Why Facebook’s errors might be increasing

Now that I’ve figured out that Facebook only works on alternate days (or at least evenings, since it gave up the ghost again for the early afternoon), I’m back into my usual swing of things. It’s not so much that I spend that much time on social networks, but getting to the bottom of things […]

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Remember when you could post, comment and like on Facebook? Those were the days

Let’s see: Facebook doesn’t work on Wednesdays and Fridays. Check. Thursdays are OK though.    It’s another one of those days where the Facebook bug that began on Wednesday (though, really, it’s been going on for years—including the famous outage of 2013 where what I am experiencing happened worldwide to a large number of users) […]

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Five or ten years, your Kiwi passport is not a valid government-issued ID, says Facebook

Sometimes you wonder if the big players on Silicon Valley exist in a parallel universe.    Google, of course, is a firm that makes little sense to me: one that usually says one thing and does another, in almost every encounter I have had with it. And you know they can’t be that smart if, […]

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Autocade hits 6,000,000 page views: a few quick figures

The Dongfeng Fengshen AX7, or a Renault with a Peugeot engine (and I don’t mean the PRV V6 or the old Douvrin), entered into Autocade this week. With Autocade hitting 6,000,000 page views earlier this week, here’s a quick anorak’s run-down on the rate of growth. In short: it’s about the same in terms of […]

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The political caricatures of old have taken human form, but they’re still nothing like us

That’s another British General Election done and dusted. I haven’t followed one this closely since the 1997 campaign, where I was backing John Major.    Shock, horror! Hang on, Jack. Haven’t the media all said you are a leftie? Didn’t you stand for a left-wing party?    Therein lies a fallacy about left- and right […]

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Even on Instagram, they prefer bots to legitimate users

Instagram bans are like Facebook blackouts or Google blacklists: no matter what the company says your time-out is, it’s considerably longer.    Day 1 was Sunday, when I noticed that the likes I made via Ink 361 didn’t stick. I went back to Iconosquare (Statigram) and this message flashed up:    The wisdom online is […]

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How a car accident makes you grateful

The trouble with all the yellow-peril reporting that’s far more prevalent than it should be in Aotearoa is when something happens to you that may get people thinking about a stereotype.    Back in March, of course, we had one writer justifying racism toward (east) Asian tourist drivers in the Fairfax Press, when the facts […]

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In the Empah, the royal baby is 8 lb 3 oz, thank you

The Cambridges with their new daughter in her first public appearance; photograph from the Press Association.   I haven’t followed the news of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s new baby much, but I was interested to note that when Kensington Palace announced her weight, it was in Imperial only. None of this foreign metric […]

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It’s full circle for style.com: back to its origins in fashion retail

Originally published in the online edition of Lucire, May 1, 2015   Top Earlier today, attempting to get into Style.com meant a virus warning—the only trace of this curiosity is in the web history. Above Style.com is back, with a note that it will be transforming into an e-tail site.   If there’s one constant […]

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