There’s no big secret that I changed high schools, from one where the experience was less than stellar to Scots College, where I felt like I fitted perfectly. During my second mayoral campaign, an old boy of the first place, Rongotai College, wrote to me via my feedback form sitting on his high horse, wondering […]
Read More… from Being part of the problem, but not seeing it
Wayback Machine/Archive.org Nostalgia, with the Open Directory Project. This archived page from 1999 isn’t even the original. I still remember when it was called Gnuhoo in 1998. Where have all the web directories gone? It seems we need them more than ever, since Google is so poor at ranking websites (while it funds the […]
This is by no means a new complaint, but if you want to give a non-sinister explanation, then the idea that Google is too poor to build its search capability has to be one of them. And that it’s been poor for the good part of a decade. More sinister is the idea that all […]
Read More… from Google News continues bias against independent media
I take my hat off to Eda Tang of The Post (formerly The Dominion Post) for highlighting six Chinese New Zealanders and our reo tūpuna (ancestral languages). As many of us said last year (and for many years prior) during “Chinese Language Week” (NZCLW), it’s not all about Mandarin, a relatively new tongue that […]
Read More… from A celebration of Chinese languages by The Post
My Lucire interview with Bay Area designer Devan Gregori has gone online—it’ll likely appear in print afterwards with different visuals. Devan has a wonderful story about how she came to be a fashion designer, and it’s very different to those who fell into the trade through a childhood interest or watching their grandmother sew. I […]
I guess whomever wrote this in Wikipedia is being helpful, but the second pronunciation shown is not how you pronounce Lucire. It may be how you pronounce lucire, the quaint Romanian word, in Romanian, but it’s not the pronunciation of the magazine’s name. Maybe the Lucire Romania crew adopted this pronunciation when dealing with […]
Read More… from Lucire unplugs from OnlyKlans, and we find more Wikiality
Above: Trying to log into Wellywifi. If you get the second screen, you’re already doing well. Despite being the person who successfully pushed for our city’s free wifi programme in 2009–10, I note the irony of being the only person (according to Wellington City Libraries staff I have spoken to) who cannot connect to […]
Read More… from Can’t connect to Wellywifi? You’re not the only one
Meta (including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and presumably Whatsapp) is taking user content for its ‘generative AI’. I don’t remember signing up for this, but then I stopped using these sites regularly. Allegedly you can opt out of this. I opted out of ad preference collection there and it made no difference, but in case it […]
After I suggested that Mike Masnick of Techdirt try out Mojeek for his site:techdirt.com search, since Bing was coming up blank, he decided he would try the search with Techdirt as his keyword (which is what Mojeek requires by design: it doesn’t site searches without search terms; here he would have had to do site:techdirt.com […]
Some say, ‘Fake it till you make it,’ as a positive thing. In fact, a very dear friend used to say it, and it did him a lot of good. But then, he’s an honest sort of chap and he never promised something he couldn’t deliver. His take on faking it was to present a […]
Read More… from ‘Fake it till you make it’ isn’t a legal doctrine