If youâre around my age with a similar interest in model cars, this mural, Re-collection, by Leon Keer on a block of flats in Grenoble, France, will appeal.
Leon has Tweets with the before and after, and one about the process.
Itâs sad that Lesney (Matchbox) went down the fantasy route to compete with Hot Wheels, whereas the 1970s Corgi and Majorette castings that are represented here are so much better, in my opinion. I had a good childhood; I certainly couldnât complain about the model collection that my parents and grandparents indulged. And what great work from Leon to bring back this sense of nostalgia.
After 13 years, it was time to facelift the Lucire licensing website.
Itâs a very familiar template, similar to what we used for JY&A Consultinga few months back. The home page copy we already had from a flier that we created late last year that Susan Ninan and I worked on; and the âAboutâ pageâs text was mostly carried over (though it still needs 13 years of updates).
I am surprised the old site still netted us enquiries but it was looking extremely dated. The 2008 design was positively archĂŠological in internet terms. However, Iâm not sure if the new one is particularly interesting, because the web design convention is to do something very simple at the moment.
The old one was created with consideration for those who didnât have mouse wheels, whereas these days it seems to be all right, even fashionable, to scroll away.
Hopefully everything is more fit for purpose though, and the links are more useful. Weâve kept the code very light.
And if you do want to license an international fashion magazine with an independent, authentic and engaged firm, you know where to come.
Above: The old and the new Lucire licensing sitesâto my eyes, the old appears more creative, even in 2021.
I havenât been able to find anything on this bug online, but itâs 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 of CSS rules. The theme developer actually came in and helped us with a few modifications, which shows the extent to which he does follow-up for paying customers.
But there was one thing he was never able to crack, and I donât think itâs his fault, since it happens on a lot of websites, including Medinge Groupâs (also a theme I did not design, though I did earlier ones). On both these sites, there were no bolds and italics. There still arenât on Medingeâs.
There are <strong> and <em> codes in there, but the bolding and obliquing are done by the browser. The font files actually arenât loaded, so what we see are false bolds (the browser attempts to âoverprintâ the roman, duplicating the outline and shifting it marginally to give the illusion of a heavier typeface) and obliques, not italics (itâs the roman file pushed over 15 degrees or so). The former is particularly bad, as the outlines clash, and the result can be hollow glyphs, something that any font developer will know when one outline winds up accidentally on top of another in Fontographer or Fontlab.
These Wordpress themes rely on Google Fonts (another sin, in my opinion) so I donât know if the fault lies with Google or Wordpress, or the developer. If Wordpress does indeed power 70 per cent of websites, then I have to say the bug is awfully common, and I probably do see it on a very high percentage of visited sites.
The themes allow us to select the font family, but the selection only calls a single font file from the family.
Above: A graphic clipping text from Lucire Rouge that I sent to the developer.
The solution, as I discovered after months of toing and froing with Lucire Rougeâs theme dev, was to do your own font-linking rules in the CSS file and upload the fonts themselves to the relevant directory on the server. I must note publicly the âmonthsâ were not his fault, but due to my own delay. I should not expect computer programmers to be typographers, either.
It is something that one needs to watch out for, as the fake bolds and italics are horrible to look at, and must look amateur, even to the non-professional.
Iâm 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 another terrible sequel idea that came to mind today. Non-antipodeans who donât know of Eric Banaâs past might not think his fictional casting here being terribly funny, but for a lot of us he was a comedic actor before he was the Hulk or the Time Traveler (one l, just this time, for the movie). But I couldnât think of another funny 40-something Australian who had done some action.
I always felt the way Vernon Wells played Bennett in the original was campy, as though he could see the conceit behind the whole thing of being in a Schwarzenegger movie in the mid-1980s. He wasnât above parodying himself when he appeared in Weird Science in a role that recalled Wez in Mad Max 2.
In case this comes up in a search while a Hollywood exec is looking up Commando II, please be advised that this would be a rotten idea.
Forgetful Muzio Player has been replaced by a program (or app) called Music Player, which isnât the best brand name considering the many other apps out there with the same name. This oneâs version 2.5.6.74 and its maker is InShot Inc., so if all goes well, this is the one Meizu users should go for.
