Admin of LemmyNZ and PieFedNZ. @Dave@piefed.nz and @Hal@piefed.nz are also me.
A Wellington firetruck has been taken off the road, after its engine caught fire, prompting a response from a fellow crew.
The New Zealand Professional Firefighters Union said the truck was only one of two high-reach heavy aerial-ladder trucks in the capital.
No-one was hurt in the blaze and the fire was extinguished.
Labour has promised to ban big companies from charging excessive prices, if elected.
Leader Chris Hipkins said a handful of big businesses were guilty of price gouging - that is, charging more than necessary for essential items.
The full policy includes:
- making it illegal for big companies with substantial market power to charge excessive prices for essential goods and services, or to pay unfairly low prices to suppliers
- setting a legal test for price gouging: holding prices “well above what they would otherwise be in a competitive market, sustained over time”
- requiring companies that gouge to pay penalties and hand back every dollar of excess profit
- giving the Commerce Commission power to investigate price gouging and supporting consumer groups and suppliers to do the same.
Williams said similar rules were already in place in the United Kingdom, Europe, Canada, and Australia.
National has made a supermarket break-up a key part of its election pitch, proposing to sever Pak’nSave from New World in a bid to drive down grocery prices.
National’s plan would turn the company into supermarket chains: Pak’nSave, New World/Four Square and Woolworths.
The breakup, however, would be contingent on a six-month review by the Commerce Commission into whether the split would leave shoppers better off.
Hi all, this is just a quick update to let you know I’ve set up a Discord channel that is bridged to our Matrix chat.
For a long time we’ve had a Matrix chat room, many people joined in the early days but over time that fell off and became just a handful of regulars. Matrix isn’t exactly common, and many users are only using Matrix for Lemmy and they have Discord for their other groups. So I’ve now set up a bridge so you can message to the Discord channel and it will appear in the Matrix room, and vice versa.
Check out our help page on the chatroom, or click these direct links to join:
TL;DR, moving to a dedicated server. Also some updates later in this post.
Since we moved to a VPS in February, I’ve been closely monitoring the resources of the server. I’ve kept just ahead of it, with our disk usage around 90%, RAM usage around 90%, and using 90% or more of our monthly bandwidth allocation. This was deliberate, we don’t want to pay more than we need to.
I’ve added a little RAM or disk space occasionally, and this time when I opened a ticket to request some more, they said “hey, so we have this deal at the moment”. One thing led to another, and now we’ll have a dedicated server for $45 USD a month, still in the Auckland data centre.
The specs are as follows:
CPU: E3-1270v5
Ram: 64GB
Disk: 2 x 1TB SSD
Traffic: 10TB
It’s much more powerful than what we have currently:
4 vCPU
9GB RAM
160GB SSD
Traffic: 1TB
I have already transferred over everything except Lemmy itself. So all the alternative frontends, our help pages, and the survey software now run off the new server.
Also, currently we have almost entirely moved off of Cloudflare. Currently they are still providing the DNS nameservers but there is no proxying or caching happening anymore, and we seem to be doing ok. I’ll be looking at that last step at some point, but it’s awfully convenient having a Cloudflare API to automatically set up TLS for any new subdomains so I have some investigation to do there. Anubis appears to be able to stop some 90% of bot scraping traffic, which I’m pretty happy with since we don’t have the Cloudflare blocking rules anymore.
So anyway, the plan is about 8:30pm this Friday I’ll take down Lemmy, back up the database, transfer it across and load it into the new server. This can take some time, expect an hour or two of downtime if everything goes well. If you want to follow along, join the LemmyNZ Matrix chat room.
Feel free to ask any questions about anything and I’ll do my best to answer!
The National Party is promising to reduce the compulsory student loan repayment rate if re-elected, while cracking down on overseas-based borrowers.
It said it would reduce the repayment rate from 12 percent to 10 percent from April 2027.
The party’s finance spokesperson Nicola Willis said compulsory student loan repayments were paid at 12 cents on every dollar earned above $24,128.
