Now we are on the new server, here are March 2022âs imagesâaides-mĂ©moires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month.
Posts tagged ‘photography’
March 2022 gallery
28.03.2022Tags: 1960s, 1965, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2016, 2022, Abercrombie & Fitch, actress, advertisement, Aston Martin, Australia, BL, BMC, car, celebrity, Citroën, design, employment, fashion, film, Ford, France, humour, Instagram, James Bond, Lucire, Lucire KSA, magazine, marketing, Mini, music, Nissan, photography, PSA, publishing, Renault, sexism, South Africa, TV, Twitter, typography, UK, USA
Posted in cars, culture, design, France, gallery, humour, marketing, media, publishing, TV, typography, UK, USA | No Comments »
January 2022 gallery
01.01.2022Here are January 2022âs imagesâaides-mĂ©moires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month.
Notes
More on the Ford Falcon (XA) in Autocade. Reposted from Twitter.
TaupĆ Plimmerton summer sunset, photographed by me.
BBC parody news item, via Twitter.
More on the Wolseley on Autocade.
More on the Mitsubishi Colt Galant at Autocade.
Dodge 1500 advertisement via George Cochrane on Twitter.
Model Alexa Breit in a bikini, via Instagram.
More on the Renault 17 in Autocade.
More on the Renault 20 in Autocade.
More on the Renault Mégane IV in Autocade.
âSign not in use’ posted by John on Twitter.
Asus ROG Strix G17 G713QE-RTX3050Ti, at Asus’s Singapore website.
Pizza Express Woking parody still, via Twitter.
Tags: 1960s, 1965, 1970s, 1971, 1975, 1976, 2020, 2020s, 2022, advertisement, airline, Aotearoa, Argentina, Asus, Australia, Autocade, Autocar, BBC, BL, British Leyland, car, Chrysler, computing, Dodge, electric cars, England, film, Ford, Germany, humour, Instagram, James Bond, Japan, marketing, media, Mitsubishi, modelling, New Zealand, news, parody, photography, Plimmerton, Porirua, Renault, retro, Taiwan, Twitter, UK, USA, Wellington
Posted in cars, gallery, humour, interests, internet, marketing, media, New Zealand, politics, UK, USA, Wellington | No Comments »
December 2021 gallery
01.12.2021Here are December 2021âs imagesâaides-mĂ©moires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month.
Notes
Roger Moore and Ford Fiesta Mk I, via George Cochrane on Twitter.
More on the Volkswagen Fox in Autocade.
More on the Ford Consul Corsair at Autocade.
The Guardian article excerpt, full story here.
The devil drives Kia? Reposted from Twitter.
Audi maths on an A3, via Richard Porteous on Twitter.
Christmas decoration, via Rob Ritchie on Twitter.
Back to the â70s: Holden Sandman used for Panhead Sandman craft beer promotions.
GeorgiaâPacific panelling promotions, 1968, via Wendy O’Rourke on Twitter.
Ford Cortina Mk II US advertisement via the Car Factoids on Twitter.
Bridal fashion by Luna Novias, recently featured in Lucire.
Deborah Grant in UFO, with the VWâPorsche 914, which would have looked very modern at the time.
Freeze frame from episode 1 of The Champions (1968), with William Gaunt, Stuart Damon and Alexandra Bastedo.
Our rejected greeting card design, with a picture shot at Oriental Parade, Wellington.
Ford Taunus GT brochure spread via the Car Factoids on Twitter.
My Daddy Is a Giant image and UK measures, reposted from Twitter.
Richard Nixon attempts to appeal to younger voters, 1972. Simple, modernist design using Futura Bold.
A 1983 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am advertisement.
Mazda Savanna brochure via George Cochrane on Twitter.
More on the Renault Mégane E-Tech Electric in Autocade.
Lucire issue 44 cover, photographed by Lindsay Adler, layout by me.
