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. […]
Category: interests
The non-work stuff.
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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Curiosities within Google’s search console (formerly Webmaster Tools)
I took a peek at Google Webmaster Tools. Apparently there are a lot of noindex pages on the Lucire website that they want me to resolve. Well, folks, if you didn’t put tag index pages so high up for a site: search, I wouldn’t need to have so many. This is to help Google […]
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Remembering Nehemiah Persoff, 1919–2022
Nehemiah Persoff as a corrupt Latin American finance minister, Phillipe Pereda, in the Mission: Impossible episode, ‘The Vault’ (1969). I read that the wonderful Palestinian-born character actor Nehemiah Persoff passed away this month last year, aged 102. I remember Nehemiah most from the third-season Mission: Impossible episode, ‘The Vault’, which is among the best […]
BMW iX takes Autocade to 4,700 models
We’ve hit 4,700 models on Autocade, and unfortunately the model that sees in the milestone is, to my eyes, visually challenging. Still, there’s a part of me that’s quite curious about the interior and how it drives. Goes to show that there’s no planning in making the BMW iX our 4,700th. I also want to […]
Autocade reaches 31 million page views
It took four months but Autocade’s finally at 31 million page views, having made it to 3,352,136 this morning (April 2). That smaller number is the page views since the program was reinstalled last year. Add that to the last recorded total before the reinstallation of 27,647,011, and you have 30,999,147. At c. 10,000 […]
Bing is coming back to life
In quite an unexpected about-turn, Bing began spidering Lucire’s website again, and not just the old stuff. A site:lucire.com search actually has pages from after 2009 now, and while 42 per cent of results still get repeated from page to page, there are actually pages from the 2010s and the 2020s. There are still a […]
The IBM Selectric version of Univers revived
This is one of the more fascinating type design stories I’ve come across in ages. Jens Kutilek has revived a very unlikely typeface: the IBM Selectric version of Univers in 11 pt. A lot of us will have seen things set on a Selectric in the 1970s, especially in New Zealand. I’ve even […]
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Autocade is about to turn 15
Above: The 1966 Alfa Romeo Giulia, the most recent entry to Autocade. Next week, Autocade will turn 15. I don’t expect big editorials extolling its history, mainly because the site has not changed much in principle or appearance since it was first conceived in 2008. We did a single video under the Autocade name, […]
A format so old, it’s new and radical
Above: I spy Natasha Lyonne and a Plymouth Barracuda. So the car is part of her screen identity? So it should be, it’s television. I might have to watch this. Two very fascinating responses come up in Wired’s interview with director Rian Johnson on the Netflix release of his film Glass Onion. I’m not […]