The Dongfeng Aeolus AX7. But just where does Aeolus sit when it comes to indexing in Autocade?
This is something that might have to come out in the wash, and it might take years.
I think we can all agree that Ssangyong is a marque or a make, and Korando is a model. Never mind that thereâs currently a basic Korando, the Korando Sports (a pick-up truck) and a Korando Turismo (a people mover), none of which really have much connection with the other, name aside. We are as comfortable with this as we once were with the Chevrolet Lumina and Lumina APV, the Ford Taurus and Taurus X, and the Toyota Mark X and Mark X Zio. So far so good.
But when do these drift into being sub-brands? BMW calls i a sub-brand, but as far as cataloguing in Autocade goes, it doesnât matter, as the model names are i3 or i8 (or a number of ix models now coming out). Audiâs E-Tron is its parallel at Ingolstadt, and here we do have a problem, with a number of E-Tron models unrelated technically. Itâs not like Quattro, where there was the (ur-) Quattro, then Quattro as a designation, and everyone accepted that.
Similarly, the Chinese situation can be far from clear.
Many years ago, GAC launched a single model based on the Alfa Romeo 166 called the Trumpchi. So far so good: we have a marque and model. But it then decided to launch a whole bunch of other cars also called Trumpchi (the original became the Trumpchi GA5, to distinguish it from at least eight others). Some sources say Trumpchi is a sub-brand, others a brand in its own right, but we continue to reference it as a model, since the cars have a GAC logo on the grille, just as the GAC Aion EVs have a GAC logo on the grille. (The latter is also not helped with Chinese indices tending to separate out EVs into âNew Energy Vehicleâ listings, even when their manufacturers donât.)
I feel that we only need to make the shift into calling a previous model or sub-brand a brand when itâs obvious on the cars themselves. Thatâs the case with Haval, when it was very clear when it departed from Changcheng (Great Wall). Senia is another marque that spun off from FAW: it began life with the FAW symbol on the grille, before Seniaâs own script appeared on the cars.
The one that confounds me is Dongfeng Aeolus, which was make-and-model for a long time, but recently Aeolus has displaced the Dongfeng whirlwind on the grille of several models. We have them currently listed in Autocade with Dongfeng Aeolus as a new marque, since thereâs still a small badge resembling the whirlwind on the bonnet. The Dongfeng Aeolus AX7 retains the whirlwind, but has the Aeolus letters prominently across the back, but to muddle it up, the AX7 Pro has the new Aeolus script up front. These canât be two different marques but the visual cues say they are.
Maybe weâll just have to relegate Aeolus back to model status, and do what Ssangyong does with the Korando (or Changcheng with the Tengyi). These are the things that make life interesting, but also a little confusing when it comes to indexing an encyclopĂŠdia.
Click here for all months (or hit ‘Gallery’ at the top of the screen, if you’re on the desktop), here for December, and here for November. This post explains why I wound up doing the gallery here.
I append to this entry through the month.
Here are the images that have piqued my interest for December 2020. For November’s gallery, click here (all gallery posts are here). And for why I started this, here’s my earlier post on this blog, and also here and here on NewTumbl.
Now that I have an image gallery plug-in (New Image Gallery) for the miscellaneous stuff that normally goes on NewTumbl, the question is whether these should appear as posts or pages. Let’s try posts to begin with, as I’m not yet sure that I want dozens of individual pages (which to me are top-level items in Wordpress). My previous blog post here outlined why I’m experimenting with this. This post will be updated as the gallery is updated.
Image sources are there in WordpressâI need to find a way to make them show when you click on the image. I may need to hack the PHP. We shall see.
I was chatting to another Tweeter recently about the Ford I-Max, and decided Iâd have a hunt for its brochure online. After all, this car was in production from 2007 to 2009, the World Wide Web was around, so surely it wouldnât be hard to find something on it?
I found one image, at a very low resolution. The webâs not a repository of everything: stuff gets removed, sites go down, search engines are not comprehensiveâin fact, search engines favour the new over the old, so older posts that are still currentâsuch as this post about the late George Kennedyâcanât even be found. This has been happening for over a decade, so it shouldnât surprise usâbut we should be concerned that we cannot get information based on merit or specificity, but on novelty. Not everything new is right, and if weâre only being exposed to whatâs âinâ, then weâre no better at our knowledge than our forebears. The World Wide Web, at least the way itâs indexed, is not a giant encyclopĂŠdia which brings up the best at your fingertips, but often a reflection of our bubble or what the prevailing orthodoxy is. Moreâs the pity.
