Facebook prefers bots

If I was on Facebook for personal stuff, I’m certain I could repeat those days where I found over 200 bots per day, but these days I’m only reporting the ones that hit groups or client pages.    However, I’d say over 90 per cent of the applicants to one of the groups are bots […]

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Payoneer frustrates and sends you round in circles

I can safely say that I wouldn’t choose Payoneer as a payment service. As I told in their forums today as a last resort, after already spending hours (in the plural!) on this. This has been deeply frustrating and here I am telling the story for the fifth time, since Payoneer stores none of my […]

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Reaching the end of Facebook

With the new season of Alarm für Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei nearly upon us, I decided I’d pop into my Facebook group (I’m still an admin) to see what had been happening. I’ve been there a few times this week and I have discovered some of the site’s latest features.    Groups: these now have […]

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After you’ve gone through the brands you’ve heard of …

The mouse quest continues. After going through all of PB’s listings and coming up short—nothing (at least with listed dimensions) matched or came close to the size and shape of the Microsoft Intellimouse 1.1—I returned to Aliexpress for another look.    This Tecknet mouse might be the right one, but it’s hard to say till […]

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Microsoft’s revived Intellimouse isn’t a successor to the old

How I had such high hopes that the Microsoft Intellimouse Pro Special Edition bought at Noël Leeming would be a successor to my Intellimouse 1.1. The short version: it isn’t.    It might be a successor to the Intellimouse Explorer 3 on which the shape is modelled, but for those of us who prefer symmetrical […]

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One more COVID-19 post: graphing and animating the data

Russell Brown linked this COVID-19 trend page by Aatish Bhatia on his Twitter recently, and it’s another way to visualize the data. There are two axes: new confirmed cases (over the past week) on the y and total confirmed cases on the x. It’s very useful to see how countries are performing over time as […]

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Twelve things I do to keep balanced while working from home

When I was 13, my father became self-employed after being made redundant at his work. By choice, my mother did the same when I was in my early 20s. They both loved the lifestyle and I imagine it was inevitable I would do the same in my career, beginning at a time when I was […]

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Don’t rely on an algorithm to choose your brand ambassadors

Here’s a cautionary tale found by Lucire travel editor Stanley Moss. His words: ‘Photographer Dmitry Kostyukov recently experienced a rich dialogue with an algorithm belonging to a Scandinavian swimwear company. He’d been auto-mistaken for a Y chromosome, and digitally invited to become a brand ambassador. Dmitry accepted, and received the sample suit of his choice, […]

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Asus ROG Strix Evolve: a gaming mouse for a non-gamer

My early 2000s Microsoft Intellimouse 1·1 is still the perfect shape for me. After getting the second-hand one into service last year, I thought that I needed a spare. I’ve several other mice, including no-brand ones, that are a decent size, but I got used to having the forward and back buttons on either side. […]

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Returning to Firefox?

I wonder if it’s time to return to Firefox after an absence of two years and five months. After getting the new monitor, the higher res makes Firefox’s and Opera GX’s text rendering fairly similar (though Chrome, Vivaldi and Edge remain oddly poor, and Vivaldi’s tech people haven’t been able to replicate my bug). There’s […]

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