Coronavirus: the weakening of globalization, and the lessons to learn

A generation ago, I don’t think many would have thought that globalization could be brought to its knees by a virus. They may have identified crazy politicians using nationalism as a tool, but probably considered that would not happen in developed economies and democracies sophisticated enough to withstand such assaults.    This course correction might […]

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Z cars

I did say I’d blog when Autocade hit 4,100 models, which it did yesterday. Proof that the hundredth milestones aren’t planned: the model was the Changan Zhixiang (長安志翔 or 长安志翔, depending on which script system you prefer) of 2008, a.k.a. Changan Z-Shine. A less than stellar car with a disappointingly assembled interior, but it did […]

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I prefer the 99 per cent who don’t rely on Google

Almost three screens of apps, none of which require Google. I had a good discussion on Twitter today with Peter Lambrechtsen, and if you want to have a peek, it’s here. He’s a really decent guy who makes some good points. But it does annoy me that my partner, whose phone is a stock standard […]

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Reconnecting Facebook on IFTTT

A few days ago, Facebook became disconnected with my IFTTT applet, which takes the Tweets made on the Lucire account (which themselves are fed through another service) and reposts them to Lucire’s Facebook page, so that none of us have to visit either.    IFTTT is good enough to send an email to tell you […]

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Autocade turns 12

Autocade turns 12 today, as it’s now March 8 here in New Zealand. From zero models to 4,093 (the Hyundai Avante XD is the latest); and as I write this sentence, it’s netted 18,683,611 page views. Just four years ago this month, it had only managed eight million.    Just this week, I added two […]

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Fixed Vivaldi’s poor type display, thanks to wmjordan

It took two months but I finally got there.    Vivaldi now displays type normally though the browser interface is slightly messed up. But I’ll take good type display, thanks.    On the MacType forums, a user in China called wmjordan was in the same boat but had found a solution. In their words: For […]

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Directwrite isn’t the culprit

That was confusing. Yesterday’s blog post was representative of my thinking: given that certain people were upset when Chromium took away the Directwrite toggle in 2016, and type rendering on Chromium-based Vivaldi deteriorated significantly for me with v. 2.10 (it turns out v. 2.9 was the turning-point), then did Chromium only switch fully to Directwrite […]

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Has Directwrite arrived on my Chromium-based browsers four years after everyone else?

After considerable searching, the bug that I reported to Vivaldi, and which they cannot reproduce, appears to be one that the general public encountered back in 2016, when Chromium took away the option to disable its Directwrite rendering. I don’t know why I’ve only encountered it in 2020, and as far as I can tell, […]

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