Heritage

  I’m not sure why the history page about my ancestor, 甄舜河 (Gin Sun Hall), has disappeared from the family association’s page, but for others who are descended from him, here’s his pic from the Internet Archive. He lived in the late 13th century. Also from the Archive was this extract from a 1997 publication […]

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The crunch time media face is nothing new

  Talking Points Memo showed the amounts programmatic advertising brought in to them over the last eight years. (The above graphic is from their card preview on Mastodon.) I’ve never been convinced of programmatic since no one in the ad business could ever explain it in plain language. I say just figure out what’s on […]

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Who pioneered phone food ordering and delivery?

Not that any search engine will find this, but according to the BBC’s The Secret Genius of Modern Life (episode 2), the inventor of the phone orders for food was the Kin-Chu Café at 137 South Brand Boulevard, Glendale, Calif., in 1922 (another link here). ‘Special Delivery Service 11 A. M. to 1 A. M.—Phone […]

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It would be nice to get my Amazon Associates money

This has been going on for between 10 and 20 years, and I think closer to the latter. Didn’t know Jeff was this hard up for cash. I didn’t record the dialogue last time, giving them the benefit of the doubt, but since I can’t trust the buggers, I will this time. Fed in to […]

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You never know where your interests will take you

A seven-year-old needs to figure this out: what would the Ford Escort Popular Plus be priced at if were assembled in Aotearoa?   Amanda and I were chatting about prodigies. Some young people are amazing, doing uni classes at intermediate or high-school age, or playing piano like Mozart, and while not all of us have […]

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Introducing Autocade in print

  There’s a lot to report now that the news is public: Autocade is more than the online encyclopædia, it’s also a print yearbook. I’m happy to say it has been launched, after ironing out some tech issues, and there has been good interest in the new publication. You can read a bit more about […]

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Refreshing the body type on the Lucire site

EB Garamond 12 on the Lucire website.   Not exactly earth-shattering news, but we’ve changed the body type on the Lucire website from Bembo to EB Garamond 12. The cut of Bembo that we had didn’t feature macronized vowels—a big omission here in Aotearoa—though most recently it was a Latvian name, Elīna Arāja, which it […]

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More than a single print brand

[Cross-posted from Lucire]   Lucire will get a sister title in print. As the only magazine from New Zealand that’s licensed internationally—as far as I know—we could do one of two things: not pursue new titles because no one else does this work in this country, or expand our horizons further because no one else […]

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Google is warning us that they are pay-to-play

I’m afraid this says it all, and I mean it. We know Facebook is pay-to-play and Google is definitely heading in that direction. For some searches (try looking for a career coach), it arrived there a long time ago.     In case Mastodon embeds go awry in the future, here is what I wrote: […]

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As Mastodon starts to mainstream, welcome to the end of social

My Mastodon feed is full of US politics and American football. I could use lists or mute keywords, but neither seems to be an ideal solution. I thought it had been agreed by most users when the influx happened that political posts would have content warnings, because there was a desire not to re-create OnlyKlans. […]

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