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Added on 4 Jul 2013. Last read 7 minutes ago.

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This feed currently contains the following newsitems (total count 969):

    • Google News continues bias against independent media
      • This is by no means a new complaint, but if you want to give a non-sinister explanation, then the idea that Google is too poor to build its search capability has to be one of them. And that it’s been poor for the good part of a decade. More sinister is the idea that all [...] Read More... from Google News continues bias against independent media

    • A celebration of Chinese languages by The Post
      • I take my hat off to Eda Tang of The Post (formerly The Dominion Post) for highlighting six Chinese New Zealanders and our reo tūpuna (ancestral languages). As many of us said last year (and for many years prior) during “Chinese Language Week” (NZCLW), it’s not all about Mandarin, a relatively new tongue that [...] Read More... from A celebration of Chinese languages by The Post

    • Forget the “shoulds”
      • My Lucire interview with Bay Area designer Devan Gregori has gone online—it’ll likely appear in print afterwards with different visuals. Devan has a wonderful story about how she came to be a fashion designer, and it’s very different to those who fell into the trade through a childhood interest or watching their grandmother sew. I [...] Read More... from Forget the “shoulds”

    • Lucire unplugs from OnlyKlans, and we find more Wikiality
      • I guess whomever wrote this in Wikipedia is being helpful, but the second pronunciation shown is not how you pronounce Lucire. It may be how you pronounce lucire, the quaint Romanian word, in Romanian, but it’s not the pronunciation of the magazine’s name. Maybe the Lucire Romania crew adopted this pronunciation when dealing with [...] Read More... from Lucire unplugs from OnlyKlans, and we find more Wikiality

    • Can’t connect to Wellywifi? You’re not the only one
      • Above: Trying to log into Wellywifi. If you get the second screen, you’re already doing well. Despite being the person who pushed for our city’s free wifi programme in 2009–10, I note the irony of being the only person (according to Wellington City Libraries staff I have spoken to) who cannot connect to it [...] Read More... from Can’t connect to Wellywifi? You’re not the only one

    • Meta is grabbing your content for its ‘generative AI’—hopefully this opt-out form works
      • Meta (including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and presumably Whatsapp) is taking user content for its ‘generative AI’. I don’t remember signing up for this, but then I stopped using these sites regularly. Allegedly you can opt out of this. I opted out of ad preference collection there and it made no difference, but in case it [...] Read More... from Meta is grabbing your content for its ‘generative AI’—hopefully this opt-out form works

    • A keyword might help in a Bing site: search
      • After I suggested that Mike Masnick of Techdirt try out Mojeek for his site:techdirt.com search, since Bing was coming up blank, he decided he would try the search with Techdirt as his keyword (which is what Mojeek requires by design: it doesn’t site searches without search terms; here he would have had to do site:techdirt.com [...] Read More... from A keyword might help in a Bing site: search

    • ‘Fake it till you make it’ isn’t a legal doctrine
      • Some say, ‘Fake it till you make it,’ as a positive thing. In fact, a very dear friend used to say it, and it did him a lot of good. But then, he’s an honest sort of chap and he never promised something he couldn’t deliver. His take on faking it was to present a [...] Read More... from ‘Fake it till you make it’ isn’t a legal doctrine

    • First impressions of the Royal Kludge RK100 with blue switches
      • After only a few days’ wait, my (oddly named) Royal Kludge RK100 keyboard with blue switches arrived. It’s going to be my daily driver (I hope) to replace my Cooler Master Quickfire TK, which is going to another office. First impressions: I love the return of the click sound. If I wasn’t trying to get [...] Read More... from First impressions of the Royal Kludge RK100 with blue switches

    • Hiding a Mediawiki category; Techdirt on its absence from Bing (‘Welcome to the party, pal’)
      • Since Autocade was reinstalled last year, an errant line appeared on the home page: ‘Category: Pages using DynamicPageList3 parser tag’. The sole page that was listed under this Mediawiki category: the home page. It was very useless information, especially for site visitors. I finally discovered how to hide this, and I’m recording it as the [...] Read More... from Hiding a Mediawiki category; Techdirt on its absence from Bing (‘Welcome to the party, pal’)

