From The Lord of the Rings to Border Patrol: how Sweden sees us

My visits to Sweden have been few and far apart, since it is quite a distance to travel from New Zealand: summer 2002, autumn 2003, winter 2010, and summer 2024. There are many interesting observations one can make with so many years in between, seeing how society has changed with brief snapshots from each visit, […]

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Tesla misfires, Toyota lies

The 1983 Corolla liftback—the E80 series was peak Corolla, relative to what was on offer in the C segment. Toyota was on a high then.   Tesla finished itself this year, by firing its new-product development team at a time when it desperately needs new products—proper products, too, not the Cyberstuck which has so many […]

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For the sake of our city, it’s important to take the opportunities to move forward

The late 1990s were a heady time here in Aotearoa. The web—pre-Google, pre-monopolies—was indeed the great leveller: anyone with the right skills could create something online that competed at a global level. Aotearoa, which had for years felt a little backward in time—TV shows would arrive here two to three years after they aired in […]

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Getting to each 1,000th model on Autocade—so far

The Tofaş Doğan, the 1,000th model entered into Autocade in 2009.   A very quick look at how long it took us to get each 1,000 models on Autocade.   0: March 8, 2008 1,000: December 21, 2009 (1 year, 9 months for first 1,000—Tofaş Doğan was the 1,000th) 2,000: December 30, 2012 (3 years […]

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When the earliest Gmail accounts receive emails destined for others

Note: this was originally at the tail end of another post, but given its significance, it deserved to be its own post.   Who knew that Fesshole would help bring up this issue again?     Google bros all say this is impossible, or they blame the user, which is usually the case with Google […]

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Eudora users, welcome Aurora: finally, a modern, secure, Unicode-friendly successor

We have lift-off. For those of us who have been waiting for a successor to Eudora 7.1.0.9 from 2006, our patience has been rewarded. Some years ago, I had heard of a project called Hermes, and they have now delivered an alpha version called Hermes Aurora that does everything they promised. Back when Hermes was […]

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I’m blocking Threads

I decided to block threads.net from my Mastodon account, which really doesn’t do much if there are determined bad actors, but it’s a small initial step to keep Meta in its place. Just as I never linked my YouTube account to Google back when I used those legacy 2000s websites, I really don’t need to […]

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The crunch time media face is nothing new

  Talking Points Memo showed the amounts programmatic advertising brought in to them over the last eight years. (The above graphic is from their card preview on Mastodon.) I’ve never been convinced of programmatic since no one in the ad business could ever explain it in plain language. I say just figure out what’s on […]

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A history of dealing with ad networks

Written in the feedback form to one ad network as we attempt to find someone to complement our work with H12 Media. Sums up a lot about the murky world of online advertising. It’s to a ‘Google Publishing Partner’, and we know Big Tech lies, but I’m keeping an open mind with this provider. Italics […]

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It would be nice to get my Amazon Associates money

This has been going on for between 10 and 20 years, and I think closer to the latter. Didn’t know Jeff was this hard up for cash. I didn’t record the dialogue last time, giving them the benefit of the doubt, but since I can’t trust the buggers, I will this time. Fed in to […]

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