Dave

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.

For the first time in 20 years, Rotorua residents can wake up and officially breathe in clean air.

Bay of Plenty Regional Councillor Lyall Thurston said it had taken a collective effort from the community, councils, government and public health officials for Rotorua to officially shed its "polluted" air quality status.

Rotorua has long struggled with poor winter-time air quality, due to smoke from wood burners getting trapped by Rotorua's unique landscape.

For a time, Rotorua was the city with the worst winter-time air pollution in the country and in 2008 it recorded 37 days when PM10 air pollution exceeded the national standard.

To remove the polluted status, Rotorua was required to have no more than one breach of the national standard a year, for five years in a row.

In 2020 it recorded its first year with only one day exceeding the standard. The following four years it had no days exceeding the standard, meaning the "polluted" status can finally be removed.

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?

A group of satellites that Rocket Lab has helped put into space is poised to aid Ukraine's military in the war with Russia.

Rocket Lab USA launched its third mission for Japanese company iQPS at the weekend from its spaceport on Māhia Peninsula.

It has been widely reported Japan has agreed to provide Ukraine's military intelligence agency for the first time with advanced synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery from satellites run by iQPS (Institute for Q-shu Pioneers of Space).

"Another fantastic launch by the Electron team to flawlessly deliver another iQPS mission to orbit," Rocket Lab founder Sir Peter Beck said on 17 May.

This morning my kid asked the voice assistant to "Turn off the computers in this house".

I heard it, thought well that's a strange request but seems harmless because how is home assistant gonna turn off computers.

Me a little while later, "why is shit broken? What's happening!"

Turns out dumb me had adguard exposed to the voice assistant, it switched off all the adguard settings including the DNS rewriting that is the cornerstone of many of my self-hosted services.

I've since revoked that access.

On Wednesday, Parliament's Privileges Committee released its final report into the MPs who protested the Treaty Principles Bill with a haka in the House in November 2024.

There was surprise and shock over the recommended punishments for Te Pāti Māori MPs, which seemed both unprecedented and extreme.

In retrospect, considering this week's response from Parliament's Speaker, the advice now available from Parliament's Clerk, and Committee Chair Judith Collins' public defence of her own report, that the initial reaction was overly calm. The committee report now appears partisan, indefensible and open to attacks of racism.

On Tuesday, 20 May, Parliament's House will debate whether or not to accept the Privileges Committee Report and its recommendations for punishments, namely that Te Pāti Māori's two co-leaders be suspended from Parliament for 21 days and their junior colleague for seven days, all without salary.

Talking to RNZ's Morning Report, Collins gave her view of the actions and motivations.

"This is not about haka, this is not about tikanga. This is about MPs impeding a vote, acting in a way that could be seen as intimidating MPs trying to exercise their right to vote.

"After Te Pāti Māori had exercised their right to vote, they then stopped the ACT Party from exercising theirs."

That is not true.

ACT had already voted. Every party had voted before Te Pāti Māori did. As the smallest party in Parliament, Te Pāti Māori is always the last to be called on for their vote.

It has been that way all Parliament.

Judith Collins could not fail to be aware of that.

The vote tallies and outcome had not yet been declared by the Speaker, so the fuller voting process was incomplete, and disrupting it was disorderly behaviour; but the claim that the MPs were intimidating another party to prevent it from voting is entirely unfounded.

The answer Collins gave RNZ was either misinformation (perhaps Judith Collins mistakenly believes the MP's actions were more serious than they were) or it was disinformation (in the aftermath of the report, she might have felt it necessary to convince the country the incident was more serious than it was).

Whatever the reason for the untruth, the claim suggests that Collins has a more jaundiced view of the MPs' actions than is realistic or defensible.

Did she fundamentally misunderstand the MPs' actions during the investigation (which would cast the committee findings into doubt), or did political or other prejudice make those actions appear worse than the evidence showed?

Research has repeatedly found that in any justice system, dark-skinned defendants are treated more severely based on ethnicity.

Findings based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the sequence of events would be highly embarrassing. Findings tainted by political or other prejudice would bring both the committee and the Parliament into disrepute.

A company's plan to mine 50 million tonnes of South Taranaki seabed every year has cleared the first hurdle in the Fast-track process.

Trans-Tasman Resources (TTR) executive chair Alan Eggers said he was "delighted" the company's application for its Taranaki VTM project had been accepted as complete and would now move on to the next stage of the Fast-track process.

Opponents, meanwhile, are "livid" and have vowed to continue their fight against the project.

TTR wants to mine 50 million tonnes of seabed a year for 30 years in the South Taranaki Bight.

Eggers said the company had identified a world-class vanadium resource that could contribute $1 billion annually to the economy.