Here are May 2022鈥檚 images鈥aides-m茅moires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month.
Posts tagged ‘language’
May 2022 gallery
02.05.2022Tags: 1950s, 1955, 1960s, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1970s, 1971, 1974, 1976, 1977, 1980s, 1983, 1986, 2022, actress, advertisement, advertising, Alfa Romeo, Audemars Piguet, Autocar, Bertone, BL, Brazil, British Leyland, Canada, car, celebrity, Envoy, fashion, film, Germany, GM, Hollywood, humour, James Bond, language, magazine, marketing, modelling, musician, Netherlands, Opel, Panos Emporio, retro, Saab, science, Simca, Sweden, Switzerland, Triumph, Twitter, UK, USA, Vauxhall, watch
Posted in cars, culture, gallery, humour, interests, internet, marketing, Sweden, technology, UK | No Comments »
Some surprises on day one with the Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 5G
07.12.2021
Top: Decent enough specs for the Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 5G. Above: Very respectable download speeds (in the header) as the phone updates 71 apps.
My Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 5G is here, and it鈥檚 proved better than the reviews suggested.
First up, kudos to the seller, YouGeek on Aliexpress, who not only double-checked to see that I wanted the Chinese version, but was considerate enough to send me, without any prompting, a New Zealand power adapter. The wrapping was the most secure I鈥檝e ever seen from any Aliexpress vendor, like a hefty transparent Michelin man.
DHL did the delivery two days ahead of schedule, which pleased me no end.
The phone itself surprised me. I imagined 6路53 inches would be too big and 199 g too heavy, but neither has come to pass. It鈥檚 marginally taller than the outgoing Meizus but not ridiculously so, and as I have large hands, the width is fine. I haven鈥檛 noticed the weight increase, either.
The blue finish, which isn鈥檛 available on the export Note 9T 5G, is probably the best colour of the three on offer, and frankly I don鈥檛 care if the back is plastic or metal. As long as it keeps the bits inside, it鈥檚 fine.
What also isn鈥檛 on offer for export is precisely these specs: MediaTek Dimensity 800U running at a maximum of 2路4 GHz, 6 Gbyte of RAM, and 128 Gbyte of internal storage. The model code is M2007J22C.
Other surprises: it鈥檚 Android 11 (security update, October 1, 2021) running MIUI 12路5. Now, whether it was straight out of the box, I can鈥檛 swear to, since it prompted me to do an update not too long after I switched on and logged in.
It did try to get me to give a voice print to unlock its features by saying four Chinese words. Naturally I said them, but it seems Xiaomi doesn鈥檛 recognize Cantonese! The fingerprint scanner wasn鈥檛 that easy to set up鈥攊t took numerous attempts before it recognized my finger鈥攂ut I got there, and now it鈥檚 programmed, the home screen does launch quickly.
The first order of business was to take myself off ad personalization (so easy, they even take you to the screen during set-up), then download Bromite as the browser, to stop using the clumsy default; and replace Sogou keyboard with Microsoft Swiftkey. The rest was getting the apps to mirror the old phones鈥, which was pretty simple thanks to various APK sites such as APK Pure. The only one that did not function at all (a blank screen after the logo) was Instagram, but you expect Facebook, Inc. products to be buggy. An Uptodown download of a version from June 2021 solved that.
Despite what other reviewers found, I discovered that the watermark on the photos was switched off by default. I鈥檝e seen the grand total of one advertisement on the default apps, so the notion that Xiaomi is heavily ad-driven doesn鈥檛 seem to be the case with mine. There is a possibility that the combination of Chinese spec, English language, and a New Zealand IP address isn鈥檛 one that advertisers want to reach. There are far fewer app notifications than I got on the Meizus.
After updating the OS, there were 71 apps that also needed the same treatment. Those came down at lightning speeds, even on wifi, at over 20 Mbyte/s.
I鈥檝e synced my messages, call logs and contacts, though surprisingly the phone could not work out that the New Zealand 02 numbers were the same as +64 2, and those had to be manually added. The old Meizu M2 Note had no such trouble back in 2016.
The default typeface choice in MIUI is much easier on the eyes than the default Android fonts.
Interestingly, the default music player here also fails to pick up local music on an SD card, rendering it useless, much like Meizu鈥檚 (are they copying one another, to have the same bug?). Once again, it was InShot鈥檚 Music Player to the rescue, and it works fine here. Sadly, I do have to relink a lot of the album covers.
Screenshots aren鈥檛 as intuitive, as the volume control invariably appears if you do the power鈥搗olume switches鈥 combination, but a screenshot feature in the pull-down menu does the job.