Tags: 1960s, 1963, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1970s, 1971, 1972, 1980s, 1983, 1988, 2000s, 2006, 2021, actor, actress, advertising, Aotearoa, Audi, book, Brazil, car, celebrity, Christmas, COVID-19, design, election, electric cars, fashion, fashion magazine, film, Ford, GeorgiaâPacific, GM, graphic design, Holden, humour, ITC, Japan, JY&A Media, Kia, Lindsay Adler, Lucire, magazine, marketing, Mazda, media, modernism, New Zealand, newspaper, Norway, photography, politics, Pontiac, Porsche, Renault, Roger Moore, The Guardian, TV, Twitter, typography, UK, USA, Volkswagen, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara
Posted in cars, culture, design, gallery, humour, interests, media, New Zealand, politics, publishing, TV, typography, UK, USA, Wellington | No Comments »
All you need is one NewTumbl user to undo management goodwill
14.01.2021This is a comment (with my reply, in reverse chronology) from a NewTumbl user, Thewonderfulo, who often posts about the siteâs rating system. Iâve no idea if itâs official, but it certainly passes itself off as authoritative.
I usually find myself agreeing with them but hereâs a prime example where I donâtâbecause, first, I canât see anything in the NewTumbl rules that confirms this (excepting one sentence below which Iâll get on to); secondly, NewTumbl has told me of some of their positions personally and I feel theyâve confirmed my position; and thirdly, if bare behinds can be seen in PG-13 films (including in their country), then a single ‘buttcheek’ is even less offensive and couldnât possibly be M, which is where NewTumbl classifies nudity.
There is one sentence under the O category (âOfficeâ, or safe for work): âImages that would be considered sultry or provocative qualify as O provided the people in the photo have both their tops and bottoms covered â not just hidden from view, but actually wearing clothes.â Weâd then have to argue about how much âcoverageâ there is, and here Iâd fall back on being alive for nearly five decades and having kept my eyes open about popular culture. Swimwear, for instance, provides acceptable coverage which wouldnât offend most of us in the occident. From memory thatâs the level of skin the post in question was dealing with.
Itâs exactly as I said in my last post on NewTumbl. I love the concept, and the people who run the site, but the moderators are in some sort of Handmaidâs Tale Gilead. In fact, Iâd venture to say that Tumblr wouldnât consider a buttock to be offensive enough for removal. Given NewTumblâs history, as a Tumblr alternative that would be more tolerant, I believe that the moderators really donât understand the whole picture, and where the lines should be drawn.
To think, after chatting directly to NewTumbl I was feeling a bit more chipper about the site, only to have a one-sentence comment and zero willingness to engage by a user who is, I fear, typical of the âstandardsâ that are actually being applied by the overenthused American puritans.
Incidentally, speaking of Americans, the sort of divisive talk that they are infamous for is all too present. Have a look at the thread from my earlier post. Frankly, if they have a problem with a buttock on a woman who is actually wearing clothes, while this sort of mudslinging is fine on a family-friendly post, then I wonât be in a hurry to return. Sorry.
Tags: blogosphere, culture, internet, NewTumbl, photography, USA, Web 2·0
Posted in culture, internet, politics, USA | 3 Comments »
November 2020 gallery
28.11.2020Now that I have an image gallery plug-in (New Image Gallery) for the miscellaneous stuff that normally goes on NewTumbl, the question is whether these should appear as posts or pages. Let’s try posts to begin with, as I’m not yet sure that I want dozens of individual pages (which to me are top-level items in Wordpress). My previous blog post here outlined why I’m experimenting with this. This post will be updated as the gallery is updated.
Image sources are there in WordpressâI need to find a way to make them show when you click on the image. I may need to hack the PHP. We shall see.
Tags: 1980s, 2000s, 2020, Autocade, BBC, blogosphere, car, Doctor Who, Ford, humour, Mazda, NewTumbl, photography, Toyota, TV, Twitter
Posted in cars, culture, gallery, internet, TV, UK | 3 Comments »
The first world problems of the cellphone (lockdown edition)
09.05.2020
This Pukerua Bay Tardis was the last thing I shot before the cellphone’s camera and gallery failed
First world problems: the cellphone. Right now my partner and I have half a phone each, so between us, we have one phone. She can receive calls on hers but no one can hear her answer. Mine no longer rings but you can hear me speak. So I guess the way to communicate with us, while there are no repairers within easy reach during Level 3, is to call her, we note down the number, and one of us calls you back on my phone. Oh, and neither of us can take photos any more: hers has had an issue with SD cards from quite early on, and mine developed an inability to function as a camera last week.
