Does the CEO of One NZ still want us to email him with questions and complaints? I've sent him this complaint: > My last bill, invoice date 23 August, due 9 September, arrived in my letterbox on 8 September. That's really quite late and rather poor performance. For comparison, a post card put […]

Does anyone know which snack will completely satisfy my snacking requirements this afternoon?

> It may seem an unlikely bird haven, but the abundance of birdlife at the Western Treatment Plant famously rivals Kakadu. South of Werribee, at the edge of Port Phillip Bay, nearly 200 man-made lagoons and natural wetlands sit side-by-side across the 105 sq km site. More than 300 species of […]

Can I view this article at work? Headline: Gen Z favourite toymaker Jellycat doubles annual profit in adult-fueled toy craze After the last time I casually looked up what a rose toy or a rabbit was I’m not sure I want to know about adult-fueled toy Jellycat 🙀

This is the high quality ARTIS-ANAL bread because of these sequential slices one is twice as wide as the next one. I guess nobody does maintenance on the blades of their bread slicer? Is “artisanal” just another euphemism for “poorly maintained”? Sort of […] [Original post on mastodon.nzoss.nz]

Real shame about Saudi Arabia and Mohammed Bone Saw acquiring Electronic Arts (EA). I enjoyed playing the Battlefield series of games. They did have a bit of a American monomyth in them, but their game trailers didn't have any violations of the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War unlike their […]

If you subscribed to NZ Geo during last year's subscription push it's about time to resubscribe (unless you paid for a 2 year sub). https://www.nzgeo.com/

Just an interesting side note about the crow who finally left for warmer southern weather yesterday. All summer, I washed out the birdbath daily. Each time, there was always at least one flower in the water. I never thought much of it, since the flowers […] [Original post on mastodon.thirring.org]

Quite a read about domestic water supplies in Aotearoa. Lots of homes with their own water supplies have nitrate contamination in them. My own water is from town supply, sourced in the Kaimai, below where we do our trapping. Delicious […] [Original post on mastodon.nzoss.nz]

WOW WOW WOW

Published every month by the BLS since 1939-02 the Non-farm payroll figures make interesting reading. They even published the figures in 2020-03 and 2020-04 (a colossal -1,397,000 and -20,471,000 job losses). There’s uncertainty about whether they’ll have enough money to publish next month […]

For Lovers of Brick, Chicago Is a Wonderland Brick aficionado Will Quam leads tours through the neighborhoods of Chicago to showcase the humble building material that saved the Second City. By Leigh Giangreco […]

I was out gardening and found a starling had been killed and eaten. A bit further on a native tuna (#anguilla australis) had also been killed and eaten. Quite a large one too, from what remains of its head. That couldn’t have been easy to lift out of the steep sides of the creek. There’s some […]

'Just come and be in it' - 87-year-old community theatre director > June Renwick from Auckland's Selwyn Community Arts Theatre still gets "really excited" about seeing people discover their hidden performance talents. I’ve had the privilege of being in one of June’s productions and it really […]

Story about YSAR. I’ve been out in the bush with them one weekend. Good fun. The Scout hut mentioned is our Scout hut. I helped re-roof it last year. Pity YSAR have no funding anymore. https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/how-to-save-a-life/

Does Japan suffer from a lot of invasions of monsters and giant insects? The Sony PlayStation State of Play seems to involve a lot of monsters invading and needing to be repelled.

Earlier this week when it was raining and miserable there was a knock on my office door. The postie was there in the pouring rain to hand me my mail. He knows I work from home so he came around into my garden to the shed to deliver the mail. Thanks NZ Post! (Also it's some AThom ESP32 things I […]

Nearly killed myself. I was unsuccessful. Yesterday I was going to mow the lawn so I moved the step away from my shed to let the mower get in closer. But then the rain started and I couldn’t mow. Later I went out to my shed to grab something I’d forgotten. Coming out of the shed I completely […]

Was seeing something a bit fishy with one of the entities in Home Assistant so I hit the old "Reload" on the integration. Now instead of being fishy it's unavailable. Confirmed it was still reachable on the network. Reload again. More items are unavailable. Reload again. Even more items are […]

To prove I'm do not have autism I have followed *another* account on the fediverse that promises to post photos of trains.

I'm unsure what goes through the minds of people who gleefully add "AI" to the work they do. "I should do my work using AI." ∴ "Lots of workers are being replaced with AI." ∴ "I have replaced myself!" ∴ "Why am I unemployed?" Are these the logical steps in their heads? Is there anything in […]

Congratulations to my dear partner for identifying Dianna Krall - Cry Me A River as the vocal sample in High Contrast - Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. #music

I've voted in the Bird of the Year competition! https://www.birdoftheyear.org.nz/ Mostly voted for birds I've taken a photo of in the backyard.

