Thank god there was no social media when I was a kid and the TV was showing “what to do in event of nuclear attack information films”.
Went to the supermarket early this morning when it was close to empty, no more than a couple of dozen shoppers. Was amazed to hear three distinct North American accents at the checkout and wondered just how many US refugees we now have here in New Zealand.
So far this has been a “waiting for the weather to be less awful before walking to the dairy to buy milk, bugger it I had better take the car” kind of summer.
Regular eye treatments mean there are eight days each month when I can’t do garden or other outdoor chores. My actual work takes up 21 days, there’s some overlap . Even so, it’s been months since a potential gardening day has coincided with not-awful-weather.
Have updated the About page on my news focused website:
It’s not the most profound thought: But when was the last time a normal person deposited a cloak in a cloakroom?
Visited a $2 shop and was disturbed to see there are now items costing well over $10. To be fair, $2 shops no longer call themselves that… even if some of us still use the term.
I normally pay my water rates when the bill arrives, for reasons I don’t need to explain, I missed the Christmas one. Now I have a reminder from:
watercare@solutiondynamics.com
It’s legit… but Watercare is taking a huge risk here, neither the email address or Pay Now link LOOK 100% legit.
Today is exactly 45 years since I started my first full-time job as a journalist.
I did some earlier, paid casual work for the Manchester Evening News, a start-up called City Life, was two years on the Manchester University student union’s Mancunian newspaper and wrote news stories for the National Union of Student’s National Student newspaper.
On Monday January 5 1981, I reported for duty as the staff writer on Practical Computing magazine at Business Press International at Quadrant House in Sutton, Surrey. At the time it was unusual for someone with a science degree to get a journalism job… but at Practical Computing, that background was seen as an asset.
Looks like we had one or more of the scary North Shore hornets turn up while eating dinner on the deck. Jo sent pictures to Biosecurity.
My long essay on the state of technology at the end of 2025 probably got lost in the run up to Christmas. So here it is again… think of it as setting the agenda for 2026.
Last week I wrote this long essay about the state of the tech sector… there are a couple of NZ angles, but it’s still a good read for anyone.
Your feedback is welcome.
If you’ve got some time to spare find it here
A handful of technology brands insist their names are written entirely in capital letters. In the past brands like Asus and Gigabyte pushed this idea. Today the Oppo phone brand likes to see its name appear in lights… sorry all capitals. There are other examples.
The jibe about ‘appear in lights’ is no accident. That’s exactly the effect companies who do this want.
Of course companies can write their names however they want
They don’t need to worry about being literate, sensible or easy to read. Although all of those things might help them.
Journalists should not write company names in capital letters. Their goal is to make information easy to understand. This means ignoring demands to spell company names in capitals unless there are good, practical reasons to do otherwise. We’ll look at these in a moment.
Readers come first
Journalists serve readers, not markets nor companies. They do this by making information easy to get and understand. Messing around with capital letters interferes with that.
Capitals are the reading equivalent of speed bumps. They slow a reader’s flow. As you scan a text, your eye stops when it reaches a word spelled out in capitals. They appear in lights.
This is a reason companies want their name spelled that way. It increases the impact of the word. They thing words spelled out in capital letters stand out in text passages. They leap out from a page or screen.
Narcissistic companies
A less charitable interpretation is that spelling a company name in capital letters is a variation of [narcissistic capitals.](https://billbennett.micro.blog/2022/07/28/narcissistic-capitals-companies.html)
Puffed-up fools think capitals makes them look more important. It doesn’t. In fact it can do more harm than good.
Editors who nod through product names in capitals knowingly or unknowingly put brands’ interests ahead of their reader’s interests. There can be commercial pressure to do this, especially from companies that are potential advertisers.
Smart readers will realise this and learn not to trust the publication. For similar reaons, readers are, subconciously, less inclined to trust companies who insist their names are spelled in capitals. This may not be true in other cultures, but in ours, a name spelled all in capitals is a warning.
When company name are capital letters
We pronounce names like HP or IBM as a string of letters. It makes sense to write them as capitals. This doesn’t apply when company names are acronyms forming a pronounceable word.
Acronyms are words formed from a series of initial letters or parts of other words, such as: IBM, BBC, Unesco, WHO, Anzac, laser and radar.
Acronyms can make text simpler, easier to read and understand – life would be harder if you had to write light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation every time you refer to a laser.
Spell an acronym out in full the first time you use it unless you are writing for a specialist audience and the term is instantly familiar.
I prefer to write the full term, followed by the acronym thus: The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco).
