As a freelance journalist (and occasional business writer) I have clients who insist on Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Both are awful in different ways.
Most of the time I write everything in a Markdown editor then save or copy and paste into a Word or Google Docs file. It is about ten times more efficient.
Markdown is, essentially, a plain text editor with a few extra commands. I’d argue that discovering Markdown was behind my second biggest every productivity leap. The first leap was when I became so frustrated with Windows 8 that I bought a MacBook, possibly the smartest investment a writer could ever make.
It is only a matter of time before Elon Musk comes to a sticky end when James Bond enters his secret lair, kills his evil henchmen and saves the planet from certain destruction.
Just realised that the scheduled phone call I came in from doing gardening work to handle is, in fact, a video call and I’m about as untidy looking as a garden could be.
Boffins confirm what most of us already knew, that video conferencing is draining.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/27/videoconferencing_fatigue_is_real_study/?td=rt-3a
Do people who are concerned about the woke mind virus use masks if they go somewhere potentially infectous like a library?
I’m not a coding kind of person, but I can’t stress enough how my computing experience improved after learning how to use rsync on my Mac. You can buy pretty apps to do that same thing, but rsync seems better, faster and more robust.
One argument against New Zealand moving to four year parliaments is that there is no second chamber. By all means have a longer term, but in the absence of more regular mandate refreshes, add some checks and balances.
I wonder how many New Zealanders have got the government they wanted?
I don’t mean the folk who read this; the feed makes it clear many of you are unhappy. I mean the people who don’t make a noise on social media.
Do you think they are delighted or dismayed?
I’ve been using Bluesky for three whole days now and no-one has given me a Mastodon-style scolding for not doing (or doing) something that is far from obvious but seems to offend.
Is it me being fussy or do other people think that news media, including specialist tech news media, doesn’t do a great job reporting AI? Specifically, there’s often not enough explaining and background information for someone coming new to a story to get a handle on it.
Poorly defined, open-ended non paying gigs* from difficult clients.
Poorly defined, open-ended non paying gigs.
Poorly defined non-paying gigs.
Non-paying gigs.
Paying gigs.
Paying gigs from regular clients.
Clearly defined paying gigs from regular clients.
Clearly defined, paying gigs from regular clients who pay quickly.
Clearly defined paying gigs from regular clients who pay quickest.
Clearly defined, high paying gigs from regular clients who pay quickest.
If you are interested in my take on the Optus outage that brought much of Australia to a grinding halt, you can catch the replay of my RNZ Nights interview here:
Feedback is welcome.
I’m on the New Zealand Tech Podcast with Paul Spain.
Talking about the Christchurch Call Summit and whether you need to constantly upgrade your phone among other things.
I explore the phone upgrade story in greater depth here:
My work goes crazy about this time of year as everyone in New Zealand races to get things finished before we head into Christmas and the (Southern Hemisphere) summer break.
Then, usually about the end of November it slams to a sudden stop and hardly anything happens until February.
I’m on a gigabit fibre connection. I can download a HD movie in the time it takes to pour a glass of syrah, but it looks like it will take more than 2 hours to download a 2GB Ubuntu disc image.
Friday’s newsletter went out a little later than usual, which meant it got lfewer immediate reads than most weeks…. I see a lot of regular readers picked it up and opened it this morning.
If you missed it, you can read it online: billbennett.co.nz/rural-exp…
Blogger and recovering journalist Elizabeth Tai writes about the state of Google Search and how that affects the wider internet in Is the Internet really broken?
She also looks at how the Verge covered its take on this.
It’s a nuanced take. She, rightly, points out there are ways the internet in general and search are broken from both the user and the online writer or publisher’s point of view. Heaven knows it’s hard to get noticed by Google these days if you aren’t selling something and SEOed up to your eyeballs.
For the most part she agrees with the Verge, but doesn’t like the emotive language.
However, I’m less confident than Tai, that Mastodon, Substack and others are “rising to fill the gap”. It’s a nice sentiment, but it feels more and more like a defensive, alternative world for a niche audience.
The one thing we both agree on is that there is no big money in this, except perhaps for Substack which is funded by venture capital and will be under pressure to give investors a huge pay day.
Over the last decade I’ve written more than 300 features for the NZ Herald’s business reports. Perhaps the most noticeable change in that time is how the idea of business sustainability has gone from being a theory to being mainstream. There are few large New Zealand companies that don’t have a strong sustainability story.
Sure, you’ll find greenwashing, and it’s not always perfect. There is still a long way to go, but the progress is real.
In this year’s Sustainable Business report I interviewed Toitū chief science and advisory officer Belinda Mathers who works to certify companies as they reduce or even eliminate emissions.
There’s a story about RDT working with Auckland Airport to build a retail centre that takes sustainability a long way beyond emissions reductions.
Waste Management is moving fast to electrify one of New Zealand’s largest commercial vehicle fleets.
Law firm MinterEllisonRuddWatts wants New Zealand to get a move on building more clean electricity generation capacity.
And I interviewed Abbie Reynolds from the Nature Conservancy about looking for a fresh approach to conservation and protecting the natural environment.
Today’s newsletter includes a short editorial suggesting that a new Provincial Growth Fund would fix many gaps in New Zealand’s rural broadband and mobile coverage.
Gabor Cselle writes about the lessons from Twitter alternative T2-Pebble not making it.
For me there were two flaws. He mentions both.
First, not getting an app out to the market. The web interface was fine in itself, but not the best way to consume a feed.
Second, not joining the Fediverse and providing access to a wider range of accounts and ideas.
In practice I found the small community was friendly enough, but there was close to zero focus on anything I care about.
While most of us are aware of Betteridge’s law of headlines, I think there is a subset of cases where the right answer to the news headline written as a question is DUH!