What Vodafone’s Super Wifi is really like in practice

While I saw Vodafone’s Super Wifi commercials, I never thought to act on them, since (mistakenly) I thought it was something to do with cellphones. Might have been the gadgets they used in the commercial.    But, after talking to Raghu, their sales’ rep in Pune, a city outside of Mumbai that I know well, […]

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Computing in 2021: Gmail’s advertorial spammers, Facebook bots, and Twitter fatigue

I’m not entirely sure I need to block out the email addresses here since they’re likely to be burner Gmail accounts, but I’ll give these spammers the courtesy they don’t deserve.    As shown below, they’ve been coming for over a year; there’s a chance I may have even received them in 2019.     […]

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All you need is one NewTumbl user to undo management goodwill

This is a comment (with my reply, in reverse chronology) from a NewTumbl user, Thewonderfulo, who often posts about the site’s rating system. I’ve no idea if it’s official, but it certainly passes itself off as authoritative.    I usually find myself agreeing with them but here’s a prime example where I don’t—because, first, I […]

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Is NewTumbl hiding posts critical of it?

Postscript: Alex, who maintains three spaces on NewTumbl, can still see my “missing” five posts. In addition, NewTumbl has responded and it’s believed there was a bug. More on that here. This is interesting: talking to Bii on Twitter, who is also a NewTumbl user, I discovered that he can’t see my last five posts […]

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Searching for Murray Smith

Earlier today Strangers, the 1978 TV series created by Murray Smith, came to mind. Smith created and wrote many episodes of one of my favourite TV series, The Paradise Club (which to this day has no DVD release due to the music rights), and penned an entertaining miniseries Frederick Forsyth Presents (the first time that […]

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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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Looks like Twitter makes up your settings, too

Speaking of Twitter doing weird things, I checked out some of Lucire’s settings on there today, something I haven’t looked at for a long time.    I do not ever recall telling them I was in Malaysia—it’s not a country we’ve even had a correspondent in—and Estonian and Welsh were never marked as languages. I’m […]

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Two big reasons not to use Gmail

I was absolutely shocked to learn this is how Gmail works.   If I read this correctly, #Google lets more than one person use a single email address (in this case, over 200!)? How daft! Why would they do that? pic.twitter.com/KtTO6PnDEI — Jack Yan 甄爵恩 (@jackyan) September 27, 2020 PS.: This was the image linked […]

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In the 1980s, I thought society would evolve to become more efficient and smarter

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 […]

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Twitter also tracks your preferences, even after you opt out of ad customization

As with most platforms, I selected, on Twitter, that I didn’t want my advertising to be personalized. I don’t mind them making a buck, but I do mind them tracking my preferences, just as I did with Google and Facebook.    Google lied about its advertising preferences from 2009 to 2011 till yours truly busted […]

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