The battery life is interesting, as I鈥檝e used it for about six hours since it was charged up to 100 per cent, and it fell to 65 per cent in that time. That tells me the 5,000 mAh is good for 18 hours of sustained usage, which included setting up, Bluetooth-linking it to the car and the M2 Note, running apps, using Here Maps for some navigation, and using some mobile data. I haven鈥檛 viewed any videos yet, and I don鈥檛 play any games. I鈥檒l be interested to see how it fares on a more regular day: earlier reviews had led me to believe it could last over a day. I鈥檓 sure it can without the heavy use I鈥檝e put it through in its first six hours.
I understand that with the pace of change in China, this phone, launched this week one year ago, is already obsolete, but as far as I鈥檓 concerned, I hope I鈥檓 future-proofed for another six years鈥攖hat鈥檚 how long the M2 lasted before things like its short battery life and inability to receive some calls became an issue. (And this was despite the M6 Note having come into service from 2018 with a short break to get serviced at PB.) It鈥檚 been a very pleasing first six hours, without the stress of having to put on a Chinese OS myself, and continuing to be Google-free.
Tags: 2021, advertising, Aliexpress, Aotearoa, cellphone, China, Google Android, language, Meizu, New Zealand, privacy, review, Shenzhen, technology, typography, Xiaomi
Posted in China, design, internet, New Zealand, technology | 1 Comment »
On Cantonese, for Te Papa’s Chinese Languages in Aotearoa project
26.10.2021
What a real honour to promote my reo! Thank you, Dr Grace Gassin and Te Papa for spearheading the Chinese Languages in Aotearoa project and for this incredible third instalment, where I get to speak and promote Cantonese!
Obviously I couldn鈥檛 say anything earlier, especially during Chinese Language Week, but I am extremely grateful the very distinct Chinese languages are being given their due with this project!
My participation began with Grace and I having a k艒rero last year, and how Chinese Language Week was not inclusive. The organizers of that make the mistake of equating Chinese with Mandarin, and claim that Cantonese and other tongues are dialects, which is largely like saying Gaelic is a dialect of English.
Do read more at the Te Papa blog as Grace goes into far more depth, and brings everything into the context of the history of Aotearoa.
It turns out that Grace had been thinking about this for quite some time and had already shaped ideas on recording the Chinese languages here in Aotearoa as part of her job as curator, Asian New Zealand histories. She is a fluent Hokkien speaker, a dialect we Cantos often write as Fukkien, though that can lead to unfortunate puns with Anglophones. She also has some command of Cantonese鈥攃ertainly far, far more than any Hokkien I know.
There was such an amazing crew on this, with Yong-Le Chong (who is a Cantonese speaker, incredibly learning the language from television!) directing and prompting me off-camera and Tim Hamilton as DOP鈥攑lus Grace and Daniel Crichton-Rouse from Te Papa producing and supervising. Luckily I said nice things about Tim鈥檚 work in Lucire (not knowing he would be the DOP) prior to this!
I was a bit under the weather when we filmed, having had a cough for many weeks and dodgy eggs at a caf茅 two days before. Big thanks to the crew for putting up with this and for believing me when I said it was not COVID (a test had confirmed that, and it was just before the August 2021 lockdown, when the notion of COVID in the community was unfamiliar).
My thanks to Kent Favel and Erica Harvison for their permission to film at my Alma Mater, St Mark鈥檚 Church School, and to my darling partner Amanda.
Note that the M膩ori terms in this post are only italicized because of the international readers who form the larger part of my visitors; in New Zealand these are words that are commonly used, and are not italicized.
Tags: 2021, Alma Mater, Aotearoa, blogosphere, Chinese, culture, Daniel Crichton-Rouse, Dr Grace Gassin, family, history, home, Hong Kong, identity, immigration, Jack Yan, language, museum, New Zealand, personal identity, St Mark鈥檚 Church School, Tawa, Te Papa, Tim Hamilton, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara, Yong-Le Chong, YouTube
Posted in China, culture, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Wellington | No Comments »
鍙板北闃夸集杩旈剦涓嬭瑳鑻辨枃
12.10.2021This is one of those things I have to note down otherwise it鈥檒l get lost to time. And you won’t see this mentioned during ‘Chinese Language Week’ here.
In the old country (鍙板北, or Taishan, China), when my father was a boy in the 1930s and 1940s, there were some wh膩nau in the village who had been to the United States, where his paternal grandfather had settled. When conversing with them about their experiences in foreign lands (specifically, 閲戝北), they said a few things that confused him then, but as an adult it all clicked.