I canât let this post go without one gripe about Facebook. Good news: as far as I can tell, they fixed the bug about tagging another page on your own page, so you donât have to start a new line in order to tag another party. Bad news, or maybe itâs to do with the way weâve set up our own pages: the minute you do, the nice preview image that Facebook extracted vanishes in favour of something smaller. Iâll check out our code, but back when I was debugging Facebook pages, it was pretty good at finding the dominant image on a web page. Lesson: donât tag anyone. It ruins the ĂŠsthetic on your page, and it increases everyoneâs time on the site, and that can never be healthy. Time to fight the programming of Professor Fogg and his children (with apologies to Roger McNamee).
Top: The post Facebook picks up from an IFTTT script. Above: What happens to a post that once had a proper image preview after editing, and tags added.
Out of curiosity, why do people visit Autocade? We havenât had a big jump in visits with COVID-19 (contrary to some other motoring sites), as I imagine encyclopĂŠdias arenât as fun as, say, AROnline, where at least you can reminisce about the British motor industry that was, back in the day when Britain had a functioning government that seemed terrible at the time when no one could imagine how much worse it could get. Obviously we havenât had as many new models to record, but are they the reason people pop by? Or are the old models the reason? Or the coverage of the Chinese market, which few Anglophone sites seem to do? If you are an Autocade fan reading this, please feel free to let us know why in the comments.
One moan about Facebook. Go on.
Sometimes when I pop inâand that remains rarelyâand look at the Lucire fan page, Iâll spot an automated Tweet that has appeared courtesy of IFTTT. Itâs had, say, no views, or one view. I think, âSince there have been no real interactions with this bot entry, maybe I should delete it and feed it in manually, because surely Facebook would give something that has been entered directly on to its platform better organic reach than something that a bot has done?â
With that thought process, I delete it and enter the same thing in manually.
Except now, as has happened so many times before, the page preview is corruptedâFacebook adds letters to the end of the URL, corrupting it, so that the preview results in a 404. This is an old bug that goes back yearsâI spotted it when I used Facebook regularly, and that was before 2017. Itâs not every link but over the last few weeks there have been two. You then have to go and edit the text to ask people, âPlease donât click on the site preview because Facebook is incapable of providing the correct link.â Now youâre down some views because people think youâve linked a 404. Not everyoneâs going to read your explanation about Facebookâs incompetence. (Once again, this reminds me why some people say I encounter more bugs there than othersâI donât, but not everyone is observant.)
This series of events is entirely counterintuitive because it means that bot activity is prioritized over actual activity on Facebook. Bot activity is more accurate and links correctly. And so we come back to the old, old story I have told many times about Facebook and bots and how the platform is bot city. In 2014, I rang the alarm bells; and I was astonished that in 2019 Facebook claims it had to delete over 5,400 million bot accounts. You should have listened to me then, folksâunless, of course, bots are part of the growth strategy, and of course they are.
So, when feeding in links, remember this. Facebook: friendly to bots, not to humans. Itâs probably not a bad way to approach their site anyway.
Iâve looked at my May blogging stats going back a decade (left sidebar, for those on the desktop skin) and itâs always quieter. I blog less. I wonder why this is. The beginning of hibernation? The fact that less interesting stuffâs happening in late autumn as the seasons change?
Growing up in a relatively wealthy country in the 1980s, after getting through most of the 1970s, youâd be forgiven for thinking that the world would just keep getting better and things would make more sense as humans evolved.
From a teenagerâs perspective: home computers, with a modulatorâdemodulator (modem), could bring you information instantaneously and from around the world. As an immigrant kid, that excited me: contact with people âback homeâ and from other places, making communication quicker. You could hear from others, and you could help others who needed you. And if you didnât have a computer that could connect to a bulletin board, there was Teletext, which gave you regularly updated information through your TV set.
Cars were getting more aerodynamic, which meant they would use less fuel, and that was understood universally to be a good thing. MPVs were very practical vehicles that had small footprints yet fitted a lot of people, or stuff, inside. Here in New Zealand, natural gas-powered dual-fuel cars were mainstream, and that meant we werenât reliant on overseas oil. They also didnât pollute anywhere near what petrol didâthey burned cleanly.
And since saving energy was understood to be a good thing, who knew? Before long solar power would be the norm for new homes and weâd be putting electricity back into the grid.
I also heard about recycling for the first time as a teen, and that seemed like a good thingâall that old paper and plastic could have a second life.
People were interested in being more efficient because no one wanted a repeat of the oil shocks of the 1970s. Nor did we want the government imposing carless days on us again.
That same teenager would have thought that by the dawn of the 21st centuryâif the US and Soviet Union behavedâweâd have evolved to have recognized that we had the tools to make things better.
When the internet came to our house in the 1990s, I saw it as a direct evolution of the 1980sâ optimism. It made sense.
So through that lens, a lot of what the world looks like today doesnât make sense.
We have connected computers, milliards which are handheld, yet some of us are addicted to them and others use them to express outrage, rather than delight in having any contact at all with people thousands of miles away.