Iâm not that bothered, really. Iâve no real desire to get a new one and while itâs a shame to lose a very good camera, one wonders whether I should just get a camera. After all, those last longer than a mere 18 months âŠ
The fault on my Meizu M6 Note isnât easily explained. Iâve spotted similar errors online, solved by deleting the app cache or app data. That doesnât work for me. The camera crashes on opening, as does the downloadsâ folder. The gallery is a grey, translucent screen that does or doesnât crash eventually. The stock music and video apps cannot find anything, though the stock file manager and ES File Explorer tell me that everything is there, and the music and video files play.
Iâve not lost any important dataâIâve always backed up regularlyâand Iâve transferred everything off the SD card, including all SMSs and contacts, as well as photos.
PB (who sold my phone) says this is a software issue (avoiding a warranty claim) but Iâm sensing that the phone is crapping out whenever itâs trying to write to one of its disks. That sounds like hardware to me. I can transfer files via ES File Explorer but it crashes immediately after the transfer. It doesnât appear to be the SD card, as when I unmount it, it makes no difference.
Meizu has been useless: no forum answers and no customer-service answers, though I did contact them during the CCP Workersâ Day holiday and mainland China was, it appears, shut.
Iâd go back to my old phone but the only way to charge it is to drive to Johnsonville and ask the repair shop to charge itâthatâs been the only way since they repaired the screen last year. They claim they havenât altered the charging mechanism, but since no charger in this house works, not even a new one, I canât explain why this is. The techs there are mum because it would be giving away a trade secret, I suspect. It seems I need a special charger since the manufacturerâs one is no longer compatible, and, guess what? I bet you the repairer will sell me one at some ridiculous price.
But for now it is rather inconvenient, making me wonder: just why on earth do we need a cellphone anyway, when we have perfectly adequate land lines, when they become this much of a nuisance? They are frightfully expensive for little, fragile trinkets that I now increasingly use for just calling and not apps. There is no utility to a phone that can only be charged at one location, and there is no utility to the newer phone to which no one has posted a ready solution.
Last night, I reset the newer unit to factory settings, and, happily, none of the Google BS returned. Maybe it was software. I still canât do any updating with Meizuâs official patches, which is annoying. But for that brief, glorious period, I could take photos again. The camera, gallery and downloadsâ folder would open.
I did have to find, with some difficulty, the Chinese version of the Meizu app store, since I never saved the APK separately. This at least allowed me to get some of the Chinese apps not available on Meizuâs western app store. It was a shame to see some of the apps I once had no longer in the catalogue; presumably, the licence had expired.
And there I was, for about five or six hours reconfiguring everything, and Iâm now suspecting that I should not have put the thing into developer mode or downloaded Whatsapp. Those were the last things I did, content that all was well, before waking up this morning to find myself back to square one, with the bugs all returned. The log files tell me nothing other than Meizuâs servers not responding properly (theyâve been getting progressively worse supporting people outside China).
I never wanted Whatsapp but for one friend formerly in Germany, and one of Dadâs friends in Hong Kong. The former has moved back here and can be reached on Facebook, accessible via a basic browser. And sadly, I doubt I will hear much from the latter now that Dad has passed away. He knows my regular number anyway, and if I had a cellphone that rings, maybe he could call it.
Since Whatsapp and Instagram are owned by Facebook, it would not surprise me if both were becoming less and less compatible with Android v. 7, and Iâve charted Instagramâs increasing, Facebook-era faults on this blog before. If Facebook canât get its basics right on its flagship site, then why should I have their crap in my pocket?
Generally, I could live without it. Maybe tomorrow night Iâll give the reset another go. Iâve saved most of the APKs from this round, and it was a good opportunity to do without some apps that I seldom used. But I already lost a day to it earlier in the week, a night to it last night, and I face the prospect of more hours to come. These things are not productive when they take up this much time. And I donât like typing on tiny keyboards, I do absolutely zero work on them other than calls since it is impossible to compose a logical email (which you then have to somehow sync back to the desktop to maintain a full, professional record, wasting even more time), and they serve only a narrow range of purposes, photography being one. Iâm still quicker looking at a paper map than relying on a device.