One was when they spoke of their travels to 閲戝北. They claimed, 鈥樿埞闋墦閼艰埞灏捐伣鍞斿害.鈥 As a child, Dad would think, 鈥榃ow, that ship must have been massive.鈥 He knew that if someone had 鎵撻懠 in one village, the next village could hear it. Conclusion: the length of the ship between the bow and stern must be greater than the distance between two villages.
As an adult, 鈥楾he buggers tricked me. No wonder they couldn鈥檛 hear 閼 at the bow of the ship. They would have travelled in the hold!鈥
The second one was in response to, 鈥榃hat are movies like?鈥 I imagine cinemas were thin on the ground during wartime, so he could only ask those who had been to the US. Their response, 鈥樻墦鐓欏〉.鈥 Hitting smoke and dust? (Note that these have to be pronounced in Taishanese, not Cantonese, and definitely not Mandarin, for this story to make any sense.)
Again, as an adult, who wound up grasping English better than many Anglophones, he realized the old 鍙板北闃夸集 had seen westerns, where they fought Indians, or more specifically, Injuns.
The third one was, 鈥榃hat鈥檚 it like speaking English?鈥 The reply: 鈥樺﹢绫績.鈥 He never figured that out as a child鈥攊t sounded like gibberish. Again, when older, having learned English, he realized what they meant: all the same.
Bear in mind those early travellers, or immigrants who were returning to visit the old country, wouldn鈥檛 have had great jobs and learned little English. It isn鈥檛 surprising in this context that they had pidgin phrases, ones they could fool a boy with.
Tags: China, Chinese, family, history, humour, language, Taishan, Taishanese, USA, 鍙板北
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Spacing in French: figuring out how to punctuate professionally
22.09.2021With the French edition of Lucire KSA now out, we鈥檝e been hard at work on the second issue. The first was typeset by our colleagues in Cairo (with the copy subbed by me), but this time it falls on us, and I had to do a lot of research on French composition.
There are pages all over the web on this, but nothing that seems to gather it all into one location. I guess I鈥檓 adding to the din, but at least it鈥檚 somewhere where I can find it.
The issue we had today was spacing punctuation. I always knew the French space out question marks, exclamation marks, colons, and semicolons; as well as their guillemets. But by how much? And what happens to guillemets when you have a speaker who you are quoting for more than one paragraph?
The following, which will appear in the next issue of Lucire KSA in French, and also online, is demonstrative:
In online forums, it appears the spaces after opening guillemets and before closing guillemets, question marks, exclamation marks and semicolons are eighth ones. The one before the colon, however, is a full space, but a non-breaking one.
I should note that the 1938 edition of Hart鈥檚 Rules, which was my first one, suggests a full space around the guillemets.
When quoting a large passage of text, rather than put guillemets at the start of each line (which would be hard to set), the French do something similar to us. However, if a quotation continues on to a new paragraph, it doesn鈥檛 start with the usual opening guillemets (芦), but with the closing ones (禄). That 1938 Hart鈥檚 disagrees, and doesn鈥檛 make this point, other than one should begin the new paragraph with guillemets, which I deduce are opening ones.
If the full stop is part of the quotation then it appears within the guillemets; the full stop is suppressed if a comma follows in the sentence, e.g. (Hart鈥檚 example):
芦 C鈥檈st par le sang et par le fer que les 脡tats grandissent 禄, a dit Bismarck.
Sadly for us, newer Hart鈥檚 Rules (e.g. 2010) don鈥檛 go into any depth for non-English settings.
Hart鈥檚 in 1938 also says there apparently is no space before the points de suspension (ellipses), which I notice French writers observe.
Looking at competitors鈥 magazines gives no clarity. I happened to have two Vogue Paris issues in the office, from 1990 and 1995. The former adopts the same quotation marks as English, while the latter appears to have been typeset by different people who disagree on the house style.
This is my fourth language so I鈥檓 happy to read corrections from more experienced professional compositors.
Tags: 1938, 1990, 1990s, 1995, 2010, 2021, composition, Cond茅 Nast, France, Hart鈥檚 Rules, language, Lucire, Lucire KSA, Oxford University, Paris, publishing, typesetting, typography, Vogue
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The pathetic snowflakes of Big Tech
10.08.2021We all know what will happen. This is one of two fakes who have sent me a Facebook friend request this week. The first was given the all-clear despite having spam links; and no doubt this will be judged to be perfectly acceptable by Facebook. (In the meantime, a post from Lucire that featured the latest PETA 鈥榳ould rather go naked鈥 campaign was instantly removed.)
