Iâve occasionally had good luck with ultra-cheap Chinese mice. Years ago, I bought one, with very simple left and right buttons and a scroll wheel, and it proved to be one of the most comfortable I owned. The wheel didnât run smoothly at first but a quick trim of the plastic, and itâs been fine since.
This US$3·89 mouse (price at time of writing) was a similar case. I ordered it to see if it might be better than the NZ$75 Asus ROG Strix Evolve mouse, and that was bought to replace my favourite, the Microsoft Intellimouse 1·1. One of those was being used after my Microsoft Laser Mouse 6000 diedâlike the Intellimouse, these had large bodies that people with bigger hands, like me, can use.
As those in a similar predicament know, mice have shrunk over the last decade, so finding a replacement takes months as you read the specs and, in some cases, visit the stores to see if they have anything.
A Tecknet mouse proved too low by a millimetre or two to be comfortable, but when I saw this no-name unit being sold by a place called 7 Elves Store (did they mean dwarves, as in Disney?) on Aliexpress, I decided to take a punt. (The specs suggest the brand name is Centechia, but itâs nowhere to be found on the device or in the heading and description.) And for US$3·89 plus (sorry) my share of carbon emissions from the air freight, it didnât cost me much to find out.
It arrived a few weeks ago in damaged condition. The buttons did not work at all, and once again I had to make some simple repairs to get it working. Itâs too light. The plastic is of a crappy grade. And the details on the base of the mouse suggest whomever wrote the text had not been in the occident much, if at all. I donât like the lights because I donât care if a mouse has pulsing RGB effects since (a) my hand is over it and (b) Iâm looking at the screen, not the mouse.
But hereâs the thing: it fits my hand. Itâs nowhere nearly as comfortable as those old Microsoft mice, but as a cheapie that I can take in my laptop bag, it does a better job than the Tecknet. Itâs not as comfortable as the Asus, but it beats every other mouse, that is, the ones I didnât buy, that Iâve seen in the shops. On the whole, I can use it more than the Tecknet, and it will do when Iâm travelling or out of the office, though I still havenât found the holy grail of a decent sized Microsoft mouse. (The revived Intellimouse, as I may have mentioned earlier, is asymmetric, and its shape doesnât work for me.) Iâm not sure why this is so hard for mice manufacturers: youâve all peaked a bit early, and none of the improvements youâve made have advanced the ideas of user comfort and ergonomics.
For those who care about this stuff, hereâs the Aliexpress link.
Itâs pretty bad that Admiral, which detects whether you are using an ad blocker or not, now advises this with Privacy Badger.
Let me make this very clear: I am not against advertising on websites. I have advertising on our websites.
I am against tracking by people such as Google. And that is all I am blocking: the tracking part. There is a difference.
Frankly, if you need to track in order for your ads to work, then there is something deeply wrong with your model. Youâre actually doing your clients out of exposure.
This goes for the ad networks that work with us, too. If you have Privacy Badger installed and both you and I miss out on ads on our sites, then so be it.
What is so wrong about using the context of the page and delivering ads to suit? Everyone still wins with this model and we donât feel as violated.
So I wonât be disabling Privacy Badger, thanks.
It also means Iâll be happy to charge a premium on advertisers who want to appear on our site because the content is relevantâand because the non-tracked stuff will at least get seen by an engaged public.
Hereâs a screenshot from the new members of one of my Facebook groupsâactually the only public one I still have. Since Facebook lets spammers join now, we have to block them manually. Their posts donât make it through to the group as we have safeguards there, too. But Iâm not going to let them inflate, falsely, the member count, which in turn will make it harder for posts to reach group members.
A lot of these botsâthey hunt for large groups and their scripts join themâseem to hide under the guise of role-playing for the Pinoy TV series Halik, and they all chat to each other in automated fashion. As Facebook is stupid enough not to recognize the bot activity, youâd think that at least they could see the script at play here, as these accounts are often new, and they set to work joining large groups and pages.
They donât recognize them, or, they do recognize them and allow the bot activity to carry on with their blessing. Each one of these blocked accounts was reported, and as usual they were found to be perfectly fine.
In this screenshot, there were five legitimate accounts. We used to keep the numbers well down because potential members had to answer basic questions, and even some legit people are too lazy to do that. Back then we would see one legit account joining after weeks or months. I think I preferred that, because it kept the spammers and bots away.
