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 […]

A look back at 2015: a year that was harder to laugh at

20.12.2015/05.56

I’ve done this a few times now: looked through my year’s Tumblr posts to get an alternative feel for the Zeitgeist. Tumblr is where I put the less relevant junk that comes by my digital meanderings. But as I scrolled down to January 2015 in the archive, I’m not that certain the posts really reflected […]

Remarks on the typography of Star Wars

16.12.2015/10.57

Star Wars is in my feed in a big way. To get up to speed on the film series, I had to start with the memorable theme by John Williams. Thanks, Bill and Paul. And who better to describe the plot than someone else in the science-fiction world, Doctor Who? Seriously though, I […]

Trump a creation of the media, not of ad spends

11.12.2015/11.18

This is by no means a blog post in favour of the Republican poll front-runner, although this graphic from Vox (not the old Vox that I used to be on) was very interesting: Jeb Bush's operation appears to have set $32.5 million on fire pic.twitter.com/dziA85tUAz — Vox (@voxdotcom) December 11, 2015 When I ran […]

Capricious Cortana

23.11.2015/14.56

I have never seen a program as inconsistent as Microsoft’s Cortana. We were always taught that computers were very logical, that they all followed a certain set of code each time. Not so Cortana, which has had more different behaviours than anything I have ever seen. When I run into technical issues, […]

My first day with Windows 10

17.11.2015/14.37

I never expected that the Windows 10 download would ever begin. I had registered for it, but the Windows 10 notification window kept coming up with various excuses, talking about my drivers being out of date, then claiming that because of the automatic log-in, the download would not start. Clicking ‘Tell me more’ never did […]

When mistrust brings us together

13.11.2015/11.51

I can be staunch on IP protection in a lot of cases—but in the case of Martin Shkreli of Turing Pharmaceuticals AG hiking the price of an Aids drug from $13·50 to $750 per pill, not so much (for obvious reasons). If you’re in pharmaceuticals, then there has to be some element of wanting to […]

Autocade reaches 7,000,000 page views, growing at its quickest rate

10.10.2015/06.04

I was surprised to see that Autocade managed its 7,000,000th viewer some time this month, five months after the 6,000,000th. Considering it took three years to get to the first million, this means people are willing to use Autocade more regularly as a resource on the web. As something that started on the side, this […]

The best mouse to buy might be a dead-stock one made in 2005

09.10.2015/14.06

With the mouse being the culprit on my main computer causing mouse and keyboard to be unresponsive in Windows 7 (I’ve still no idea when Windows 10 arrives and Microsoft has been no help at all), I decided to shop for a new one again. The failed mouse was one I bought in 2012, […]

Volkswagen’s scandal won’t spread to other German car groups

24.09.2015/14.50

If you want a humorous take on what happened at Volkswagen this week, the above video sums it all up. During my 2010 mayoral campaign, I noted that if New Zealand did not diversify its economy to have more of a focus on technology, there could be a problem. Relying on primary products (I didn’t […]