“It is often one of the biggest weekly expenses for a young graduate,” she said.
‘‘Reducing this to 10 cents means an accountant starting out in their career and earning $75,000 per year would keep an extra $39 a fortnight, or around $1000 a year.’’
Dried cured beef, ube cream cheese, sinamak balsamic reduction and a calamansi honey aioli smashed into a bun - Lazy Juan’s winning combo.
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:
So how’s it going?
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:
So how’s it going?
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:
So how’s it going?
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:
So how’s it going?
Myself, @MadPsyentist@lemmy.nz and @terraborra@lemmy.nz have been working on a new help site for LemmyNZ. Instead of various Lemmy posts to explain rules, donations, and FAQs, we now have:
On this site, we have a Join LemmyNZ page that I hope does a better job of onboarding than a registration page.
I’ve updated various links around LemmyNZ to point to pages on this site instead of the posts that previous had the content.
If you have any feedback, let’s hear it!
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:
So how’s it going?
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:
So how’s it going?
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:
So how’s it going?
Welcome back for our second financial update. See the first one here.
This quarter we added a little bit of hard drive space and 1GB of RAM but haven’t been charged for it yet. As I paid for the VPS for 6 months in February, there are no further VPS charges this quarter.
The expenses are made up of:
Expenses are allocated to the period they were paid, not to the period they cover. This is based on the actual amount charged to my card.
We received five donations totalling $140 this quarter. Donations are based on the amount the person donated, as listed by Buy Me A Coffee (before their fees). At the end of the year I’ll do a match up to try to match actual payout to donated amount to see what this difference is.
During the quarter we added 10GB of storage space and 1GB more RAM but otherwise the VPS seems to be sized appropriately. Last time I mentioned bandwidth usage and the potential to move away from Cloudflare. As a step towards this, I have disabled Cloudflare image caching, so all images should come via the server. This could also impact the load speed for geolocation reasons so we will see how this goes.
If you want to contribute to the cost of running Lemmy.nz, see the post here. Or the direct link: https://buymeacoffee.com/lemmynz
The usual caveat: Please don’t contribute if it will impact you financially. I don’t want to see anyone saying “I only had $5 in my bank account but Lemmy is important so I donated my last $5” like I’ve seen on other instances. If you can’t afford it then don’t feel bad, this round is on me. I don’t mind, truly. But if you can easily chip in a few bucks a month, then it is appreciated 🙂
As usual, feel free to ask any questions!
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:
So how’s it going?
A week back I posted a poll for LemmyNZ users to vote for a new logo.
The results are in.
The winner was the globe by @Manticore@lemmy.nz!
Out of the LemmyNZ users, we had 8 votes for the winning entry, 2 votes for Kimmy, and 1 vote to keep the existing logo. I even made some graphs:
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:
So how’s it going?
Hi all,
TL;DR: If you’re a LemmyNZ user, go and vote for your preferred logo here:
A few weeks back there was some discussion in the weekly kōrero posts about replacing out logo. The logo was AI generated, was done using the really early tools available at that time, and was our logo before there were any users other than me. I’ve always hated it, and have wanted to replace it for a long time.
Of the back of that discussion, I started a vote. I underestimated how much people cared, and so cancelled the vote but learnt that people seem to like the banner (Laser kiwi).
I asked for help in this post, and one user played with some ideas for us (various versions in that post) and has come up with a cool logo with NZ the centre stage of the world. For good measure, I have kept the existing logo and the one from the previous vote in the poll.
I have also left the banner out this time. Last time I had them grouped and it wasn’t clear if people liked the banner or the logo. We don’t have a good suggestion to replace the banner so unless people have suggestions we can leave the laser kiwi.
The images in this vote are:
“Revenge for not being on so many world maps. Now its our turn to be the world map” by @Manticore@lemmy.nz
Kimmy the kiwi/lemmy logo hybrid, that I made and came about from the chat in the weekly kōrero:
And the existing one:
This is a vote for the logo of the LemmyNZ instance, so please only vote if your account is on LemmyNZ.
