I wear a safety pin on my jacket. It’s not because my jacket needs to be held together, nor do I have an infant in nappies at home, nor because I used to be a punk — I never was. I wear my safety pin to show support for vulnerable people. I’ve done so since…
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I recently participated in a “Procurement Hackathon” event run by the Chris Webb and Jane Kennedy at Department of Internal Affairs in Wellington. Rolled into this event was the launch led by Minister Clare Curran of the DIA Marketplace, which is starting life as a directory of third-party pre-approved services, many of them SaaS, that…
Continue reading →A few weeks ago, my partner-in-everything Kate Frykberg facilitated an exercise with me to distill my core values. My main reason for wanting to do this was to achieve better clarity on my own internal reasons for deciding which work opportunities to pursue, which to decline, which to double down on, which to close down….
Continue reading →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:…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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,…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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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