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 […]
Read More… from Tech musings from a non-tech: search engines and the nightmare of AWS
We need to change our habits slightly with the new pay-by-plate meters in Wellington City, as I discovered. If I arrive in town for, say, two 90-minute meetings with, say, 15 minutes between them, what I might do after the first is to move my car. I might also put a bit of extra money […]
Read More… from We need to serve the technology with the new pay-by-plate meters
It’s a pity Zapier’s email systems don’t work because the people seem very nice. I signed up to the service in December, but eventually unsubscribed from all their emails by going to the email preferences’ page and selecting the appropriate option. It didn’t stop the emails from coming, so I wrote to them to advise […]
Twenty twenty-three, what a year. I’ve met some amazing people this year, a lot of whom are in the public service. You know who you are. I am happy to know you. Those who champion the good in our society. Those who offer alternatives to things that harm society. Those who create good in this […]
Scott Burchill makes a good analysis in Pearls and Irritations on how the US is ‘a rogue state’ and becoming a pariah (alongside Israel) over recent events in Gaza, and how its influence is waning. It’s hard to argue with a lot of his points; certainly here, with the exception of some politicians who either […]
We received a few more automated notices from Copytrack last month, and as usual we were able to show them the licences. However, this one involved one of our editors, and I had to waste her time looking for documentation from a decade ago. There are some other legal issues relating to their methods, which […]
Read More… from I have business for the photo bots, but they don’t want it
My apologies to the late screenwriter Murray Smith’s family for using him as an example for this search engine analysis, but it proves a point of how useless Google is. Apart from the Companies’ Office in the UK, there’s very little recorded about Murray by his legal name. This blog is one of the few […]
Read More… from Google can’t even find a specific name properly
It has been a long time since I looked at how the three main occidental search engines—Mojeek, Google and Bing—were performing with a site: search and whether they could pick up dynamic pages. As I did in April, I’m trying it with site:lucire.com, which has both static and dynamic content. Mojeek is fairly consistent, but […]
Read More… from Testing Mojeek, Google and Bing on a site: search again: November ’23 update
Thanks to a conversation on Mastodon (which was going quite nicely till the other person lost their temper and concluded that anyone who criticizes Duck Duck Go must be a Google shill) I wanted to see if Bing had recovered on the group of sites I used to run through the search engines. It’s been […]
Read More… from Testing the big three occidental search engines on site: searches again
Once again, Google is full of bollocks. Its latest email to me says there’s a video on the Lucire website that’s ‘too tall’. Here’s a screenshot of the offending video on the page it identified. I checked the embed code, and the width is set to 300, the height to 169. […]
Read More… from Google can’t deal with YouTube code; and a farewell to Smugmug after 13 years