Up until now, had been using ATLOGIS “NZ Topomaps” app for Topographic maps for use outdoors in the NZ Bush. However much to my chagrin, despite paying them some coin for their Pro version find that they changed it now be a yearly subscription at $20.00.
Now using the similarly named NZ Topo maps developed by Mason Blackwood. Have paid for the Ads Free version.
Fantastic Planet on it’s last evening prior to it’s departure from Auckland. Click photo to access gallery on NUI.NZ
In the year 2022, Why on earth do New mid-range and better Laptops fitted with a 15.6 inch 1366×768 resolution screen still even exist?
—
Something tongue in cheek… In the guise of certain people in New Zealand advocating banning 1080 poison by way of “BAN 1080” signage and scrawls particularly in parts of rural New Zealand, I propose a new movement for the more tech inclined among us: BAN 1080 768, Demand 1080 (minimum)… 😛
“768” being the vertical resolution on laptops screens I’m railing against (which is not tongue in cheek). The majority, if not all laptops with a screen size of 14 inches or larger should have at least a screen resolution of 1920 x 1080. No laptop with a screen 14 inches or larger on a medium spec (AMD Ryzen 5, Intel i5) or better laptop should ever be sold new with a mere 1366 x 768 resolution screen in the year 2022. Continue reading “BAN 1366×768 Screens 😛”
Here’s one for rather interesting warning labels. This one discovered on a Game Cartridge (Possibly for a Nintendo “Family Computer”)
First three symbols seem pretty self explanatory (Keep away from Heat, Physical abuse, and Water), but what on earth is the 4th one? Do not feed to Crocodiles???
Using Google Translate’s optical character recognition function, the text appears to say something along the lines of “We can not guarantee the item will survive damage from the above activities”.
Discovered this thing sitting around in my attic space. Recalled I purchased this thing like a decade ago, but never got around to deploying it anywhere. Needless to say, socially speaking, equipment like this certainly would not fly these days…
Picture from Whitecliff’s walkway done at the start of this year.
The NRMA’s car rental division, Kingmill Pty Ltd, formerly operating as Thrifty Car and Truck Rental Australia have since been rebranded as SIXT Car Rental Australia upon expiry of their original Master Franchise agreement with Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group (DTAG) in the United States.
This change includes some of their network of sub-franchisees throughout Australia including, Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd and Pacific Automotive Holdings Pty Ltd which have followed their franchisor to rebrand as Sixt Car Rental Australia, while some other now former franchisees have either stayed on as Thrifty, changed over to other car rental brands or are in the process of establishing their own independent car rental brand.
Whether there will be any real material operational change with SIXT Australia (from how they usually did things under the Thrifty brand) or whether it’s essentially just a brand change (in the form of “same pig different lip stick”) remains to be seen. It is sincerely hoped that certain franchisees will take this opportunity of a clean slate in which to substantially improve their conduct and move on from some of their former practices (Including charging of fees outside of the written legal documentation and deliberately trying to deceive customers such as myself through the posting of multiple false testimonials pretending to be happy customers).
The Thrifty brand in Australia under it’s new structure has now been returned back to it’s parent Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group (DTAG) / The Hertz Corporation and now appears to be largely hitched in together with the Hertz branded locations through out Australia. In a nutshell, the people running Thrifty Australia as of now is not the same people running Thrifty Australia as of a few months ago. Continue reading “Former Thrifty Car Rental Australia operational structure now rebranded as SIXT Australia”
Short late afternoon explore
With the upgraded VPS, started putting up galleries from my recent trips around Waikato and Bay of Plenty…
Ray White Open home sign in Rolleston…
A family has now moved in to the property I most recently purchased, with an Alarm system to go in very shortly.
I have noticed many houses that were for sale have since gone straight into the rental pool. Anecdotally, it appears to be happening all around the country. Consequently, should the trend continue, I would not be surprised to see that we eventually end up with a nationwide Rental glut at some point. May be the tables will then finally turn in favour of tenants and instead of Renters scrambling for properties to rent, Landlords would be scrambling for Tenants.
We don’t know how long this low interest rate environment is going to last. The government to be honest (both current and past) have been exceedingly coy as to their apparent lack of will do actually do anything concrete about the housing affordability and the accelerating inequality in this country.
Earnslaw Burn track to the water falls and a look at the Lupins around Glenorchy, click picture below to view the gallery. As pretty as the Lupins are during bloom, they’re are classed as an invasive weed.
Triple purpose, Canterbury Area Road Trip.
Investigations so far suggest that there is some type of conditional redirect exploit/hijack being planted on many WordPress websites redirecting search engine referred visitors to fake award/survey sites such as “moviesuddenvalley”, “applefacetook”, “hurryexpectsugar”, “mouthtroubleask”, “ondiesmall”, “thendownmeat”, “makemodernfive”, “sayhitome”, “whateyeweight” among several others typically ending in a “.live” or “.top” address. While this Hijack, as far as I have seen appear to predominantly affect some WordPress websites, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this possibly affects other types of websites as well.
In my experience, for sites that are affected, to replicate…
(These most certainly could differ depending on the site affected)
The hijack will not fire If you access the site directly (via bookmarks or typing the address directly in the address bar of your browser). This appears to be some conditional exploit based on visitors coming from Search Engines. (e.g by typing the site URL directly into the Address bar, you won’t get redirected) and it looks like it will only fire once per IP Address each week (resets at the start of each week).
I probably should add that many so called WordPress vulnerability scanners online I’ve discovered aren’t even set up to detected this sort of hijack. The scanners based on “Securi” certainly will not detect this exploit, I’ve found.
Other resources…
—
Original Post (Old):
Noticing some apparent weird intermittent redirect hijack on the general web where some sites are allegedly redirecting to some dodgy website with names such as “mouthtroubleask”
Update – 2020-09-11T06:55:00+12:00: Added steps to replicate (from my own experience)
Update – 2020-09-12T18:20:00+12:00: Added note to mention that all of the online WordPress malware scanners I’ve tried won’t detect this sort of hijack.
A little short walk, about 15 minutes from the car park down the base of the viewing platform. Now very quiet… only two families (at different times) were present during my visit.
Experimented with running Pi-hole on the Raspberry Pi 4 that I have.
The Set up at least for the more tech inclined is very easy, all you had to do was launch a command line prompt and type this command…
curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash
After running it for an evening. Thoughts and findings so far…
Curiously noticed these appearing in the query-log…
Why would Teams try and poll for these addresses is beyond me. It does raise a sufficient level of curiosity that I will be checking this out.
Real Life Facebook, an Older YouTube Skit from Australian Comedian, Kinne
(Click picture below to access YouTube Clip)…
Caught my eye while cruising homely.com.au. Inflated ego award goes to… *Drum roll*…
“I’m better than all of you, you are all losers, look at me me me, it’s all about me!”
Asking to have one’s backside kicked. (Figuratively speaking of course)
