Dave

Possibly related:

I also don't understand why every chat app needs 1GB of RAM to itself.

Widespread internet outages are being felt around the North Island, telecommunications company Voyager says.

It says it has identified an issue affecting "Chorus Wellington UFB (ultrafast broadband) handover".

"This handover services Wellington, Kapiti, Hutt Valley, Palmerston North and through to Napier."

Voyager said Chorus had identified the source of the issue and are working on a fix.

Currently around 90 percent of connections are offline.

TL;DR If you are reading this (regardless of what instance you are on) then please fill in the Lemmy.nz 2025 Census

Last year we did a census to get an idea about the people using Lemmy - both who they are and how they use Lemmy. You can see the results here.

Lemmy.ca did one the year before, which was our inspiration. The results can be seen here.

I had intended to repeat this each year, and so here we are. I have worked with @otter@lemmy.ca who ran the Lemmy.ca census, with contributions from others, to come up with a refined set of questions that we will keep largely standardised. We also expect to have a LimeSurvey template available that other instances can use if they want to (I can do this right now if someone reading wants it, but it's Lemmy.nz based at the moment so would need tweaks for the specific instance). LimeSurvey is a self-hostable survey tool.

The intent is to catch anyone who interacts with Lemmy.nz. If you see this post, that's you! You're interacting with us by reading our content! Anyone can fill in the survey, it can help us get other insights across Lemmy.

None of the questions are mandatory, so just answer what you are comfortable answering. I expect to leave this open for a while and have some reminders to make sure we get as many responses as possible. I’ll do a results post once the results are in and I have had a chance to analyse them.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Answer the Lemmy.nz 2025 Census

Three people have been charged with manslaughter in relation to the Loafers Lodge fire that killed five of the building's 92 residents.

The charges follow a two-year investigation by police into the state of the building, and whether the management and compliance of its fire safety systems contributed to the outcome.

A 50-year-old man, who has name suppression, was charged with murder and arson. He pleaded not guilty to the charges and is due to stand trial in August.

On Thursday, Wellington police's area investigations manager Detective Senior Sergeant Timothy Leitch said three other people had been charged with manslaughter in relation to the fire.

The people charged were involved with the management and operation of the building and police allege they were responsible for aspects of the building fire safety, Leitch said.

Those charged are two men aged 75 and 58, and a 70-year-old woman. They appeared in the Wellington District Court on Thursday facing five charges of Manslaughter.

When Helen Clark's Labour government brought in a law that would create waves of undocumented children, even the immigration experts had no idea of the impact it would have on thousands of lives.

The 2006 Citizenship Amendment Act ended automatic citizenship for children born here to overstayers or parents with temporary visas. It was also supported by the National party.

"It is only recent because these children are now finishing high school and realising that their life has now come to an end, they don't have any options as to what to do."

At the time Helen Clark said she was concerned about incidents of people flying to New Zealand for a short time and having babies here to ensure they gained passports, known as "birth tourism".

"Every year now more and more children are going to be coming out of high school and realising that they can't study, they can't go and get jobs because it would be a breach of the law for employers to employ someone who's here unlawfully. So they can't work, they can't study, they can't travel, they just simply cannot do anything."

McClymont says he has not had a satisfactory response from the government to his suggestion that New Zealand follow Australia and Britain by giving children birthright citizenship after 10 years of habitual residence.

"Really, it's hard to see what the justification is for punishing these children. Nobody is making the argument that these children have done something wrong and that they deserve to be punished.

"The only potential argument is that these children are being punished as a deterrent for others against having children here in New Zealand," he says.

"It's just unfathomable as a society that we can actually do this to children and use them for this purpose. There doesn't seem to be any moral justification whatsoever for treating them so badly."

TL;DR Lemmy.nz turns 2 today. I made a video!

There's a mirror here if it doesn't work: https://files.catbox.moe/xca9pn.mp4

Last year I posted a video celebrating Lemmy.nz's first birthday. Today I'm doing it again! No sound, and my video skills haven't got any better, but at this point it's practically a tradition for me to do a bad video and a history write up.

Here's a bit of history of the last year here for those that are unable to watch the video or who just want to know more. If anyone has other memories to add, please do!

Picking up from where the last one left off - we were having trouble with Lemmy.world and had added a second server in Finland that was responsible for collecting the activities from Lemmy.world and sending them in batches to Lemmy.nz so it could keep up. This was a temporary solution until (A) Lemmy got the functionality to send in parallel, and (B) Lemmy.world updated and turned this on. We finally got there just 6 weeks ago on 20 April 2025, and the batcher was turned on 6 May 2024, so we spend almost a full year running the batcher. Luckily it worked really well for us, we were very lucky to have a Lemmy user/contributor able to build such a tool and happy to provide the support to set it up and monitor it.

