Some guy in Wellington. I care about software development, AI, bicycles and Wellington. Expect infrequent posts / interaction, I’ve got a bit on.

Last Notes

Walked past a fairly big water leak in the middle of the road and was just about to report it when I saw the signs. #TiakiWai #wellington
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2026-08-03 00:45:29 UTC

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Jealous.
@nprofile…wj33 @nprofile…vvev

2026-08-03 00:30:26 UTC

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@nprofile…wj33 @nprofile…vvev That sounds much better than Wellington: $340 PA is significantly cheaper than just my yearly rubbish bill (more like $430), plus we have council provided glass and general recycling which I pay via rates but have no idea what it actually costs, and we have zero compos / green waste.

2026-08-02 22:10:49 UTC

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@nprofile…vvev Yeah - even on our small street there are at least three different rubbish collection methods - two private companies and the WCC yellow bags - all requiring different trucks and some of them on different days.
The last Wellington city council term proposed a single rubbish, recycling and compost service which would have resolved this - but its likely that this is now DOA.

2026-08-02 21:30:47 UTC

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Heard back from the company this morning: "The rate change has only recently come into effect" and they have issued a new invoice with the lower amount.
That doesn't really ring true with me - the website quote was lower than the invoice for the last two years... however, I'll accept it, as they are the cheapest in Wellington (if you manage to get their quoted price).
Next year I will 100% check the invoice against the quote. I'll also go have a chat with our neighbour who uses the same company to give them a heads up.

2026-07-31 21:35:00 UTC

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@nprofile…xpw3 there isn’t much competition in Wellington (or NZ for that matter).

2026-07-31 19:54:23 UTC

I've had the same wheelie bin provider for the last 8 or so years. Each year around this time we get a email with a price increase and invoice to re-up for another year.
This year I got curious and went online to their website, put in my address and the exact same service we get (same size bin, same collection frequency) and the quote was 47 dollars cheaper than my invoice! It was cheaper than last year and the year before!
I've been paying a loyalty premium for at least 7 years and now I'm pissed!
I can email them and complain or I could cancel and go with a slightly cheaper competitor (but not as cheap as their online tool says it should be). What do you reckon?
#wellington #NZ

2026-05-26 21:56:27 UTC

Thinking more about activitypub (on the back of setting the blog and CanYouBeatWellington up as actors).
I use Strava and Garmin connect to track my bike rides, but I'm now increasingly aware that I don't really own that data or control who sees it. There is also a bunch of stuff in there I don't need - I don't really care about segments / KOMs or anything like that. All I really want is to see a log of the rides I've done (speed, distance, time etc) and a sum up of what I've done over the last week, month, year, decade. And maybe sharing with a few select people.
I'm considering building a lightweight, self hosted activity focused activtypub system. Any interest out there for something like this? What would you like to see in a system like that?
#activityPub #cycling

2026-04-10 22:18:07 UTC

I've done some back end tinkering on https://canyoubeatwellington.radomski.co.nz/ fixing tech debt, security issues and removing bloat. History is limited at the moment (it was lost in the upgrade), but it is much more stable so it should build it up over time. I might look to add history again later.
And on that subject; its official: you can't beat #Wellington today. It is a cracker out there. Voting works again, so if you agree, go and smash that big green thumbs up.
#canyoubeatwellington
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2026-01-09 20:09:50 UTC

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@nprofile…7ndt Yeah, this will be a 'best efforts' type thing. Current data set is over 15,000 songs. The archive pages were in different formats over the years so it took a while to get it all down. I have them all in a cloud based database and will work through matching and enriching with spotify APIs which will give me a good sense of how many I can find.
I think the cool / interesting part will be the analysis of the songs.

2026-01-09 06:39:53 UTC

#RNZ #MatineeIdle is coming to an end. This was the push I needed to do a little side project I've been thinking of for a while. I'm currently scraping the full data set of every song ever played on Matinee idle into a database.
I'll then create one massive spotify playlist to share, and also do a little data analysis on the data set to answer some important questions - who is the most played artist? What is the most covered song? What decade was the most popular?
What else should I do with this data set? What other questions do you have? #NZ