Is Google stealing your voice for its virtual assistant? Meanwhile, Mktg Stinx

Here’s Google’s latest privacy gaffe, the latest in a long, long line where they pretend to not know it’s happening till they’re embarrassed into admitting that it is happening—and then the authorities will fine Google millions of dollars which they will make back in a few hours. Ibly writes in a post on the fediverse […]

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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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The curious case of Google’s SEO searchers

They may no longer be relevant, but most (all?) of our sites still have meta keyword tags. When we redevelop a site, we tend to take the header tags in full from the previous incarnation, so unlike the old joke about George Washington’s axe (‘This is the original. I’ve only had the handle and blade […]

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First customer copy off the press

They’re out there in the wild now. Stewart Sims was our first Autocade Yearbook customer and he’s just posted photos of his copy on Mastodon. Thank you, Stewart!     PS.: Flâneur over at that other site had also posted his copy. Thank you!   You may also like Introducing Autocade in print BMW iX […]

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The designer’s quest for timelessness

In the editorial to one of our print publications—not yet at liberty to say which—I show a 2004 cover of Lucire featuring Jennifer Siebel inset in the text. It got me thinking how, when I first designed the cover, with Jon Moe’s photograph, I was aiming for a classical timelessness. Now nearly 20 years on—in […]

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Google is warning us that they are pay-to-play

I’m afraid this says it all, and I mean it. We know Facebook is pay-to-play and Google is definitely heading in that direction. For some searches (try looking for a career coach), it arrived there a long time ago.     In case Mastodon embeds go awry in the future, here is what I wrote: […]

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Cloudflare’s unpredictable blocks could come in handy

A few weeks ago, I removed Design Taxi from our links’ list because I received this:     so I assumed the site had gone or had made a decision to block certain people or countries. But it turns out that it hasn’t and I now have egg on my face. I’ve no idea why […]

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Bring back the human-curated web directory

Wayback Machine/Archive.org Nostalgia, with the Open Directory Project. This archived page from 1999 isn’t even the original. I still remember when it was called Gnuhoo in 1998.   Where have all the web directories gone? It seems we need them more than ever, since Google is so poor at ranking websites (while it funds the […]

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Lucire unplugs from OnlyKlans, and we find more Wikiality

  I guess whomever wrote this in Wikipedia is being helpful, but the second pronunciation shown is not how you pronounce Lucire. It may be how you pronounce lucire, the quaint Romanian word, in Romanian, but it’s not the pronunciation of the magazine’s name. Maybe the Lucire Romania crew adopted this pronunciation when dealing with […]

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From the fediverse: saving the news from Big Tech, and why you shouldn’t use Brave browser

Excellent links by way of the fediverse today. First up, Cory Doctorow about saving the news from Big Tech, with sentiments that aren’t far off my own, many of which have been recorded on this blog. His post is from June 2023. Highlights include this on contextual advertising: In studies, these contextual ads perform slightly […]

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