1y ago

Aotearoa Weekly Kōrero 19/4/2024

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 doesn’t 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 a hippo
Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)

So how's it going?

67 comments

Been to the audiologists to get some hearing aids. I was a very regular clubber in my teens/twenties, so many live gigs with massive sound. Good at the time, but oh boy, tough to hear people talking to me now.
Can’t watch tv without subtitles, biut to be honest, I wonder if I’ll still need subs even with the aids when I get them. So many tv shows and movies have mumbled unclear dialog, but I’ll give it a try. Hopefully Mrs Floofah won’t be prodding me anymore when I can’t hear her speaking!!
- As I understand it, modern TV/movies can be hard to hear dialogue even for people with perfect hearing because the sound can be designed for a different speaker setup. Most commonly you're watching through TV speakers when the sound is set up for surround sound.
  In that case, go through your TV settings looking for Dynamic Range Compression, Night Mode, or in my case it was labeled something like "Voice".
  I don't have surround sound but have heard you can adjust volumes so the speaker doing voice is louder, if that's your setup.
  Also pretty sure you can get headphones for TVs which can help.
  
  We have a 5.1 surround system for the TV. The individual speakers are setup to balance the volumes from each. If I connect headphones, it shuts off the speakers so I loose the surround sound immersion effects.
  My hearing it very poor with higher frequencies, hence a big reduction in clarity even with normal voices, any mumbled voices are nearly impossible.
- I used to DJ house and techno in the 90s… what? Was someone speaking? It’s bad 😣.
  
  Do you suffer tinnitus? I wonder how the aids will help overcome that in my ears. They say they will, but I need to wait another week before they arrive to hear how they work for me.
- Great that you're getting hearing aids! Probably a whole ton of birdsong awaits you.
  
  I’ve fought shy of getting hearing aids for too long, I’m hoping they will remove my stress and embarrassment of often needing people to repeat what they are saying to me.
  The birdsong, especially the piwakawakas as they flit around close by indeed will be lovely to hear clearly again.
- Honestly we almost always watch tv/movies with subtitles on and we don't have any hearing problems. The most annoying is when the dialogue is soft but the music sound effects are way louder in the next scene so you're juggling the volume up and down
  
  Been using subs for a very long time and I thought the other evening while watching, I wonder if having to actually listen and comprehend what’s spoken, might be tough to revert to after everything being so clear from the subs.
Continuing on the catflap project, I purchased a rpi5 and raspberry cam 3 (both of which are the latest versions that they make - both from the same company obviously). Realized when I opened them up, that the camera uses a 20pin connector, and the rpi5 uses a 15pin connector. And of course the camera doesn't come with such an adapter. Now waiting again, as it seems not many stock it in NZ (pbtech only have it in their head office and it's like 3 times more expensive than purchasing from element 14).
I was keen on getting a bit done on the project over the long weekend, but that plan might've taken a big hit.
- Weird. Does the Rpi4 have a 20 pin connector? With the Rpi5 so new, the camera was perhaps designed for the RPi4.
  Exciting to hear you're slowly making progress! I'm assuming from looking at it that the camera is not weatherproof, is your plan to have it inside through the window or to weatherproof it in some way (or do nothing and hope for the best)?
  
  Yea it seems the rpi4 has the 20pin connector.
  It's a shame. Don't know if it was a last minute decision to change the connectors on the rpi5, but the camera3 came out in early 2023, and the rpi5 came out later in 2023. You'd have thought they would've release the camera with some thought into compatibility, maybe have both types of cables in there? I don't know.
  Yeah at least there's some progress lol. Got the Image Recognition up and running on my laptop to test it out (on their basic pre trained models) and it's pretty cool how it all works with a live video feed. Got me pretty excited lol. All it took was 4 lines of Python!
  I actually hadn't thought about weather proofing at all, probably because the door we'd have it installed at is under quite a large canopy, and so rain doesn't get in (there's sort of a retaining wall right in front of the canopy as well so sideways rain isn't really an issue either). But it's actually an interesting thought. It seems that there are a couple of weather proof housings on the market for the rpi cams though, if I need to go down that route. Also the plan is to have it on the underside of the top of the cat flap body (if that makes sense lol) and I plan to 3d print a bit of a shroud for it, so hopefully that'll help protect it Abit as well.
Work finally picked up but also this is the first day where I have free time in aaages. So I used it to clean.
- Noooo! Have you considered chilling and doing nothing while ignoring your chores?
  
