About / Welcome

Welcome,

This site was originally a Forum for family / friends to act as an alternative to using Facebook, however never achieved adoption and subsequently evolved into a personal general blog that it is today (serving as my personal self-hosted surrogate to Facebook).

As always, the views expressed here are my own and (unless otherwise explicitly stated) I do not purport that any of my views to be factually correct and opinions on any given topic are most certainly subjected to change. The intended audience of this blog is Family and friends and the content here should be regarded in the same vein as a series of personal public Facebook posts as opposed to a fully-fledged blog.

Regards,


Fergus Young
www.young.kiwi

 

About / Welcome

National Party slash and burn to give tax cuts to landlords

Robinhood in reverse. Slashing and burning essential public services in order to give tax cuts to the landlords.

The optics surrounding this are not good and do not at all reflect positively on this National party led government – and I say this as (confessingly) a Landlord myself.

I’m far more concerned with seeing policy to support us living in a cohesive society and struggle to see how the carte Blanche slashing of important services (and capping wages of those working in those services) is in any way conducive to this.

And it was the National Candidates in the run up to the last election whom showed complete disinterest (compared to other parties, even ACT) when I raised the issue of housing affordability and the negative affects it was having on our nation and our society.

National Party slash and burn to give tax cuts to landlords

COVID-19 finally got me

Update 5th February 2024: Have now tested negative. Apart from sleeping for much longer and a dry cough, symptoms are largely gone. Overall, for me, felt like a longer acting but milder version of the flu.

Rapid Antigen Test Cassette with both the Control and Test lines visible indicated a COVID positive result
Positive COVID-19 Rapid Antigen Test

Symptoms initially appeared mid last week sometime but daily Rapid Antigen testing only began showing positive 4-5 days after symptoms first appeared.

So far symptoms have been rather mild (so far). More like a mild / low grade influenza with mild fever for only a day and a tickly / itchy throat for the rest of it,

That said, it’s appears to affect everyone differently and quite vastly so. Have had APAC Development team members at work being knocked out for weeks at a time.

COVID-19 finally got me

Personal homepages are a thing of the past

The web has evolved. I know of very few people other than myself who still maintains a regularly updated personal website. Seems almost everything personal including hobbyist topical sites have gone the way of Faceborg Pages / Groups and other social media sites

Looking to gradually reduce my activities on this blog in due course. I don’t know who outside of my immediate friend base and social circles are really interested in any of my thoughts anyway. Will be aiming to keep a lower profile and begin reducing my online footprint.

With that said, this domain isn’t for sale as I plan to continue using it.

Personal homepages are a thing of the past

Auckland Funnel Cloud

Funnel cloud spotted from Grand Drive, Remuera as I was nearing home yesterday. First time I’ve ever seen such a thing with my own eyes. Thankfully it never developed into a fall blown twister / tornado.

Funnel cloud formation coming out from dark clouds against the blue sky behind
Funnel cloud spotted in Auckland

Admittedly, I was initially concern that it was headed for my home. Turns out the thing was quite a bit away fortunately (out in the Harbour). The formation did resemble almost precisely the tornadoes I’ve been repeatedly seeing in many of my apocalyptic dreams.

Auckland Funnel Cloud

Ti-Rakau Drive and Trugood Drive Traffic light issue

Reported this issue to Auckland Transport. With “return to office” mandates and the lack of Travel choice in much of the East Tamaki Employment zone, thought this should get looked into.

Saw traffic backing up along Ti-Rakau Drive (West bound traffic) and all the way back to Botany and up along Harris Road as well (when returning back home from the In-office day on Wednesday)

Update: Auckland Transport have since come back to me and confirmed the issue and have kindly made adjustments to the phasing along with thanking me for report this.

From what AT have implied, this was the first report of this they have received. As far as I know, this issue has existed for months so it did leave me wondering why no one else has report this? Even if it’s to inquire if the current programming / phasing of the lights are correct. (This isn’t the first time this has happened, are people just assuming someone else will pipe up and report these issues?)

That said, with the Trugood lights now “fixed”, the congestion will likely be moved further down (e.g Ti Rakau / Revees Rd interchange) so overall travel time savings for my route will probably only amount to around a few minutes.

