The crunch time media face is nothing new

07.03.2024/21.32

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 […]

Check your security settings when putting a Mediawiki installation behind Cloudflare

20.02.2024/10.33

Some great advice from Cybarbie on Mastodon about Cloudflare and my putting Autocade behind it: Sure enough, after following her advice, I saw the numbers improve after a 9,000-page-view day, to two consecutive days of 11,000. Visitor numbers have increased from c. 5,500 to 6,490 in a 24-hour period: This […]

Is Google stealing your voice for its virtual assistant? Meanwhile, Mktg Stinx

05.02.2024/09.27

Here’s Google’s latest privacy gaffe, the latest in a long, long line where they pretend to not know it’s happening till they’re embarrassed into admitting that it is happening—and then the authorities will fine Google millions of dollars which they will make back in a few hours. Ibly writes in a post on the fediverse […]

Tech musings from a non-tech: search engines and the nightmare of AWS

03.02.2024/01.23

A great quote from Penn Jillette in Cracked: Einstein comes up with this idea E = mc² — a profound, powerful, mind-blowing idea — and he has to work forever to make people understand that and to share that reality. Woodward and Bernstein are pretty sure the president of the United States committed crimes, and […]

Robert Vanwey on whom to boycott

28.01.2024/23.25

It’s hard to find fault with Robert Vanwey’s ‘Who to Boycott’, subtitled ‘There are some in business who treat workers like property’. Note: for those who don’t like Substack, you might not wish to click through. But I gave my word to Rob I would link it because I was impressed by his thinking and […]

First customer copy off the press

26.12.2023/10.56

They’re out there in the wild now. Stewart Sims was our first Autocade Yearbook customer and he’s just posted photos of his copy on Mastodon. Thank you, Stewart! PS.: Flâneur over at that other site had also posted his copy. Thank you! You may also like Introducing Autocade in print Business etiquette […]

Two days wasted thanks to Asus ROG Armoury Crate

08.12.2023/13.29

I’m recording this in case it happens to others. Yesterday, Windows 11 began to hang. Not in the traditional sense where everything froze. I had about a minute where things worked. I could open Vivaldi and Eudora, and within those I could still do some things. Eudora was pretty stable, which is a sign of […]

When anti-capitalists love billionaires

29.11.2023/12.20

Ka wehi ta ratou kaupapa here, ko hiahia kōrero te reo Māori ahau. People are waking up to how bad Google has become, if posts on Mastodon are any indication. What’s disappointing are the replies, usually saying they have switched to Duck Duck Go because it’s so much better, and others saying Kagi is […]

As Mastodon starts to mainstream, welcome to the end of social

03.11.2023/01.59

My Mastodon feed is full of US politics and American football. I could use lists or mute keywords, but neither seems to be an ideal solution. I thought it had been agreed by most users when the influx happened that political posts would have content warnings, because there was a desire not to re-create OnlyKlans. […]

The history of the ITC white Jaguar Mk I, recovered

24.10.2023/02.00

In a Mastodon conversation, Andrew Ryan (well known to many car aficionados as ‘The Car Factoids’) reminded me of the infamous ITC white Jag—the Jaguar Mk I that plunges into a quarry, originally filmed for The Baron. I wanted to share with him a page to which I had contributed that included all the […]