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YouTube tracks you even when you’ve signed out and blocked their cookies
Of course YouTube lies. Say you’ve paused your search and watch history on YouTube. And you block all youtube.com cookies. YouTube won’t track you, right? You’ve made it quite clear you don’t want a...
View ArticleNavigating the Julian Assange arrest
I’m finding it disturbing that some of the talking heads here we’ve seen are giving the Julian Assange story the same bias that much of the US mainstream media are. To me, it’s dangerous territory: it...
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Spoiler alert: The Avengers’ endgame
I’m hearing the young people talk about this lately. But we already know how The Avengers ends. Then they come back with some new cast members years later. John Steed (Patrick Macnee) and Tara King...
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Huawei without Google: isn’t that a good thing?
I see Google’s going to stop supporting Huawei as a developer. How is this a bad thing? First, Huawei can still get the public parts of Android, since they’re open-source. Secondly, if they don’t...
View ArticleWikipedia acts swiftly when criticized, bans an editor for life
When I wrote this post in May 2018, ‘People are waking up to Wikipedia’s abuses’, even I didn’t expect that Wikipedia would act so harshly when it gets criticized on its own platform. One editor...
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What’s all this Johnny Foreigner type?
After all that bollocks from the Hon J. Rees-Mogg, MP about banning the metric system from the Commons, I thought the Brexit-loving Tories would at least get this right. That #Brexit bill is typeset...
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The 1970s: when TV shows were New
As a child of the 1970s, I was exposed to this English word: new. Now, before you say that that isn’t anything special, for some reason, in the ’70s, there was an obsession with newness. It wasn’t like...
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That’s not Blofeld, it’s Brofeld
I really had hoped that for the next Bond, we wouldn’t see ‘Brofeld’. I’ve never had a problem with M being a woman or Q being a nerd, but ignoring Fleming’s entire background for Ernst Stavro...
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Breaking Hart’s
Usually, all our publications use Hart’s Rules. It’s well understood, enough compositors know it, and it’s a credible enough style guide for us to point at and use as a defence. There are some...
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Wide of the mark
Don’t believe everything you read on the internet, e.g.: Anyone alive during this period will be wondering, ‘Where’s Altavista?’ Just on visitor numbers, as opposed to visits per month, they were...
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Carlos Ghosn redresses the balance
It’s been fascinating to watch Carlos Ghosn’s press conference in Beirut, and subsequent interviews, confirming my own suspicions back in November 2018 (as Tweeted and blogged). Carlos Ghosn's...
View ArticleRoger Nichols performs the original Hart to Hart theme
In 2013, I wrote a small note on my Tumblog about Roger Nichols’ theme to the TV series Hart to Hart. The music was played as the opening and closing themes in the pilot, and as an incidental theme to...
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Boris Johnson is hardly Churchillian
I’ve heard world leaders describe the fight against COVID-19 as a war, and there are some parallels. As any student of history knows, there was such a thing as the Munich Agreement before World War...
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One more COVID-19 post: graphing and animating the data
Russell Brown linked this COVID-19 trend page by Aatish Bhatia on his Twitter recently, and it’s another way to visualize the data. There are two axes: new confirmed cases (over the past week) on the y...
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A concert that takes you home
One bonus of the lockdown was the live Easter Day concert held by Hong Kong’s own Sam Hui (許冠傑), perhaps fairly described as the king of Cantopop. I had no idea this was even on if it weren’t for...
View ArticleA refreshing piece on diversity in our mainstream media
Two fantastic items in my Tweetstream today, the first from journalist Jehan Casinader, a New Zealander of Sri Lankan heritage, in Stuff. Some highlights: As an ethnic person, you can only enter...
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On Cantonese, for Te Papa’s Chinese Languages in Aotearoa project
What a real honour to promote my reo! Thank you, Dr Grace Gassin and Te Papa for spearheading the Chinese Languages in Aotearoa project and for this incredible third instalment, where I get to speak...
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GM and Ford keep falling down the top 10 table
It’s bittersweet to get news of the Chevrolet Corvette from what’s left of GM here in New Zealand, now a specialist importer of cars that are unlikely to sell in any great number. And we’re not...
View ArticleFacebook: the year in review
If you’d rather not read every Facebook entry I made on my blog this year, here’s a helpful video by Simon Caine on all the shitty things they’ve done over 2021. As we still have a couple of weeks of...
View ArticleA new video for the home page
Earlier today, Amanda and I had a wonderful time at Te Papa to celebrate the Chinese Languages in Aotearoa programme. My contribution was appearing in a video, that was on this blog last October. It...
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