Kudos for Lucire; global trade sans the US; and our ads go tracker-free

Nice to see Lucire can still pick up kudos with Feedspot putting it into their top 100 fashion magazines, ranking it at 21st. Not bad after 27 years, and going on 28, with a fraction of the budget of the multinationals. We’re two behind Women’s Wear Daily, and three ahead of British Vogue. We do […]

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One of the lucky ones

The last time I had a proper birthday party—where you invite your friends—was pre-COVID. And my group of friends was, and is, eclectic. Individuals from all walks of life, many of whom are being authentic to themselves. In many cases, they are people who have looked at restrictions placed on them by society or norms […]

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Testing the browsers: can Vivaldi be succeeded?

Because of regular errors with Vivaldi, which they blame on my antivirus, I’ve been testing alternatives for Windows 11. The errors include this message, rendering the program useless.     Vivaldi’s people would have you believe that an antivirus program is deleting things out of the folder, but that doesn’t explain why, after many attempts, […]

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January 2025 site: tests on occidental search engines: Bing recovers

After running my latest round of search engine site: tests, I think we can safely say that Bing has recovered in terms of its index size, and it’s no longer down where Alltheweb was in 2002. It actually has tens of millions of results for Microsoft’s own domain, and not a few lakh. This is, […]

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History in jeopardy

Benj Edwards wrote a very good post at Vintage Computing and Gaming, which begins: For a while—in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s—it felt like nerds were making the world a better place. Now, it feels like the most successful tech companies are making it worse. Among there, he notes: And there’s another problem. Very […]

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Another nonsense “SEO” word appears on the web

I’ve noticed another nonsense word make its way on to the search engines: appkod. Similarly to how Semrush told users that jackyan was trending alongside Google SEO, there are weird web pages all over with SEO service appkod or similar combinations, such as Appkod SEO Agency and Instagram marketing Appkod. A Pakistani company has adopted […]

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A new edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four

  George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four joins A Farewell to Arms among our fiction titles at Libriz today. We’ll only sell it where the title has entered the public domain, so principally our edition’s for the UK market. Fully reset, it is arguably easier to read for contemporary eyes. Being a newer title than A Farewell […]

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We’ll all soon know luxury Chinese car brands

Maextro S800, with a two-tone paintwork.

I noted in the new Autocade Year of Cars that the French faltered in China because the Chinese marques no longer need them, especially when they are churning out superior product. They have no use for French cachet, especially as the brands edge upmarket. You’ve got the HIMA collective from Huawei, all with luxury marques, […]

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After warnings were ignored, we now arrive in the new tech mainstream

If you look back at all the tech companies I’ve called out, deep down I did so as a warning. If they show this contempt for the user, then it’s symptomatic of greater problems. Everything from Google switching your ad preferences’ opt-outs back to opt-ins and the stonewalling when it came to deleted blogs, to […]

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Finally, progress with Wix and their fraudulent client

I don’t know if it was the timing of my previous post—or whether this, too, fell into the category of, ‘If you want something done, ask a woman to do it.’ Today I received an email from Elisa at Wix Support announcing that Emerald Sky’s fraudulent post no longer featured my name. Once again, just […]

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