterbury University, whilst the main conference was held at the "Chateau on the Park" motel.

"Whoever has seen the universe, whoever has beheld the fiery designs of the universe, cannot think in terms of one man, of that man's trivial fortunes or misfortunes, though he be that very man."
-- Luis Borges

Titan is the largest moon of Saturn, about 1.2 billion kilometres from Earth. Discovered in 1655 by Christiaan Huygens, the dense opaque atmosphere prevented any understanding of Titan's surface for many years. It is the only moon known to have an atmosphere with a greater density than Earth and the only known object in space that has stable bodies of surface liquid.

The end of this year marks my seventeenth year working in high performance computing and my ninth at the University of Melbourne in this role. When I compare this to previous years there have been some notable changes in the technology and the system I am primarily involved with (Spartan), but also in my own employment activities. Late last year, there was a structural review of our operations at Research Computing Services, as the existing organisational chart was becoming unwieldy and increasingly untenable.

As per previous conferences, eResearch Australasia 2024 in Melbourne had several hundred attendees from the scientific research community, research computing developers and operators, administrators and managers, and various vendors. The program gives a very good indication of the level of this conference and the reason that it has been such a success over the last fifteen years and more.

This tutorial illustrates Advanced Normalization Tools (ANTs) to do image registration in 3D using data from Brain/MINDS data portal and how to apply the transforms/inverse transforms from image registration using the Slurm Workload Manager.

ANTs is described on their repository as follows:

"Advanced Normalization Tools (ANTs) is a C++ library available through the command line that computes high-dimensional mappings to capture the statistics of brain structure and function. It allows one to organize, visualize and statistically explore large biomedical image sets. Additionally, it integrates imaging modalities in space + time and works across species or organ systems with minimal customization."

The tutorial is derived from the tutorial at the Brain/MINDS data portal.

The basic Linux command for directory creation is mkdir $DIRNAME, with the most common options being -p to create parent directories and the handy verbose flag (-v) to print the directories to standard output as they are created. An array of subdirectories can also be created. e.g.,


$ mkdir -p -v examples/{dir1,dir2,dir3}
mkdir: created directory 'examples'
mkdir: created directory 'examples/dir1'
mkdir: created directory 'examples/dir2'
mkdir: created directory 'examples/dir3'


Converting between filesystems can be fraught with difficulties, especially if one is dealing with a proprietary filesystem. One such system is APFS, the Apple File System, designed by Apple for its devices, introduced originally for macOS Sierra in 2017 and later, iOS 10.3, tvOS 10.2, watchOS 3.2, and all versions of iPadOS, and designed to replace HFS Plus. The question here is how does one access APFS on Linux when a kind individual has provided you, for example, a USB device that has been written with this filesystem.

Several months ago, YouTube began "a global effort" to prevent users from blocking advertisements. This process included allowing users with an adblocker, once detected, a few videos, then a warning, and then outright prevention. There was an implicit suggestion that one could receive the desired ad-free service from a Premium subscription. Methods employed by YouTube to implement these blocks include embedding advertisements in the video itself, serving advertisements from the same domain as the video, or using browser fingerprinting to detect ad-blocking extensions.