UK picks on independent Tweeters, falsely calls them Russian bots and trolls

If you were one of the people caught up with ‘The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!’ and a selection of Cold War paranoia resurrected by politicians and the media, then surely recent news would make you start to think that this was a fake-news narrative?    Ian56 on Twitter was recently named by […]

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Business as usual at Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg comes forth, tells us nothing we didn’t already know

Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg came out and made a statement on Facebook that had no apology (though he gave a personal one later on CNN) and, at a time when people demanded transparency, he continued with opaqueness.    First, he told us nothing we didn’t already know about the Cambridge Analytica scandal.    Secondly, he avoided […]

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The path of least resistance: we humans aren’t discerning enough sometimes

I came across a thread at Tedium where Christopher Marlow mentions Pandora Mail as an email client that took Eudora as a starting-point, and moved the game forward (e.g. building in Unicode support).    As some of you know, I’ve been searching for an email client to use instead of Eudora (here’s something I wrote […]

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Happy 40th birthday to The Professionals

‘Anarchy, acts of terror, crimes against the public. To combat it I’ve got special men: experts from the army, the police, from every service. These are the professionals.’    Forty years ago, ITV began airing one of the UK’s most iconic TV series.    There’s more at Dave Matthews’ The Authorised Guide to the Professionals, […]

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Behind the scenes

Agent: Yes, that’s correct, we promise we can find you a job, no matter what. Applicant: That’s great! You can help me? Agent: Of course. Now, let’s look at your academic transcript. The Agent studiously examines the transcript. Agent: Oh, dear, this isn’t very good. Applicant: Um … Agent: It says you have a very poor average, that you scored 16 […]

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Drivetribe will be a mecca for motorheads—Autocade readers welcome

Now that the first episode of The Grand Tour has aired, and we’re nearing the official launch of Drivetribe (November 28), we’re beginning to see just how good an investment £160 million was for Amazon when it picked up the cast of The Goodies, I mean, Top Gear (sorry, I get those BBC shows mixed […]

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Finding the heart on Top Gear again

Above: Chris Evans and Rory Reid talk about the McLaren F1 in Extra Gear. Now that the new new Top Gear has aired in New Zealand, I have to say that it isn’t really there yet. But unlike much of the UK, I’m not going to dis Chris Evans, who is a consummate gearhead. The […]

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RTL orders Blitzkrieg on Alarm für Cobra 11 fan community prior to the show’s 20th anniversary

With the lead-up to the 20th anniversary of the German TV show Alarm für Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei, a fan group I run—the largest unofficial community on Facebook for the series—has been the subject of a Blitzkrieg by RTL. Trailers, which made up the majority of the uploaded videos, are indeed copyrighted material, but have […]

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A look back at 2015: a year that was harder to laugh at

I’ve done this a few times now: looked through my year’s Tumblr posts to get an alternative feel for the Zeitgeist. Tumblr is where I put the less relevant junk that comes by my digital meanderings. But as I scrolled down to January 2015 in the archive, I’m not that certain the posts really reflected […]

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Remarks on the typography of Star Wars

Star Wars is in my feed in a big way. To get up to speed on the film series, I had to start with the memorable theme by John Williams. Thanks, Bill and Paul.    And who better to describe the plot than someone else in the science-fiction world, Doctor Who?    Seriously though, I […]

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