From The Lord of the Rings to Border Patrol: how Sweden sees us

My visits to Sweden have been few and far apart, since it is quite a distance to travel from New Zealand: summer 2002, autumn 2003, winter 2010, and summer 2024. There are many interesting observations one can make with so many years in between, seeing how society has changed with brief snapshots from each visit, […]

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As we grow and chart a new direction, a fresh site for JY&A Media

  JY&A Media has a new website, to tie in with the new direction we have for the business. I think it was evident that when we created the Autocade Yearbook and built our e-commerce shop, Libriz, that things were changing. Whereas JYA Creative and JY&A Fonts work with clients to help realize their branding, […]

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Tesla misfires, Toyota lies

The 1983 Corolla liftback—the E80 series was peak Corolla, relative to what was on offer in the C segment. Toyota was on a high then.   Tesla finished itself this year, by firing its new-product development team at a time when it desperately needs new products—proper products, too, not the Cyberstuck which has so many […]

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My friend Randy writes a book; our ‘Written by humans’ graphic; Hart’s is economical

  Extra plug for my friend Randy Scobey, who has written a memoir. Since Randy and I met through blogging in 2006, it seems fitting to mention this on my blog. What I wrote in Lucire about his book is heartfelt. If you want to read a first-hand account on the stigma felt by the […]

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Google ranks LLM-authored junk highly

One very interesting development in the whole fight against misinformation using my name is that Google won’t give me a right of reply through this blog.     You’d logically think that an authoritative site would appear higher, all things being fair, but my posts about the spammy keywords don’t appear in the results. Misinformation, […]

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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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Online reviews: no safeguard against piling

There is a certain satisfaction in reading statuses like this:     But at the same time it confirms what I said years ago about Google My Business and its ilk. There are no safeguards for piling. Thanks to Google’s bugs, I believe my business has a listing but it’s been nicely messed up so […]

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Getting to each 1,000th model on Autocade—so far

The Tofaş Doğan, the 1,000th model entered into Autocade in 2009.   A very quick look at how long it took us to get each 1,000 models on Autocade.   0: March 8, 2008 1,000: December 21, 2009 (1 year, 9 months for first 1,000—Tofaş Doğan was the 1,000th) 2,000: December 30, 2012 (3 years […]

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Autocade hits 36 million page views, with shifts in the leaderboard

We’ve hit 36 million page views on Autocade now, with the counter showing 8,356,587. Add that to the 27,647,011 just before the old server was decommissioned, and we’re on 36,003,598. We hit 35 million on February 1, so it took 58 days to net the latest million, 17 days longer than last time. We’ve noticed […]

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What do the authors of misinformation have to gain?

Medium, which has been great at removing misinformation about me, rightly asked (after removing yet another fake story about me), ‘Why are they using your name? What are they gaining?’ I replied: Thank you, and I’m glad you’ve asked. I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of this for a while, ever since these […]

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