A refreshing piece on diversity in our mainstream media

Two fantastic items in my Tweetstream today, the first from journalist Jehan Casinader, a New Zealander of Sri Lankan heritage, in Stuff. Some highlights:    As an ethnic person, you can only enter (and stay in) a predominantly white space – like the media, politics or corporate leadership – if you play by the rules. […]

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From my desk, 1986

Before this gets recycled, I thought I’d scan it as a memento: a 1986 printout off our Riteman dot matrix printer (which I still have, with spare cartridges), hooked up to a Commodore 64. I forget the printer interface. The image isn’t mine: I only imagine that 14-year-old me was claiming copyright over the layout […]

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From one émigré to the Lais, leaving Hong Kong for Scotland

This final podcast of 2020 is an unusual one. First, it’s really directed a family I’ve never met: the Lais, who are leaving Hong Kong for Glasgow after the passing of the national security law in the Chinese city, as reported by Reuter. They may never even hear it. But it’s a from-the-heart piece recounting […]

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The Grundig parts’ cache time capsule

When Dad was made redundant from Cory-Wright & Salmon, which had purchased his workplace, Turnbull & Jones, he bought all the Grundig equipment and accessories, thinking that he would find it useful. And for a while he did. The odd one he cannibalized, while the parts were used and adapted. Cory-Wright wound up contracting him […]

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The 2020 Level 2 history exam is racist

The below is excerpted from an email sent to the Race Relations’ Commissioner, Meng Foon, sent yesterday, in light of this Tweet (and the thread that follows): Me and my friend just wrote a letter to NCEA about the inclusion of a Lionel Terry poem in the History exam 💅😘 — Cadence Chung (@cadence_chung) November […]

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Autocade reaches 21 million page views

Above: The 4,283rd model entered into Autocade: the mostly forgotten Isuzu Bellel. A few days ago, Autocade hit 21 million page views. It was pretty uneventful even for me, since the site hasn’t been updated too much since the 20 millionth page view. Thanks to COVID-19, I’ve been quite busy and haven’t contributed to the […]

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Medinge Group at Dutch Design Week: the contribution from Aotearoa New Zealand

My partner Amanda and I are part of Medinge’s presence at Dutch Design Week this year.    Since Medinge couldn’t celebrate our 20th anniversary due to COVID-19, some of our Dutch members, helped by many others, took the opportunity to get us into the event, which is virtual this year.    We had done a […]

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Another mailbox bites the dust from another crash—what is taking out Eudora’s data?

Something is crashing my PC and taking Eudora mailboxes with it.    The latest is losing my Q3 outbox table of contents, which I suppose isn’t as bad as losing the inbox, outbox, and all third-quarter emails, though being at the end of the week, there was still some repairing from the weekend back-up I […]

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Forget the stereotypes: how immigrants write with English as their second language

How interesting to find a photocopy of a letter my Dad wrote to the Department of Social Welfare in 1986, to apply for National Superannuation on behalf of his parents.    We had been here less than a decade, but, frankly, Dad’s correspondence was always like this. The whole idea of immigrants coming to Aotearoa […]

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More things that don’t work: Google knowledge panels, and typing in te reo Māori in Facebook

A guide to emojis for 2020. Just for clarification: 😷 = happy😷 = angry😷 = laughing😷 = sad#COVID19 #emoji — Jack Yan 甄爵恩 (@jackyan) September 5, 2020 At least Twitter works. Google, as usual, doesn’t.    I had a check to see how Lucire was performing in a Google search yesterday and noticed there was […]

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