COVID-19 infections as percentage of tests done, December 7

It’s hard not to be in a bubble sometimes, especially when that bubble is safe in the southern hemisphere and away from wars and COVID-19.    With TVNZ having a New York bureau, we of course hear about how poorly the US is doing with COVID-19, and we also hear from the London bureau, where […]

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Only 10 months on, let’s not repeat history

This was my Tweet after having privately expressed my frustration over the WHO’s failure to declare an emergency of international concern in January: No surprise. Will the WHO revise its evaluation, because this is (and has always been) of international concern? Did they not realize the New Year is the biggest migration of humans on […]

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If you’re in the ‘New Zealand can’t’ camp, then you’re not a business leader

Which club is the better one to belong to? The ones who have bent the curve down and trying to eliminate COVID-19, or the ones whose curves are heading up? Apparently Air New Zealand’s boss thinks the latter might be better for us. From Stuff today, certain ‘business leaders’ talk about the New Zealand Government’s […]

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Podcast for tonight: behind the scenes on The Panel

For your listening pleasure, here’s tonight’s podcast, with a bit behind the scenes on my first appearance on RNZ’s The Panel as a panellist, and ‘I’ve Been Thinking’ delivered at a more appropriate pace, without me staring at the clock rushing to finish it before the pips for the 4 p.m. news. You may also […]

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Autocade reaches 20 million page views

Above: The 4,243th model entered into Autocade, now on 20,008,500 page views: the Maxus G50. Autocade’s passed the 20,000,000 page-view mark, sitting on just over 20,008,000 at the time of writing, on 4,243 models entered (the Maxus G50 is the newest), an increase of 101 models over the last million views.    As it’s the […]

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Back on RNZ’s The Panel: on Hong Kong’s new national security legislation

Public domain/Pxhere What a pleasure it was to be back on The Panel on Radio New Zealand National today, my first appearance in a decade. That last time was about the Wellywood sign and how I had involved the Hollywood Sign Trust. I’ve done a couple of interviews since then on RNZ (thank you to […]

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Switching to a Chinese OS solves another Instagram bug

Whaddya know? Uploading an Instagram video with an Android 7-based phone is fine if it’s on a Chinese OS and not a western one.    This was a bug I wrote about nearly two years ago, and I wasn’t alone. Others had difficulties with their Android 7 phones with getting Instagram videos to play smoothly: […]

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After 18 months, some progress on the Meizu M6 Note

That was an interesting day in cellphone land. I collected the Meizu M6 Note from PB last Friday and switched it on for the first time in the small hours of Tuesday.    I originally wasn’t pleased. I had paid NZ$80 for a warranty repair (there is provision under the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 in […]

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Crunching the COVID-19 numbers for June 15

I hadn’t done one of these for a long time: take the number of COVID-19 cases and divide them by tests done. For most countries, the percentage is trending down, though there has been little movement in Sweden. I hadn’t included Brazil, Russia and India before, but as they are in the top part of […]

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Where does Hong Kong’s new national anthem law leave parody?

Steve Cadman/Creative Commons 2·0 I don’t profess to be an expert on how Hong Kong law functions these days with its mix of old British ordinances and the laws made after 1997, but one thing that struck me with at least the news reports covering the criminalizing of insults against ‘March of the Volunteers’, the […]

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