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

NZ House prices are unjustifiably overpriced.

Yeah, I’m calling it. House prices despite recent falls are hugely and unjustifiably over priced given the quality of the housing stock (not to mention high interest rates) – Both due to Building Defects and Lack of maintenance on the part of the owners.

It would seem many existing houses quite a few years old will have some of structural framing defects. Chances are unless people have been meticulous with maintenance, if you pull the Interior plaster wall off or look into the ceiling space, There will likely be a number of Timber members that have suffered in someway from water ingress unbeknown to the owners – Usually from a leaking roof (particularly under heavy wind and rain conditions pushing water up under the flashings and into the building cavity) or improperly flashed details.

I don’t believe the issue is simply limited to the Monolithic cladding and houses made of untreated framing alone. Have seen State houses of the 1940’s suffer from this primarily due to lack of maintenance and inspection.

It’s why for myself at least I have shied away from embracing the purchase of new Town houses (Terrace houses) owning to access issues for regular inspection and maintenance. Frankly while many of them are built with a cavity which will help keep any water away from structural framing. Some I can see haven’t been particularly well built.

NZ House prices are unjustifiably overpriced.

Facebook now requiring login to view business pages

Meta / Facebook are at it again, requiring you to login to Facebook just to view business pages and public community pages…

Seems phones may still have uninhibited access to pages marked as public. Desktops and Tablets appear to be affected.

I know this is in vain… Internet users of the world, please stop supporting these misbehaving tech behemoths. So tired of these corporates trying to monopolize and seize control of our lives.

Facebook now requiring login to view business pages

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

Waikato Expressway Ngāruawāhia remedial roadworks.

Drove down the Waikato Expressway. Turns out this was not the best move (for my mood) admittedly.

There’s a section of the Waikato Expressway north of Hamilton that has been reduced to 1 lane each way and 50 km/h for what feels like coming to a year. This is the Junction between SH1 and SH1C. The issue here northbound is that 4 lanes effectively go down to one.

I don’t drive down this route regularly as I live out in Auckland, but the lack of progress each time I do drive down that way is particularly striking. And each time I come to a complete halt in that section, I have time for my eyes to wander and noticed a lot of this equipment (barriers, porta-loos, diggers, rollers, etc) is hired. I’m picking it will be us, the taxpayer who is ultimately picking up the tab for all this hired equipment to be laying dormant.

I feel the situation with our infrastructure works now warrants a more urgent look in. This isn’t the first and this certainly won’t be the last. I feel it’s is entirely appropriate to question what is going on and for the likes of Waka Kotahi to explain to the public in layman’s terms what is involved and what is perhaps blocking up the progress.

Edit 1: To add, just found this pamphlet. It looks like those at the grassroots / front line workers have been getting all the heat from the public. This is not where the indignation should be directed at. It should be directed at Management overseeing these projects. That said, I totally understand the public frustration and Waka Kotahi / Higgins absolutely need to be grilled on this – but I certainly don’t condone abuse to the front line road workers.

Edit 2: 9th June 2023 – Just Heard back from NZTA , they’ve said the leasing is done by Higgins and is their own business (arrangements). NZTA agree that the works have been slow and under resourced. Will try and reach out to Fletchers / Higgins and see what is up with that project given the national significance of the road.

 

Waikato Expressway Ngāruawāhia remedial roadworks.

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