Epiphyllum Oxypetalum

Pictures of Epiphyllum Oxypetalum Flowers. Opens only once a year at night.

23rd June 2020: This plant is no longer in my possession and has since been given to a relative down country.

Have been receiving the occasional inquiry about where to possibly acquire this plant (or clippings of) from site visitors both locally and overseas. If people know of any Garden centres (or otherwise) in New Zealand that may be able to supply this plant or otherwise assist, please do state in the comments below to help out fellow Netizens :o) Thanks!

 

Epiphyllum Oxypetalum

RIOT.IM & The social “Forum” feasibility project

A while ago, there was a project involving setting up some sort of Forum for arranging social events outside of Meetup and Facebook for a group of friends.

Webs Domains were purchased, web space was purchased and Multiple Examples were set up for evaluation including Oxwall, Adhoc BuddyPress, PHPBB3, Family Connections, and some cloud hosted services such as Google+, Google Groups, even a try of Meetup itself (Seriously derailed).

After capitulating last year and allowing myself to be assimilated into the Face-borg collective, I now have an understanding what they really meant by “Forum”, it wasn’t a web based forum at all that I assumed many were thinking of, it’s basically a chat / instant messaging program they were talking about.

After reviewing Slack, Mattermost, Tox Chat among others, came across Riot.IM / Matrix.org. The Riot.IM product appears to cover most of the main points I’ve been looking out for…

  • Federated open inter-operable standard. (Can host your own server and get it talk to other servers), much in the same way Email is currently.
  • Open Source
  • Option to Encrypt the group chat.
  • Option to make it private or public.
  • Ability to attach pictures
  • Emoji’s (All important to some)

The example chatroom I set up “Tarawera” seems to work okay on my Windows 10 Desktop using the Google Chrome Browser and also using the Riot.IM app on my Xperia Z2 Android device.

Riot IM Web-based Interfrace

Now, apparently there’s voice chat available. There’s an Icon on the web-based interface for it, but haven’t tried it out yet,

In short, this is probably my best chance so far at trying to release the grip that the proprietary corporate platforms (Such as Facebook and WeChat) currently have on my friends for communicating with one another.

If anyone would like to try, please contact me and will send you an invite.

RIOT.IM & The social “Forum” feasibility project

Keeping in contact with friends and Family at home and abroad

The often used line for people who sometimes quite vigorously defend (their use of) Facebook is that “It helps me keep in contact with Friends and Family far away (or overseas)!”

Here’s the kicker, People I firmly feel were already freely doing that across the Wider general Internet way before the likes of MySpace and Facebook ever came on the scene.

Many people had their own Personal Homepages (at their ISP, colleges or elsewhere) or Personal Blogs and people would find each other by way of any number of search engines of the time, go to their page and flick them an email or sign their ‘guestbook’. (I know I have reconnected with many people I’ve lost contact with this way.),

RSS and ATOM standards were common place where people could subscribe to each other’s blogs or web pages, using any number of RSS readers and be able to keep abreast with articles from multiple sources, be it from their friends’ blogs, News media publication, or elsewhere in one place, (very much, I feel, in the same way how Facebook’s “newsfeed” operates today, but with far more granular control over what you wish to see than the Facebook newsfeed of today ever offered).

Another often used excuse for relying on facebook is “How can I share my photos with my family and friends overseas?”, Facebook is hardly the only medium or tool to do this. Again, your own blog could fill the same role with NUI.NZ as being my living example.

It’s worth remembering that Facebook as a communication medium is entirely controlled by a single corporation whose natural overarching focus is to maximize profits for their shareholders and is not an inter-operable communication protocol with several (typically competing) providers like how Email is structured.

If some people are serious about reducing their reliance on Facebook, are concerned as I am about the increasingly centralization of power to a few for-profit run silos, and are in favour of supporting open inter-operable web standards, I would kindly suggest that a regular Blog could fill that role as the first stepping stone.

Setting up your own personal blog I strongly feel needn’t be solely the domain of I.T. geeks. There are now blogging services which make it easy to get started as it is signing up for a Facebook Account.

There are several different blogging platforms, including B2Evoluation, WordPress, and many others. WordPress as a blogging platform seems fairly okay in my opinion… if you want a quick start, then suggest as an initial starting point signing up for a free account at wordpress.com at least as a stepping stone to get you on your way (it is very easy to sign up, as easy as it is to sign up for Facebook or any other social network).

Once you outgrow WordPress.com and/or you get sick of the adverts, you can then fairly easily move off on to your own self hosted WordPress blog at any web host of your choice once you’re ready.

What ever blogging platform you eventually get going with (Preferably an open source one that allows you to self-host in the future if not now), you can simply post links on your social media profiles (Faceborg, Google+, etc) back to your blog / homepage and have your blog / homepage as your main (web identity) hub and point of presence on the Internet in which to syndicate / share your content from. Much like what I do with on my own Faceborg Profile.

Keeping in contact with friends and Family at home and abroad

Pukekohe + Other Randoms

11th February 2017 – Random pictures with a walk around Pukekohe Hill and Waitangi Falls around the former Franklin District.

I still need to draw down the excessive annual leave racked up and travel overseas, somewhere, anywhere, for say a month.

Pukekohe + Other Randoms

Week Beginning 5th February 2017

Note: these are simply quick thoughts that have been jotted down. They have been categorized as “Insignificant” for very good reasons. Some of these points (each separated into their own paragraphs) may or may not be spawned into more substantial posts.

Urban Exploration Politicking

[Spun out in to it’s own post, follow this link to view article]

Unruly Tenant spray paints “FTP” on door

A good friend reports that his property in Turangi has been trashed with the Gates all gone and the Garage door spray painted with lets say “FTP” to be brief (No, not “File Transfer Protocol”, the other definition… involving the word police) What the hell was the property manager at the 21st Century Turangi office doing? Why was this tenant allowed to stay in the property for 4 whole months of rent arrears before my mate had to take matters into his own hand and demand to the property manager that the tenant be kicked out?

P Epidemic

Growing alarmed within myself about the Prevalence of P Use in New Zealand.

 

Week Beginning 5th February 2017