    • A farewell to my friend, Denis Wood (and to a stranger, Sir Michael Parkinson)
      • I was deeply shocked and saddened to hear of the passing of my friend Denis Wood, treasurer of Scots Collegians’ Association, Inc. I’ve been on the Collegians’ executive for over a decade and Denis was always present as our financial guru. He was committed to our Association and our purposes. I’m still processing this news, [...] Read More... from A farewell to my friend, Denis Wood (and to a stranger, Sir Michael Parkinson)

    • Rod Hilton: ‘Google search is over’
      • Rod Hilton, on how terrible Google is getting. This isn’t down to the web being worse, as Marissa Mayer laughably claims. This is down to Google focusing on its surveillance capitalism-based ad business, which earns most of its revenues, over search. It hasn’t been a search-centred company for decades. And I thought its [...] Read More... from Rod Hilton: ‘Google search is over’

    • Autocade reaches 32 million page views
      • It’s been a slow haul to get to 32 million page views on Autocade, but we are there, in four months rather than the dire five I predicted earlier. The last installation reached 27,647,011 the day before it was unplugged, and the new one has reached 4,362,443, which totals 32,009,454. I don’t think we can [...] Read More... from Autocade reaches 32 million page views

    • Mojeek continues to refine its search results; Bing collapses again
      • Props to Mojeek again. I gave them feedback about how lucir was coming up for a search about Lucire. There is a search engine convention that identifies root words and delivers variants, but I argued that as I was querying a capitalized word, maybe Lucire should appear further up top. To their credit, this now [...] Read More... from Mojeek continues to refine its search results; Bing collapses again

    • Going to HTTPS need not be this hard
      • Autocade finally got a secure certificate. The reason it took so long: people who make these things write convoluted instructions to lock out laypeople, or they are simply wrong. The Autocade one is through Let’s Encrypt, which has a confusing website. It linked to instructions for our web host, Hetzner, which were plain wrong. The [...] Read More... from Going to HTTPS need not be this hard

    • Autocade’s top 10, August 2023
      • Although Autocade’s viewership has gone down, it’s still fascinating (maybe only to me) to see what the top 10 look like since the site was reinstalled last year. Toyota Corolla (E210) (7,307 views) Ford Taunus 80 (5,830 views) Daewoo Winstorm (4,943 views) Opel Astra J (4,688 views) Ford Fiesta Mk VII (4,683 views) [...] Read More... from Autocade’s top 10, August 2023

    • How not to buy a website
      • Not long ago, someone tried to buy Autocade. In the interests of transparency, I showed them a couple of forward plans we had, and we never heard from them again. I had done a bit of research on the potential buyer and it seems their MO is to buy sites on the cheap, and [...] Read More... from How not to buy a website

    • From the fediverse: saving the news from Big Tech, and why you shouldn’t use Brave browser
      • Excellent links by way of the fediverse today. First up, Cory Doctorow about saving the news from Big Tech, with sentiments that aren’t far off my own, many of which have been recorded on this blog. His post is from June 2023. Highlights include this on contextual advertising: In studies, these contextual ads perform slightly [...] Read More... from From the fediverse: saving the news from Big Tech, and why you shouldn’t use Brave browser

    • States of play for Facebook, Linkedin and OnlyKlans
      • Over a decade ago, I watched as Facebook intentionally broke organic reach and Lucire’s plummeted 90 per cent overnight. It was clear what Zuckerberg’s grift was: to get us to pay to boost posts. But there was already, back then, plenty of reasons you shouldn’t: it was buggy as heck. Fast forward to 2014 and [...] Read More... from States of play for Facebook, Linkedin and OnlyKlans

    • Techdirt’s down to zero results on Bing; meanwhile, Bing shows 1,760 for Lucire
      • Hat tip to Leighelse on this one, when she alerted me on Mastodon. @DuckDuckGo @yegg Would either of you know, please, and is DDG in a position to help? Our search box is a DDG one (and has been for a long time) and seeing it come up empty constantly since March is disheartening. https://t.co/Wg8CoTq8cg [...] Read More... from Techdirt’s down to zero results on Bing; meanwhile, Bing shows 1,760 for Lucire