Ti-Rakau Drive and Trugood Drive Traffic light issue

Sold a domain name (for the first time)

Ended up flicking off the domain name anhedonia.org. Admittedly I forgot I even had that domain name and the unsolicited offers sent to me were ending up in the Junk folder unbeknownst to me until I went to check that folder.

No, this is not an invitation to begin sending me unsolicited offers to buy any of the other domain names I happen to hold.

Looks like Domain Agents and Escrow.com are legitimate in so much so the proceeds from the domain sale has appeared in my bank account. That said, the mechanics of the domain sale process however I feel could have been made a lot more clearer upfront and feel I was left hanging by Escrow especially particularly on up and coming steps I should be taking in advance to ensure a smooth transaction.

Sold a domain name (for the first time)

Matrix synapse Invalid Repository signatures

Received this perplexing rookie error while trying to undertake maintenance on one of my virtual servers.

An error occurred during the signature verification. The repository is not updated and the previous index files will be used. GPG error: https://packages.matrix.org/debian bullseye InRelease: The following signatures were invalid: EXPKEYSIG F473DD4473365DE1 matrix.org packages packages@matrix.org

Apparently apart from running the usual such as…

/usr/share/keyrings$ sudo wget -O /usr/share/keyrings/matrix-org-archive-keyring.gpg https://packages.matrix.org/debian/matrix-org-archive-keyring.gpg

…I needed to also hop into /etc/apt/sources.list and comment out the line…

deb https://matrix.org/packages/debian/ focal main

e.g From…

# deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-security multiverse
deb https://matrix.org/packages/debian/ focal main
# deb-src https://matrix.org/packages/debian/ focal main

…To…

# deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-security multiverse
# deb https://matrix.org/packages/debian/ focal main
# deb-src https://matrix.org/packages/debian/ focal main

After that, was able to upgrade my Matrix Synapse homeserver without error

Matrix synapse Invalid Repository signatures

Grid Lock Screenshot

Home time traffic on a Friday. Just as well I was working from home today. If I had to deal with this again on a regular basis. Would absolutely lose my freaking mind.

Auckland transport suggest that the Bus Driver Shortage afflicting the region will likely draw to a close in September. That long?

Unfortunately, it seems a few employers are still keen to force people back in the office at all costs while openly admitting that productivity while people were working from home was not actually a problem but simply to say it was “Sad” to walk into a sparse office – I struggle to see how this is a well throughout reason for lumping employees with such a heavy personal cost just to fill “bums on seats” in terms of personal time, commuting cost + stress along with mental health, and more importantly morale.

Grid Lock Screenshot

War of words where no one is a winner

The issue I have with the events that have transpired over the weekend is that the result was really a loss for both sides of the transgender discussion. Not only that, the impact has apparently spilled over to inflict at least some mild transient damage to New Zealand’s reputation.

Instead of reasoned debate, we ended up in totally unnecessary and counter-productive violence of both the physical and verbal kind. The issue here is instead of making the other side more likely to see and come to understand your point of view, the attacks like this just make the other party dig in, radicalize and double down entrenching a war that frankly does no one any use.

War of words where no one is a winner

Moved from Google Keep to Joplin for note keeping

Have moved from Google Keep to Joplin.

Screenshot from Joplin’s Linux client.

Only draw back I can see is there is no Web based UI to the thing. Have to use the native platform specific Joplin apps.

Installed Joplin client on Ubuntu 22.04 using this command line.

wget -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/laurent22/joplin/dev/Joplin_install_and_update.sh | bash

However, found that Joplin (after double clicking it’s short cut icon) refused to launch. So had to run these commands to lay down something called libfuse2

sudo add-apt-repository universe
sudo apt install libfuse2

…and then tried again, it launched after quite a few seconds.

Set up the path to my Joplin directory on my NextCloud installation.

https://[YOUR_SNAP_NEXTCLOUD_SERVER]/remote.php/webdav/Joplin

As for actually migrating your Google Keep Notes to Joplin, it’s a bit of a long winded process. Check here for some potential methods.

Moved from Google Keep to Joplin for note keeping