‘A highly pleasurable read’—another positive review for Panos: My Life, My Odyssey

  I must have been pretty busy in July 2022 not to have read this review properly. I remember it coming in—it’s from The Bite, a London-based magazine—and thinking, ‘That’s great, it’s positive, add that to the files,’ but it really deserves a bit of a highlight here. Jada Brookes (a nom de plume for […]

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The captivating case of Brian MacKinnon

  On a whim, I decided to look up the case of Brian Lachlan MacKinnon, who went back to his high school 15 years after he graduated and posed as a 16-year-old pupil. I saw it on BBC Scotland’s Public Eye at the time (around 1995), though I think I had also heard of the […]

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The IBM Selectric version of Univers revived

This is one of the more fascinating type design stories I’ve come across in ages. Jens Kutilek has revived a very unlikely typeface: the IBM Selectric version of Univers in 11 pt.     A lot of us will have seen things set on a Selectric in the 1970s, especially in New Zealand. I’ve even […]

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‘Google … broke the web’

Nice to see I’m not the only one who sees Google for what it is today. Warning: coarse language.     What’s bizarre is a reply I wrote largely in agreement (and had a few likes to) has vanished. Maybe some Google lovers didn’t like what I wrote? Sometimes I can make the point better […]

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A format so old, it’s new and radical

Above: I spy Natasha Lyonne and a Plymouth Barracuda. So the car is part of her screen identity? So it should be, it’s television. I might have to watch this.   Two very fascinating responses come up in Wired’s interview with director Rian Johnson on the Netflix release of his film Glass Onion. I’m not […]

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Here’s hoping Yuzo Related Posts v. 6 does the trick

When we put our sites on a new server last year, one Wordpress plug-in we retained, despite a known exploit, was Yuzo Related Posts. Basically, nothing else could do related posts as well. It just worked. Everything else, inexplicably, either did not do post relationships terribly well, was too resource-heavy, or was too ugly, Fortunately, […]

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Beware AI; the dangers of Google ads; and the beauty of Radio.garden

Hat tip to Stefan Engeseth on this one: an excellent podcast with author, historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari. Among the topics he covers, as detailed in the summary in Linkedin’s The Next Big Idea: • AI is the first technology that can take power away from us • if we are not careful, AI […]

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January 2023 gallery

Here are January 2023’s images—aides-mémoires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month.     Notes Rosa Clará image, added as I was archiving files from the third quarter of 2021. The Claudia Schiffer Rolling Stone cover came to mind recently—I believe it was commended in 1991 by the […]

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An introduction to smart TVs for a complete novice

Earlier in December, we decided to put a TV into our guest room. One catch: there is no aerial there, so initially we thought, ‘We have some great DVDs, let’s plug in the DVD player.’ But it didn’t quite feel right. We’ve stayed at enough places with smart TVs, including some running the Android TV […]

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When reverse image search services allege you’ve stolen work

I think these are going to get more frequent. We received another copyright claim, accusing us of publishing a photograph without authorization. They wanted around €500, part of that for the licence, and part of that for running it since 2009. This one, from a German company, was easier to deal with than an American […]

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