I have a theory that Terry Pratchett was personally responsible for the revival of the Flat Earth movement.
…And possibly the renewed interest in witchcraft.
Lost the gizmo that allows us to mount phones on the car dashboard using the air vent.
Local supplier has one in stock. Price is $70 plus ~$10 postage. Delivery in 7 days.
AliExpress price is $7.30 including delivery. Scheduled to arrive in 7 days.
Dear small business owner.
Using Instagram as your ONLY online presence means you are dead to those of us who don’t wish to sign up for surveillance capitalism. I’m particularly looking at you if you’re running a single suburban restaurant or a food truck. It’s idiotic.
I’m sure you know exactly how it works for a journalist: diary empty two weeks, a few things a week out, jam-packed 24 hours out.
Why on Earth is there a Yellow Pages in 2024? Can there really be a viable business model for printing a paper book of phone numbers for people who are incapable of using a modern phone’s browser to look up phone numbers.
More than a decade ago we opted out of getting the Yellow Pages. I found the communication recently when looking for something else. This week a new Yellow Pages directory landed on our doorstep. I had no idea there is a statute of limitations on opt outs.
If I worked in a public relations agency, I’d quickly become depressed about the constant need to pretend to be excited about excruciatingly dull announcements.
THat thing where you put something in a safe place, that is so safe you can’t find it again.
I’ve been turning down requests to go on radio or TV talking about the Crowdstrike outage because I simply don’t know enough about the back story and the context to add any value.
This is the oldest front page lead story in my clippings portfolio, from 1979, 45 years ago on the Manchester University student newspaper: The Mancunian. At the time I had no idea where this journalism thing was going…
ChatGPT flatters to deceive
From the ubiquitous AI:
“Bill Bennett, a prominent New Zealand technology journalist, has covered the Mobile World Congress (MWC) for several years. His reporting on MWC events includes coverage from 2011 to 2020, where he provided insights and updates on various technological advancements and industry trends .”
In fact I’ve been to MWC twice: 2016 and 2019 I was set to go in 2020, but the event was cancelled thanks to the pandemic.
Why ask a robot?
It’s not vanity searching I was reduced to asking ChatGPT to find out the dates I reported on MWC because Google Search has become utterly useless for this kind of task. Apart from anything else, it has delisted dozens of pages from my site in recent weeks, but even pages that are indexed don’t always surface in a search.
As it turns out, ChatGPT is just as useless. I found the dates by searching for the local copies of website posts that I keep on my hard drive. This exercise shows why keeping careful archives is useful.
Oh… and about that “prominent”. I guess the AI is smart enough to attempt flattery, but not smart enough to know I’m not fooled.
I’m always up for this kind of news story:
Perhaps the second greatest incentive to a healthy lifestyle is that by not having to visit hospitals and other medical services you can avoid ever even knowing that such a terrible thing as “daytime television” exists.
Hmmm. Maybe they are Quattro Pro spreadsheets… One of them has a line item that mentions “Quattro Pro purchase”
Have figured out that a couple of the hard to open “Unix Executable files” are ancient PlanPerfect documents from, I think, 1988 or 89, (at least one of them has those dates in its data). From memory PlanPerfect was the short-lived MS-Dos companion to WordPerfect.
What a shame he is an Arsenal supporter.
Today feels like it was the first time since 1966 when England’s football team had an important 50:50 refereeing decision go their way at the pointy end of the a tournament.
Have just found an archived copy of the book I co-wrote in 1982:
Usborne guide to understanding the micro
Travelling in Auckland’s rush hour
There’s a curious anomaly with Apple Maps and Google Maps that took me a while to understand.
I live in Beach Haven on Auckland’s North Shore. Travelling from here to the Auckland isthmus is straightforward for 21 hours of the day, but between 6:30 and 9:30 am, car traffic is congested to the point where it can take 90 minutes, even more in the worst case.
The same car trip at other times might take 20 to 25 minutes.
Bus trips to the central city, Ponsonby or Newmarket are easy thanks to a much improved network that whisks passengers down Onewa Road and over the bridge in minutes. It doesn’t make sense to use the car in these cases.
For travelling almost anywhere else a car is essential. Multi-leg trips on public transport are possible, but often not practical. In some cases there’s no sensible return option.
So car it is.
And that’s where the digital maps get weird. This applies equally to Apple and Google Maps.
Ask, say, Apple Maps for the travel time from Beach Haven to Greenlane Clinic. Outside the rush hour it’s 30 minutes. No problem.
In the rush hour the app tells me the travel time is 38 minutes. Yet, when I attempt the trip, 38 minutes after leaving home I’m still only halfway down Onewa Road.
Why are both maps consistently wrong about travel times for this and similar trips?
My theory is that the maps get travel time data from phones. Phones sitting in cars move along roads like Onewa Road at a snail’s pace. But these are massively outnumbered by phones whisking along Onewa Road on the buses. Google and Apple don’t know if a phone is in a car or a bus, so the aggregate data shows travel times that aren’t possible in a car.
That’s my theory. If you have a better one, please share.
Since May, Google has been removing a few of my web pages from its index every week. It seems random, although I realise there must be some kind of algorithm at work here. They’re not unloved pages… some are (or were) popular with plenty of incoming links.
Memo to self:
Clean out browser cookies more often.
Vive la France
Please don’t use the term “reach out” unless you are a member of the Four Tops. In that case you can use it as often as you like. For everyone else, the term has become a horrible cliche. Think of a more original way to express what you want to say.
Minor cognitive dissonance as brain switches between early Saturday and Sunday morning Euros football and last night’s All Black - England game.
The thing I learned this week. It is much harder to close down a solvent, but not longer needed, limited company than I imagined.