A new video for the home page

23.07.2022/11.53

Earlier today, Amanda and I had a wonderful time at Te Papa to celebrate the Chinese Languages in Aotearoa programme. My contribution was appearing in a video, that was on this blog last October. It dawned on me that despite being on YouTube, this really needs to be on the home page of this website, […]

Bing is definitely very broken, and it’s hurting Duck Duck Go

/11.32

The last few days have been about ‘How awesome is Mojeek?’ and ‘How shit is Bing?’ I’m finding great search results from Mojeek, and as a site search for Lucire, it’s absolutely brilliant. Blows Duck Duck Go (Bing with privacy) away, even back when DDG had a reasonably comprehensive index of our pages (before the […]

Half an hour is a long time in politics

20.07.2022/12.09

Hat tip to Johnnie Moore for this one, on Twitter earlier today. Half an hour is a long time in politics pic.twitter.com/AAIgPFhdw8 — The Secret Barrister (@BarristerSecret) July 20, 2022 You may also like A tribute to Boris Johnson I’m still doing election campaign posters, just not what you thought What’s all this Johnny Foreigner […]

Forget Duck Duck Go, Bing, and Google—I’m trying Mojeek

17.07.2022/12.27

It was disappointing to note that after switching to HTTPS, and signing on to Bing Webmaster Tools, the search engine results for those sites of ours that made the change are still severely compromised. I’ve written about searches for my own name earlier, where my personal and company sites lost their first and second positions […]

If corporate America says it, it’s probably untrue

16.07.2022/23.53

Le dernier. I see the Le Snak range has now left us, after its US owner PepsiCo cited a lack of demand. I call bullshit, since during 2021 it was becoming increasingly difficult to find them on the shelves. Throttling distribution is not the same as a lack of demand, something you see time […]

Kissing that Disqus advertising money goodbye (webmasters beware)

14.07.2022/03.21

I’m going to have to write off what Disqus owes us. No response to this thread, and no response to a DM I sent at their request. Please DM us your account name and site shortname and we will be happy to look into this for you. — DisqusSupport (@DisqusSupport) July 8, 2022 I assume […]

I’m not the Jack Yan running for mayor of Toronto

11.07.2022/23.34

As far as coincidences go, this was unexpected. To readers from Toronto, and anyone else emailing me about this, I’m not the guy running for mayor there. I realize I’m way more likely to come up in searches for my name and for my name with mayor or mayoral candidate, since my namesake doesn’t […]

They’re brainwashed by the cult of Boris, so the next Tory leader will be an ideologue

10.07.2022/10.35

Sean O’Grady puts into his opinion piece what so many of us have said. He does it far better than I could. They backed Johnson through the Dominic Cummings scandal, through the resignations of two ethics advisers, through the scandal of a party donor paying for the decoration of his flat, through the mishandling of […]

The next lot to be removed: Disqus

08.07.2022/05.43

Years ago, we removed the Facebook widgets from Lucire’s pages. Last year, there were Instagram’s and Twitter’s turns, after each of those platforms locked us out (though later we regained access, and in Twitter’s case we issued a veiled threat to their lawyers). Last night, it was Disqus’s turn as we removed the commenting […]

Facebook saves private medical information despite saying it gets scrubbed

02.07.2022/11.37

As embedding from Mastodon is not working tonight, I’ll copy and paste Per Axbom’s post: Nice bit of reporting from Swedish Radio. They built an online fake pharmacy and activated Facebook advertising tools. Thousands of simulated visits to the pharmacy were made each day, and the reporters could see all the sensitive, personal information being […]