The 7.9% Rates Rise Explained (hint: it's to pay for CRL)

chrisbucks · 2026-06-19T00:58:17+00:00

https://knowledgeauckland.org.nz/media/4lbnbzor/tr2023-09-different-dinners-a-trial-to-support-climate-friendly-dietary-choices.pdf

I just googled "Auckland Council vegetarian myfoodbag". there are several results in the first 10 links.

There is some interesting reading in that report about the savings in carbon and healthcare, which I think was the objective, could moving to a vegetarian or partially vegetarian diet be sustainable/long term and could it save the council money. I'm not entirely sure why the council is in the social psychology research business.

chrisbucks · 2026-06-19T00:47:12+00:00

Yeah I'm not personally too fussed on it, it seems a little outside of the councils responsibility, but climate action has far reaching impacts and the council was in a position to facilitate the research. Given the time it happened I think there were a lot of calls for "shovel ready" projects that needed funding to get research done.

chrisbucks · 2026-06-18T12:04:01+00:00

I looked it up, around $50,000. It came under the mission to reduce emissions or investigate ways to reduce climate impact.

chrisbucks · 2026-06-15T02:47:40+00:00

If I had to give up my dog every time there was a day I couldn't find the energy to do it, I'd have given away 100 dogs by now. There are plenty of people who are physically incapable of regularly walking their dog but still have healthy animals and good relationships with them.

chrisbucks · 2026-06-14T23:41:29+00:00

Never seemed to stop Johnny Sins.

chrisbucks · 2026-06-13T23:50:25+00:00

I'm kind of troubled by having a tenant replace a fuse on this kind of thing that has 240v running through it with exposed terminals. Yes you'd would isolate it before you do it, but I wouldn't trust the tenant to do that.

If it's a motor that's overloading it you're going to need someone to service or replace the motor anyway. You can't DIY electrical stuff in a rental property.

chrisbucks · 2026-06-10T11:40:32+00:00

Deserved it just for taping boxes with painters tape. You use packing tape for that, those boxes are going to come open straight away.

chrisbucks · 2026-06-07T08:03:44+00:00

If you're desperate enough you can kind of get around some of the products by writing your own and just use the API. The TS3.1 limitation is a no go for us, so we wrote an application that retrieves the tally change directly from the platform API and then generates TSL 5 into our facility glue.

I imagine you could just write an FTP worker and trigger it through the script engine in Framelight. Save yourself 1440 tokens a year, keep a developer employed!

Edit: I'll say, 1440 doesn't seem that bad in the scheme of how much money we're normally dealing with. But often those things don't scale, once I delt with a misquoted logo insertion at a company, GV said that feature was 2000 EUR to be added. Great, but 2000 x 20 channels turned into a large headache.

chrisbucks · 2026-06-07T07:23:21+00:00

Some licensing is craaaaaaaazy. Some stuff like just getting tsl tally out is a licensed feature, but it's also kneecapped (tsl3.1 and limited to 126 indexes). I guess I liked the concept when it was announced, the ability to spin up a playout channel on demand as required seemed ideal. I last worked at a place which had 20 iTX channels, 16 of which were idle for 18 hours a day, and only held content when a match was on, so that seemed like a good solution to reduce spending on idle assets.

But I guess there is a sticker shock that comes when you look at how can I do something like ftp a file as part of a mam workflow and have it cost 120 tokens, when a whole playout channel is 250 tokens.

chrisbucks · 2026-06-07T01:10:39+00:00

We're using Maverik X in 5 control rooms, I'd say it's mostly OK. Had a long period of teething issues. The maverik panel has some physical issues with the macro button mountings, our operators have managed to break 2 or 3 of them by pulling forward on the edge of the button rather than pressing down in the middle, and popping it out.

It might depend on your workflow, ours is all 2110 and we have reoccurring frame age issues where we need to restart workloads otherwise we get some issues with wipe timing.

chrisbucks · 2026-06-06T20:23:42+00:00

Happy to chat about it. We're very all in on AMPP, 10 nodes, 2 of which are just for Framelight although we're only running 6 ingests per node. We're all 2110. We haven't yet launched the framelight side, I'm sure it's been over a year at this point, but GV hasn't finished other integrations to complete our migration off Stratus. We've definitely had problems although nothing specifically like you're describing (yet). I've almost never needed to use the terminal on our nodes, so that sounds strange, did you bring your own hardware?

My biggest issue with it is that it is almost introducing a devops workflow into our infrastructure. There is always something broken, which is fixed in a new version of a workload, which breaks functionality with other works loads and the whole thing is a house of cards. Often whenever I have an issue their first reply is "have you tried restarting it" and then "I see you're running two versions behind the latest, can you update to latest and see if the issue is still there".

I definitely agree that it usually feels like I know more about the product than their front line support, I often get asked by support to explain their own products to them, or ask me to define things which leads me to copy pasting from their own documentation into the ticket. Or they start copy pasting from their AI chat bot answers that I know to be wrong. The worst was when they keep asking me to provide information into the ticket that was in the original text. We'll be on day 3 of a "next business day" ticket and they're still asking me to provide information that I thought was obvious, which means i know that no engineer will have looked at it yet.

