A brief misadventure into the Chinese internet

When I was a kid and wanted to hit back at someone for being mean to me, my parents would often say that successful people, true leaders, would be 大方, which is roughly akin to saying that one should rise above it. I would say that goes with nations as well: you can tell when […]

Read More… from A brief misadventure into the Chinese internet





Time to abandon Meizu Music: 8.2 is a lemon

That didn’t last long. Within a day, this was what Meizu Music showed:    The songs, all 1,229 of them that I had fed in manually, are still there, and they still play, but the question remains: for how long? If they don’t show in the list—I told you computing devices were forgetful—then how long […]

Read More… from Time to abandon Meizu Music: 8.2 is a lemon



Facebook whistleblower gets fired; and a workaround for Meizu Music’s inability to find your SD card

This is a pretty typical story: find fault with Big Tech, try to alert the appropriate people in the firm, get fired.    Julia Carrie Wong’s excellent article for The Guardian shows a data scientist, Sophie Zhang, find blatant attempts by governments to abuse Facebook’s platform, misleading their own people, in multiple countries. Of course […]

Read More… from Facebook whistleblower gets fired; and a workaround for Meizu Music’s inability to find your SD card



Autocade reaches 23 million page views—and it’s more satisfying than Twitter

Above: The Levdeo (or Letin) i3, not exactly the ideal model with which to commemorate another Autocade milestone. Autocade will cross the 23 million page view mark today, so we’re keeping fairly consistent with netting a million every three months, a pattern that we’ve seen since the end of 2019.    Just to keep my […]

Read More… from Autocade reaches 23 million page views—and it’s more satisfying than Twitter



What Vodafone’s Super Wifi is really like in practice

While I saw Vodafone’s Super Wifi commercials, I never thought to act on them, since (mistakenly) I thought it was something to do with cellphones. Might have been the gadgets they used in the commercial.    But, after talking to Raghu, their sales’ rep in Pune, a city outside of Mumbai that I know well, […]

Read More… from What Vodafone’s Super Wifi is really like in practice



Despite being blatantly obvious, Facebook does nothing about thousands-strong bot nets

We already know that Facebook does nothing if you want to use scripts to join groups, even if the scripts all give roughly the same answers. Apparently that’s not enough to trigger the systems at this company that’s worth almost a billion dollars (that’s a proper billion, or what the Americans call a trillion). Unless, […]

Read More… from Despite being blatantly obvious, Facebook does nothing about thousands-strong bot nets