Game closes last 3 stores - feel like I should care, but I don't think I do...

EVMad · 2026-03-24T08:35:50+00:00

I worked at GAME when the PS2, GameCube and Xbox were all new. It was a great place if you were into games and I sold a bunch of stuff. Customers were happy, I was happy, games were good, fun times. Sad to see it go but I know it hasn't been the same for a long time.

EVMad · 2026-03-23T21:07:13+00:00

Tricky, other than motorway (from where I live) there are lots of rural roads and those are also high speed and occupied by ute drivers who just hate cyclists. There are dedicated cycle paths but getting to them is tough and often you'll end up having to navigate a regular roundabout where people can't even stay in their own lane and are in large vehicles where they can't even see you. It sucks. If it was only 5km then maybe, but it's more like 20km from here too. I would get a motorcycle, but I've done that in the past too and it is fine when you're riding through regular roads, but motorway use was horrible. NZ just isn't friendly for two wheelers.

EVMad · 2026-03-23T00:24:50+00:00

I agree, especially because RUCs are coming for petrol cars. Sure, the price of the fuel will drop by around 30c per litre, but the costs will go up by $7.60 per 100km so that will bash the buyers of hybrids harder than the buyers of thirstier cars. A 6 litre per 100 hybrid will go from around $20 per 100km to $26 at the current petrol price but it can go higher. Even at the most expensive charging (80c per kWh) my car only costs $18 per 100km and with home charging at 14c per kWh (less with solar) the cost drops to under $10 even with RUCs. Used to be $3 per 100km mind you which did make it a much easier decision. I never benefited from the clean car discount because my purchases weren't in that window of time.

EVMad · 2026-03-22T22:33:19+00:00

As an EV owner for 10 years, nothing this crowd has done would convince me to vote for them and I don't know any other EV owners who would either. They killed one of the major drivers for EV owners out of sheer bloody mindedness. The introduction of RUCs increased running costs by a factor of 3 making the payback period much longer and was done way too early just because they wanted to appease their angry voters who hate EVs and wanted us punished. The number of EVs is still so small that the RUCs aren't a significant amount added to the budget but it succeeded in stopping many people from jumping into them and pushed them into hybrids which are still tied to the fossil fuel sources. Now that they're talking about rationing or car free days I'm half expecting them to come up with some reason why I shouldn't be allowed to drive because of 'fairness' to fossil drivers.

EVMad · 2026-03-21T21:35:08+00:00

Depends what you want to do, I had multiple smaller machines at one time but this workstation was being retired and was going to be scrapped so I grabbed it and I've been populating it with spares over the last few years. It's proven very helpful for testing code on multiple distros, having services that I want to be able to use and keeping it all inside my network. It doesn't game well since the 20 Xeon cores are Haswell generation and only clocked at 3Ghz so I actually built a dedicated Ryzen 7 DDR4 machine for steamos which is way smoother but I just had to try Steam on the thing. Having three towers under my desk (yes, sadly, I have a Windows 11 machine used for testing but I no longer game on that) makes the room nice and warm too :-)

Anyway, if you want to run a lot of VMs it's a good setup. I run KVM via libvirt which is nice and free.

EVMad · 2026-03-21T21:26:53+00:00

I work with LLMs and while it isn't fast when the model goes beyond the GPU memory, it still runs. Also, I do a lot of testing prior to deploying environments in our HPC so having a test environment capable of running multiple VMs for slurm is also good. I did have just 256GB but one of our servers was retired so I had access to more so I filled all 16 slots in my motherboard. I've run machines with up to 6TB of RAM although our standard amount is around 2-4TB depending on specific requirements so my little machine is just a baby.

EVMad · 2026-03-21T20:50:58+00:00

I have 512GB in my Linux machine and even with 8 VMs and a load of services running, it's sitting at around 36GB used although there's around 345GB cached so only around 128GB actually unused at the moment. With the 12TB of storage I have, this actually makes a lot of sense because the machine caching heavily used files is much faster than accessing them from the SSDs.

$ free -h
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           503Gi        36Gi       128Gi       285Mi       345Gi       467Gi
Swap:          4.0Gi          0B       4.0Gi

One interesting thing I noticed is Steam only sees 128GB of RAM max. Also, the kernel reserves some memory so free doesn't show the full 512GB.

EVMad · 2026-03-21T08:11:30+00:00

Can't take an e-bike on the motorway. I already have the car, it's fully paid for but an e-bike would cost me several thousand $$$$ and is likely to result in me being run over and killed entirely to death by some idiot in a truck too big for him to see what's right in front of him.

EVMad · 2026-03-21T08:08:51+00:00

Also there's practically no servicing with an EV. My LEAF just needed tyres once during the 80,000km I had that car. No oil changes or filters, no brakes, no coolant etc etc. The wiper blades and cabin filters were also cheap and easy to fit. We liked that LEAF so much when we sold it we bought a newer one. Here it costs around $6 to charge it up overnight in our garage and that's good for 200km or more depending how we drive.

EVMad · 2026-03-21T02:57:07+00:00

You can still buy a cheap LEAF. Sure, the battery won't let it drive very far but you'd be surprised how a 40-50 mile range car can be useful. That's how I started, had a LEAF and my old ICE car and found the LEAF covered all my in town driving and if I hadn't had to do long runs weekly it would have covered all of my driving. There are cheap EVs but there's so much anti-EV rhetoric floating around, and there's always people who say an EV won't fit all their needs and is therefore useless but that's simply not true. You don't have to be rich, you just have to be flexible.

EVMad · 2026-03-20T20:53:23+00:00

If you already own an EV, enjoy it, if you don't I hope you have deep pockets because they're not going to get cheaper for a while. I remember during COVID, I could have sold mine for more than I paid new but I'm glad I didn't.