It certainly gives the impression that bots, based on this sample (and others like it since Facebookâs pro-bot policy change arrived with this group), are running at about 50 per cent of the total, which gels with recent research that Instagram is 46 per cent fake (that is, 46 per cent of all accounts are not legit). Nevertheless, I still see far more bots than humans overall: just get yourself into the fake Halik accounts of the Smiths and Montefalcos, and now theyâre branching out into other surnames like Montenegro and Buenavista. Thousands, untouched, the only consistent activity on the wasteland that is Facebook.
If someone who has never been authorized to have a role on a Facebook page can have full admin access to it, then it stands to reason that a legitimate owner of a Facebook page cannot do what she needs with it.
Thatâs exactly what happened to my friend Holly Jahangiri, who has a Facebook page and an Instagram profile, both of which are connected. She can read her private messages. She can log into both, and she is the admin of both. Facebook has her email address and cellphone number. But she couldnât schedule a post for either, and thatâs when Facebook sent her into a loopânot unlike the one that Google sent me on in 2009, although Googleâs forum person was way ruder.
Facebook kept asking Holly to review her connection and confirm she is admin of her own pageâinformation that they already had. Unless their databases are so shot to hell that even internally they cannot determine this.
She would love to click ‘Confirm’ but the button was greyed out, saying, ‘You must be an admin of the associated Page’s business in Business Manager to confirm the Instagram account.’ But she is the admin.
Even if she tried disconnecting her accounts and attempted to reconnect them, so she could review that connection that they asked for, no confirmation email ever arrived. And when she logged into both Facebook and Instagram, on desktop and mobile, the accounts were indeed linked and confirmed in their Account Center.
It seems a small ask to be able to schedule a post on a pageâmind you, Tumblr wouldnât let me for some time, as every time we got to the scheduled moment, it would alter the day and move it forward into the futureâbut Holly persisted and decided to send them a message through their Business Support Center. She was lucky: she actually got a response. I never have. Or maybe she was unlucky that they responded.
Their first piece of advice was to ask Holly to do what she had already done: disconnect and start over. She proved she did it with the screenshot they requested, and that it still didn’t work.
Then they asked:
⊠in order for us to assist you better, please provide us with the following:
1. A screen recording in which illustrates the steps up to the section where the issue is showing. Please ensure that it is of the entire screen, including the URL bar at the top of the screen. For screen recordings, we recommend to upload the video on Dropbox and email the link to us. Do ensure the URL link is set to public. As in case we may need to forward your concern to the relevant team, this file will be very useful.
2. Page URL/ID where you are connecting your Instagram Account to.
Even though Holly has the knowledge to do a screen recording, she felt this was getting ridiculous, and, like me, she wasnât prepared to upgrade her Dropbox just to host a video for Facebook. And she had already given them (2).
She explained things once again but that Facebook kept asking her confirm her Facebook page and Instagram connectionâand providing her no means with which to do it. And that the Account Center said the two were connected.
She did one more screenshot with URL showing. In it, Facebook is still asking her to âConfirm Your Facebook Page and Instagram Connectionâ but giving her no means to do it.
Facebook responded by saying they still needed a video. And Holly answered that it wasnât going to happen.
Then she received this:
Hello Holly,
Thank you for contacting Facebook Concierge Support. We greatly appreciate your patience while waiting for an update.
We understand that you are unable to provide the video recording of the actual steps you are taking to show the issue being experienced.
What we can see is that the [Hollyâs page, redacted] is added on a Business Manager account where you have no role. Please be informed that if a Page is connected on a Business Manager account, the Instagram account you are trying to link on that Page must also be owned by the same Business Manager account.
If you know who are the admins of the Business Manager account that owns the Page, please check with them if the Instagram account – [Hollyâs Instagram account, redacted], is also added on that Business Manager. Also ask them to grant you admin access on that Business Manager. Once that is done, you can try again linking the Page and Instagram account.
Feel free to get in touch with us if you need any further assistance and we will be very happy to assist you further.
Do not hesitate to find our best support via https://www.facebook.com/business/help for future inquiries. We look forward in making your journey with Facebook a better one.
Thank you for contacting Facebook Concierge Support. Have a nice day!
Kind regards,
Yoyo
I would be fuming by now, because Holly is the admin of both, and there was no evidence of hacking. No one else is there as the admin.
