Marking galleries private today

Along came Copytrack again yesterday, identifying an image that they allege we stole and put on Lucire’s website. And once again I had to go back through old emails—only 11 years this time, not 13 like the last—to retrieve the email to prove that I had the correct licence to publish it, and that and […]

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How the search engines fare on a site: search here

Time to do some analysis on the age of the search results for this site through the search engines. I’m curious about the drop in hits. ‘Contents’ pages’ also include static pages and, in Bing’s case, PDFs. (PS.: For clarification, a contents’ page would include a Wordpress tag page, or a page for a set […]

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Bing increases Techdirt’s results, saving it some embarrassment

After notifying Mike Masnick, the founder of Techdirt, about my findings about Bing, coincidentally, the search engine began spidering his latest articles. It claimed to have 150 results, and delivered 92, many of which were repeated from page to page as usual. Tonight it’s a claimed 249, delivering 173. Techdirt is well respected and very […]

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This surely makes it blatantly obvious that Bing is near death

Here’s a site I’ve always liked: Techdirt. It’s incredibly influential, and reports on the technology sector. Mike Masnick’s run it for the same length of time as I’ve run Lucire (25 years, and counting). And when it comes to Bing’s index collapse—or whatever you wish to call it—it’s no more pronounced than here (well, at […]

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Beware AI; the dangers of Google ads; and the beauty of Radio.garden

Hat tip to Stefan Engeseth on this one: an excellent podcast with author, historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari. Among the topics he covers, as detailed in the summary in Linkedin’s The Next Big Idea: • AI is the first technology that can take power away from us • if we are not careful, AI […]

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An introduction to smart TVs for a complete novice

Earlier in December, we decided to put a TV into our guest room. One catch: there is no aerial there, so initially we thought, ‘We have some great DVDs, let’s plug in the DVD player.’ But it didn’t quite feel right. We’ve stayed at enough places with smart TVs, including some running the Android TV […]

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For the web, the glass is half full

Manu Schwendener/Unsplash   I like what Robin Sloan had to say in his blog post, ‘A Year of New Avenues’. It’s typeset in Filosofia, which is another great reason to read it. I’ve often said the trends of a new decade, or century, don’t emerge on the dot. You’ve got to get a few years […]

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Are there a lot Gmail users who get their address wrong, more than any other service?

Kurt and I have very different brains, if you read this thread that I jumped in on. I am sure he is right on how things should work. Get me talking about spacing and spelling, and I’d be in the same boat. Or the use of the word billion. I have my ideas on all […]

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Keybase: one failure after another

Because I locked my Twitter, Keybase was unable to find its usual proof there. It told me to link a new one from their ‘app’. I’d love to, folks, but you don’t let me see anything.     That’s Keybase. I can’t see anything in the window, and I can’t move the window. I have […]

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Avira dishonours paid subscription, blames it on the customer

I see Avira has downgraded me to their free version despite my being paid up. As far as I can tell, this has been the case for months, and I remember Tweeting them back when Twitter was a thing. I can’t log in at all, and it keeps showing a ‘Get Prime’ button to force […]

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