For the sake of our city, it’s important to take the opportunities to move forward

The late 1990s were a heady time here in Aotearoa. The web—pre-Google, pre-monopolies—was indeed the great leveller: anyone with the right skills could create something online that competed at a global level. Aotearoa, which had for years felt a little backward in time—TV shows would arrive here two to three years after they aired in […]

Read More… from For the sake of our city, it’s important to take the opportunities to move forward



Online reviews: no safeguard against piling

There is a certain satisfaction in reading statuses like this:     But at the same time it confirms what I said years ago about Google My Business and its ilk. There are no safeguards for piling. Thanks to Google’s bugs, I believe my business has a listing but it’s been nicely messed up so […]

Read More… from Online reviews: no safeguard against piling



Getting to each 1,000th model on Autocade—so far

The Tofaş Doğan, the 1,000th model entered into Autocade in 2009.   A very quick look at how long it took us to get each 1,000 models on Autocade.   0: March 8, 2008 1,000: December 21, 2009 (1 year, 9 months for first 1,000—Tofaş Doğan was the 1,000th) 2,000: December 30, 2012 (3 years […]

Read More… from Getting to each 1,000th model on Autocade—so far



Heritage

  I’m not sure why the history page about my ancestor, 甄舜河 (Gin Sun Hall), has disappeared from the family association’s page, but for others who are descended from him, here’s his pic from the Internet Archive. He lived in the late 13th century. Also from the Archive was this extract from a 1997 publication […]

Read More… from Heritage



The crunch time media face is nothing new

  Talking Points Memo showed the amounts programmatic advertising brought in to them over the last eight years. (The above graphic is from their card preview on Mastodon.) I’ve never been convinced of programmatic since no one in the ad business could ever explain it in plain language. I say just figure out what’s on […]

Read More… from The crunch time media face is nothing new



Who pioneered phone food ordering and delivery?

Not that any search engine will find this, but according to the BBC’s The Secret Genius of Modern Life (episode 2), the inventor of the phone orders for food was the Kin-Chu Café at 137 South Brand Boulevard, Glendale, Calif., in 1922 (another link here). ‘Special Delivery Service 11 A. M. to 1 A. M.—Phone […]

Read More… from Who pioneered phone food ordering and delivery?



It would be nice to get my Amazon Associates money

This has been going on for between 10 and 20 years, and I think closer to the latter. Didn’t know Jeff was this hard up for cash. I didn’t record the dialogue last time, giving them the benefit of the doubt, but since I can’t trust the buggers, I will this time. Fed in to […]

Read More… from It would be nice to get my Amazon Associates money



You never know where your interests will take you

A seven-year-old needs to figure this out: what would the Ford Escort Popular Plus be priced at if were assembled in Aotearoa?   Amanda and I were chatting about prodigies. Some young people are amazing, doing uni classes at intermediate or high-school age, or playing piano like Mozart, and while not all of us have […]

Read More… from You never know where your interests will take you



Introducing Autocade in print

  There’s a lot to report now that the news is public: Autocade is more than the online encyclopædia, it’s also a print yearbook. I’m happy to say it has been launched, after ironing out some tech issues, and there has been good interest in the new publication. You can read a bit more about […]

Read More… from Introducing Autocade in print



Refreshing the body type on the Lucire site

EB Garamond 12 on the Lucire website.   Not exactly earth-shattering news, but we’ve changed the body type on the Lucire website from Bembo to EB Garamond 12. The cut of Bembo that we had didn’t feature macronized vowels—a big omission here in Aotearoa—though most recently it was a Latvian name, Elīna Arāja, which it […]

Read More… from Refreshing the body type on the Lucire site