She wrote: âSo who BUT me would own that business manager account? If it belongs to someone else, how do I undo that and create my own? How do I straighten this out? If it’s something I did incorrectly, then clearly I’m asking you: HOW DO I FIX IT?â
In classic Big Tech support, it seems Yoyo never read her message. They wrote:
Hi Holly,
Thank you so much for your email.
I can perfectly understand that you are not aware on who is the Admin of the Business Manager. Therefore, what I can do for you is, I will submit and Admin appeal for you by you will need to provide me the with some information and documents as below :
1) A copy of a valid government-issued photo ID, such as a current driver’s license or a passport, of the individual signing the statement. See the different kinds of IDs we accept in the Help Center: https://www.facebook.com/help/159096464162185
2) A signed statement from a person with sufficient knowledge and authority over this matter that includes all of the following:
a) The Facebook email address or profile URL associated with the Facebook account that you wish to have added as the new admin
b) A description of requestor relationship to the Business (and authority to request access to the Business, as applicable);
c) An explanation of your request, and whether there has been a termination of the employment and/or business relationship with the named person(s)/Business, as applicable;
d) The past three invoices/billing statements on the ad account(s) that the Business owns AND the last 4 digits of the credit card(s) on the account(s); âą If the BM does not have any ad account, please declare such information in the statement
e) A declaration that the information you have provided is true and accurate (e.g. “I certify that the information provided is true and accurate”) – your statement must include similar language.
For any other issues, please feel free to initiate a chat support session at the following link:
https://www.facebook.com/business/help
For any feedback regarding our features within platform, please use the link:
https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/268228883256323
Thank you for contacting Facebook Concierge Support and have a good day ahead!
Regards,
Yoyo
If youâve made it this far, youâll know why Holly shouldnât need to provide any of the above. The first paragraph from Yoyo is completely wrong since Holly is aware of who the admin is, but Facebook seems to want to ignore that.
At this point she was prepared to delete the lotâsomething Iâm prepared to do, too, but havenât. Apparently gadgets like IFTTT are tied to my account and they run things on Lucireâs Facebook page, which, based on the decision of the majority, is still being used by the team.
She showed Yoyo another screenshot that confirmed she is the sole admin. And told them that she would not provide any additional documents.
Their response, inter alia (and by this time, Yoyo was calling Holly ‘Yoyo’):
When it comes to data protection and privacy, Facebook does not reveal any information, the documents mentioned are mandatory since you are not the Admin of the Business Manager in which the Page is connected. We are not advising you to close your account for the sake of your business; rather, we are attempting to assist you.
Please submit the mentioned documents as soon as they are ready so that we can assist you further.
I can hear you screaming, âBut she is the admin!â
Any sane, reasonable person could empathize with Hollyâs reply:
So, the point is, I AM admin of the business account that any of my own pages/account are connected with unless I somehow orphaned them THIS MORNING after my last email to you, and your request at this point is tantamount to phishing. I’m not playing – I will not be sending you additional ID; you have my email, phone number, address, etc. (I have sent my driver’s license to Facebook, in the past, and I now deeply regret it. I will not be doing it again; I do not believe you safeguarded it in the first place.)
âWe are not advising you to close your account for the sake of your business” – what a joke. My business has never benefited from Facebook in any way, shape, or form. I opened the Business account because Facebook led me to believe I had to have one in order to upgrade and maintain my pages. I HAD an ad account, which I deleted, this morning. Ads I ran in the past were basically sent to EXACTLY the opposite of my target demographics and never led to ONE SINGLE SALE, so that is useless to me.
As an individual, all purchases I have ever made from other “businesses” on Facebook or Instagram have been scams.
I report fake and imposter accounts and I am told that they do not violate community standards.
I have reported actual kiddy porn in the past, to be told that it did not violate community standards.
I can only conclude, at this point, that Facebook prefers bots and scammers and phishers of men, because – I guess – they don’t cause as many headaches and the numbers look GREAT to advertisers.
I am now stuck in some sort of hellspace between your business center and your creator studio and ready to delete my personal profile as well as my pages and groups because I cannot figure out how to disconnect them from your “business center” thing.
