Why a Google self-driving car worries me

23.12.2015/02.22

Ford With Google and Ford announcing they will team up to make self-driving cars, I have some concerns. I’m not in Luddite position on the idea of self-driving cars. Potentially, they can be far safer than what we have today. I see so many godawful drivers out there—New Zealand has a very high road […]

Remember when you could post, comment and like on Facebook? Those were the days

29.05.2015/05.47

Let’s see: Facebook doesn’t work on Wednesdays and Fridays. Check. Thursdays are OK though. It’s another one of those days where the Facebook bug that began on Wednesday (though, really, it’s been going on for years—including the famous outage of 2013 where what I am experiencing happened worldwide to a large number of users) […]

Even on Instagram, they prefer bots to legitimate users

05.05.2015/01.58

Instagram bans are like Facebook blackouts or Google blacklists: no matter what the company says your time-out is, it’s considerably longer. Day 1 was Sunday, when I noticed that the likes I made via Ink 361 didn’t stick. I went back to Iconosquare (Statigram) and this message flashed up: The wisdom online is […]

There can be only one, unless you forget to register your design: the Range Rover Evoque and the copycat Landwind X7

21.04.2015/03.04

The stunning original: the Range Rover Evoque. There has been a lot of ongoing press about Landwind’s copy of the Range Rover Evoque (a road test of the Evoque comes next week in Lucire, incidentally), one of my favourite Sloane Ranger SUVs. There’s no way Landwind would have come up with the design independently, and, […]

Farewell, Manhattan: switching to the Cooler Master Storm Quick Fire TK Cherry MX Brown

10.04.2015/14.45

The Cooler Master Storm Quick Fire TK, with white case. On Tuesday, my Manhattan keyboard, for which I gave a glowing review on Amazon, gave up the ghost. I’m not entirely sure why but through its lifetime, there were two things wrong with it: the first was that regular typing wore off the keys’ […]

Read the report: Deloitte actually doesn’t blame migrants for increased corruption

26.03.2015/11.06

Deloitte has published a report on the increasing corruption in Australia and New Zealand, which Fairfax’s Stuff website reported on today. Its opening paragraph: ‘An increase in bribery and corruption tarnishing New Zealand’s ethical image may be due to an influx of migrants from countries where such practices are normal.’ The problem: I’m […]

Remember back when we wrote status updates on Facebook?

01.03.2015/05.40

I said things along these lines for a while: there’s Facebook fatigue, Facebook is the new Digg, etc. Based on who I am seeing leave Facebook lately, there’s increasingly more truth to this. I scrolled down my own wall earlier today to find a bunch of links to other stuff. If you’re wanting to know […]

FCC rules in favour of ’net neutrality (at least we think it has)

27.02.2015/10.24

I’ve gone into the reasons I support ’net neutrality elsewhere, but it was nice to hear about this on the wireless: even though we still don’t know the specifics, as the FCC has kept this to itself for now. (We do know that Google has written a letter to the FCC, and that ‘an entire […]

Where the action is on social media, and it’s not Facebook

16.10.2014/13.41

I’ve blogged several times about the bot problem that Facebook has, and this is an issue that runs alongside the click farms that operate on the website. One of my groups has over 12,000 members, and it’s a magnet for click farm participants, who target these bigger ones. And when you look through the […]

An expatriate’s view of Occupy Central and what Hong Kong wants

29.09.2014/10.31

Equal access: an audio recording of this blog post can be found here. I know I’m not alone among expats watching the Occupy Central movements in Hong Kong. More than the handover in 1997, it’s been making very compelling live television, because this isn’t about politicians and royalty, but about everyday Hong Kong people. […]