We participated in Canvas 2024, where everyone places a pixel on a big shared canvas to create art. Here is a post about our NZ contribution, though many of us also contributed to other art on the canvas (and we also had many from outside NZ helping us at times).

We did a census around this time last year, and the results were released about a month after our birthday last year. This year I have been working with Lemmy.ca (who were the inspiration for our census) to create a mostly shared structure so that both of us and any other instances who want to can have a shared set of questions for easier comparison across instances. I expect to have the survey up and running in the coming days so keep an eye out!

The video has a section on some of the news stories across the year, including Dunedin Airport introducing a time limit on hugs, Auckland City Mission distributing meth lollies, a call to police about a realistic looking sex doll, someone leaving flavoured milk at a petrol station, and a guy who did a performance in Wellington where he folded a fitted sheet.

I also included a section on how we do boats good in NZ, with the grounding of the ferry Aratere, the sinking of the navy boat Manawanui, and a commuter ferry sailing through a SailGP practice (I think the ferry was in the right on that one though).

We entered Lemmyvision with the Alien Weaponry song Mau Moko, and got 3rd! Last year we got 5th so that's a pretty good result.

Some things not mentioned in the video:

• There was a migration of hardware of our hosts, moving from owned hardware to leased dedicated hardware as the hardware was aging.

• We now have two lemmy-ui front end containers running load balanced, which should help with errors we were getting sometimes. We've had the two containers a little while now and I do feel like it's helping.

• We are currently piggy-backing on hosting, but the guys giving us hosting are now stepping away from hosting the other services on the shared host (like Mastodon.nz, Pixelfed.nz) and are passing these on to others as they find people willing to take them on. It's likely as this happens we will need to move off to our own hosting, handle donations ourselves, etc. More info will come as plans are sorted.

The last year was certainly a lot less dramatic than the first year. Hopefully the next year will be like that too!

Thanks to everyone for being here!

Hi all, I have recently installed Bazzite, after previously being on Nobara.

I have been playing Dave the Diver and DOOM (2016), both through Steam, and I get pretty serious input lag. A second or more delay at times, generally when FPS is struggling.

I'm running on a laptop with integrated graphics, so the struggling integrated GPU is not a surprise, but I didn't have this input lag issue with the same games on Nobara.

Any tips on a setting or something to help this?

I have lowered graphics settings to help with FPS, but ultimately I am not going to be able to avoid occasional FPS dips. The mouse input is instant, it's just an issue with the keyboard.

Any help appreciated!

Edit with solution: it seems the problem is IBus, see this comment: https://lemmy.nz/post/23401044/15684126

Basically the solution is to add IBUS_ENABLE_SYNC_MODE=2 to /etc/environment and restart.

A Christchurch foodbank is "absolutely heartbroken", "mad" and "gutted to the core" after two thieves stole frozen and chilled food meant for hundreds of families in need.

On Sunday night, at 10.20pm, two individuals dressed in balaclavas and gloves broke the locks of Hoon Hay Foodbank's walk-in freezer and chiller.

"You have completely depleted [sic] all supplies of any meat and frozen and chilled items that were going out to hundreds of whānau [sic] who genuinely need the help to put Kai on the table... all you had to do was send a text and book in for a food parcel to access food if you were in need."

Food safety officials are investigating the discovery of a dead larva found in a government funded school lunch in Auckland.

He said the larva has been sent away for testing and the results were expected back next week.

The lunch scheme was plagued by problems in term one, with criticism of late, inedible, repetitive or nutritionally lacking lunches, and even a case of a lunch containing melted plastic.

New Zealand's first super-sized grid-connected battery - built at a cost of $186 million - will help improve Northland's energy resilience in future power outages, Meridian Energy says.

The company said its Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) would also help smooth out power peaks and troughs, by storing energy when electricity is cheap and releasing it at times of peak demand, such as early mornings and evenings.

The battery park consisted of 80 shipping-container-sized batteries spread over a two-hectare site at Marsden Point, next the former oil refinery south of Whangārei.

Project director Alan de Lima said at full capacity the giant battery could supply 100 megawatts (MW) of power, enough for 60,000 homes or about half Northland's population, for two hours.

It had been connected to the grid since the beginning of the year and would start operating as soon as final tests had been signed off.

It was also stage one of Meridian's planned Ruakākā Energy Park.

Stage two would involve building a $227m 130MW solar farm, with 250,000 panels spread over 172ha of land next to the battery.

Work was due to start in August with power expected to start flowing in early 2027.