When dead trees beat the internet

02.05.2025/10.30

Ben Daubney has an excellent post titled ‘The web used to be a reliable library. AI has ruined it.’ A real-life Duck Duck Go (Bing) search he ran netted him six “AI slop” entries in the top 10, and I’m betting that Google isn’t any better. If search engines had kept up with the game, […]

The end of US free shipping at Libriz (hopefully just for now)

01.03.2025/12.36

US currency. Photograph by Engin Akyurt/Unsplash.

With regret, we’ve had to remove free postage for US customers at Libriz. The price had shot up considerably for us, and those of you who have been checking out the site will know that this was carried out last week, and has nothing to do with a certain meeting at the White House. Compounding […]

Forgetting humanity: the desperation of tech

28.09.2024/11.19

Computer-generated image of people at the Museum of the Future, photographed by the author. The people appear on a screen but in broken form, appearing as a collection of blue, lit pixels against a black background.

How very interesting to see that the disinformation posts about me have stopped going up since I called out Semrush on their own subreddit. For four days I’ve not found any new ones on Google. The timing tells me that Semrush can, contrary to its response, adjust keywords, especially after learning the sheer hell their […]

Forty-eight hours without new disinformation—dare we hope for seventy-two?

26.09.2024/06.13

Now isn’t that interesting? After posting about Semrush on their Reddit, where their error is laid bare for all to see, I have now had a blissful 48 hours where there were no new disinformation posts about yours truly pop up on Google searches. So much for Semrush claiming that it could not remove a […]

XScreenSaver’s privacy policy lays bare Google’s disgraceful conduct

10.06.2024/23.09

After saying that I wouldn’t blog about these, along comes one that is too priceless to ignore. XScreenSaver has been on the Google Play store but was facing deletion unless it included a privacy policy. Since it collected no data, its creators didn’t feel it was necessary, but as Google insisted, they wrote a cracker. […]

WordPerfect for Linux and Unix character terminals

21.04.2024/09.43

Huge thanks to Paul Kater in the Netherlands for finding these: WordPerfect for Unix character terminals and WordPerfect for Linux. These are classic WordPerfect, without the WYSIWYG UI, but given that WordPerfect was the gold standard in word processors, I’ve no doubt that it’ll beat many of its newer rivals for power and functionality. […]

Eudora users, welcome Aurora: finally, a modern, secure, Unicode-friendly successor

27.03.2024/02.37

We have lift-off. For those of us who have been waiting for a successor to Eudora 7.1.0.9 from 2006, our patience has been rewarded. Some years ago, I had heard of a project called Hermes, and they have now delivered an alpha version called Hermes Aurora that does everything they promised. Back when Hermes was […]

Semrush, your users used your tool, then created misinformation. How did this even come about?

22.03.2024/10.14

It seemed right to quiz Semrush about the misinformation that is being posted out there, allegedly because of its program. I’ve yet to receive a reply, but I really need to understand why. How did my name even wind up in their system alongside Google and SEO? I emailed them, telling them what I could […]

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 […]

Farewell to Universal Media Server, hello Plex Media Server

08.07.2023/03.39

After many years, I’ve had to remove Universal Media Server. I used v. 6.3.1 for many years and I see that was launched in 2016. I know that wasn’t the first year I began using the program, so I could well have had some form installed for the last decade. I stuck with v. 6.3.1 […]