The expectation of invisibility

I rewatched Princess of Chaos, the TV drama centred around my friend, Bevan Chuang. I’m proud to have stood by her at the time, because, well, that’s what you do for your friends. I’m not here to revisit any of the happenings that the TV movie deals with—Bevan says it brings her closure so that […]

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An introduction to smart TVs for a complete novice

Earlier in December, we decided to put a TV into our guest room. One catch: there is no aerial there, so initially we thought, ‘We have some great DVDs, let’s plug in the DVD player.’ But it didn’t quite feel right. We’ve stayed at enough places with smart TVs, including some running the Android TV […]

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Stop worshipping people based on wealth

  Salon is on to something. I know from first-hand experience that those who hold political office are not always the smartest. When you run against others for the same job, it doesn’t take long to spot the less intelligent, some buoyed by privilege, others by an unshakeable belief in their invincibility. Its headline: ‘Is […]

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I’ve left the data farms but occasionally revisit the Matrix

Warner Bros.   Even though Twitter is now in its MySpaceX era, I won’t shut my account. I have scripts that run through it, and I don’t wish for some schmuck to come in later and claim my username. Mastodon has taken off this week, my Twitter notifications are at a low, and as I […]

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Thank you to VUW’s Alumni as Mentors programme

It’s not every day your Alma Mater gives you an award. I was very humbled to be recognized tonight by Victoria University of Wellington for my contribution to the Alumni as Mentors programme. The hard work is really the VUW team’s, who do such an amazing job matching us with students, and providing resources and […]

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Rising popularity on Autocade

Ever since we had to reset the counter for Autocade in March, because of a new server and a new version of Mediawiki, it’s been interesting to see which pages are most popular. The old ranking took into account everything from March 2008 to March 2022. With everything set to zero again, I can now […]

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Laying out French articles in HTML takes a long time

Above: Some French text in Lucire.   Regular Lucire readers will have seen a number of articles run in English and French (and one in Japanese) on our main website. Typographically, the French ones are tricky, since we have to distinguish between non-breaking spaces and non-breaking thin spaces, and as far as I know, there […]

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Autocade reaches 28 million page views

  On March 19, 2022, Autocade had accumulated 27,647,011 page views. That was the last recorded total, and the new site went live the following day. That means over 10,000 views didn’t get added to that total, but as it’s the last I have (unless the Wayback Machine has one from the 20th ult.), then […]

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Better a Tesla Model 3 than another truck

  I know Tesla gets a lot of flak on social media. Some by me. But I still remember the plucky firm in the 2000s, Martin Eberhard and his stated commitment to transparency, and Lucire’s recognition of the firm by calling the Tesla Roadster its Car to Be Seen in. And while the Roadster didn’t […]

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Vivaldi 5.2’s bugs: time to go back to Opera GX?

Above: Vivaldi appears for less than a second; each entry then disappears. One of the bugs from last night.   Vivaldi updated last night, and nearly instantly shut down. Sadly, there’s a bug which shuts the program down the moment you hit a form field (filed with them, and they are working on it), and […]

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