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Napier And Havalock North
9th Oct 2026
Left Feilding today and headed to the Hawke Bay. The first stop is Napier for two nights.
The Scott Base B & B at Feildings was lovely. Hosted by Brenda, it was a very comfortable stay amongst a lovely part of the world. Very fine breakfast too. I can definitely recommend it.
I tried to find the caravan park we stayed at Napier the last time I visited, about 20 years ago. Its location relative to the town centre is completely lost to me, and the two caravan parks I checked did not ring any bells. Maybe it’s no longer there. I guess a lot can change in 20 years.
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A small selfie wearing a new jumper I picked up before my trip. Cost me $5.00, down from $30 (I scanned it twice as I thought it was an error). And it’s great: warm, right size, feels comfortable, even has pockets. An incredible buy!
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Parody of the classic Window’s Minesweeper as if it was developed as a modern-day AAA shooter. Very amusing.
Via Bluesky post by the developer: Mike Lacher.
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Organised my gift for my niece’s upcoming birthday. She loves birds so I’m giving her a copy of Omnibird, as recommend by @Miraz. She may be a bit young for it now, but she’ll grow into it. She loves drawing too, and the pencils were only $7.00 NZD with the book, so that was a no-brainer.
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I’ve never barhopped in my life, but this might be the first time I’ve cafehopped.
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Day 10: Mystical. #inktober
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Today’s native bird sighting: a kererū. Quite a striking bird.
I also saw some pūkekos, but I was driving at the time and I couldn’t stop for a photo.
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Day 9: Ram. #inktober
Just in case this isn’t clear, this is meant to be a ram’s head on the end of a wooden battering ram. Ram on a ram, get it? (Drawing the knots of wood is hard)
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Day 8: Stinky. #inktober
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Oh, there are masked lapwings over here. Just heard one in the distance a few minutes ago. I did not know that.
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Lines through Feilding.
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Lines of Feilding.
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I really wish we as an industry moved away from distributing tools as Node packages. I guess the thinking is “hey, you build websites, you’d have Node already, it’ll be easy for you to install this package (and us to distribute it).” First of all, I may build websites, but not with Node (if I can help it). And second of all, there’s no such thing as “having Node.” Different packages would work on different version of Nodes, and because each distribution requires, on average, 42.1 bajillion dependencies, any one of them could break when your version of Node falls out of date. How is that easy?
The alternative? Anything else! Personally I would prefer static binaries either distributed via Homebrew (for Mac) or RPM/DEB for Linux. Or heck, just offer them as a zip. Don’t make me think about dependencies I don’t care about.
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Pækākāriki and Upper Hutt
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Day 7: Panic. #inktober
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Must remember to resist shortening words while I’m over here. Entered a cafe and enquired about their “breakey,” and the person behind the counter looked at me blankly. Eventually it became clear I wanted to know about their breakfast. 😄
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Day 6: Ogre. #inktober
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Day 5: Smack. #inktober
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📗 Vibelog
Tools Made In the Past Week
Loved the Lex On Tech post about the apps people vibe-coded to solve their own needs. Building for an audience of one has been a train I’ve been on for a long while, before the concept of AI coding agents came about. Their presence now has just made it easier, and made it feel less spending time of these things was time wasted.
This is a roundabout excuse to write about the tools I asked agents to build for me over the last week. They were:
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It was an absolute pleasure catching up with @JohnPhilpin for coffee today. Great conversation about tech, music, and Micro.blog.
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Johnsonville, the Skyline Walkway, and the Inevitable
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A Day In Wellington
Visiting the botanical gardens and the summit of Mt. Victoria. Continue reading →
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I can go pretty much anywhere in Australia or New Zealand, order a white coffee, and it’ll be decent. I’ve yet to have a great white coffee anywhere north of the equator. I think the milk makes a huge difference. It feels… IDK, “heavier” than it does down here.
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Went out this evening to look around the harbour area a bit. I enjoyed this art installation: Fibre-Optic Colonnade Car Wash, by Eddie Clemens.
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Chalk me down as someone not thrilled at “customer” being used in place of “passenger.” Yes, yes, I know I paid for passage. But I pay for a lot of things, and “customer” could be used to describe me in any of them. Is variety such a bad thing here?
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I have friends who are unafraid to spend multiple weeks abroad with a single carry-on backpack. I can’t do that; I’m not a light traveller. I don’t think I’m a heavy traveller either. Just someone who thinks waiting a few minutes on the other end is worth the extra luggage capacity.
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Another thing I learnt about PostgreSQL: notifications sent within a transaction will only be dispatch to listeners until and unless the transaction is committed. So inserting rows in one transaction, and notifying something which will consume those rows in another should not result in a deadlock.
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Dev Notes: Select Locks In PostgreSQL
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Checking my foreign currency reserves to see if there is any I can offload on my upcoming trip. Current holdings are $8.70 SGD and $20.00 USD. No kiwis.
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Not sure if this is just an Aussie thing, but in grade 4 we were issued “pen licenses” where we could start writing in pen, rather than pencil. I almost lost mine during probation because I used pen for drawings too. I guess I needed to get the “heavy pen usage” rating for that. 😄
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Coding agents managed to port Hazard Maze, another old Delphi project, to the web. Not as straight forward as the last one: it took about an hour to get 90% of it done, but another several to get it working right. But now, it’s working the best it ever has.
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Preparing some work for a new feature, and it feels a bit like the divsion of work that comes from drawing an owl:
Task 1. Add these two new columns to the database schema.
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Took a brief look at Spacefast. Looks interesting. What’s appealing is that it’s private by default, which is something I wish more static-site hosting offered.
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I’ve been taking the tram to work recently, for uninteresting reasons (*cough* coffee *cough*). This usually involves a 5 minute wait at Flinders St. Today I wondered if I could walk one stop south at the Arts Centre, just across the river. Made it comfortably, with plenty of time to spare.
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I know Gruber likes to say that Markdown isn’t really designed as a replacement for WYSIWYG editors, but as someone who spent today fighting Pages, I cannot disagree more. Sure WYSIWYG is approachable, but do anything that needs to maintain a house style, and it all ends in tears.