  It's too late. They're done...
We picked up a chest freezer yesterday and it’s so much more freezer space! Just need to find more things to fill it with now. However, we’re in the position now that we have two fridge/freezers + chest freezer.. not sure if we should get rid of one or both and a get a vertical fridge only. But it’s kinda nice having all the extra space as we tend to do a big lot of shopping all at once and end up over packing the fridge/freezers
- My parents have got three fridge/freezers (two in the garage) and it's amazing how they manage to always have them bursting at the seams lol 😂
  Edit: we've "only" got two and feel we need another lol. It's the freezer space that gets us.
  
  That's actually how we ended up with two of them. Our first one was a hand-me-down that was a little too small for us - we packed it so tight the whole defrost system froze over and it stopped cooling the fridge. We bought a new one and after defrosting the old one completely it was running fine again so we just left it in the garage.
  But yeah the freezer space is always the limiting factor after a big shop. Now I feel a bit more comfortable buying more bulk items we can freeze 😁
No one is saying anything in the korero this week? I was hoping to hear about your weekends, everyone!
I had a really weird/bad virus recently, turns out apparently it's going around the rohe's children. It mustn't have got the memo that I'm a grown up!
In garden news I only have 3 caterpillars but they are enjoying it, feijoas are crazy, there is an incursion of Morning Glory.
- Spent a good chunk of my weekend catching up (online) with an old childhood friend, who I lost touch with over 15 years ago. We also played an old-school PC game (Diablo 2) that we played as kids - and it was so much fun. After that, we decided to make this a thing every weekend and revisit some of the old games we used to play back then and relive the good ol' days, back when the worst of our worries were trying to get get good grades... :)
  On to the more mundane stuff, I'm happy to report that my spring onions are doing great. They've survived for nearly two months now, on just some water and liquid fertiliser, in spite of harvesting them regularly. I'm never going to buy spring onions from the market again!
  there is an incursion of Morning Glory.
  Is this the edible variant, ie Ipomoea Aquatica (aka water spinach)?
  
  Omg I remember Diablo! When Diablo 1 came out, my whole flat's social life went on pause until we'd finished it! It's cool that you're reconnecting with your friend.
  Spring onions, mmmm.
  Nope sadly it's just plain old indica. Neighbour seems to have a patch of it but I can't point the finger too hard since we are the ones who have tradescantia.
- I'm in New Plymouth for the second week of the school holidays. And haven't done much. I spent about 16 of the last 24 hours sleeping as I've got some sort of cold. I wonder if it's the same thing.
  I've spent most of the 8 waking hours watching Star Trek Lower Decks. I've heard people talking about it on Lemmy, and have now watched the whole first season. I'm not really sure what I was expecting, because normally (at least in my experience) Star Trek takes Star Trek seriously, and if you want a non-serious Star Trek then you watch The Orville instead. But Lower Decks doesn't take Star Trek seriously at all, and I've been enjoying it 🙂
  
  That reminds me, I still need to watch Lower Decks. And Strange New Worlds. And Prodigy. Not sure which series I should start with...
  
  Yeah? Sounds fun, will give it a go sometime. (We're currently only watching one show a night and it has to be Forbryndelsen or I will riot). I quite enjoy silly space shows like Red Dwarf and Lexx though it's probably not quite that far along.
  The virus I had wasn't a cold, it mainly involved severe vertigo, though it then turns into a respiratory infection as a complication in pediatric patients, apparently. I guess if your kids start throwing up, ask them if the room is spinning!
  
  I love Lower Decks so much
I’ve been reading up on the H5N1 bird flu situation in the USA. I doubt our health system would cope if it starts spreading human to human… particularly as it’s being gutted by Luxon.
I wonder if I'm doing something wrong/ theres a setting somewhere, but pin posts aren't actually pin for me. I though this was just a thing on the Voyager app I use, but it's also the same when I access in on a browser via lemmy.nz
- Lemmy has different pinning options. This post is pinned in "Community". If you go to !newzealand@lemmy.nz, you should see it at the top.
  Lemmy can also pin for local users, in this case any users on Lemmy.nz would see the post at the top of the Local and All feeds. I haven't done this, as I find it annoying and suspect others would too.
  Basically the idea is if you want to find it, it should be easy to find when going to that community page, but it shouldn't be in your face all the time.
  
  Ahh ok that makes sense. I keep forgetting I'm not on the "NewZealand" Community, as I browse on the "Local" page(?) for all my NZ stuff, since I use Lemmy.nz
  Thanks for the explanation 👍

67 comments