For many years (2002–12), we hosted with a US company that gave us a Plesk front end. That meant we did a lot in-house: create PHP and MySql databases, started up hosting environments for new domains, even managed our own email server. That company eventually opened up an Australian branch and my appointed customer manager […]
Tag: technology
Everyone now sees the rot economy—and we’re beginning to understand what’s behind it
Again, things I’ve been pointing out for over a decade—heck, even over two decades, if you consider early concerns I had over Yahoo!—are now mainstream thought. Ed Zitron’s latest newsletter begins: A great deal of what I write feels like narrating the end of the world—watching as the growth-at-all-costs, hyper-financialized Rot Economy seemingly tarnishes every […]
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One of the last times we went out-of-house for typesetting
A spot of nostalgia today: another little sheet dug up among all the old paperwork. After desktop publishing came out, the technology wasn’t good enough for everyone to have access to it, so some elements were still contracted out of house. This would have been one of the last times, done by one of […]
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After warnings were ignored, we now arrive in the new tech mainstream
If you look back at all the tech companies I’ve called out, deep down I did so as a warning. If they show this contempt for the user, then it’s symptomatic of greater problems. Everything from Google switching your ad preferences’ opt-outs back to opt-ins and the stonewalling when it came to deleted blogs, to […]
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Duck Duck Go is probably scared of Mojeek
Duck Duck Go serving a page after using the !lucire bang. The second result is a frameset that has not been linked to in over two decades, a sign of Bing being a Wayback Machine. As some of you know, I used Duck Duck Go as my principal search engine between 2010 and 2022, […]
Vivaldi DLL disappears upon start-up; soon restores itself
Anyone getting these errors with Vivaldi? Sometimes I get them after I boot up Vivaldi and it works for a short period. Other times, they occur when the computer is booted up. ‘The code execution cannot proceed because vivaldi_elf.dll was not found. Reinstalling the program may fix this problem.’ ‘Windows cannot access the […]
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Why don’t we just stop tracking?
Not only is Linkedin OK with disinformation, thereby making itself complicit to fraud, it turns out verification isn’t that simple. I’ve said many times that I think most “apps” are just web browsers limited to a single site, but, in the interests of greater visibility, I relented and downloaded the Linkedin app. Like most apps, […]
New Zealand’s 3G switch-off: you might be fine despite the warning messages
I had been concerned that I was getting messages from One NZ (formerly Vodafone) telling me to change my phone because 3G was being killed off. The Australian 3G switch-off made things more concerning, since there are Aussies with virtually new phones being cut off, and the one thing they have in common is that […]
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Blocking the Semrush bots
It’s not enough to block just Semrush’s bot, SemrushBot, in one’s robots.txt, since they have a whole bunch of them. We’ve usually allowed all bots but with “AI” and Semrush’s terrible programming that wasted hours of my time every day for nine months, there are certain parties no longer welcome to crawl. To block Semrush […]
Forgetting humanity: the desperation of tech
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 […]
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