Autocade turns 12

Autocade turns 12 today, as it’s now March 8 here in New Zealand. From zero models to 4,093 (the Hyundai Avante XD is the latest); and as I write this sentence, it’s netted 18,683,611 page views. Just four years ago this month, it had only managed eight million.    Just this week, I added two […]

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Fixed Vivaldi’s poor type display, thanks to wmjordan

It took two months but I finally got there.    Vivaldi now displays type normally though the browser interface is slightly messed up. But I’ll take good type display, thanks.    On the MacType forums, a user in China called wmjordan was in the same boat but had found a solution. In their words: For […]

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Directwrite isn’t the culprit

That was confusing. Yesterday’s blog post was representative of my thinking: given that certain people were upset when Chromium took away the Directwrite toggle in 2016, and type rendering on Chromium-based Vivaldi deteriorated significantly for me with v. 2.10 (it turns out v. 2.9 was the turning-point), then did Chromium only switch fully to Directwrite […]

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Has Directwrite arrived on my Chromium-based browsers four years after everyone else?

After considerable searching, the bug that I reported to Vivaldi, and which they cannot reproduce, appears to be one that the general public encountered back in 2016, when Chromium took away the option to disable its Directwrite rendering. I don’t know why I’ve only encountered it in 2020, and as far as I can tell, […]

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Cellphone? What cellphone?

It’s true. I spent time on business development, answering emails, doing tech stuff on our sites, and generally kept on top of things. I often wonder if I would have become an active Facebooker or Tweeter had they been invented and come into my orbit in, say, 2002. We all may have been too busy […]

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Why I don’t sign up to new online ad networks in a hurry

In the early days, banner advertising was pretty simple. By the turn of the century, we dealt with a couple of firms, Burst Media and Gorilla Nation, and we had a few buy direct. Money was good.    This is the pattern today if we choose to say yes to anyone representing an ad network. […]

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Could this happen one day at GM?

The MG line-up in New Zealand. Could it be part of a bigger portfolio of brands later this decade?   In the context of what has happened with Holden, and Peter Hanenberger’s thoughts on the direction of GM, I wonder how far away we are from seeing these headlines: Cash-strapped GM sells passenger car brands […]

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Social media produce some terrible clairvoyants

I see Billie Eilish is singing the next James Bond title song, and it sounds pretty good.    The last one, ‘Writing’s on the Wall’, wasn’t one of my favourites and while I didn’t mind Sam Smith’s composition, I felt a female voice might have suited it better. On a Bond music forum on Facebook […]

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One News is hard to miss on TV, but hidden on the internet

I wanted to see what TV1 news (I can never remember its official name with all its rebrands over the years—is it One Network News, TVNZ1 News, One News, or something else?) had on GM’s decision to shut Holden, but I missed both the six o’clock and the Plus One screenings. I headed online with […]

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Asus ROG Strix Evolve: a gaming mouse for a non-gamer

My early 2000s Microsoft Intellimouse 1·1 is still the perfect shape for me. After getting the second-hand one into service last year, I thought that I needed a spare. I’ve several other mice, including no-brand ones, that are a decent size, but I got used to having the forward and back buttons on either side. […]

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