With the passing of Richard Roundtree, I feel it only appropriate to repost photos of my childhood Shaft’s Big Score pencil case. My original post where these were featured is here, and today’s Mastodon post here. I know Richard was also in Roots (remembered it, but way too young to have understood it […]
Category: interests
The non-work stuff.
The history of the ITC white Jaguar Mk I, recovered
In a Mastodon conversation, Andrew Ryan (well known to many car aficionados as ‘The Car Factoids’) reminded me of the infamous ITC white Jag—the Jaguar Mk I that plunges into a quarry, originally filmed for The Baron. I wanted to share with him a page to which I had contributed that included all the […]
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This weekend’s milestones at Lucire and Autocade
Autocade’s 4,800th model: the Toyota Urban Cruiser Hyryder. Stuff that has happened: Lucire has turned 26. Not a huge celebration given we did the quarter-century last year. Looking back, we did it quite well. When we had our 20th and 21st, we intended to mark them through those years, but never really did. It […]
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A long time ago, in a newsroom far, far away …
Star Wars fans with a sense of humour will love Chris Barker’s Deathstar Express, which had been popping up on social media this year. He’s put almost all of his mock front pages on one web page. When you think about it, and I’m sure Chris had, how do you keep the population in […]
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Autocade reaches 32 million page views
It’s been a slow haul to get to 32 million page views on Autocade, but we are there, in four months rather than the dire five I predicted earlier. The last installation reached 27,647,011 the day before it was unplugged, and the new one has reached 4,362,443, which totals 32,009,454. I don’t think we can […]
States of play for Facebook, Linkedin and OnlyKlans
Over a decade ago, I watched as Facebook intentionally broke organic reach and Lucire’s plummeted 90 per cent overnight. It was clear what Zuckerberg’s grift was: to get us to pay to boost posts. But there was already, back then, plenty of reasons you shouldn’t: it was buggy as heck. Fast forward to 2014 and […]
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Farewell to Universal Media Server, hello Plex Media Server
After many years, I’ve had to remove Universal Media Server. I used v. 6.3.1 for many years and I see that was launched in 2016. I know that wasn’t the first year I began using the program, so I could well have had some form installed for the last decade. I stuck with v. 6.3.1 […]
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The captivating case of Brian MacKinnon
On a whim, I decided to look up the case of Brian Lachlan MacKinnon, who went back to his high school 15 years after he graduated and posed as a 16-year-old pupil. I saw it on BBC Scotland’s Public Eye at the time (around 1995), though I think I had also heard of the […]
Go for it, Harry
Say what you will about Prince Harry making millions from his book and TV appearances. What if it’s to help fund the destruction of one Keith Rupert Murdoch and News Corp., and save the very fabric of democracy itself in the UK? It’s not going to be cheap, but the dude is out for blood. […]
Did Google use your website to train its language-learning model?
It’s going to be very interesting to see the legalities of Google using the contents of 15·1 million websites for its C4 dataset, used to train large language models. Ton Zijlstra put me on to a Washington Post article that revealed which sites were used. He had discovered that his own website (zylstra.org) had provided […]
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