What isn鈥檛 acceptable, is, of course, criticizing them. Bob Hoffman writes (original emphases):
According to Vice, recently the Cybersecurity for Democracy project 鈥渉as revealed major flaws in Facebook political ad transparency tools and highlighted how Facebook鈥檚 algorithms were amplifying (COVID vaccine) misinformation.鈥 This should come as no surprise to anyone who has been conscious for the past few years 鈥
This week Facebook, in an act of abject unscrupulousness, suspended the accounts of several of the researchers from NYU who are leading the Cybersecurity for Democracy project and need to access Facebook to do their work. One of the researchers called Facebook鈥檚 action 鈥溾榙isgraceful鈥 at a time when the disinformation around COVID-19 and vaccines is literally costing lives.鈥
This is how weak and pathetic Facebook is. Instead of doing better (which they claim they try to do), they鈥檇 rather shut down criticism. A bit like a dictatorship.
They鈥檙e not alone, of course. In the news recently were the snowflakes of Ebay, who also can鈥檛 take a bit of criticism.
Ina and David Steiner publish a news website about ecommerce and were critical of Ebay in its latest incarnation. The CEO wasn鈥檛 happy, nor was Ebay鈥檚 head of global security, James Baugh, who began a campaign to terrorize the Steiners.
The Steiners found their fence tagged, then Ebay鈥檚 staff began sending ordering items to be sent to them, including a f艙tal pig, a mask of a bloody pig face (witnessed by a police officer), a book on surviving the death of a spouse, a package of live spiders and fly larv忙, and a sympathy wreath, among others. Then Ebay鈥檚 employees went to Boston, near where the Steiners lived, and planned to plant a tracking device on their car. The Steiners spotted the rental vehicles stalking them. Understandably, they couldn鈥檛 sleep properly, and even slept separately fearing they would be physically attacked.
It was thanks to the Steiners鈥 own efforts that they managed to get the number plate of one of the vehicles tailing them, which was then referred to police, who finally managed to figure out what was going on.
One person has been sentenced in all this mess to 18 months in prison, and there have been other arrests, though as this is the US, the CEO gets off scot free with a US$57 million golden handshake.
This isn鈥檛 that out of the ordinary, and entirely predictable for anyone who has followed this blog. Or the news, for that matter.
A few years ago, I blogged about how Elon Musk and Tesla tried to get one of its whistleblowing employees killed by telling the police that he was planning a mass shooting. According to Bloomberg Businessweek:
Many chief executive officers would try to ignore somebody like Tripp. Instead, as accounts from police, former employees, and documents produced by Tesla鈥檚 own internal investigation reveal, Musk set out to destroy him.
The employee, Martin Tripp, allegedly was hacked and followed before the attempt to have him swatted.
Former Gigafactory security manager, Sean Gouthro, said Tripp never sabotaged Tesla or hacked anything, and Musk knew this, but still wanted to damage Tripp鈥檚 reputation.
You can read more directly at the source.
My negative encounters with Big Tech, which I put down more to shoddy programming or incompetence than malice, are pretty tame.
Put together, the pattern of IP theft, censorship, inciting genocide and misinformation, and targeting individuals, is very obvious. It鈥檚 part of their culture these days, since the US keeps letting these companies do what they wish with impunity, and to heck with what anyone would reasonably think the laws actually say. And it鈥檚 not just the US: when has our Blairite government or its predecessor moved against Big Tech in any meaningful way, on taxation, or on apportioning some responsibility for their part in COVID-19 misinformation?
Meanwhile, I was amused to see this under Arthur Turnure’s entry in Wikipedia:
So Turnure starts Vogue but decides to work under an 18-year-old in another city.
The reference linked doesn’t back this up at all.
I know Wikipedia is full of crap that we can all go and correct, but as we’ve seen, shit sticks and on the internet, bullshit sticks, including one item that I’ve blogged about before that remained for over a decade.
What gets me is why someone who doesn’t know a subject would deem themselves sufficiently knowledgeable to write about it. Because I just wouldn’t dare.
As detailed before, you don’t see as many inaccuracies in the Japanese or German versions of Wikipedia, and you have to conclude, especially now with politicians doing the same thing, that the Anglosphere is increasingly an anti-intellectual place to be. ‘The fundamental problem with the English-speaking world is that ignorance is not considered a vice,’ said the brother of my friend, Prof Catherine Churchman. My earlier post from 2018 stands now more than ever.
Tags: 2019, 2020, 2021, Anglosphere, Big Tech, Bloomberg, Bob Hoffman, Boston, Cond茅 Nast, crime, Ebay, Elon Musk, English, Facebook, language, law, Massachusetts, Natick, spam, terrorism, Tesla, USA, Vogue, Wikipedia
Posted in business, culture, internet, technology, USA | No Comments »
June 2021 gallery
01.06.2021Here are June 2021鈥檚 images鈥aides-m茅moires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month.
