First night

16.09.2019/14.20

Forty-three years ago (September 16, 1976), we arrived in this country. As we flew from Sydney and into Wellington, my Dad pointed out the houses below to me. ‘See, those are the sorts of houses New Zealanders live in,’ he said. I thought it was odd they lived in two-storey homes and not apartment […]

An expat’s thoughts about Hong Kong

01.09.2019/22.32

Studio Incendo/Creative Commons 2·0 As an expat, I’ve been asked a few times about what I think of the Hong Kong protests. There’s no straight answer to this. Here are a few thoughts, in no particular order. The British never gave us universal suffrage, so the notion that it was all roses before 1997 is […]

Huawei without Google: isn’t that a good thing?

21.05.2019/08.39

I see Google’s going to stop supporting Huawei as a developer. How is this a bad thing? First, Huawei can still get the public parts of Android, since they’re open-source. Secondly, if they don’t get updates ahead of time, so what? When have western software companies rolled out bug-free updates? Based on my own […]

The newer the Instagram, the clunkier the video

07.12.2018/06.48

It’s been nearly one week with the new Meizu M6 Note. It’s the “international” model, which means it’s not Chinese-spec, and there was no way to turn it into a Chinese one. One observation is that the international one is far buggier than the Chinese one. Either that, or Android 7 is far […]

Meizu’s made it harder to switch OSes and root the M6 Note—at least I managed the latter

01.12.2018/11.36

Above: If phones were sentient beings, it probably is a bit mean to have the old phone take a photo of its successor. After a drop to the ground (and by that I mean the hard floor at the local Pak ’n’ Save) produced lines on the screen of my old Meizu M2 Note, I […]

Don’t group Chinese New Zealanders into one faceless bunch

18.10.2018/22.30

Some visiting Australian friends have said that they are finding New Zealand politics as interesting as their own, although I don’t think this was meant as a compliment. Those of us in New Zealand had a few days of House of Cards-lite intrigue, in that it was stirred up by a conservative whip, in an […]

Google censors at every level—it’s just what they do

11.10.2018/08.04

As my final post on Google Plus, I posted the Murdoch Press article on how the company exposed user data between 2015 and 2018, choosing not to disclose it publicly for fear of regulatory scrutiny and damage to its reputation. How interesting to note that it has now been removed twice by the powers […]

The easy-to-spot signs of the social media racist

02.10.2018/11.39

As Twitter (and other social media) descend, what’s been interesting is seeing how many of us Kiwis aren’t being terribly original. No, I don’t exactly mean Dr Don Brash thinking that he can import US-style division into New Zealand wholesale without understanding the underlying forces that helped Donald Trump secure their presidency (in which case […]

Eighty-three today with Alzheimer’s: a caregiver’s viewpoint

15.08.2018/10.45

Above: Dementia Wellington’s support has been invaluable. Today my father turned 83. It’s a tough life that began during the Sino–Japanese War, with his father being away in the army, and his mother and grandmother were left to raise the family on their land in Taishan, China. In 1949, the Communists seized the […]

The end of US ’net neutrality: another step toward the corporate internet

11.06.2018/23.20

Elijah van der Giessen/Open Media/Creative Commons That’s it for ’net neutrality in the US. The FCC has changed the rules, so their ISPs can throttle certain sites’ traffic. They can conceivably charge more for Americans visiting certain websites, too. It’s not a most pessimistic scenario: ISPs have attempted this behaviour before. It’s another step […]