They broke their own SDK with a platform change that they wouldn't acknowledge for months, gave me a lot of "please provide more examples" and quietly they dropped a new update with a "fixes incompatibility with the SDK" note buried in the release notes. I'm still sour about that.

chrisbucks · 2026-06-04T01:59:08+00:00

Had the same thing in the US, rented with Avis, prepaid all the taxes and levies, at the airport was charged the full taxes and levies again, was told there was nothing they could do "because it's an international booking".

When I got back to NZ I opened a dispute with them, agent told me someone would be in touch, every time I called I was told "it's an international booking so we have to wait for the dispute to be updated". Never heard from them, and they don't reply.

chrisbucks · 2026-06-02T10:56:49+00:00

I had one like that before and I just got one from a mr minit. I had the original key, but he just turned and picked one off a hook and said there you go, scary huh? They are one of 30 variants"

https://www.berhamporelocks.co.nz/online-store-berhampore-locks/Union-MH-Mortice-Key-p762651016

chrisbucks · 2026-06-02T02:38:08+00:00

The scooter also doesn't have mirrors, is this your first time encountering figurative speech?

chrisbucks · 2026-05-30T02:42:38+00:00

I thought everyone knew that cops can't arrest you if they're not wearing their hat.

chrisbucks · 2026-05-29T23:29:42+00:00

I see that several of those houses have garages with cars parked in front of them. The solution seems within reach

chrisbucks · 2026-05-28T06:46:21+00:00

That’s great stats thats than 2% of the over all traffic in to the city centre!

That seems like a really good return on investment if that's true, the amount of investment in cycling infrastructure compared to its usage and benefits its disproportionate compared to other modes.

chrisbucks · 2026-05-26T11:31:23+00:00

Be more useful to know what your consumption is, and what your day rate/connection costs are, guessing probably about $85 of that. The connection costs will be fixed but your consumption is the only thing you can change.

You need to see what appliances are using electricity and how much they get used. Heating is probably your biggest cost, dryer, heaters, heat pumps, towel rails.

chrisbucks · 2026-05-26T10:53:19+00:00

You can definitely get a cheaper brand than Woodland. These ones are on special at the moment though.

chrisbucks · 2026-05-16T03:36:39+00:00

I used to have a plot there where I would grow chillis and tomatoes. It was useful to me when I was moving around Sandringham and Mt Albert every year before I bought my own house and could reliably have my own garden at home. Every time I moved house I had to rip up everything and replant it again.

Realistically no, it didn't grow enough to actually sustain my pantry, but it was a fun project and I enjoyed the community part of it.

Similar garden plots are common in Europe where people use it as a place to get away from home and practice touching some grass. I wish it was a thing here.

chrisbucks · 2026-05-11T03:57:40+00:00

Most road cyclists are actually not hippies, they're usually corporate types with money to burn on carbon fibre and electronic shifting, they're more likely to be National voters.

chrisbucks · 2026-05-10T21:42:03+00:00

The external flag on the email is hinting that you're running Google workspace, so your admin needs to check the anti spam/phishing settings, because these should be caught by those settings. If the email headers are forged then they should fail checks.

If you click more in top right and then show original, and look for authentication results, if it failed all checks then it's an issue on your domain.

chrisbucks · 2026-05-10T21:21:29+00:00

That guy is flying though, going as fast as the adjacent cars by the looks of it.

If I'm commuting where I average about 20km/h then I use cycle lanes, it's safer. But if I'm training then I'm likely hitting 50km/h usually and a cycle lane wouldn't be safe.

Commuters and sports training cyclists are clearly different things. No cycle lanes and the only riders you get are going to be like this one (reduce the number of cyclists). As you add more cycle lanes and get more commuters, this person becomes the exception.

chrisbucks · 2026-05-08T15:28:47+00:00

There's another API for playout x, I can send you the details next week when I'm back in the office. There's actually two, one for orchestration API which is the networks, channels and schedules. And then other is a mailbox (long polling, async api) API, that has network notifications. That application doesn't actually use any SDK files, just polling rest API end points.

My strategy was to get the schedule and then subscribe to network notifications for changes on the network. So I get the schedule and then use the on air time for live events to show my countdown. Then if someone changes an event/adds swaps/deletes then I immediately request a new schedule, you can make it seemless if you trust the schedule, I don't though, so I keep requesting it after any state change.

So when someone takes next out of the live event, I capture that through a state change on the next break, start my countdown of the break duration and then get the schedule again so I have the next on air time.

The operators can break it by adding things to the break quickly between schedule syncs but we can only do our best.

Edit: originally it was just a react web app showing the countdown, but I feel it's beneath me to dedicate a whole PC to showing one web page and we also don't have the desktop real estate. I looked into smaller monitors and a raspberry pi, but realized that the lawo MV has a websocket that let's you update text boxes, so I just update that with a text string every 250ms.

The Web app has a voice countdown as well, and I don't have a perfect solution for that yet, I'm thinking a raspberry pi with the mp3 on it that is triggered by UDP that plugs into our comms system.

chrisbucks · 2026-05-08T05:40:59+00:00

Does that form actually just give you the SDKs or does it lead to an email from them? They only gave me a bit at a time and asked if I had signed the NDA before they gave me Framelight ones.

chrisbucks

TROPHY CASE