Technology fetishism
TL;DR: I’m moving my focus off Twitter, onto Mastodon and FB. Everyone who uses Twitter is likely to have their own view on this… Twitter has been really good. A critical mass of interesting people, organisations, breaking news and everyday experiences. But the new owner seems determined to make it his personal plaything, and ruin ... [More]
Not a transport post. After much dithering, I’ve made the switch to iPhone. I’ve used Android phones for ten years. If I’m honest a lot of that was due to the price. Midrange Android phones seemed like better value for money. But they also have a short life. 2 years then you replace them because ... [More]
Not a transport post. For those who only visit for those, sorry – I’ll have something meaty for you in a few days. Having just ranted on vaccines, here’s something else that may be controversial. When I was a kid, the tech debate was which home computer was best. Nowadays, it’s operating systems. Mac OS ... [More]
My blog’s RSS feed has been having problems. This has also affected some email subscribers. I think I’ve found the problem, so hopefully both are working again now. Just a quick post: The Age and Herald Sun reported yesterday that Metro Trains Melbourne made an annual profit of $29 million, on $786 million of revenue ... [More]
To my surprise, Google has stored dozens of voice recordings of mine, going back about 18 months.
There are warnings of fake Telstra bills being sent by email. They look like the real thing. The only clue that they’re not is that the View/Pay Bill button goes to a non-Telstra web site. The lesson here is: check where the link goes. If it doesn’t go to an address that is clearly on ... [More]
One last post of miscellaneous stuff to mark the end of 2017. Grandad My Grandad was born on this day in 1924. He passed away on Boxing Day, just shy of his 93rd birthday. Being one of our UK relatives, we didn’t visit him much, but we did manage to see him during our UK ... [More]
Eagle-eyed readers would have noticed I’ve put in a new blog template. The intent was to provide more space for photos and table data. The old template (and most like it, in fact) squash them up even when displayed on a big desktop screen. See any problems? Leave a comment. Also, I’m interested to know ... [More]
A reminder that despite how it may sometimes seem, not all my blog posts are about transport. If you want to view only the transport posts, try here. For convenience, this link is also on the menu at the top, under Transport. Over the years I’ve had many mobile phones. Here’s an update to that ... [More]
On Thursday night my phone, a Nexus 5 that I got about three years ago, finally started playing up. It would continually boot, with a buzz, and a proclamation on the screen of “Google”! Then repeat. Bzzt… Google! Over and over. Scouring online, I discovered this is a reasonably rare, but not unique, situation. The ... [More]
A couple of experiences with online hosting services that I wanted to relate. Don’t worry, I’ll try not to let this get too geeky. NetRegistry domains For years I had a domain name custard.net.au associated with the company I owned that I used for contracting — this is a common thing in the IT and ... [More]
After the mess of the last attempt, and noting the large number of people reading on mobile devices (phones 39%, tablet 10%), I’ve switched to a plain but hopefully more mobile-friendly blog template. Here is a photo of some people doing geeky things to test the pictures. I’ll probably do some tweaking, but any feedback ... [More]