Going beyond a blacked-out image: thoughts on Black Lives Matter

View this post on Instagram #blackouttuesday in support of Black Lives Matter. It was the only blacked out media I found on the phone. Recorded in our conservatory one night. A post shared by Jack Yan 甄爵恩 (@jack.yan) on Jun 2, 2020 at 7:39am PDT Usually I find it easier to express myself in written […]

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Cellphone saga update: back to the past

Off to PB. The M6 Note was under warranty after all, so it’s now with PB Technologies’ service department in Wellington, after I explained it could have trouble doing read–write operations and the tech saw the camera and gallery hang (usually they just shut themselves down). I paid over NZ$400 for the phone including GST, […]

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Cautiously optimistic about Boucher

When I ran for office, there was often a noticeable difference between how I was treated by locally owned media and foreign- owned media. There are exceptions to that rule—The New Zealand Herald and Sky TV gave me a good run while Radio New Zealand opted to do a candidates’ round-up in two separate campaigns […]

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The latest phone factory reset was good for eight days

It looks like this latest phone reset lasted all of eight days, as today, all the bugs returned, all indicating to me that the M6 Note has some sort of read–write error. PB has offered a link to file a report and asked that I drop phone and form in to their Wellington store, but […]

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Microsoft’s revived Intellimouse isn’t a successor to the old

How I had such high hopes that the Microsoft Intellimouse Pro Special Edition bought at Noël Leeming would be a successor to my Intellimouse 1.1. The short version: it isn’t.    It might be a successor to the Intellimouse Explorer 3 on which the shape is modelled, but for those of us who prefer symmetrical […]

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May is always quieter for blogging—and we get to 4,200 models on Autocade

Again, proof that each 100th vehicle on Autocade isn’t planned: the 4,200th is the second-generation Mazda Premacy, or Mazda 5 in some markets, a compact MPV that débuted 15 years ago. If it were planned, something more significant would have appeared.    I know MPVs aren’t sexy but they remain one of the most practical […]

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The first world problems of the cellphone (lockdown edition)

This Pukerua Bay Tardis was the last thing I shot before the cellphone’s camera and gallery failed   First world problems: the cellphone. Right now my partner and I have half a phone each, so between us, we have one phone. She can receive calls on hers but no one can hear her answer. Mine […]

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Live from Level 3

Finally, a podcast (or is it a blogcast, since it’s on my blog?) where I’m not “reacting” to something that Olivia St Redfern has put on her Leisure Lounge series. Here are some musings about where we’re at, now we are at Level 3.    Some of my friends, especially my Natcoll students from 1999–2000, […]

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Facebook exploits COVID-19 for profit, and viral thoughts

A lot of the world’s population has come together in the fight against COVID-19. Except Facebook, of course, who is exploiting the virus for profit. Facebook has done well in the first quarter of 2020 with positive earnings. Freedom From Facebook & Google co-chairs Sarah Miller and David Segal note (the links are theirs): ‘Facebook […]

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Even the web is forgetting our history

Hernán Piñera/Creative Commons/CC BY-SA 2.0 My friend Richard MacManus wrote a great blog post in February on the passing of Clive James, and made this poignant observation: ‘Because far from preserving our culture, the Web is at best forgetting it and at worst erasing it. As it turns out, a website is much more vulnerable […]

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