Volvo has announced that it will build a plant in China, and seeks approval for a second, in what it calls its second home market. It was inevitable, though for the long-term survival of the brand, it’s not a bad idea. Through Geely’s acquisition, it can potentially leapfrog other foreign car brands inside […]
Category: technology
Technology, futurism, blogging and related matters.
Google’s new algorithm will likely weed out content mills
I’m not enough of a bastard to only dis Google, because they have made a pretty good move today. Google’s new algorithm, it is claimed, will weed out content farms, one type of site that has annoyed us here regularly. These are sites that just pinch others’ content automatically. Because search engines pick […]
Read More… from Google’s new algorithm will likely weed out content mills
Firefox 4 Beta 13 passes my tests
Firefox 4 Beta 13 works, and I have not found any bugs with it. I may be wrong, but I believe this is the last beta before release. What’s amazing is that the bugs I have been complaining about for a long time have each been fixed. In other words, the reporting system […]
Type-changing bug identified—not that it matters next to Christchurch
It’s quite pathetic to be blogging about something like this on the day of the Christchurch earthquake, but Jonathan Kew, who has kept on the font-changing bug in the Firefox 4 betas after I mentioned it to him, has created a patch that sorts the problem out. Apparently, it applies to old PS1 fonts: Firefox […]
Read More… from Type-changing bug identified—not that it matters next to Christchurch
How do you pretend you are surfing abroad?
Some years ago, you could set your browser to use a proxy server and surf the web as though you were in another country. This was a handy tool for us, as we often need to check that the ads being shown on our sites were suitable—you never know what ad networks might try to […]
Fax and text spam: bad marketing moves
Above I’d mention the war, but Honda was founded after the surrender. I despise fax-spam, and under my reading of the Telecommunications Act, these come under nuisance calls. But regardless of the legality, it seems rather hypocritical for Honda to have sent me one for its Insight hybrid car. Think about it: a lot […]
Google Buzz is back, whether I like it or not
After all the hassles surrounding Buzz and privacy last year, you’d think Google would have learned. Maybe not. Buzz has been reintroduced to my Google account for the third time without my consent, just over a year after a part of the the internet community expressed its anger. Google has probably figured that we have […]
Read More… from Google Buzz is back, whether I like it or not
Why I removed Chrome, and the six basic things that it can’t do
I write this not long after another Firefox crash (Atomic Decrement being the signature) and wiped three quite well worded (if I say so myself) paragraphs. To vent, I Tweeted, and received (again) the suggestion of switching to Chrome. I appreciate the kind motive but Chrome is so severely lacking that last night, I […]
Read More… from Why I removed Chrome, and the six basic things that it can’t do
There’s got to be a morning after Quora
This blog post was originally published at Social Media NZ. Michael Moore-Jones has written a post in response here. I read with interest Michael Moore-Jones’s review of Quora. He is very enthusiastic about the new website, and with some good reasons. I’m still in the “wait and see” camp. I joined, part of that […]
The real experts are fixing Firefox 4
Good news: there have been more developments with Mozilla as they work on the rather serious bug (the one where you can’t read a damn thing) in Firefox 4 Beta. John Daggett at Mozilla created logging to help identify the problem, and I ran the latest nightly build to get the logs back to […]