This time last year I wrote about upgrading to Wi-FI 6. It’s a good move, but only worth doing if you have relatively new devices - at the time of writing I said devices that were 18 months old or newer would do it although it would pay to check first. Today that would be 2.5 years or newer.

billbennett.co.nz/wi-fi-6/

When I was in my first term at university a friend who lived a couple of doors away in my halls invited me to play Dungeons and Dragons. I lasted 20 minutes before I got bored… made an excuse and ran away to the student bar where I met a girl and never looked back.

I’m giving the T2 Twitter alternative a test drive. It’s early days… I’m only 90 minutes in and I think it only opened beyond the first 1000 users overnight NZ time.

First impressions are favourable, what’s there is polished, but it is feature-poor for now.

I get phishing attempts every day. This one is unusual and, I think, quite specific. I have no idea what the people here are talking about.

Can anyone please point me at other journalists who are on micro.blog?

My other website ranks higher: @JohnPhilpin

This week we had dinner at a hotpot restaurant on Dominion Road and I realised this is the Chinese version of a fondue.

It turns out my other website billbennett.co.nz is part of the content used to train Google’s C4 LLM dataset.

So when you use Google’s AI, I’m in there somewhere.

Phishing, vishing, smishing and beyond is a story I wrote for NZBusiness about the most common form of online crime in New Zealand.

It’s written as a guide for non-technical readers so there’s less depth and more about the basic steps small businesses can take to not be the low-hanging fruit for criminals.

There’s this thing about being a New Zealander that feels strange to someone like me who wasn’t born here. If I go overseas to another city and mention I’m from New Zealand, people will say, do you know X who lives there? At least half the time I do.

Likewise my late mother-in-law was visiting and travelled to the South Island for a few days where on two occasions she struck up conversations with strangers. When she told them she was visiting Jo and me… both people told her they knew us.

Someone should write an alternative reality novel where Google didn’t close Google+.

I’m certain our female cat, Poppy, has stopped trusting me after I sold her down the river to the vet surgeon who operated on her yesterday. She runs away and hides whenever she sees me.

By accident more than design I managed to sample a wide variety of Hot Cross Buns from Auckland bakers and supermarkets. There’s no science here, just an aficionado’s tasting notes.

The best all round buns I tasted so far in 2023 are from the Wild Wheat outlet on Hinemoa Street in Birkenhead. They are made sour dough style, have plenty of fruit and are well spiced.

They are somewhat puddingy, not that this was a real word until ten minutes ago. You could, at a pinch, warm them a little and eat them with cream or custard for dessert. I sometimes eat them with blue cheese, it’s an unlikely sounding combination that could change your life.

From memory they cost around $15 (sorry, I should have taken notes) for half a dozen. I found they last the longest and are excellent toasted.

My other favourite buns are from Ott Patisserie at the start of Birkenhead Avenue. Somehow the baker has managed to give them a different flavour without departing too far from tradition. It just works.

The buns are lighter in colour and in composition, you could even say delicate when comparing them with Wild Wheat’s robust buns. They are also lighter on the pocket. Half a dozen costs $10.

At $22 for half a dozen, Daily Bread’s Belmont shop has the most expensive hot cross buns I’ve seen this year. They are excellent, although as my Dad used to say: at that price they ought to be.

Like Wild Wheat’s buns, they are sour dough based and have plenty of spice and fruit. While I like the look and texture of Daily Bread’s buns, I prefer the taste of Wild Wheat and Ott’s offerings.

The other notable hot cross bun I tasted was New World Birkenhead’s non-traditional brioche style buns. These are quite different in look and taste. Despite that, they still feel like real hot cross buns. At $4.50 for six they are a bargain. Last year I used a pack to make a terrific bread and butter pudding.

The Hot Cross Buns from the Birkenhead Bakers Delight shop were among my least favourite buns. In terms of taste they are on a par with everyday supermarket buns, but at $12 for half a dozen they are more than twice the price.

There is nothing wrong with them. All the buns tested here are perfectly acceptable. They taste fine, but the are neither exciting nor in any way remarkable. In contrast, all the buns mentioned earlier are special.