However, I donât like faulty gadgets that have cost me hundreds of dollars, and since a reset solved the problems for a few hours, it might be worth one more shot to at least bring things closer to normal, useful or not. Letâs at least have that camera and music back.
Tags: 2010s, 2020, bugs, cellphone, China, COVID-19, Doctor Who, Facebook, Google Android, Meizu, photography, software, technology, Vodafone, Whatsapp
Posted in China, New Zealand, technology, Wellington | 2 Comments »
Facebook exploits COVID-19 for profit, and viral thoughts
01.05.2020A lot of the world’s population has come together in the fight against COVID-19. Except Facebook, of course, who is exploiting the virus for profit. Facebook has done well in the first quarter of 2020 with positive earnings. Freedom From Facebook & Google co-chairs Sarah Miller and David Segal note (the links are theirs): ‘Facebook has exploited a global pandemic to grow their monopoly and bottom line. Theyâve profited from ads boasting fake cures and harmful information, allowed ad targeting to âpseudoscienceâ audiences, permitted anti-stay-at-home protests to organize on the platform, and are now launching a COVID âData for Goodâ endeavour to harvest even more of our personal information.
âMake no mistake, Facebook having more of your data is never âgood”, nor will they just relinquish the collected data when the pandemicâs curve has been flattened. Rather, theyâll bank it and continue to profit from hyper-targeted ads for years to come.’
It’s been a few weeks (April 19 was my last post on this subject) since I last crunched these numbers but it does appear that overall, COVID-19 infections as a percentage of tests done are dropping, several countries excepting. Here is the source.
France 167,178 of 724,574 = 23·07%
UK 171,253 of 901,905 = 18·99%
Sweden 21,092 of 119,500 = 17·65%
USA 1,095,304 of 6,391,887 = 17·14%
Spain 239,639 of 1,455,306 = 16·47%
Singapore 17,101 of 143,919 = 11·88%
KSA 22,753 of 200,000 = 11·38%
Switzerland 29,586 of 266,200 = 11·11%
Italy 205,463 of 1,979,217 = 10·38%
Germany 163,009 of 2,547,052 = 6·40%
South Korea 10,774 of 623,069 = 1·73%
Australia 6,766 of 581,941 = 1·16%
New Zealand 1,479 of 139,898 = 1·06%
Taiwan 429 of 63,340 = 0·68%
Hong Kong 1,038 of 154,989 = 0·67%
Emmerdale fans will never forgive me. I’ve not been one to watch British soaps, finding them uninteresting. However, in this household, we have had Emmerdale on since it’s scheduled between TV1âs midday bulletin and the 1 p.m. government press conference on COVID-19, or, as some of us call it, The Ashley Bloomfield Show, named for our director-general of health who not only has to put up with all of this, but took a hit to one-fifth of his pay cheque. Naturally, one sings along to the Emmerdale theme, except I have no clue about its lyrics. Are there lyrics?
Never used to leave the TV on for #Emmerdale, but with #COVID19 I doâand like many, I sing along:
Who the hell cares what goes on at that farm?
Donât really know who has come to some harm.
Whatever you see, thereâs no cause for alarm,
When we peer in the lives of Emmerdale.— Jack Yan çç”æ© (@jackyan) May 1, 2020
Not a single like on Twitter or Mastodon. I’ve offended a heck of a lot of people.
We are supposedly at Level 3, which someone said was Level 4 (the full lockdown) with takeaways. However, we’ve gone from the 1960s-style near-empty motorways to this almost immediately.
It was pretty bad, crawling along. pic.twitter.com/GrkT0TmgoS
— Jack Yan çç”æ© (@jackyan) April 29, 2020
Tags: 2020, Aotearoa, COVID-19, deception, exploitation, Facebook, health, humour, ITV, Mastodon, media, music, New Zealand, news, photography, privacy, statistics, TVNZ, Twitter, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara
Posted in business, culture, humour, internet, media, New Zealand, TV, Wellington | No Comments »