Ubuntu 24.04 LTS I recently upgraded my laptop to the most recent version of the most popular Linux operating system, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. It’s free software, costing $0. With Ubuntu’s free Expanded Security Maintenance, it will be supported until April 2034, at which point it can be easily upgraded at no cost. It offers the…
Continue reading →Most of us acknowledge that catastrophic global warming is one of the most significant existential issues ever to face our species. But we tend to talk about it in the abstract, basing our information on international research, which seems distant from our home in New Zealand. The good old Kiwi “she’ll be right” can kick…
Continue reading →I called out Claude the AI on its hallucination, and asked it how humans should deal with hallucinating AI’s. Claude’s ultimate advice was: stop using me.
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Did you know that you can access all of NZ’s free-to-air TV channels through your computer or mobile phone? It’s super easy, even for non-technical people. It’s true that most of NZ’s TV providers have streaming apps, as well as content buried in their websites. But if you just want to have the equivalent of…
Continue reading →Last week was Techweek2020, and I ran a series of EdTech showcases, interviewing NZ Education Technology companies. The highlight of the week for me was Tim Vaughan, the Chief Revenue Officer at Education Perfect talking about what’s made them so successful: There’s no secret, it boils down to: A pathological obession with customer experience, which…
Continue reading →A friend recently reminded me that I’d given this talk at the National Interfaith Forum over 11 years ago. Oddly, the subject has come up a number of times for me over the last few weeks, in the context of how we should develop and celebrate tolerance. But is tolerance enough? Read on… “Beyond Tolerance”…
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 →Government procurement for innovative solutions sucks. Here’s one way to fix it. I was privileged to participate in the Startup Nations Summit Policy Hack earlier this year in Tallinn, Estonia. This one day policy hackathon brought together representatives from all over the world, working on different problems. On the day before the Policy Hack, the…
Continue reading →As I work more and more with government innovators, I’ve learned that despite the fact that we come at it from many different angles, there is a common ethos and camaraderie. We’re all after the same thing: to improve government to better serve the governed. They say we get the government we deserve. We say…
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