Panq

Hell, there were plenty of retail Christmas displays before halloween over here.

I know its too early but

Some of my neighbours have had their lights up and on for the past couple of weeks. It really does come earlier every year (not that I mind).

The sad thing is we don’t even drive the Kuga that much, only for long trips. I think it would be a reasonable bet that we’ve spent less on fuel than we have on maintenance.

Last road trip from Auckland to Wellington, we just hired a big car (a mid-size SUV, I guess). 100% recommend anyone shopping for a car (or whatever) does a quick check to see if it’s actually worth owning it vs hiring. In my case (one kid and no boat), it’s way cheaper to just hire something big and flash for the occasional road trips.

Oof. I’m pretty confident that I’ve spent less than that servicing every car I’ve ever owned, which is… 15 years or so?

Japanese subcompacts are so cheap that it’s more or less impossible for me to justify buying anything else.

It’s the first nice day for a bit, so I rode the push bike in to work today. Forgot how slippery everything is in the wet and had a brief lie-down in the mud, but still made pretty decent time. I’d call it a fairly decent start to the day.

Tangentially related: we’ve got an electric sit/stand desk that sometimes needs the controller resetting, but the only way to do so is to unplug it and wait for the capacitors to discharge, which takes at least 12 hours or so. I wonder if I can just add a push button and a resistor… 30 seconds is annoying, but would be a huge upgrade from can’t-move-desk-until-tomorrow…

The solar/battery models don’t run 24/7 - you can trigger them remotely (so you can check the live feed whenever) or they can trigger with motion. Still perfectly useful for a bunch of use cases (e.g. just checking if you closed something, or installed somewhere that motion sensing is reliable like a low-traffic corridor) but not super useful for, say, a front door.

Just to second this - I’ve upgraded all but one camera to Reolink RLC-810A a few years back and they’re rock solid. All offline (no internet, but connected to Home Assistant on a separate LAN), all powered by a cheap unmanaged PoE switch from PB Tech. (Edit: this one).

They’re recording 24/7 to their local memory, but I almost entirely use them via Home Assistant’s ability to pull a JPEG directly from the camera (because it takes a fraction of a second at 4k vs the unbearable pain of waiting >10s for video to buffer even at SD resolution).

We had good weather for once, so I went for a reasonably long (43km or so) bike ride and then climbed [a very small mountain] (https://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/places-to-go/auckland/places/mount-william-area/tracks/mount-william-walkway/) that we’ve been meaning to check out for a while.

Karioitahi beach, right on the boundary between Auckland and Waikato.

Rode up a steep hill and found a decent bit of weather this morning. And a rainbow down the other side, too.

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Replacing the hanger is probably a five minute job. Finding the correct one is much harder. Replacement spoke is cheap, but making a wheel run true is a bit fiddly and I’m not particularly good at it.

I’ve already put aside plenty of money for an upgrade, it’s the choosing one that I hate.

Also: NZ has a Workride scheme where you can get a bike with no GST paid off over a year from your pre-tax wages/salary. It works out somewhere around 50% off the actual sale price for a typical worker (though some of that is from your own Kiwisaver contribution and/or student loan repayments, which you’re technically just putting off and not actually saving in the very long term).

I’ve been trying to ride my bike into work instead of driving lately, but today it decided it’s had enough of hauling my fat arse around and the derailleur hanger snapped in half.

Probably should use it as an excuse to upgrade, but I hate shopping for expensive things.

tips on soldering

In addition to the other comments - if you’re soldering to something that can sink a lot of heat (a great big copper connector, or the ground plane on a circuit board), you will probably need a fairly broad tip. A finer tip can’t transfer heat fast enough, so you end up having to hold it in contact for far too long to get hot enough to melt the solder and (counterintuitively) you end up melting plastic or overheating components. Doubly so if you’ve cranked up the heat to help.

FedEx have their own drivers in Auckland?

I can confirm that they have at least one.

To be fair though, our supplier invests a fairly large chunk of money in freight, and in the past ran their own dedicated flights when the previous carrier (maybe TNT? Can’t remember) wasn’t reliable enough. I have no idea if FedEx is that good in general or if it’s only for these sort of high-priority customers.

Between them, DHL and FedEx get almost all of our parts orders from Melbourne to Pukekohe overnight. They are unbelievably efficient compared to outfits places like Toll or Aramex that can’t get packages across Auckland in under a week.

Like some kind of masochist, I volunteered to head in about 90 minutes early, park at Clevedon, and ride to meet them at the top. I was only about five minutes short of actually beating them to the top, which I’m pretty proud of. That climb is hard.

I finally managed to convince my siblings to join me on a bike ride and we went over to Hunua on Sunday and did the easy ride from the top of Moumoukai Hill Road down to the Clevedon market. Highly recommend if you’re in the area, and it was a ridiculously beautiful day for it.

I figure it’s just entitled people using them to stop someone else parking there when they leave.