SUVs outsell regular cars in some size segments. They are less aerodynamic, use more fuel, and are less efficient. We have American companiesâFord in the US and Holden hereâsaying that theyâll stop selling cars in most segments in favour of utility trucks, crossovers and SUVs. Petrol is expensive, and I complain about it, but I guess no one else thinks itâs expensive. Dual-fuel cars are a thing of the past here, for the most part, yet lots of people marvel at hybrids, conveniently forgetting we were decades ahead in the 1980s.
And solar power isnât the norm.
We still, happily, recycleâbut not everything we collect winds up being recycled. We have an awareness, but if we kept on progressing as I expected us to when I was Greta Thunbergâs age, then we wouldnât have Greta Thunberg reminding us that we havenât.
I wonder if others in middle age realize that humans have the potential to go forward, and in many respects we doâbut collectively there are enough of us who go backward and prevent any real advance in society.
I like to have the same optimism as teenage me about the future. In terms of myself, many things bring me happiness, particularly in my personal and work lives. Yet in terms of society, I wonder if I can be as optimistic. I know deep down that we are interested in efficiency and treating our planet better (or we say we are), so then who are the ones holding us back, and what are we doing that stops us moving forward? Is it personal greed, hoping others will pick up the slack? Many of us choose products and services from companies that align with our views about what we wantâyet are we doing the same when it comes to politicians?
I know Wikipedia is full of fiction, so what’s one more?
I know, you’re thinking: why don’t you stop moaning and go and fix it if it’s such a big deal?
First up, for once I actually did try, as I thought the deletion of a sentence would be easy enough. But the site (or maybe my own settings) blocks me from editing, so that’s that.
Secondly, it reinforces this blog post.
This one sentence was presumably written by a New Zealander, and one who knows very little, though they have more editing privileges than me.
Like the 12-year-old ‘Ford CE14 platform’ piece that only got corrected after I posted on Drivetribe, I have to ask: what possesses someone to invent fiction and to be so sure of themselves that they can commit it to an encyclopĂŠdia? (Incidentally, subsequent Wikipedians have reintroduced all the errors back on to the Ford page since editor Nick’s 2017 effort to correct itâyou simply cannot cure Wikipedia of stupid.)
I know we aren’t being set very good examples by American politicians (on both sides) and by British ones these days, but surely individual citizens have some sort of integrity when they go online to tell us how great they are?
For the record, the Familia nameplate was never used here in the last generation for a new carâyou only see it on Japanese imports. Secondly, the three-door BH shape was only ever sold here as a Ford Laser, never a MazdaâFamilia, 323 or otherwise.
“Post-truth” is nothing new: it’s been the way of Wikipedia for well over a decade. It was all foreshadowed online.
It still begs the question why I don’t see such callous edits on the German or Japanese editions of that website.
I thought downgrading to an earlier Instagram would have solved the frame-rate problem, but I was wrong. Here are two videos using the same file. The first was uploaded using my new phone, but running v. 43 from April 2018, given that using the latest Instagram produced very stuttered video. However, it was the same story, so we can conclude there’s something wrong with using newer phones with Instagram. I’m not alone: others reported this bug earlier this year and the one solution appears to be upgrading the OS to Android 8. The conclusion I have to draw is that there is a fault with Android 7, or how Instagram works with Android 7.
The second was uploaded using my old phone, running probably the same version from April 2018, since that was the last time I performed an Instagram update. The frame rate is now normal.
The first took four attempts to upload. The second took nine attempts, meaning that I have uploaded this file 13 times on two phones, only to have Instagram show two. There is a problem with Instagram making videos publicly visible, a bug I first reported here earlier this year.
I’m going to have to pray my old phone holds up despite its damaged screen. Looks like all video uploads will have to be done using it, at least till Instagram fixes the frame-rate issue.
Attempt no. 4 at uploading this video: tailing a #Ford Mustang GT, March 2017. This is the full video. Iâve downgraded to a version of Instagram that was current in April 2018, but it hasnât solved the frame-rate problem. I also havenât solved the need to repeatedly upload until Instagram makes a video visible to followers. #fordmustang #USA #Stangers #Aotearoa#Wellington #whanganuiatara #NZ #car#waka #ponycar #benteight
Testing the #Ford Mustang video on the old phone. Will it be smoother? Seems the newer the tech, the buggier it is. This is the 13th attempt at uploading, since Instagram refused to show the earlier ones publicly. #fordmustang #ponycar #Stangers #benteight #USA #musclecar #Aotearoa#Wellington #whanganuiatara #NZ
Failed uploads Above: Finally, the video uploaded after nine attempts on the old phone. One attempt never made it to the wall. Instagram refused to show eight of the uploads.