Kia ora and welcome to !newzealand, a place to share and discuss anything about Aotearoa in general
Rules:
FAQ ~ NZ Community List ~ Join Matrix chatroom
Banner image by Bernard Spragg
Got an idea for next month's banner?
Welcome to today’s daily kōrero!
It doesn’t have to be me making the thread, first in first served. If you are here on a day and there’s no daily thread, feel free to create it!
Anyway, it’s just a chance to talk about your day, what you have planned, what you have done, etc.
So how’s it going?
Today I'm processing UAV data of slips from up North. It's going to be fun!!!!
Wow, that does sound fun! So many questions! Do you fly the UAV or does someone else do that? Is it more like a drone or like a light aircraft? What does processing the data involve?
I don’t fly them my colleagues do as they have their part 2 training. I process the data into ortho imagery, mesh, and point clouds and combine with LiDAR data and survey topographical data picked up at the same time as the flights.
Do you compare to previous records to spot changes in order to find the slips?
I think it's more reactionary. Come across a slip along the road and (probabaly) as part of the Maintenance NOC it requires surveying so pickup and fly it, lidar use is only really for checking the drone / uav has good data. To answer your question we just use the term UAV but they're drones, DJI Phantoms or Mavics or some other cool ones like the skydio
Things have come on a long way from the early 2000s. Back then my old man was doing the assessments around the Tararua District for all the land that had slipped and it was a case of flying around in a small plane for ages making guesstimates of how much dirt had moved :)
editing to add he was the passenger, seeing the state of some of his fence posts and fences i'm glad he wasn't the pilot in the plane given the damage he can do in a tractor.
Haha awesome !!!3
Awesome, thanks for explaining!
This sounds amazing! What kind of tooling do you use to achieve this, and what is the output format? Who consumes this information once it has been refined?
UAVs and modern computers really do enable some incredible things.
yeah it's pretty cool. We provide a few different deliverables. Mesh usually in a format the client likes e.g. .obj but our preference is Context Capture .3sm / .3sx files they just work nicely for a mesh. We also provide orthorectified/georeferenced imagery (.tif, .jp2, .ecw) and point clouds from the UAV flight. To check the accuracy of the UAV we post process the GPS data against Base station and Survey control we establish on site as well as using LINZ CORRS stations. It's usually District Councils and Internal Engineers who use the data to design fixes for the road (Slips we do are usually on road corridors) so it's not that glamourous haha. Recently we've also been doing Bridges and Road corridors to digistise into CAD from the UAV data and then design cycleways which is much more fullfilling.
All those storms lately, I'm guessing you'll have a lot to sort through. Cool job though!
Yes there is a lot. We are helping out our office up that way I’m Taranaki based.
Got my hair did, smell like salon potions.
Hopefully today will be better than yesterday. Had a power cut. Friends down the road also lost power. Called power co, they logged with lines co. As it got darker I then noticed neighbours had power, took a tour around - yes we were the only ones out. Called back power co to find out where lines co was. They were dispatched 20 minutes ago, still took another hour to show up (still night so no mass storm damage to hold things up). Lines co finally arrived, discovered that our point of entry had burnt out and needed replacement by electrician. This is 8.30pm. House is dark, no heating. Looked for a sparky (found one through our local FB group and then tracked him down to find a number). He came and replaced, then had to call back power co to tell lines co to come back out to reconnect. Back on at midnight.
Awaiting invoice....
Yikes !!!!
Feck what a night.
It's been so endlessly rainy that I've been thinking about buying a laundry dryer... Hard to justify a >$1000 purchase for something we'd not really use outside of the depths of winter though. It seems hard to find good info on specific models, anyone got a condenser/ heat pump dryer they'd recommend?
Do you need a new one? For something you're not going to use often, a second hand one might do?
I have a consumer.org.nz account so can find their reviews on models if it helps. A quick look through shows even top brands have poor reliability... If you go with new then picking something with a long warranty may be a good idea.
I just use the laundromat when I need to dry clothes. If you can, I recommend that. A home dryer can only dry one load of washing at a time. I can get 3 or 4 loads dried at the laundromat in the same or less time for like $6.
We've got an Electrolux one, have had it for over a year now and had 0 issues with it. They take a lot longer than a hot air dryer, but sip power in comparison. Our model uses a hose rather than a tray for the extracted water and it handles all sorts of loads fine. Only the 2 of us, so the time to dry isn't a big factor as we're not doing a whole families worth of washing over & over.
I have a bosche condenser we do not like it our clothing comes out damp still.
Yeah they're not very good and take an age to run. I looked at heat pump options when we got a dryer and the cost savings didn't stack up against the extra purchase cost unless you were running multiple loads a day through it. We only use ours in winter so not worth it.
Is it this one? https://www.harveynorman.co.nz/whiteware/laundry/clothes-dryers/bosch-8kg-heat-pump-clothes-dryer.html
In the consumer.org.nz reviews, they have 22 dryers ranked and that's the only Bosche one. It came second to last overall. They rank based on multiple things but their drying performance score was 56 compared to 83 for the highest ranked model (there was one that got 85 for drying but was further down the ranks because of other scores).
That looks like a newer version of ours, we have had it six years
Sounds like they haven't got any better at drying...
