My week on @AotearoaPeople

Last week I was the curator of the @AotearoaPeople Twitter account.  I covered a lot of areas of interest to me. The tweet stream follows. I hope you enjoy it! Jump to: Monday: Intro, my whanau, and our charitable trust Tuesday: Lexicography and words Wednesday: Tech, startups, and investment Thursday: The future of government Friday:…

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Better Rules Hack : Start a Business

At the start of Tech Week this year, I participated in the Better Rules Hack that was organised by Legal Hackers NZ and the DIA’s Service Innovation Lab. This was a big deal for me – after being involved in organising over 25 Startup Weekends and facilitating 16 of them in several countries, this was…

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Abe Lincoln, sharpening axes, and startups

I was having office hours today with one of the startups I work with, and asked the founder how he was going on sales.  He responded by saying that things were slow, as he was preparing thoroughly for the next phase.  He quoted Abraham Lincoln: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and…

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Hate and the Internet

I was part of a panel today run by InternetNZ on Hate and the Internet.  The event was framed as follows: There is increasing discussion about hate speech and the issues associated with the publishing and circulation of hateful content online. But what is hate speech? And what does it mean in a New Zealand…

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2018 – The year of Linux on the desktop

Just kidding, this post is a review of Kubuntu / Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) I’ve been running Linux on my desktop – either directly, or in a virtual machine (VM) – since Mandrake 8.1 in 2002, and I’ve had a love-hate relationship with it.  Love: Free (as in both beer and speech) Open Source, configurability,…

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Greylisting is looking a bit long in the tooth

Back in 2006, when I set up thinktank.co.nz’s mail server defenses, SPAM was increasing at an astronomical rate. There were a number of tools to use on mail servers to help stem the tide, including greylisting, SpamAssassin, Realtime Blackhole Lists (RBL’s), signature systems including Vipul’s Razor and Pyzor; other technologies such as Sender Policy Framework…

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Printing unprintable websites like the NBR

Do you want to print off articles (either on paper or PDF) from unprintable websites like the NBR? Some web property owners set up their sites so that you can only view them on screen. No problem, it’s completely possible to print these off using this little trick. You’ll need the Chrome browser to do…

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A vision for 2070

Today I’m participating in a meeting called Optimistic Futures, organised by the Service Innovation Lab, InternetNZ, and Victoria University – three organisations with which I have an association. Here is my own broad vision for what I’d like the world to look like in 2070. We have solved the big, wicked problems. The environment is…

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