The everyday Hot Cross Buns from New World are not at all bad. At $4.50 for half a dozen they are a fine alternative if the supermarket is out of the brioche buns. A $4.70 pack of six everyday hot cross buns from the Pak’n Save supermarket on Lincoln Road were the most ordinary tasting buns. They had less fruit, less intense spice and more of a soft roll feel.

Looking at the prices, Daily Bread’s buns are one and a half times the price of Wild Wheat’s, more than twice the price of Ott’s and close to five times the price of New World’s. They’re good, but there’s no way they are five times as good. I’d certainly make the trip back to Ott or Wild Wheat for a luxury treat.

Impressed by Simone Silvestroni’s De-brand blog post. It covers some of the things I’ve been wrestling with as a journalist.

My Bill Bennett micro.blog site was set up from the outset along similar lines. It’s hard to totally debrand the Ghost site because it’s a business. But let’s work on it.

If you have to ask a customer to leave a review on one of the big sites about your product or service, that’s a sure fire indication that you aren’t confident your customers are so happy they’d go and do it off their own bat.

Earlier this week I wrote about linkrot.

This post missed a similar annoying trend. Today’s link check of my site hit four 403 errors. There are a few every week.

Over the last year or so I’ve been killing the links when I find them because I fear lots of 403s can make my site look suspect to search engines. (I’d be interested to hear if my fears are real or imaginary).

The pages are there, you can click through to them all but something tells the bot that access is forbidden.

Often 403 means there’s a poorly maintained site at the other end. It’s not linkrot as such, but the growing number of 403s is a sign the web is deteriorating.

Have you seen a rising number of 403s on your outgoing links and, if so, how do you deal with them?

At least three quarters of the attempted phishing emails in my inbox aren’t really trying…

It never ceases to amaze me how many people take my clearly deranged joke microblogs, tweets and toots seriously - but then when you look at the general ratio of actually deranged material floating around online I guess it shouldn’t be surprising.

Impressed that Apple has released an iPhone especially for Villarreal and Wellington Phoenix football supporters.

Every week I check the links on my other website. And every single week a handful are broken and need fixing or just plain gone.

Link rot - where links no longer point to their original target - is real.

At one point there were 1500 individual web pages on my site and around 6000 links. Today there are around 1000 pages and ~2800 links.

That number drops by a handful each week. This week’s check was exceptionally bad because hundreds of Twitter links stopped working and there is a problem with the web archive.

Integrity, an excellent linking checking program for the Mac, found 493 bad links.

Not all broken

Not every link flagged by Integrity is broken… some were missing temporarily when the bot visited. In other cases the page took too long to load.

While some flagged links are redirects. This week’s 493 bad links only included a single redirect.

It’s good practice to recheck any links Integrity flags… and then manually check before removing a terminally broken link with no obvious alternative.

The web archive is a good source of alternative links. Often a publisher will remove a link, but there’s an archive of the page. Where possible I will link to these.

In recent months, more and more archived pages have been missing in action.

Twitter’s meltdown probably won’t won’t be the last mass-extinction event for web links, but it is a reminder that online history is constantly rewritten, revised and in many cases, deleted.

Attempting to copy 3.7 TB of data over Wi-Fi because I optimistically assumed Wi-Fi 6e could handle the transfer faster than it would take for the MacBook Pro to Ethernet dongle to arrive by courier. It’s like a 21st century tortoise versus hare race.

We survived Auckland’s atmospheric river and Cyclone Gabrielle, only to be flooded by a ridiculous amount of rain that came down over North Auckland in about 30 minutes this afternoon.

I used to think those “we have delivered your package” emails and texts from online retailers were a bit weird… after all, most of the time I open the door to the courier…. so I know.

And then we got a delivery of fresh food while out at an appointment and knew to rush home to get it out of the sun rather than meander back via cafe coffee and lunch.

(We live in Auckland so this year we’re talking potential sun, not real sun).

I guess most people living in New Zealand’s North Island now have a much better understanding of why “May you live in interesting times” is a curse.

I haven’t needed to look at the Contacts app on my iPhone for ages. Did just now and it seems every person who has emailed me with a signature including their phone number is now a listed contact. At least 20 per cent are cold callers who I never want to hear from again