Sources
The Guardian letter, from Twitter.
Ford Cortina Mk II pick-up made by Hyundai, referred by 臧曤彊鞖 on Twitter.
Ikea water, reposted from Twitter.
Alexa launch, reposted from Twitter.
Protest Sportswear’s women’s range for spring鈥搒ummer 2021. Read more at Lucire.
Collusion between Google and Facebook, from Bob Hoffman’s The Ad Contrarian newsletter.
Ford Falcon ESP limited edition鈥攁 familiar image to those of us who read Australian car magazines in the early 1980s. More on the Ford Falcon (XD) at Autocade.
This was the famous advertisement for the 1965 Ford Mustang, for its d茅but in April 1964 at the World’s Fair in New York. It was mentioned in Lee Iacocca’s autobiography, but I had not seen it till 2020.
Dido Harding work history, shared by James O’Brien on Twitter, possibly from The Eye.
Tags: 1960s, 1964, 1965, 1980s, 1982, 2010s, 2012, 2021, advertisement, advertising, Amazon, art, Australia, Bali, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, car, cartoon, celebrity, collusion, Donald Trump, Facebook, fashion, Ford, Google, Hawai鈥榠, history, humour, Hyundai, Instagram, Korea, language, licensing, Lucire, McKinsey & Co., Netherlands, New York, newspaper, NewTumbl, NY, oligopoly, politics, retro, technology, The Guardian, Twitter, UK, USA
Posted in cars, design, gallery, humour, internet, media, politics, publishing, technology, UK, USA | No Comments »
It’s not hard writing clear terms and conditions
25.03.2021We鈥檝e had a 鈥楬ighlights鈥 section in our T&Cs for a while, but today I thought I鈥檇 take another look at them. Without reading them again, I drafted these:
鈥 We don鈥檛 know anything about you unless you tell us.
鈥 When you do tell us stuff (like signing up with your email address) we store that offline, not on the cloud.
鈥 When you comment on our sites, we don鈥檛 see your IP address.
鈥 The businesses we work with might get data on you without us knowing because we鈥檝e used their programs. But we鈥檝e tried to work with companies in countries with stricter data laws, e.g. our feedback forms are with Aida in Germany.
鈥 We have ads on our sites, and they might pick up info about you. We recommend you opt out of ad networks setting cookies on your system through Aboutads.info and related services.
The law degree kicks in and I wasn鈥檛 quite able to replace the existing ones, but hopefully the final highlights suffice (links removed here, but they are on the page):
鈥 We don鈥檛 know anything about you unless you tell us.
鈥 When you tell us stuff (like signing up with your email address) we ultimately store that offline, not on the cloud.
鈥 When you comment on our sites, we don鈥檛 see your IP address.
鈥 We don鈥檛 have a Google Analytics account so we don鈥檛 collect stuff on our sites for that.
鈥 However, the businesses we work with might get data on you without us knowing because we鈥檝e used their programs or plug-ins. We鈥檝e tried to work with companies in countries with stricter data laws, e.g. our feedback forms are with Aida in Germany.
鈥 We have ads on some of our sites, and they might pick up info about you (e.g. through cookies). They don鈥檛 share this info with us. We recommend you opt out of ad networks setting cookies on your system (for example, click here, here or here). We also recommend you opt out of Google Analytics tracking you.
鈥 More details are below.
While there are more bollocks below these on the page, covering our arses in various situations, including historical ones, fundamentally the above is what we follow.
We used to have a record of IP addresses and we never did a thing with them, and when our servers were rejigged in 2013, we stopped collecting them. I鈥檓 sure some plug-ins on the sites know what they are, and they鈥檙e bound to be in the logs, but no one here has the time to look at them. I don鈥檛 think anyone鈥檚 peered that those logs (save for debugging) for over two decades.
Anyone who鈥檚 read this blog knows why I don鈥檛 have a Google Analytics account, and long may it remain that way. I seem to recall finding a way to make sure I could never access that part of the Google Dashboard when I was granted access to Medinge鈥檚 analytics. We鈥檝e none of our own.
I do know what pages are popular on the sites but that鈥檚 from aggregated data. And frankly, that鈥檚 all I need to know.
It鈥檚 really how I expect to be treated by others and it鈥檚 not that hard to do this online. Who needs complicated T&Cs which even the company can鈥檛 follow? Strip away the jargon, and both you and we win.
Tags: 2020s, 2021, Jack Yan & Associates, language, law, privacy
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