Ben Daubney has an excellent post titled ‘The web used to be a reliable library. AI has ruined it.’ A real-life Duck Duck Go (Bing) search he ran netted him six “AI slop” entries in the top 10, and I’m betting that Google isn’t any better. If search engines had kept up with the game, […]
Tag: cellphone
Online history lesson
It took a couple of days’ tweaking, but the Wordpress part of Jack Yan & Associates’ website now (nearly) matches the new template on the home page, T&Cs and contact page. This was a tricky one due to the conflicts between the BootstrapMade template and the standard Understrap one for Wordpress. Also debatable is […]
The newer the tech, the slower the site
So far I’ve had two people feed back about the site redesign and it’s positive. One friend in the US noticed that the site ran slower for him than before, which is very astute of him: he’s absolutely right because it seems the newer the tech, the slower things go. Bit like banking. I’ve had […]
Your preferences mean nothing to Google or Microsoft
I could just repeat my post from January 26. Let’s face it, Google is a notorious spammer, with a failing search engine, and an advertising business that’s a decent negligence lawsuit away from collapsing. It was 2011 when I showed everyone that your opt-out settings in Google Ads Preferences Manager were meaningless. Today, your email […]
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Startpage isn’t what I thought it was—but then Google does the opposite to what you think
Startpage says it licenses Google’s results but gives us privacy. So, if you want Google-level, Google-biased results, but don’t want their tracking, you use Startpage. Um, no. Let’s just take a random search for a screenwriter I once mentioned on this blog: It’s quite a bit slower than Google, too. The results are […]
Xiaomi’s tiny idiosyncracies
There were a few surprises switching to Xiaomi. First up, it asked me to do a voice identification by saying these four words, 小爱同學. Only thing is, it doesn’t understand Cantonese. The default weather app was able to give me details based on exactly where I am (location service turned on, and I […]
Some surprises on day one with the Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 5G
Top: Decent enough specs for the Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 5G. Above: Very respectable download speeds (in the header) as the phone updates 71 apps. My Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 5G is here, and it’s proved better than the reviews suggested. First up, kudos to the seller, YouGeek on Aliexpress, who not only […]
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Xiaomi’s confusing nomenclature
I’m starting to understand Xiaomi’s naming conventions but it’s a mess, especially coming from a marketer’s point of view. I ordered the Note 9, which is superior to the 9. So far so good. But what I’m getting is not what’s called the Note 9 here (or in any export market, from what […]
What succeeds my Meizu M6 Note?
My Meizu M6 Note has had to be retired, due to an expanding battery, something which I probably shouldn’t have tolerated for so long (it began happening months ago). I only made the call to stop using it last week after the volume buttons could no longer function, and I probably should have stopped […]
Refreshing the less oft-seen pages on Lucire’s website
A decade separates these two incarnations of Lucire’s shopping home page. Some Facebook gadgets were added during the 2010s and the magazine cover was updated, but it was woefully out of date and needed to be refreshed. It’s very unusual for us to go into the less-frequented pages in Lucire and adapt them to […]
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