Bill Bennett
The term “peak body”, commonly used in Australia, annoys me on many levels. It’s lazy, imprecise and often self-aggrandising, but that’s just for starters.
This is an unpopular view and may upset you, but hear me out:
When a well known musician dies, I really don’t want to hear their music at that point. To me, the rush to play their music is mawkish and disrespectful. I prefer to leave a short period of mourning first, then go for it.
The Repair Cafe
The Birkenhead Repair Cafe was held on Saturday. It was my first time as a volunteer, but I’m going to be a regular fixer.
I was confident about fixing things like toasters, kettles and sandwich makers, and we had some of these, also had a rice cooker, vacuum cleaner (which needed a hard-to-get spare part so it isn’t fixed yet) and two sewing machines, I could fix one but not the other, I think it needs specialist expertise. I’ll be doing some homework on fixing these before the next cafe.
Was hoping someone might bring a typewriter… I love fixing them.
We also had a woodworker, a jewellery repairer, a woollen-knitting fixer and a couple of sewing experts. There was a bike repairer set up outdoors.
It’s a great initiative. A lot of the repairs are trivial, things might have loose wires or need new plugs. But there were some challenges too… which keeps me on my toes.
The repair cafe is a brilliant idea, it’s important right now wth all the cost of living pressures, but it’s equally important not to send things to the land fill when there can be a simple fix. m
Apple isn’t perfect, but it still sets the bar for a big tech company and privacy. I’d like a higher bar, but that’s probably unrealistic.
Contacted customer support for a normally very responsive US-based online service when it was Saturday lunchtime in New Zealand and realise I probably won’t get a reply until Tuesday morning.
Will the bad news never cease?
I mean, yeah, it’s bad, but get a grip, it’s not like blowing up the Rainbow Warrior…
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.
I left the People’s Republic of Twitter 18 months ago and didn’t realise that the Thoughts of Chairman Elon are now compulsory reading for the denizens still stuck there.
Why would any sane person willingly put up with that?
Found a peculiar thing about the way social media picks up metadata from my Ghost-hosted website. Today I posted a link to the latest story. BlueSky uses the current metadata, but Mastodon and Linkedin used the metadata that was there last night in the draft, but was swapped out this morning.
In a ideal world I’d be able to shut off all communications links to the United States until the presidential election is over. There’s only so much unhinged racism or misogyny I can take.
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.
In crude political terms the American Democrat versus Republican election system feels like a choice between the sensible part of the National Party and loony section of the Nats with a bit of Act thrown in for extra craziness.
Social media is quite boring right now now for those of us who are not obsessed with American politics.
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: