Time to abandon Meizu Music: 8.2 is a lemon

21.04.2021/11.25

That didn’t last long. Within a day, this was what Meizu Music showed: The songs, all 1,229 of them that I had fed in manually, are still there, and they still play, but the question remains: for how long? If they don’t show in the list—I told you computing devices were forgetful—then how long […]

Facebook whistleblower gets fired; and a workaround for Meizu Music’s inability to find your SD card

19.04.2021/10.17

This is a pretty typical story: find fault with Big Tech, try to alert the appropriate people in the firm, get fired. Julia Carrie Wong’s excellent article for The Guardian shows a data scientist, Sophie Zhang, find blatant attempts by governments to abuse Facebook’s platform, misleading their own people, in multiple countries. Of course […]

Autocade reaches 23 million page views—and it’s more satisfying than Twitter

07.04.2021/04.54

Above: The Levdeo (or Letin) i3, not exactly the ideal model with which to commemorate another Autocade milestone. Autocade will cross the 23 million page view mark today, so we’re keeping fairly consistent with netting a million every three months, a pattern that we’ve seen since the end of 2019. Just to keep my […]

What Vodafone’s Super Wifi is really like in practice

04.04.2021/00.14

While I saw Vodafone’s Super Wifi commercials, I never thought to act on them, since (mistakenly) I thought it was something to do with cellphones. Might have been the gadgets they used in the commercial. But, after talking to Raghu, their sales’ rep in Pune, a city outside of Mumbai that I know well, […]

Despite being blatantly obvious, Facebook does nothing about thousands-strong bot nets

01.04.2021/02.51

We already know that Facebook does nothing if you want to use scripts to join groups, even if the scripts all give roughly the same answers. Apparently that’s not enough to trigger the systems at this company that’s worth almost a billion dollars (that’s a proper billion, or what the Americans call a trillion). Unless, […]

I can finally identify with the main character in a New Zealand TV show

31.03.2021/08.36

While I care much more about when John Simm will grace our screens again (pun intended), it was hard to avoid the reality TV that gets beamed into our living rooms during prime-time. There is the disgusting Married at First Sight Australia, where I am speechless with shock that fellow Scots alumnus John Aiken appears […]

Computing in 2021: Gmail’s advertorial spammers, Facebook bots, and Twitter fatigue

25.03.2021/10.40

I’m not entirely sure I need to block out the email addresses here since they’re likely to be burner Gmail accounts, but I’ll give these spammers the courtesy they don’t deserve. As shown below, they’ve been coming for over a year; there’s a chance I may have even received them in 2019. […]

It’s not hard writing clear terms and conditions

/04.18

We’ve had a ‘Highlights’ section in our T&Cs for a while, but today I thought I’d take another look at them. Without reading them again, I drafted these: • We don’t know anything about you unless you tell us. • When you do tell us stuff (like signing up with your email address) we store […]

There goes the neighbourhood

05.03.2021/09.01

Demolition has commenced on 1–4 Māmari Street, across the road from where I lived for over three decades. I’m not against change and my feelings toward the development have already been recorded here. It was with a tinge of sadness that I saw the demolition crews there and the only wall left standing […]

Reduced Facebook? Australia is the lucky country

18.02.2021/11.31

Whichever side you are on with Facebook imposing a ban on Australians sharing news content, this says it all about the level of intelligence over at Menlo Park. In Australia, Facebook has not only de-platformed legitimate governmental bodies and non-profits, it has de-platformed itself. Maybe taxing these companies would have been easier, and […]