Xpeng P7+ on the road with a Chinese skyline behind it.

Autocade Year of Cars 2025: the covers that could have been

Xpeng P7+ on the road with a Chinese skyline behind it.

Would you have bought Autocade Year of Cars 2025 if it had either one of these covers?     This one, with the Geely Galaxy E8, was rejected due to image quality. It was going to be the cover till about a week before publication. Then we zoomed in 400 per cent on the output […]

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How to deal with the shrinking, independent, human web

I alluded to this earlier this year when we redid JY&A’s links’ directory, but Joan Westenberg confirms it with some real stats. Once upon a time, the web seemed limitless, but now ‘we’re trapped in digital zoos built by tech giants. Google. Facebook. Amazon. Apple. Microsoft. They’ve carved up the web into their private empires, […]

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Carry on designing

Journeys through time are fascinating. Earlier this week, I looked at some of the websites we liked from the Jack Yan & Associates links’ section. In many cases, it was a trip down memory lane, as some sites still had their 2000s layouts. Sadly, this could mean that a few of them will disappear in […]

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Which other Glen A. Larson production did this girl group appear in?

  This girl group appears in three Glen A. Larson productions that I can think of, and probably appears in more. Switch, Knight Rider and Cover Up are the three I know of. Their fashions and hairstyles, plus those of the audience, would place this in the first part of the 1970s—by the time they […]

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For the sake of our city, it’s important to take the opportunities to move forward

The late 1990s were a heady time here in Aotearoa. The web—pre-Google, pre-monopolies—was indeed the great leveller: anyone with the right skills could create something online that competed at a global level. Aotearoa, which had for years felt a little backward in time—TV shows would arrive here two to three years after they aired in […]

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Autocade hits the 5,000-model landmark

We’ve reached 5,000 models on Autocade, after 16 years. The 5,000th model entry was for the Xiaomi SU7, the first car from the Chinese cellphone brand. This wasn’t random: when I realized we had hit 4,999, I thought about what we could mark the 5,000-model milestone with. The most aerodynamic electric production car in the […]

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Two Mastodon polls: on 50 shades of Grade, and the best non-Bond Roger Moore film

Asking the tough questions on Mastodon. Very tiny samples, and I was limited to four possible answers—but now you know.       Meanwhile, I see Linkedin has not been very good at removing misinformation about me. Not as bad as Quora, but still down there. The latest post says ‘jackyan’ is a metaphor for […]

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Heritage

  I’m not sure why the history page about my ancestor, 甄舜河 (Gin Sun Hall), has disappeared from the family association’s page, but for others who are descended from him, here’s his pic from the Internet Archive. He lived in the late 13th century. Also from the Archive was this extract from a 1997 publication […]

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You never know where your interests will take you

A seven-year-old needs to figure this out: what would the Ford Escort Popular Plus be priced at if were assembled in Aotearoa?   Amanda and I were chatting about prodigies. Some young people are amazing, doing uni classes at intermediate or high-school age, or playing piano like Mozart, and while not all of us have […]

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Healthy jumps

  Some impressive stats from all of you out there in cyberspace: thank you! Autocade’s counter is currently at 6,784,553. When I last blogged about reader stats on the 22nd, it was 6,444,257. (These numbers begin counting from when the site was reinstalled in February 2022.) As the counter only updates once a day, we […]

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