Fixing Wordpress’s problem of fake bolds and italics

I haven’t been able to find anything on this bug online, but it’s very common.    As far as I can recall, all of our online publications that use Wordpress have themes designed or modified by yours truly. However, Lucire Rouge has a mostly bought-in theme, where my changes have been limited to a couple […]

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Facebook allows ad preference editing again

I was surprised to find that I could access my Facebook advertising preferences again, after the section stopped working in January 2019. What was there was still way off, in June 2021, but it’s nice to be able to edit (read delete) them again after two-and-a-half years. Things move slowly in Menlo Park when it […]

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Dear Gmail user: your industry has worn me down

After three messages I decided I would answer one of those Gmail users asking about advertorial. And from now on I’m just going to copy and paste this to anyone else asking, ‘Why won’t you answer me?’ Dear [redacted]: Sorry, this is why I haven’t answered you (and this is not because of you, but […]

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Finished replying to my 2005 and 2006 emails

I’m not exactly proud of this, but last month I finished replying to all my emails from 2005.    That year I was stuck in Auckland for an extra day due to the airport there being fogged in. I said to another traveller, ‘Well, I won’t catch up on emails now till the end of […]

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Remember, Facebook usually says one thing, then does the opposite

Don’t take what Facebook says about Trump seriously. As Christopher Wylie reminds us: When I reported Facebook to the US authorities, I received a permanent ban for whistleblowing. When Donald Trump incited a violent insurrection at Congress, he received a temporary two year ban that would let him back in time for the 2024 campaign. […]

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Time to stop entertaining advertorial enquiries from Gmail

Last month, I Tweeted that I would stop replying to advertorial queries sent to us from Gmail, since over 99 per cent of them result in no deal whatsoever. In fact, that 99 is an underestimate.    One of the early (say mid-1990s to the mid-2000s) rules of the ’net was that if you didn’t […]

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Facebook goes even more pro-bot with change in group policy

Why are there antitrust or monopoly laws? Why is the usual interpretation of the Chicago School really, really bad for the United States? Umair Haque’s latest post spells it out pretty well, in my opinion.    Just an idea: let’s not import any of their dangerous ideas into our society, or allow their ever-growing giants […]

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Rotten sequel ideas, no. 1

I’m not a comedian by any stretch of the imagination (neither are a lot of the people on comedy programmes here in Aotearoa) but every now and then my mind goes to funny places. Such as this:    Since Coming 2 America was so uniformly awful (the best bits are in the trailer), this was […]

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