In fact, Holly would have added, given the chance (these are her words):
I have been told by Facebook to download and install their partners’ anti-malware products and run them, despite my having my own premium subscription to Norton; I refused to do so, and was punished by a suspension of indefinite length (ended up being a couple of pleasant weeks away from Facebook);
I have had my wrist slapped for posting factual COVID info and stats DIRECTLY from the CDC, articles I wrote on Medium.com, and most lately, a link to a Wikipedia article explaining the origins of the classic nursery rhyme, “Humpty-Dumpty”
In other words, I’m not alone with the endless frustration this site causes. Iâm still frustrated and I barely use it, because of all the basics it gets wrong, constantly. And normally I would never take a dig at someone’s name but ‘Yoyo’ describes what Holly went through.
Holly wound up deleting all her ad and business accounts and reverted back to a personal one. When I read the above, Iâd rather have the usual silence than what Facebook thinks passes for âsupportâ!
After 13 years, it was time to facelift the Lucire licensing website.
Itâs a very familiar template, similar to what we used for JY&A Consultinga few months back. The home page copy we already had from a flier that we created late last year that Susan Ninan and I worked on; and the âAboutâ pageâs text was mostly carried over (though it still needs 13 years of updates).
I am surprised the old site still netted us enquiries but it was looking extremely dated. The 2008 design was positively archĂŠological in internet terms. However, Iâm not sure if the new one is particularly interesting, because the web design convention is to do something very simple at the moment.
The old one was created with consideration for those who didnât have mouse wheels, whereas these days it seems to be all right, even fashionable, to scroll away.
Hopefully everything is more fit for purpose though, and the links are more useful. Weâve kept the code very light.
And if you do want to license an international fashion magazine with an independent, authentic and engaged firm, you know where to come.
Above: The old and the new Lucire licensing sitesâto my eyes, the old appears more creative, even in 2021.
I chanced upon a mention of off-Facebook activity on this page, and hereâs a good page explaining what it is. (That first link has a lot of advice on what you can do to improve your privacy if you have Facebook, much of which I’ve mentioned over the years. But it’s very handy to have it all in one place.)
Apparently, you can now edit your off-Facebook activityâof course itâs something they don’t advertise.
If you head to www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity youâll see all the organizations that have sent your online interactions with them to Facebook. In my case, there were 265 who had sent them activity since the beginning of 2020. Good news: you can delete everything in there (bearing in mind this could break things that you have plugged in via Facebook), and turn off future activity.
I am very glad to note that Lucire has never sent information to Facebook.
As sent to Vodafone New Zealand today. Anyone know what might be going on?
Hi there:
Not really a complaint but since you donât give any options other than compliment and complaint, the latter will have to do!
Since moving to Tawa, my landline phone has been calling numbers that no one has called. It does this by itself, usually around 3 p.m. each day.
I enquired with Vodafone on Twitter about this but we never found a resolution, and Custhelp doesnât appear to exist any more on your website. As to Tobi, the sooner that vanishes, the better!
As you read on youâll see why itâs not really easy to explain on either Twitter or on the phone, and Tobi has no option for landlines at all.
I suspected there was something wrong with the landline set-up here that causes the phone to dial by itself.
We donât exactly have a high-tech landline phone. These are basic Vtech units from Warehouse Stationery. I have never entered any âprogrammingâ into them, nor do I know how. Even the outgoing answerphone message is what it came with.
These are the same phones we had at my old place in Rongotai where they most certainly did not dial by themselves every day at 3 p.m. We moved, I unplugged them, and plugged them into the house here.
Itâs been going on for most of the two years we have been here, if I recall correctly.
Today we had a power outage, so instead of 3 p.m., the phone kept calling well into the evening after the power returned.
I went into My Vodafoneâs landline section for the first time. If you go in there, youâll see the phone kept dialling 04 569 3555 and 04 569 3566 very, very regularly. Since 3.07 p.m. and now (11.18 p.m.) it has made 130 of these calls.
On occasion, I catch the phone doing this and stay on the line. When it connects, it sounds like a fax machine on the other end. My phone then enters some sort of identity code. No human has ever answered these calls.
It will sometimes do this while I am on the phone to someone else, which is very distracting.
Today, I filmed a video on my cellphone to prove that the phone does this by itself with no human agency. You can watch this at:
Please note that no one at this house is making these calls and the phone is doing it by itself.
I would like to know why this is happening, how a phone even knows how to do this, and just who is behind this.
Thank goodness these are local calls that do not bear a charge but this smells of a scam to me.
Hopefully from the above they’ll be able to see that the phone is not even sophisticated enough to be programmed to do this. Yet the frequency of the calls (130 today alone) suggests they are automated. I haven’t found anything online about this. This link is the closest I’ve found to my experience, but Vodafone so far does not know.