Jung Chang: 'China Is at a Turning Point' The historian talks about the follow-up to her book Wild Swans, witnessing famine and revolution, and her frustrations with modern China. By Mishal Husain Weekend Interview https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-jung-chang-weekend-interview/

Dumb Light Hologram David Seymour says that Government-owned companies are bad a “making money” but that’s because he’s bad at accounting. If I post a letter then NZ Post receives $3.50 and after expenses they lost 3 cents. This is the sort of accounting a stupid person does. I didn’t have to […]

Mastodon feature request: after the third time you mute a post from the same person it asks if you’d just like to mute that entire account. Or it does some keyword analysis and detects that the last 10 posts I’ve blocked all contain the same brand name for pain medication that’s been in the […]

Impressed that this process has used 21114685 hours of CPU time since 2020 but there are only 8 cores in this box. It used three centuries of CPU time in half a decade? Goddamn computer wizards! #nerdshit

Broadcom NetXtreme Solarflare XtremeScale … is there some sort of trademark slappy fight about using “extreme” on a NIC name and dropping the leading “e”? #nerdshit

You may be familiar with Betteridge’s Law of Headlines which states that any newspaper headline that asks a question can be answered with “No.” I’d like to suggest an addition: any headline that asks a question about a right wing figure can be answered with “because he’s a racist arsehole” […]

Great collection of photos in the NZ Geo Photographer of the Year 2025 finals. Have a look and vote: https://www.nzgeo.com/photography/photographer-of-the-year-2025-finalists/ #photography

Trying out a new Linux distro on my laptop. It's been a while since I upgraded and the difference in the old Ubuntu I had, a more recent Mint 22 LTS, and the latest Bluefin (Fedora 42) is huge! Well, one big difference is that Mint perfectly supports my GPU and offers either the free or the […]

For such a car-centric, car-dependent, car-bound, car-worshipping country, have the anti-fascism freedom fighters in the US managed to figure out how to block a road or a driveway? Oh no my bus has suffered a mechanical fault right in front of this ICE convoy. Sorry mate, gotta dig up this […]

Trying to understand pool chemistry and there are some mysteries in here I can’t figure out. There’s a lot of sodium, chlorine, carbon, calcium. You put in salt (sodium chloride) or baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) and then some hardener (calcium chloride) into this big witch’s brew. Some of […]

One of the most sampled drum beats of all time, a tiny snippet from the incredible drumming on Amen Brother The Winstons The 6 second drum break that defined an entire genre of music for decades. https://youtu.be/HrrWhCbZAyY > The young man who played that drumbeat, Gregory Coleman, died […]

Tonight’s theme is drums? Doc Scott Here Comes The Drumz https://youtu.be/o7_Kbd1nLTI #JukeboxFridayNight #lettherebedrums

Just cracked open the local voting papers and hello there’s one of our friends standing for Council. Their blurb and what they stand for looks really good. Suspiciously good. As though they’ve copied my blurb from when I stood for Council. They mention how many native trees they’ve planted on […]

I yelled at the radio the other day. Some bullshit about how someone is feeding medical data to “AI” to predict health outcomes. It’s not “AI”. “AI” is meaningless as a term. The correct name is “multivariate regression”, but we’ve been able to do multivariate regressions for decades and the […]

I was chatting to the lawyer in a very expensive conversation and goddamn Adobe Reader kept popping up asking if it could use #ai to summarise what we were reading. First of all, I’m already paying a lawyer to summarise them. Second, the current AI gets things mixed up. I don’t want to be told […]

I’ve probably walked past this sign 100 times and I only just noticed that the listed amenities include Giraffe

Turns out they did retire Aratere after all. Nikki No Boats succeeded! https://www.boatingnz.co.nz/2025/08/after-26-years-on-cook-strait-interislander-ferry-aratere-retires/

Somehow I have sprained my ankle. Perhaps I have been seated too aggressively?

Installed the new spa pump this morning. Put the hose in and started filling it from the tank. Set a timer so I wouldn’t forget. About half way through the time I tapped on the rain water tank and thought, hmm, I’ve put nearly 2,000 litres into a 1,600 litre spa. Sure enough the water was […]

This is us. All of us.

How a Steam Locomotive Works (Union Pacific "Big Boy") https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hszu80NJ438 #trains

I get where those "lizard people" conspiracies come from. Those nutty right wing politicians go out for photo ops of them doing "normal things" and they're so goddamn awkward and out of place. They always look less "human" and more "lizard pretending to […] [Original post on mastodon.nzoss.nz]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Female starling has been attracted. I can tell because she’s busy flinging the male’s attempt at a nest out of the nesting box. Unfortunately for me it’s right above the duck’s pond I cleaned out yesterday as I saw it was full of straw and sticks.

Instead of four colour coded and capped wires I instead have received a motor with a specific plug on it. My spa has a wiring block. What’s the worst that could happen?

Careful: this bread contains HTML!

Capitalisation changes the meaning of sentences. Watch this demonstration: Before: i really like trains After: I really like capitalisation.