Robert Vanwey on whom to boycott

It’s hard to find fault with Robert Vanwey’s ‘Who to Boycott’, subtitled ‘There are some in business who treat workers like property’. Note: for those who don’t like Substack, you might not wish to click through. But I gave my word to Rob I would link it because I was impressed by his thinking and […]

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We need to serve the technology with the new pay-by-plate meters

We need to change our habits slightly with the new pay-by-plate meters in Wellington City, as I discovered. If I arrive in town for, say, two 90-minute meetings with, say, 15 minutes between them, what I might do after the first is to move my car. I might also put a bit of extra money […]

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Why web pages are becoming homogenized

Dan York in Vermont referred to Mia Sato’s article in The Verge today, on how Google has driven the bland, same-again websites out there. It does lay the blame at netizens more, and fairly so here, given that the desperation behind SEO has led many to employ certain tricks in order to make a buck […]

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Having less and less faith in websites

It’s a pity Zapier’s email systems don’t work because the people seem very nice. I signed up to the service in December, but eventually unsubscribed from all their emails by going to the email preferences’ page and selecting the appropriate option. It didn’t stop the emails from coming, so I wrote to them to advise […]

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Twenty years of blogging

First up, as I’ve publicly posted this and have helped out myself, my friend and colleague Hasan Abu Afash is in Palestine, and I don’t need to tell you what he and his people are facing. If you can help out, here’s a link to his Paypal.   Apparently, August 11, 2023 marked my 20 […]

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Hellos and goodbyes

Twenty twenty-three, what a year. I’ve met some amazing people this year, a lot of whom are in the public service. You know who you are. I am happy to know you. Those who champion the good in our society. Those who offer alternatives to things that harm society. Those who create good in this […]

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Who leads when the house of cards falls?

Scott Burchill makes a good analysis in Pearls and Irritations on how the US is ‘a rogue state’ and becoming a pariah (alongside Israel) over recent events in Gaza, and how its influence is waning. It’s hard to argue with a lot of his points; certainly here, with the exception of some politicians who either […]

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Introducing Autocade in print

  There’s a lot to report now that the news is public: Autocade is more than the online encyclopædia, it’s also a print yearbook. I’m happy to say it has been launched, after ironing out some tech issues, and there has been good interest in the new publication. You can read a bit more about […]

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Two days wasted thanks to Asus ROG Armoury Crate

I’m recording this in case it happens to others. Yesterday, Windows 11 began to hang. Not in the traditional sense where everything froze. I had about a minute where things worked. I could open Vivaldi and Eudora, and within those I could still do some things. Eudora was pretty stable, which is a sign of […]

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Refreshing the body type on the Lucire site

EB Garamond 12 on the Lucire website.   Not exactly earth-shattering news, but we’ve changed the body type on the Lucire website from Bembo to EB Garamond 12. The cut of Bembo that we had didn’t feature macronized vowels—a big omission here in Aotearoa—though most recently it was a Latvian name, Elīna Arāja, which it […]

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