On a related note, after I published this post, Wordpress created an extra tag that I never fed in, called F4F4F4. Why does it do this?
PS.: This seems extremely plausible, from a friendly Tweeter.
A security system connected to the landline somewhere in the house? I don't think your phone is making the call, you're just hearing it there.
Not that I know of; we do have a system, but the security people say it needs an upgrade and they need to connect it to the ONT, so I took from that that it wasnât. But a great place to start my enquiries, thank you!
Who knows? Maybe it is all connected properly. I’ve sent a note to the folks who installed the security system here.
P.PS.: From the security company: ‘If your phone was calling these numbers, it would not be related to the alarm.
âThese numbers are not recorded anywhere on the alarm.’
I havenât been able to find anything on this bug online, but itâs very common.
As far as I can recall, all of our online publications that use Wordpress have themes designed or modified by yours truly. However, Lucire Rouge has a mostly bought-in theme, where my changes have been limited to a couple of CSS rules. The theme developer actually came in and helped us with a few modifications, which shows the extent to which he does follow-up for paying customers.
But there was one thing he was never able to crack, and I donât think itâs his fault, since it happens on a lot of websites, including Medinge Groupâs (also a theme I did not design, though I did earlier ones). On both these sites, there were no bolds and italics. There still arenât on Medingeâs.
There are <strong> and <em> codes in there, but the bolding and obliquing are done by the browser. The font files actually arenât loaded, so what we see are false bolds (the browser attempts to âoverprintâ the roman, duplicating the outline and shifting it marginally to give the illusion of a heavier typeface) and obliques, not italics (itâs the roman file pushed over 15 degrees or so). The former is particularly bad, as the outlines clash, and the result can be hollow glyphs, something that any font developer will know when one outline winds up accidentally on top of another in Fontographer or Fontlab.
These Wordpress themes rely on Google Fonts (another sin, in my opinion) so I donât know if the fault lies with Google or Wordpress, or the developer. If Wordpress does indeed power 70 per cent of websites, then I have to say the bug is awfully common, and I probably do see it on a very high percentage of visited sites.
The themes allow us to select the font family, but the selection only calls a single font file from the family.
Above: A graphic clipping text from Lucire Rouge that I sent to the developer.
The solution, as I discovered after months of toing and froing with Lucire Rougeâs theme dev, was to do your own font-linking rules in the CSS file and upload the fonts themselves to the relevant directory on the server. I must note publicly the âmonthsâ were not his fault, but due to my own delay. I should not expect computer programmers to be typographers, either.
It is something that one needs to watch out for, as the fake bolds and italics are horrible to look at, and must look amateur, even to the non-professional.
I was surprised to find that I could access my Facebook advertising preferences again, after the section stopped working in January 2019. What was there was still way off, in June 2021, but itâs nice to be able to edit (read delete) them again after two-and-a-half years. Things move slowly in Menlo Park when it comes to user privacy. Frankly, they shouldnât even be collecting preferences after youâve opted out of preference-targetingânot even Google is stupid enough to do that (possibly as they have other nefarious means).
I was chatting to one friend who is as principled as me when it comes to Facebook bots. She screen-grabbed one who tried to send her a friend request, and we got chatting about the thousands-strong bot nets Iâve encountered.
She noted there was some fan fiction connected to one of the surnames, and I was able to find the Filipino TV series Halik. So are these accounts, accused by me of being bots, simply role-playing ones?
The reason I even know about them is that they attempt to join a group I oversee, usually with bot software that incorrectly answered the questions we had put up to weed out the fake accounts. (As I noted recently, Facebook has got rid of these, allowing bots to come in to every public group.) Why do they do this? They come in, hoping to hide among groups (and they also become page fans), to make themselves look legitimate. What happens instead is that we report them, and watch as Facebook does nothing about them, telling us that these automated scripts are allowed, and never mind the damage they do to pages wanting to reach their members. Youâll just have to pay more and more and more to boost the posts to reach the people you once reached for free.
Secondly, itâs concerning that accounts marked as newly started ones on Facebook already have hundreds, if not thousands, of friends within days. These just arenât normal patterns. They also talk to each other like nonsensical bots, responding with the same emojis or words.
On both these counts, the fact the accounts have names from a Pinoy TV series has little bearing. Facebook doesnât care either way.