    • Why an SVG logo does not render in Firefox
      • Thanks to the participants at the Mozilla forum for answering why my name, rendered in SVG, did not show up in Firefox on this website. It turns out that Chromium is a lot less strict (remember the days of Internet Explorer?). As a result, it rendered the SVG file even when it really wasn’t supposed [...] Read More... from Why an SVG logo does not render in Firefox

    • There’s only one rebrand I care about today
      • One thing that marketing teaches you is that you need to have a market orientation: put yourselves in the shoes of the consumer and figure out what they want, rather than force something on them. And one thing that leadership teaches you is owning up to when you’ve got it wrong, and making the necessary [...] Read More... from There’s only one rebrand I care about today

    • Miscellaneous images from the US
      • A bit of a clear-out of a downloads’ folder on my computer. This has been sitting there since 2016 and I’ve no idea of its origins, but let’s say that Americans do understand irony and whomever claimed otherwise was wrong. This was from The New York Times in the early 2000s. Dave Barboza [...] Read More... from Miscellaneous images from the US

    • Sharper headlines for Lucire
      • We’ve made a tiny change to the look of the Lucire website, replacing Aileron Ultra Light in the headlines with Newsreader Display Light, namely the 72 pt cut. It always bothered me that Aileron didn’t have proper italics, only obliques. We could have licensed Freight Big Pro Light to match the print magazines, but [...] Read More... from Sharper headlines for Lucire

    • Personal thoughts about my friend, Merrill J. Fernando
      • Above: Amanda and me with Merrill in 2016. I was saddened to learn of the passing of my friend Merrill J. Fernando, founder of Dilmah Tea and the MJF Foundation. I’ve written an obit over at Lucire, since he was very much a friend of the magazine, too, and his values of social responsibility [...] Read More... from Personal thoughts about my friend, Merrill J. Fernando

    • We’re past the sort of digital marketing that some seek: the mid-’20s are about integrated marcom again
      • When I first started working, there was a profession called corporate identity. It wasn’t called branding. I noticed the vernacular change in the 1990s, more so in the early 2000s when even Wally Olins started using it more to describe what Wolff Olins did. You just have to follow the market. We’re at a point [...] Read More... from We’re past the sort of digital marketing that some seek: the mid-’20s are about integrated marcom again

    • You can’t contract yourself out of breaking the law, Google—that’s not how it works
      • Google has updated its privacy policy, giving itself carte blanche to take publicly available data to use for its large language models and “AI”. I don’t think whomever wrote the update has any comprehension of the law. Or that they do, but think they can get away with it. Maybe in their own country they [...] Read More... from You can’t contract yourself out of breaking the law, Google—that’s not how it works

    • Farewell to Universal Media Server, hello Plex Media Server
      • After many years, I’ve had to remove Universal Media Server. I used v. 6.3.1 for many years and I see that was launched in 2016. I know that wasn’t the first year I began using the program, so I could well have had some form installed for the last decade. I stuck with v. 6.3.1 [...] Read More... from Farewell to Universal Media Server, hello Plex Media Server

    • Panos: My Life, My Odyssey in illustrious company
      • I was thrilled to read this review about Panos: My Life, My Odyssey from Nikolas Venios, founder of the Ideas Agency in Gloucester. From his Linkedin (with his full post embedded using Linkedin’s own code at the end): Panos Papadopoulos has written one of the best business/strategy/life/creativity books I have ever read (and I [...] Read More... from Panos: My Life, My Odyssey in illustrious company

    • Swedish privacy watchdog: stop using Google Analytics
      • This is good advice from Sweden’s privacy watchdog. Most countries should follow suit with their citizens’ data. IMY, the watchdog, noted (my italics for house style): ‘IMY issues an administrative fine of 12 million SEK against Tele2 and 300,000 SEK against CDON, which has not taken the same extensive protective measures as Coop [...] Read More... from Swedish privacy watchdog: stop using Google Analytics

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