😂
I thought about this recently too and ended up getting a dehumidifier instead as I figured it has more uses than just a dryer. In Winter we usually end up putting the clothes in front of the heatpump. I find running the dehumidifier in laundry mode beside the clothes for a few hours at night, makes them dry by the morning. Bonus is we can dehumidify our bed rooms when we don't have laundry to dry. We did pay $600+ for the dehumidifier though, just something to consider.
Seconding this - we have a dryer, but it only really gets used in laundry emergencies when we need something washed and dried in a few hours. Dehumidifier + drying rack does the job really well, especially when its in the sunroom/conservatory.
We got a heat pump dryer from trade depot after the first lockdown. Gets daily use and still going strong.
https://tradedepot.co.nz/vogue-breeze-heat-pump-dryer-8kg-white/
It's made by Midea, one of the largest appliance manufacturers in the world. Trade depot can be a bit sketch, esp with warranty i hear so YMMV.
Really appreciate all the replies, thanks all for the input!
Kiaora whanau!
Looks like we may be out of the bad weather!
Four keys on my laptop have decided to just stop working (G, H, single quote and up arrow). Internet searches show others with the same problem, even the same keys, but no solution.
Tried cleaning individual keys, rebooting multiple times, even a different OS as a live CD. Even a bios test has them failing. External keyboard works fully, but lugging one of those around defeats the purpose of having a laptop at all.
Warranty expired too. Considering buying a replacement, aftermarket, keyboard as I can't afford to buy a new laptop and the rest of it appears to be working fine.
A frustrating problem.
Surely you can work around it. How often do you really use those keys?
I'm a programmer, they're all quite useful
Just need to come up with some creative key mappings
What kind of laptop and how old is it?
The warranty has virtuality no impact on whether you can get it repaired for free. We have the Consumer Guarantees Act which far surpasses most warranties.
Thinkpad, just under 3 years old. The keyboard replacement is around $50 from Amazon.
I think this one is going to depend on your circumstances. Most likely you could argue enough to get it fixed, they will probably send it away and you'll be without a laptop for a couple or three weeks. If you paid $500 for it then you might struggle to get them to do it. If it was a $3000 model then I'd say you have a very good argument for getting it covered under the CGA, but it will depend on the store. There's also the risk they will claim you dropped it and not cover it.
But normally for me the conversation goes "I bought this from you a couple of years back, now it's not working". They say "Sorry it's out of warranty", I say "you're still required to fix it under the Consumer Guarantees Act". Then they get a manager and you repeat the conversation. They will normally agree at this point. If they say they can't do it without a receipt, tell them they have the record because the IRD requires them to keep the records for 7 years, and the GST Act requires they provide a copy receipt within 28 days of someone requesting it so please can I have a copy of my receipt?
Now, depending on how much $50 is worth to you and how much you like arguing with staff, it might just be easier to do it yourself.
Personally I have got a refund on a 2.5 year old laptop that died and a 2 year old phone that died, but I know some places are better about it than others.
Bought it direct from Lenovo, on sale for $1000 - I think it was half price. I believe international purchases are still covered by the CGA, might get in touch with consumer.org first.
Honestly I think your chances are good. I was worried you might have got it from PBTech who have a bad CGA history, but if you got it from Lenovo you can probably just tell them it's broken and you're from NZ and they will probably just sort it for you.
I bought a laptop direct from Microsoft, shipped from Australia, and after a couple of years it died. They sent me a return label and gave me my money back once they checked to see if it was faulty.
You a fan of Louis Rossman too?
To be honest I'd never heard of him, but checking his Wikipedia page I think I would have been a fan if I had heard of him.
I have done the odd laptop repair but these days I have a Framework laptop. Super easy to fix or upgrade, just difficult to get to NZ because they don't ship here yet.
Framework laptop
Modular laptop... 🤤 🤤
Dam I want to get one of those!
I've had it for a while now, definitely has some quirks but I really like it. I love that you can hot swap your ports. Need an HDMI port? Slide one in. Display port? Remove the HDMI and slide in and Display port. Need 4 USB-A ports? You got it!
There are only 4 port slots but you can just swap in what you need.
It charges with USB-C, and you can move the ports, so you can put the power cord on the left or the right depending on what you need.
I had it shipped through Youshop, was not cheap but it probably wasn't that different from buying that level of laptop in NZ.
They have announced a 15 inch one now. It looks really cool, maybe you'll find a 13 inch Framework on trademe later this year 😆
you're not tempted to take the old mobo and chuck it in a 3d printed case for a thin desktop / lab PC?
I am very tempted, probably to use as a server to replace my Raspberry Pi, but then what do I do with the rest of it? No one wants to buy a laptop with no guts.
Do Framework have a used spares program marketplace or anything like that? I'd have thought there'd be folks keen if they had failing parts and wanted cheaper replacements. Though because you're on early possibly everybody else would be doing the same thing - taking the mobo and being left with spare display/keyboard etc.
Nah not that you can sell your stuff on. And anyway, Framework don't officially support NZ. If they did there might be more demand for the parts.
But if I took out the mainboard and sold the rest, someone could buy a mainboard/RAM, and have a laptop. But it's hard work getting one here, so I might as well just give them mine. Easier to find a buyer, easier for the buyer who can just start using it.
I might just have to wait until I'm upgrading the mainboard in the 15 inch one before I get my nice server.
Keyboards on laptops ~~are~~ can be easy to replace