After 21–2 years, we’ve redone the links’ pages on the Jack Yan & Associates website. The old template dated from 2002, and, oddly, while cellphone browsers from a decade ago could by default enlarge the type to suit, modern ones can’t. (I’m still waiting for the software developers to incorporate the Bitstream technology from the […]
Read More… from Bringing the JY&A links’ pages into the 2020s
I like technology. I don’t hate technology. But I hate what a bunch of idiots have done with technology. You’d be forgiven for thinking I was referring to the mass misinformation-authoring that used my name over the last three months, but, frankly, this level of technological misuse is everywhere in various forms. Take today, when […]
Read More… from To those who take technology and make life harder: you’re doing it wrong
After 10 years, it was time for a new template for my personal site—I think it’s only the third in 21 years. Ten years is a long time on the web, and the previous template hadn’t been up to snuff for a long time. But there’s always the issue of finding time—which, thanks to Easter, […]
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 […]
After all these experiences, I really shouldn’t be surprised that computers and their programs are so forgetful, and the same applies to cellphones. But of course it happened again today, undoing three weeks’ work. I don’t know if this is hardware- or software-related, but all I ask of people who make this stuff is […]
Read More… from There go three weeks of ‘Changes saved’: another forgetful piece of software
Off to PB. The M6 Note was under warranty after all, so it’s now with PB Technologies’ service department in Wellington, after I explained it could have trouble doing read–write operations and the tech saw the camera and gallery hang (usually they just shut themselves down). I paid over NZ$400 for the phone including GST, […]
Motorola This is a take that will probably never come true, but hear me out: this is the end of the cellphone era. We’ve had a pandemic where people were forced to be at home. Whilst there, they’ve discovered that they can be productive on their home desktop machines, doing Zoom and Skype meetings, […]
Almost three screens of apps, none of which require Google. I had a good discussion on Twitter today with Peter Lambrechtsen, and if you want to have a peek, it’s here. He’s a really decent guy who makes some good points. But it does annoy me that my partner, whose phone is a stock standard […]
Read More… from I prefer the 99 per cent who don’t rely on Google
Growing up in a relatively wealthy country in the 1980s, after getting through most of the 1970s, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the world would just keep getting better and things would make more sense as humans evolved. From a teenager’s perspective: home computers, with a modulator–demodulator (modem), could bring you information instantaneously […]
Read More… from In the 1980s, I thought society would evolve to become more efficient and smarter
Over the last few years, I’ve had some USB memory sticks go bad. There was one particular type—a cheap one from the Warehouse—that failed once on Windows 10. The error was ‘The last USB device you connected to this computer malfunctioned, and Windows does not recognize it.’ The problem was that any other USB stick […]