First, a good bit: it picks up the directories on the SD card, which, till Meizu upgraded its Music app, I thought I could take for granted.
The not-so-good bits. It doesnât pick up the album artwork, so you have to link each cover yourself. The disadvantage is that you have to search for the cover by image, and thereâs no option to search by name. Mind you, it was the same story with Meizu Music, and provided you have a rough idea of when you downloaded the album (as it displays the covers in reverse chronological order), it isnât impossible.
It did, however, pick up the graphics from the songs where the cover image was embedded and used them for the album covers ⊠at least it did till today, when it forgot all about those and I spent more time relinking the dozen or so that the app forgot.
What is it about forgetful software, or at least software that operates differently every day? Do I need to invent the dot-ini file (since it doesnât seem to exist in this universe) or radically suggest that software follows a set of instructions, line by line, that do not vary each time?
Above: InShot’s Music Player displayed an album cover for Gone with the Wave yesterday, but today it appears to have forgotten what it was.
Nevertheless, Music Player does âshareâ the chosen album cover with the individual tracks, so when theyâre played, the image appears on the player screen, something that Muzio was loathe to do.
In other words, Music Player does what Meizu Music used to do before it became a lemon and, providing it doesnât forget all the linked album covers (all 280 of them), itâll stay on my phone for the foreseeable future. Since it didnât come from an app store, it wonât be âupgradedâ to something inferior, either, which appears to be the path of a lot of cellphone software.
It doesnât look too bad, though admittedly Muzio Playerâs interface remains superior.
Linking 280 covers with each album over the course of a day and a bit sure beats linking over 1,000 of them with each song on Muzio Player, and to have three weeksâ worth of labour vanish despite the program saying, âChanges savedâ.
If InShotâs Music Player keeps things as they are, then itâs the replacement Iâve sought for some time. Since I didnât hear back from Muzio Player, Iâve deleted the app.
One program I can say is a genuine waste of time is Ăber, if you happen to use a Meizu M6 Note like me. Iâve always resisted it, on principle. If they didnât play silly buggers on tax, I might be more inclined to have supported them, but Iâve remained very faithful to public transport and taxis all these years.
Because of timing and circumstances that I wonât go into here, and having had a virus all of last week that I havenât fully shaken off (one symptom being short of breath), Ăber was suggested again today. My first choice was driving to the station, catching the train (being careful not to spread any of my germs about), then either a bus or cab, to pick up a press car from town. That would mean after returning home, I would have to walk to the station while not feeling 100 per cent to get my own car. I know first-hand that a cab from here in the northern suburbs can be priceyâand thatâs when one even shows up, as my partnerâs faced ridiculously long waits for them during the daytime. So Ăber was a realistic choice and Iâd be suckered into helping to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few milliardaires high up at these tech firms at the expense of working people.
Never fear, for Ăber is a half-baked app that cost me two missed trains and I could have been typing this an hour earlier than I am now. Thanks to the full factory reset that PB did last year on my phone, and my installation of Meizuâs far more advanced Chinese OS afterwards, I was able to create an account this time and log in. It didnât keep returning the message that I had attempted too many log-ins, even after a single attempt.
After that, it takes about half an hour to read the terms and conditions and the privacy policy on a cellphone. You can opt out of promo messages, or so they claim (to be on the safe side, Iâve done it thrice: once when reading the T&Cs before I accepted them, once after I read them, and once more from the desktop when an email with an unsubscribe link arrived).
And thatâs really about all it does. You canât type in any destination; I later checked their instructions on a proper computer and I was doing exactly what was asked. I could feed in my home address (it came up after I began feeding in the basics), and I could feed in some favourites, but I canât actually go to them.
Naturally, it will take your credit card details: Ăber made sure that that part worked.
Having saved the Railway Station as a destination, and attempted to order a ride to there, I got to a screen to tell me that Ăber isnât available in my area. Whether that means Tawa, or Wellington, or New Zealand, I donât know.
Above: It’s impossible to feed in a destination in Ăber, but it’s probably because it’s not available in Tawa.
