Who leads when the house of cards falls?

Scott Burchill makes a good analysis in Pearls and Irritations on how the US is ‘a rogue state’ and becoming a pariah (alongside Israel) over recent events in Gaza, and how its influence is waning. It’s hard to argue with a lot of his points; certainly here, with the exception of some politicians who either […]

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First customer copy off the press

They’re out there in the wild now. Stewart Sims was our first Autocade Yearbook customer and he’s just posted photos of his copy on Mastodon. Thank you, Stewart!     PS.: Flâneur over at that other site had also posted his copy. Thank you!   You may also like Introducing Autocade in print Business etiquette […]

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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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Two days wasted thanks to Asus ROG Armoury Crate

I’m recording this in case it happens to others. Yesterday, Windows 11 began to hang. Not in the traditional sense where everything froze. I had about a minute where things worked. I could open Vivaldi and Eudora, and within those I could still do some things. Eudora was pretty stable, which is a sign of […]

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When anti-capitalists love billionaires

Ka wehi ta ratou kaupapa here, ko hiahia kōrero te reo Māori ahau.   People are waking up to how bad Google has become, if posts on Mastodon are any indication. What’s disappointing are the replies, usually saying they have switched to Duck Duck Go because it’s so much better, and others saying Kagi is […]

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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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I have business for the photo bots, but they don’t want it

We received a few more automated notices from Copytrack last month, and as usual we were able to show them the licences. However, this one involved one of our editors, and I had to waste her time looking for documentation from a decade ago. There are some other legal issues relating to their methods, which […]

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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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Cloudflare’s unpredictable blocks could come in handy

A few weeks ago, I removed Design Taxi from our links’ list because I received this:     so I assumed the site had gone or had made a decision to block certain people or countries. But it turns out that it hasn’t and I now have egg on my face. I’ve no idea why […]

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Testing Mojeek, Google and Bing on a site: search again: November ’23 update

It has been a long time since I looked at how the three main occidental search engines—Mojeek, Google and Bing—were performing with a site: search and whether they could pick up dynamic pages. As I did in April, I’m trying it with site:lucire.com, which has both static and dynamic content. Mojeek is fairly consistent, but […]

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