← Feed

Posts

• Post #4280980

  Complained to the ombudsman because the Ministers for Energy are playing musical chairs instead of responding to my OIA request. #NZpol

• Post #4280979

  https://racingthefrontier.com/ #AI

• Post #4280978

  How a Few Hundred Dollars Could Manipulate Election Prediction Markets Touted as a truth serum for political forecasting, they’re vulnerable to distortion, sometimes at surprisingly low cost. By Liam Vaughan … The odds fell back as switched-on traders hoovered up “no” contracts in response, but the following day Polymarket still gave Mahan a 36% chance of replacing Gavin Newsom. Traditional polls had him around 4%. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-07-29/manipulation-threat-taints...

• Post #4280977

  Chatting to the postie. He says he's delivering a lot of passports recently for people who are moving overseas. Remember, you can still vote the NAct coalition out from overseas. https://vote.nz/voting/how-to-vote/vote-from-overseas #NZpol

• Post #4152287

  7am and the ground is all crispy and frosty. -3° #EV is all toasty warm, pre-heated, warm steering wheel, no frost on the windows. Next to it the diesel Ute can barely be seen under a thick layer of ice. Good thing I don’t need to run it today. It would take ages to warm up, even if the engine could turn over. Hope the battery is new because the cold weather kills those 12V batteries so often. Just one of many ways EVs are worse than diesel. https://sdc.org.nz/notes/better-ev

• Post #3471387

  Solar in Aotearoa https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/snaring-the-sun/

• Post #3112740

  Automated transcriptions on YouTube are getting worse. bass guitar strum -> "Heat" (??!!) tap on a cymbal -> "[Applause]" Interesting. Heat. Heat. Heat. [Applause] Heat.

• Post #3112739

  For some reason turned on the radio news at 5am this morning and it was pretty close to my Mastodon feed: * US doing something goddamn stupid and hurting their trade partners * AI hurting the environment * National Coalition doing something mad (probably damaging the Treaty or punishing beneficiaries -- I had tuned out by that point) Add a train and it'd be just about done!

• Post #3112738

  Solar subsidy better value than winter payment An energy hardship researcher at Otago University is suggesting repurposing the winter energy payment and putting that money towards solar subsidies for households. Senior research fellow Kimberley O'Sullivan says because the price of power has increased so much in recent years, the winter payment covers less and less heating. She says switching the half a billion dollars the Government spends on the programme to #solar ... https://www.rnz...

• Post #3112737

  A while back I made some edits to a map on OpenStreetMap, mainly correcting some hut details and direction that streams were flowing (downhill, typically). How can I find *my* changesets? Is there a filter for that? There are recent changesets in this area but I can't find a way to just get mine. https://www.openstreetmap.org/history#map=13/-37.76949/175.92939 Found it: Top Right > My Profile > My Edits https ://www.openstreetmap.org/user/<username>/histor...

• Post #2852812

  New Zealand’s energy independence strengthened as Contact Energy’s first grid-scale battery goes live With the rapid decline in the gas market, Contact’s new battery system strengthens winter energy resilience while demonstrating how New Zealand can build a more flexible, reliable and increasingly self-sufficient energy system, powered by renewable electricity, said Contact CEO Mike Fuge. https://contact.co.nz/investor-centre/news/2026/glenbrook-ohurua-battery

• Post #2534209

  Marcus Intalex Deep Stepper https://sunandbass.bandcamp.com/track/deep-stepper

• Post #2370019

  My attempt to capture the #TinyBalancingSheep Behind him is is a valley with a tomo.

• Post #2162023

  Just noticed my EV has exceeded 100,000km driven. Huzzah! At my typical driving efficiency that works out to a consumption of … 🔋 15.15MWh (mega-Watt hours) ⛽️ 0 litres petrol 🛞 8 tyres At this year’s average of 50g CO₂ / kWh that works out to 7,575kg of CO₂

• Post #2162019

  Read a very interesting presentation from Contact Energy regarding their aspirations, trying to drum up interest from investors. Starts off with a lovely photo of their new battery electric storage system at Glenbrook. This slide poked me in the eye. Left hand column. One of these projected numbers is not like the others. It’s double its peers, and it’s a new company with nothing built. That makes me think it’s bullshit.

• Post #2162018

  Are you doing enough to protect local wildlife from your cat? https://www.rnz.co.nz/life/lifestyle/pets/are-you-doing-enough-to-protect-local-wildlife-from-your-cat

• Post #2006966

  Gary talks about the current Iran oil price shock and what it means for us. Lots of useful and quotable things. About sovereign debt. Why we should be reducing usage, not subsidising oil companies. "At the end of the day the people who reduce their usage are the poor, because poor people are much more responsive to changes in price than the rich." More funding for public transport, please. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi265I48MdI #NZpol

• Post #1847901

  Checking out the nationwide internet outage on my SmokePing graphs. I picked the wrong day to migrate them to another VM! I'll migrate them another time.

• Post #1847898

  Replaced a bulb in the oven. They come in a box of two bulbs. Second bulb put away safely for later. Bulb has died a second time. Where is the spare bulb that was put away safely for later?

• Post #1847897

  My solar inverter is sitting on the floor of the garage, disconnected. Now would be a perfect time to get a baseline reading for how much RF noise there is in the neighbour before the new inverter is turned on. What’s the best tool for this? RTL-SDR with Qube??? KiwiSDR but don’t refresh the browser window just take a screenshot #radio #RF #SDR

• Post #1847895

  Met Police's Palantir deployment has its own officers watching their backs > “we were never informed that the upgrade would include the deployment of Palantir's artificial intelligence. This continuous 24/7 geo-location tracking is highly intrusive and risks monitoring officers when they are off duty, on rest days, or at home. This presumption of wrongdoing and attack on officer's personal lives is unacceptable." Well said! It is highly intrusive! I agre...

• Post #1507692

  Anyone in the Waikato want an upright piano for practically free*? First tuning is noted as 1946, built in London so it’s seen the hold of a steam ship. * this is lower than the value of the castors on which it stands https://www.trademe.co.nz/a/marketplace/music-instruments/instruments/keyboards-piano/upright-pianos/listing/5890726472?

• Post #1288273

  Meet Nathan Surendran, the energy expert who predicts this is about to get much, much worse than you think https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/feeling-fairly-okay-about-the-fuel-crisis/?utm_medium=mastodon

• Post #968196

  I have learned something from this NASA Artemis II mission: There's something called a "mile" and they use this as a distance measurement. Wild! (Is this named after Miles O’Brien in Star Trek???)

• Post #687629

  Found an amazing example of a #Clathrus chrysomycelinus (a type of stink horn and cage fungus) in the bush today. https://inaturalist.nz/observations/343040663 #Mycology #Funguy

• Post #512675

  LNG Tanker Rates Double to $200,000 in Less Than a Day on Iran By Ruth Liao March 3, 2026 at 12:45 PM GMT+13 Shipowners and brokers are demanding more than $200,000 a day for liquefied natural gas tankers in the Atlantic Basin, roughly double what they were commanding less than a day earlier, according to people familiar with the matter. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-02/lng-tanker-rates-double-to-200-000-in-less-than-a-day-on-iran Surely this means it’s a good idea to build...