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 […]

Read More… from An introduction to smart TVs for a complete novice



Payoneer frustrates and sends you round in circles

I can safely say that I wouldn’t choose Payoneer as a payment service. As I told in their forums today as a last resort, after already spending hours (in the plural!) on this. This has been deeply frustrating and here I am telling the story for the fifth time, since Payoneer stores none of my […]

Read More… from Payoneer frustrates and sends you round in circles



More things that don’t work: Google knowledge panels, and typing in te reo Māori in Facebook

A guide to emojis for 2020. Just for clarification: 😷 = happy😷 = angry😷 = laughing😷 = sad#COVID19 #emoji — Jack Yan 甄爵恩 (@jackyan) September 5, 2020 At least Twitter works. Google, as usual, doesn’t.    I had a check to see how Lucire was performing in a Google search yesterday and noticed there was […]

Read More… from More things that don’t work: Google knowledge panels, and typing in te reo Māori in Facebook



Google isn’t working

I’ve done several Zoom meetings since the pandemic was declared, and two Google Hangouts. While I’m not thrilled at having to use two companies with patchy (to say the least) records on user privacy, the meetings (three for Medinge, one for another board I sit on) have been productive, and the only bottleneck has been, […]

Read More… from Google isn’t working



One News is hard to miss on TV, but hidden on the internet

I wanted to see what TV1 news (I can never remember its official name with all its rebrands over the years—is it One Network News, TVNZ1 News, One News, or something else?) had on GM’s decision to shut Holden, but I missed both the six o’clock and the Plus One screenings. I headed online with […]

Read More… from One News is hard to miss on TV, but hidden on the internet



Returning to Firefox?

I wonder if it’s time to return to Firefox after an absence of two years and five months. After getting the new monitor, the higher res makes Firefox’s and Opera GX’s text rendering fairly similar (though Chrome, Vivaldi and Edge remain oddly poor, and Vivaldi’s tech people haven’t been able to replicate my bug). There’s […]

Read More… from Returning to Firefox?



Switching to Opera GX from Vivaldi: I needed the better type rendering

Surprisingly, Vivaldi hadn’t notified me of any updates for months—I was on v. 2.05, and had no idea that they were up to 2.10. Having upgraded manually, I noticed its handling of type had deteriorated. Here is one paragraph in Lucire:    My font settings had also changed.    Coincidentally, I downloaded Opera GX last […]

Read More… from Switching to Opera GX from Vivaldi: I needed the better type rendering



The descent of Instagram

The descent of software seems to be a common theme among some companies. You get good ones, like Adobe and Fontlab, where (generally) successive versions tend to improve on those gone before. Then you get bad ones, like Facebook, which make things worse with each iteration.    Facebook Timeline launched to much fanfare at the […]

Read More… from The descent of Instagram



Tumblr is dead, long live NewTumbl

Postscripts: click here to read why I’m considering ceasing to post on NewTumbl, in November 2020. Click here to read about NewTumbl’s encouraging response in December 2020. And, just over a week later, how the site really has become too puritanical for its own good.     Tumblr is dead, long live NewTumbl.    I […]

Read More… from Tumblr is dead, long live NewTumbl



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 […]

Read More… from The path of least resistance: we humans aren’t discerning enough sometimes