Dave

An Auckland ferry cruised through the SailGP course last week, and near several catamarans out on the water.

"Not even a flying F50 was stopping this ferry," SailGP said on its official Instagram account.

An Auckland Transport spokesperson says the Bayswater ferry's skipper was called through by the race marshal on Thursday during a SailGP practice session.

There's a 30s video of it. Apparently they were given the go ahead but I bet the skipper was a bit nervous as those boats approached at speed as a swarm.

A grass fire that broke out on Māngere Mountain in Auckland on Saturday night has now been contained by firefighters.

Crews were called to the scene, near Domain Road, just before 9:30pm.

Nineteen crews fought the blaze, with firefighters also standing guard at the entrance to the road and turning away people who were trying to get a closer look at the flames.

The fire grew to more than three hectares, Fire and Emergency said.

Clinical trials are underway for a neural implant to monitor brain pressure in those living with hydrocephalus.

The condition causes fluid to build up in the brain which, if untreated, can be fatal.

Patients can be born with hydrocephalus or develop it later in life.

It is typically treated with a small tube, called a shunt, implanted under the skin which drains fluid from the brain into the stomach.

However, shunts had a 50 percent chance of failure in the first two years.

To tackle this, researchers at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute and Kitea Health developed an implant to measure pressure in the brain using an external, wireless wand.

The implant is only two by three millimetres, and weighs 0.3 of a gram.

Clinical trials in adults are about 50 percent complete, and trials on children have begun.

It is a world first, the smallest brain implant ever developed, as well as the first implantable medical device developed in New Zealand.

When Northland ear specialist Marg Hunt was driving to work on Thursday morning, she was not surprised to hear on the radio that there were hundreds of ACC claims relating to cockroaches in ears over the past five years.

"I was laughing because I was thinking 'oh gosh, you know, that's bread and butter for me'," Hunt, who has been in the ear-cleaning field for 40 years, said.

That same morning she removed a pesky mosquito lodged in a person's ear canal.

"It's mainly flying bugs [like moths and mosquitos]. I've only seen a cockroach [in ears] a couple of times actually."

If you have ever been paranoid about getting a bug in your ear, you may want to close your ears now: According to Hunt, it is mostly a coincidence when it happens and it is often while we are asleep.

"When the person's asleep, the cockroach is looking for something warm and dark to hide in.

"But flying bugs at night ... just happen to egress into the ear and flutter and cause all sorts of irritation for the person.

The junior doctors' union says a decision on the proposed Waikato Medical School is taking too long.

The Ministry of Health is progressing a business case and cost benefit analysis to decide if the $380 million school in Hamilton should go ahead.

It was working with the University of Waikato, which would be home to the country's third medical school, and Health New Zealand.

The school aimed at producing more GPs to plug dire shortages, particularly in rural and regional areas.

Resident Doctors Association secretary Dr Deborah Powell said it was frustrating a decision had not been made already.

Several people are injured after being hit by a car on Fergusson Drive near Tararua Street, in Trentham, Upper Hutt.

Emergency services responded to the crash at 1.45pm. The road will remain shut for at least another hour.

People travelling to or from the nearby Wellington Cup Races are advised to take alternative routes.

Last weeks thread here

Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!

This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.

It’s for talking about anything that might not justify a full post. For example:

• Something interesting that happened to you
• Something humourous that happened to you
• Something frustrating that happened to you
• A quick question
• A request for recommendations
• Pictures of your pet
• A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like an elephant
• Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)

So how’s it going?

I was trying to get it to pause Pi-hole on request. I'm using Home Assistant Cloud (Nabu Casa) for speech to text, and have also got OpenAI plugged into it for if it doesn't recognise a command. The screen shot is from the debug logs that I eventually found after struggling to work out why it wasn't running my automation.

I'm using the new Home Assistant Voice Preview. Don't get me wrong, overall very happy with it for the price point, but for some reason the cloud speech recognition (I believe powered by Google) is very good at understanding me until I start trying to talk about ad blocking.

Last weeks thread here

Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!

This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.

It’s for talking about anything that might not justify a full post. For example:

• Something interesting that happened to you
• Something humourous that happened to you
• Something frustrating that happened to you
• A quick question
• A request for recommendations
• Pictures of your pet
• A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like an elephant
• Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)

So how’s it going?

Hi all, welcome to Lemmy 0.19.8!

We had about 10 mins of downtime starting from 1:17 this afternoon as the database migrations ran. Apollogies if this interrupted your lunchtime scrolling, this was needed because the Controversial scores needed to be re-calculated as detailed below.

We have skipped a few versions, we were on 0.19.5, and so we have .6, .7, and .8 updates. A brief summary follows, with links to the Lemmy announcements.

Lemmy 0.19.6 changes:

• This version introduces parallel sending, which should solve our issues with Lemmy.world and remove the need for the extra VPS in Finland. Unfortunately Lemmy.world needs to update for this to work, so it will be a while longer.
• Changed sameSite cookie from Strict to Lax - I think this should help the issue where you are logged out from the browser a lot (especially in Firefox)
• There's a change in how "Controversial" is calculated, to use exponents instead of multiplication, to match how Reddit does it. Unfortunately the Lemmy documentation page seems not to list Controversial ranking among the other explanations, but there is some discussion here.
• Removed the "Trending" box from the home page. I kinda liked how it worked for us to find our local communities but oh well.
• This was a reasonably big release but mostly backend stuff - see link above for more info.

Lemmy 0.19.7 and Lemmy 0.19.8 are small bugfix releases, some of which fix issues introduced by 0.19.6 so we didn't see them. I don't see anything of interest to an average user but if you're interested take a look at the announcement posts linked.

Let me know if you see any issues, or have any questions.

Dame Tariana Turia, a former member of parliament and government minister, has died. She was 80.

The former Labour Party MP and founder and former co-leader of Te Pāti Māori was a champion of Māori aspirations.

She served in Parliament for 18 years, initially as a list MP and then in the Te Tai Hauāuru seat for over a decade.

Dame Tariana suffered a stroke over the New Year period. Her iwi said at the time she did not have much time left.

Last weeks thread here

Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!

This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.

It’s for talking about anything that might not justify a full post. For example:

• Something interesting that happened to you
• Something humourous that happened to you
• Something frustrating that happened to you
• A quick question
• A request for recommendations
• Pictures of your pet
• A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like an elephant
• Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)

So how’s it going?