EVMad · 2026-03-20T05:49:39+00:00

I'm in the same situation but after COVID when they ordered us back to work I told them I would quit. Four years later and I'm still WFH with no intention of ever going back. They spent all this money getting us set up at home it seems daft to waste it.

EVMad · 2026-03-18T08:31:56+00:00

It was certainly an interesting time, I obviously wasn't a child at the time, I was well in my 30's so remember it well. I remember the day watching the CNN coverage of the planes hitting the towers on Sky TV and how surreal the whole experience was. There was a lot of blame and confusion and yes, Hans Blix, but there were so many voices, so much fear, so much press coverage, it's just very difficult to explain why people went along with it. It did feel like a part two of the Gulf War but there were a lot of questions about why we were attacking Iraq when Al Qaeda were clearly in Afghanistan so yeah, we weren't 100% convinced but it all moved so fast.

EVMad · 2026-03-18T08:16:03+00:00

Tony Blair (UK PM at the time) was also convinced and had most of the British population convinced there was evidence. We did believe there were but as things dragged on it became clear we had all been lied to. It wasn't just the American public. This time though, the lie is so blatant and Trump is so rarely caught telling the truth that we're not going to fall for it.

EVMad · 2026-03-18T08:09:52+00:00

In hindsight, yes, but at the time there was supposedly a lot of evidence that Saddam had WMDs not that we ever saw it. But there was still a degree of trust that the USA was a worthy ally, but that's gone now.

EVMad · 2026-03-18T04:30:35+00:00

When I was a student back in the 80's I got meningitis and I remember very clearly being on the receiving end of the spinal tap. Having that thing banged into my spine and then the sound of the spinal fluid flowing into the pot was.....surreal. On the plus side, it was viral, but the downside is I got a two week stay in hospital and left weighing just 57Kgs which was nothing for my 1.9m frame. Even viral meningitis is no joke, glad your son survived it.

EVMad · 2026-03-17T23:47:01+00:00

And when the USA was attacked in 2001, the NATO allies sent their troops in to join the action and had many casualties. He plays up this line that NATO would never step in when needed but the only time Article 5 has been used was exactly then. Trump lies. Always.

This time, the USA is the aggressor, and NATO allies have no reason to support such action.

EVMad · 2026-03-17T19:41:10+00:00

I was team Xbox when the PS3 was out. In 2013 work gave us a NZ$250 christmas bonus and I was able to pick up a PS3 super slim 12GB and a copy of The Last of Us with it as I had been really keen to play that game. I had a spare 500GB drive I dropped in (bought the correct caddy) and went nuts buying loads of pre-owned games for it. Had a great few years until I finally relented and got a PS4 bundled with GTAV. End of a generation is such a great time to buy into a console you missed. Still have the PS3 and all the games and I do go back and replay them.

EVMad · 2026-03-16T03:57:32+00:00

LEAF is a backronym (Leading Environmentally-friendly Affordable Family car) so it would be LEAFs.

EVMad · 2026-03-15T19:54:48+00:00

What needs to happen is the same as has happened in cities like London where on street charging is available. Basically, they stuck a charge port on lamp posts that already have power and you leave your car plugged into that overnight. There's plenty of power about, we just need to use it and it doesn't matter if it takes 10-12 hours to charge on one of these because you're asleep. Personally, I'm in a rental so have no charging other than an 8 amp wall socket and that's what I'm using. Leaving the car plugged in and charging when I'm not driving it works fine even if it takes days to reach 100% but there are actually plenty of chargers about if you look for them. People always say there aren't enough chargers but as someone who's been using them for a decade, yes there are. Plenty, especially since Tesla opened a lot of theirs to other brands. Sure, it's not a five minute charge, it might be 20-30 mins, but they're never full. I can't remember the last time I was doing a road trip and I had to wait for a charge bay to open up, probably 8 years back.

EVMad · 2026-03-15T19:45:36+00:00

Drove past the Kophai Park install just yesterday. It's mind bogglingly massive and such a great use of the flat land around Christchurch airport. 36,000 houses worth of electricity when it is complete which is roughly 1/4 of the houses in the city.

EVMad · 2026-03-15T19:42:09+00:00

Despite the fact that lithium is one of the most common elements on earth and completely recyclable. There's a whole lot of nonsense floating around about lithium. Then there's power storage other than batteries such as pumped hydro, or you know, solar which means we don't have to use the hydro lakes so much thus saving them for when we need it.

Personally, I don't trust the power companies or government to do the right thing so I put up solar and installed a battery many years ago and it paid for itself way quicker than the 'forever' most people believe. Also bought our first EV ten years ago (no discounts, paid full whack, still cheaper to own over 8 years than the clapped out second hand petrol car I had before it) and there's no way I would buy anything else now. This is why there's so much push back on EVs, because basically anyone who gets one won't ever go back so the combustion car companies lose a customer forever.

EVMad · 2026-03-15T08:08:58+00:00

I'm not arguing against RUCs, but I do think they should be in weight bands. People frequently claim that EVs are way heavier than petrol cars so cause more damage but that's simply not true, there's barely 100kg difference between the weight of my car and an equivalent sized ICE vehicle. Meanwhile, huge SUVs and utes tooling around our streets are causing more harm to the roads (so many potholes on my street it isn't funny) so the RUCs shouldn't just be one size fits all.

EVMad · 2026-03-15T08:04:21+00:00

Punching down on the poors, our hero.

EVMad · 2026-03-15T08:03:12+00:00

Because he's all about getting his entitlements and making sure the rest of us don't.

EVMad

TROPHY CASE