Others like to write the acronym, followed by its full title in brackets. Both are equally correct, it is a matter of editorial style. And there are times when you may want to swap, for example when someone uses an acronym in reported speech.
Confusing acronyms If an acronym is confusing, don’t use it.
Some style guides allow acronyms written with full stops (or periods) between each letter or segment. I don’t. It’s ugly and adds nothing.
Likewise, there are those who think acronyms should always be written in capital letters. Again I disagree. In both cases the result is both inelegant and distracting.
You’ll notice in the examples above, I’ve written some acronyms in capitals, some with an initial capital and some in lower case. Here’s why:
Initialisms When you pronounce the acronym as a string of letters, ie. eye, bee, emm for IBM the computer company, you should write the word in capitals. This type of acronym is an initialism. Linguists and grammar teachers make a distinction between acronyms and initialisms, but journalists generally tend to regard them as the same.
If the acronym is a word and spoken as a word, then treat it as a normal word with an initial capital if it is a proper noun. Otherwise with a lower case initial letter.
Some American newspapers automatically use an initial capital followed by lower case if the acronym had more than six letters. One difficulty is deciding whether to use a or an before an acronym. The important thing is how it sounds when spoken. If the first letter sounds like a vowel, use an.
Certain acronyms were deliberately designed from the outset as pronounceable words. For example, Action on Smoking and Health (Ash). T he Economist Style Guide offers good advice: …try not to repeat the abbreviation too often; so write the agency and not the IAEA, the Union and not the EU, to avoid splattering the page with capital letters. There is no need to give the initials of an organisation if it is not referred to again.
When I trained as a journalist in the 1970s and 80s, old newspaper hands taught me to write using the inverted pyramid.
While it isn’t always the best approach, the inverted pyramid has worked for news writing since the days reporters telegraphed dispatches to editors. Today it works for online writing.
The structure echoes the classic essay structure you were taught — or should have been taught — at school.
The basic format: Introduction — say what the piece is about; answer questions like who, what, where and when. You can also explain why at this point, although that can wait until later.
Then — expand, amplify.
Keep doing this until you’ve told the whole story. Make the most important points first then add more and more detail in each additional paragraph.
Space was limited in the old school print newspapers. So traditional newspaper editors would cut a story from the bottom if it needs to fill a specific space on a printed page.
Inverted pyramid online
The inverted pyramid structure, with each paragraph being progressively less important, means editors can easily remove the least important information first.
A news story written using the inverted pyramid structure can be cut at the end of any paragraph, even the first paragraph, and still be a self-contained story.
Online this means search engines pay more attention to the most important words. This helps people find your writing faster. It means they can zero in on the story and information they are looking for. Those opening paragraphs also make neat summaries for listings and similar online uses.
If you write your copy tight enough, your opening sentence will show up as the text in a Google search. That will help draw in readers.
The most important information goes in the first paragraph and each extra paragraph carries progressively less weight. That’s where the inverted pyramid name comes from: the foundation sits at the top, the less important details are at the bottom.
It is now 23 days since my Google Search Console dashboard has updated and - not sure how many but it is more than three - days since Google said the issue was fixed.
I’ve found the MacOS voice to text works best for me… but I really need to be able to edit without using the keyboard and trackpad. Are you aware of any workarounds?
Using voice to text on the computer because my arm is in a sling. Voice recognition works up to a point, but far from perfect, and the redo-undo-delete function barely ever works which means a lot of the touchpad gestures that I was hoping to avoid.
Suddenly I have RSI like you wouldn’t believe. Much worse than any previous cases. And busy exploring the non-typing options on all my devices. Good news is we are heading into the quiet work period. But I’m going to need medical treatment. And if you read something weird, it’s not my typing.
I have resolved to purge AI from my life. There may still be a stray AI image on my main site that I’ll pick up at some point, but otherwise it’s always been clean. About 90% of the record covers on my Soundcloud site are AI generated. I can clean them up over the summer.
Up to a point I find it comforting that the AI chatbots sometimes still struggle with te reo (Māori) words, but they appear to be getting much better at New Zealand-style switching between Engilsh and te reo. Spellcheckers and audio AI are way behind.
I’m not convinced the Liquid Glass user interface changes in the new MacOS are an improvement. It’s not bad, just not better than before the update. Likewise I’m not certain Spotlight works better than before. On the other hand, the cross device integration and continuity features are excellent.
Wireless (WiFi) printing has been around for a generation. It’s as unreliable today as it was in the early 2000s. This says everything you need to know about the technology sector.