Bill Bennett
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:
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.
Found some ancient documents on an old drive that go back to the 1990s… a few are from the early 1980s. Lss than half of them are in obsolete formats that nothing can open… even a text editor struggles with a few. But Collabora Office manages to open the remainder where apps like Word can’t.
Looking forward to the Euro football final which will been on during Monday’s breakfast time here in New Zealand. My heart says England, but my head says Spain. Either way, let’s hope it’s a cracking game.
After two football matches the UK media view of Gareth Southgate has gone from “is there a spare dungeon in the Tower of London and is the axeman booked this week?” to “potentially the greatest living Englishman”.