I have map software on my phoneâboth Here Maps and Baidu Maps. And my partner does successfully use Ăber from time to time, on a Huawei phone which, like my Meizu, is Google-free. She has no Google Maps, so I know that isnât a prerequisite for Ăber. I also know Google Services arenât, either. At least these are points in their favour. I canât be bothered troubleshooting beyond that, since theyâll just deny everything and pass the buck.
Eventually, when I realized Ăber is a monumental waste of time, I carried out plan A, and took a train an hour after the one I could have taken had I not attempted to get an Ăbercab. And walked in the wintry air to collect my car.
It was an easy decision to delete my account and the app soon after. Just as well, really. Big Tech loses once again. To think, the little music player made by a small company is more reliable than the milliards behind Ăber.
Above: Relieved to be on a desktop computerâand hopefully I won’t need to have any connection with Ăber ever again.
The songs, all 1,229 of them that I had fed in manually, are still there, and they still play, but the question remains: for how long? If they don’t show in the listâI told you computing devices were forgetfulâthen how long before the program fails to play them at all? Not only were the songs gone from the list, the few MP3 files that were on the phone’s RAM (from dynamic wallpapers and recordings) don’t show, either!
I really didnât want to chance it but you just have to conclude that Meizu has released a lemon, and if in a year they still canât get it right, then itâs time to abandon it.
I could go with Migu Music but I wanted something with the functionality of the old Meizu Music. After trying several apps, Iâve settled on an advertising-supported Muzio Player. Itâs not perfectâthe cover artwork doesnât show for everything, and updating it manually for an album doesnât see it shared with the individual tracks withinâbut it does the job for the most part. And, like every other app I trialled, it picks up the music on the SD card.
Since I keep phones for some timeâthe old M2 Note is repairedâitâs going to be a long time before Iâd contemplate a replacement for the M6 Note. But when I do I doubt itâll be another Meizu. After being a cheerleader for the brand in the late 2010s, theyâve really fallen behind in customer service and, how, software development. Whomever else is willing to go the Google-free route is going to get my vote.
This is a pretty typical story: find fault with Big Tech, try to alert the appropriate people in the firm, get fired. Julia Carrie Wongâs excellent article for The Guardian shows a data scientist, Sophie Zhang, find blatant attempts by governments to abuse Facebookâs platform, misleading their own people, in multiple countries. Of course Facebook denies it, but once again itâs backed up by a lot of evidence from Zhang, and we know Facebook lies. Endlessly.
Facebook claims it has taken down over â100 networks of coordinated inauthentic behavior,â but I repeat again: if a regular Joe like me can find thousands of bots really easily, and report some with Facebook doing next to nothing about them, then 100 networks is an incredibly tiny number in a sea of hundreds of millions of users. Indeed, 100 networks is tiny considering Facebook itself has claimed to have taken down milliards of bots.
And people like me and Holly Jahangiri, who found a massive number of bots that followed the Russian misinformation techniques, have been identifying these since 2014, if not before.
Zhang reveals how likes from pages are inflating various postsâforget the bots Iâve been talking about, people have manufactured full pages on the site.
She uncovered one in Honduras, and then:
The next day, she filed an escalation within Facebookâs task management system to alert the threat intelligence team to a network of fake accounts supporting a political leader in Albania. In August [2019], she discovered and filed escalations for suspicious networks in Azerbaijan, Mexico, Argentina and Italy. Throughout the autumn and winter she added networks in the Philippines, Afghanistan, South Korea, Bolivia, Ecuador, Iraq, Tunisia, Turkey, Taiwan, Paraguay, El Salvador, India, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Ukraine, Poland and Mongolia.
Facebook was inconsistent with what it did, and its own self-interest interfered with it taking action. In other words, Facebook is harmful to democracy, and not just in the US which has received most of the occidental news coverage. On Azerbaijan, Zhang wrote in a memo:
Although we conclusively tied this network to elements of the government in early February, and have compiled extensive evidence of its violating nature, the effective decision was made not to prioritize it, effectively turning a blind eye.
She was ultimately fired for her trouble, Facebook saying she wasnât doing the job she had been hired for.
So if you are going to work for Big Tech, leave your conscience at the door. That blood on your hands, just ignore it. Redâs such a fetching colour when itâs not on a balance sheet.
Little Tech can be troublesome, too. Last year, Meizu updated its Music app after a few years of letting it languish (a familiar theme with this firm), and it was a real lemon. It wouldnât pick up anything on my SD card, at the location the old Music app itself saved the files. When I could still access the Meizu (English-language) forum, I managed to post a comment about it. Only today did I realize someone had responded, with the same issue.
I can read enough Chinese to get the phone to do a search for local music files, and the only things it could pick up are whatâs on the phone RAM itself, not the card. Thereâs no way to point to custom locations such as a card (even though there is a custom search, but it applies to the phone only).
Above: Meizu Music will only find music on the phone’s RAMâin this case sound files that come with the dynamic wallpaper and a couple of meeting recordings I made.
Eventually I restored the old app through the settings, and all was well. It would occasionally forget the album cover art and Iâd have to relink it (who says computers remember things?), but, by and large, Music 8.0.10 did what was expected of it.
Until this last week. The phone insisted on upgrading to 8.2.12, another half-baked version that could never locate any SD card music.
Sure I could just move the entire directory of 1,229 songs to the phone, but I wondered why I should.
Restoring the app would work only for a few hours (during which I would try to relink the album cover art, ultimately to no avail). Blocking the new version the app store did nothing; blocking the entire app from updating did nothing. Blocking network access to the Music app did nothing. Essentially, the phone had a mind of its own. If anyone tells you that computing devices follow human instructions, slap them.
Above: I asked the app store to ignore all updates for Meizu Music. The phone will ignore this and do what it wants, downloading the update and installing it without any human intervention.
I had a couple of options. The first was to make Migu Music the defaultâand I had used that for a while before I discovered I could restore the Music app. Itâs passable, and it does everything it should, though I missed the cover art.
The other was to find a way to make Music 8.2.12 work.
There is one way. Play every one of the 1,229 songs one by one to have Music recognize their existence.
Using ES File Explorer, you head to the SD card, and click on each song. It asks which app youâd like to open it. Choose Music. Repeat 1,228 times.
Above: I finally got there after doing something 1,229 times. As a non-tech person I know of no way to automate this easily. I can think of a few but developing the script is beyond my knowledge.
Whoever said computing devices would save you time is having you on. They may have once, but there are so many systems where things are far more complicated in 2021 than they were in 2011.
You may be asking: doesnât ES let you select multiple files, even folders? Of course it does, but when you then ask it to play them, it ignores the fact youâve chosen Music and plays them in its own music player.
And even after youâve shown Music that there are files in an SD card directory, it wonât pick up its existence.
Itâs at odds with Meizuâs Video app, which, even after many updates, will find files anywhere on your phone.
For a music player with the same version (8) itâs vastly different, and, indeed, inferior to what has come before.
Howâs the player? Well, it connects to the car, which is where I use it. But so many features which made it appealing before are gone. Editing a songâs information is gone. Half the album cover art is unlinked (including albums legitimately downloaded through the old Meizu music service), and thereâs no way of relinking it. European accented characters are mistaken for the old Big 5 Chinese character set.
The only plus side is that some songs that I had downloaded years ago with their titles in Big 5, as opposed to Unicode, now display correctly. That accounts for a few songs (fewer than 10) of the 1,229.
I know Meizu will do nowt, as its customer service continues to plummet. I may still file something on its Chinese BBS (the western one is inaccessible and, from what I can tell, no longer maintained by anyone from their staff), but itâs highly unlikely Iâll be brand-loyal. It’s yet another example of a newer program being far, far worse, by any objective measure, than its predecessor, giving credence to the theory that some software developers are clueless, have no idea how their apps work, have no idea how people use their apps, or are downright incompetent. It’s a shame, as Meizu’s other default and system apps are generally good.
In the future, Iâm sure someone else in China will be happy to sell me a non-Google phone when it’s time to replace this one.
