Dave Lane @lightweight@mastodon.nzoss.nz

Oh, and for those keeping track, the problems I was having with DIA's online passport renewal service turned out to be a system failure at their end... worked today (although still required turning off a LOT of blockers - they use Google CAPTCHA... ugh).

Very cool to hear this: https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/2018713275/hadley-wickham-open-source-data-wrangler I wasn't aware of Hadley Wickham, but very cool what he's managed to achieve in the open world.

It was cool the other day when I was giving the NZ National Party some stick for being hypocrites, reminding them about their unforgivable sin of suspending democracy in Canterbury... Someone followed up my post trying to shift attention to the Labour Party's past behaviour... it was gratifying that the next post was from Helen Clark herself... with the tag #fakenews :) I love NZ.

Very cool to hear about this on RNZ just now! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oNir75_l4U Hauturu (Little Barrier Island)...

Aerogel is very cool https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeJ9q45PfD0

Wow, this takes me back to my time in the physics department ... even down to the RC planes and bikes everywhere and completely covered chalk boards. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe83T9hISoY

The main reason for bringing Cloud hosting to NZ is that 80% of our power nationwide is carbon-neutral. In the South Island, it's approaching 100% as this is where most of the hydro lakes are.

And I wouldn't have to continue giving the NZ gov't well-deserved bollocks on a daily basis for gross incompetence in their strategic IT decision making :)

An easy way for NZ gov't take decisive action on the climate emergency they've declared (but largely haven't acted on) is to pull all NZ gov't cloud hosting out of AU and have it onshore, ideally in SI hosting facilities more than capable of providing a better service than Microsoft or Amazon (I know of a few). Further benefits: the providers would be NZ companies, they'd be subject to NZ privacy law, taxpayers would get 30%ish back in tax take, & we'd be free of multinational exploitation.

If you're interested in sustainable computing... it'd be a good idea to investigate using Aotearoa-based Clouds rather than those in AU, USA, and most other countries, which are mostly powered by electricity generated from coal and other CO2 releasing fuels. In NZ, 80% of our power is hydro (no CO2 emission) - we need more Cloud infrastructure in the South Island which gets ~100% of its power from hydro.

Having seen how human labour intensive creating a bag of cashews is... (it's generally exploitative and dangerous to the workers) I feel I need to stop eating cashews. This whole situation makes me quite sad. And I'm sure the situation is similar for many other things we buy at cheap prices we take for granted...

It seems that altruistic principles are something public corporations simply don't feel they can afford. Which is why I think we can't afford the existence of public corporations.

Ugh, closing my hanging ) ... phew, that's better.

Phew - just managed to save an AWS server instance for my work that had gone AWOL... it's been running for a LONG time without a root filesystem check. EC2 doesn't offer any sort of console view (a lame "screenshot of the logs" option but that doesn't let you remotely diagnose boot issues! Crazy, because I can do that with a variety of other hosting providers whose services are less than 1/5th of AWS' prices. We're moving to greener (cheaper & better) pastures, at least for our use cases.