Admin of LemmyNZ and PieFedNZ. @Dave@piefed.nz and @Hal@piefed.nz are also me.

  • 115 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • Back when I used OneDrive, it deleted an important but seldom used folder. It just wasn’t there anymore. No one noticed for 6 months, but luckily I had kept a backup each month so could restore it easily.

    3 weeks is definitely not long enough for me to notice something missing, if it’s just a random chunk of my 700GB of important stuff. E.g. if a folder of my kids photos from 5 years ago suddenly disappeared, I probably wouldn’t notice it for months but would be devistated to find it missing when I eventually went looking for it.


  • fill the given soap cup all the way

    One thing I’ve learnt from this thread is that this isn’t necessarily right. Its size allows for people with hard water, but if your water is soft then by filling it all rhe way you are likely using too much, which can lead to residue on your dishes. For soft water, half filling is apparently often plenty. Which is another reason to use powder not pods.


  • One of the things you get from a CD that you don’t get from a generated spotify playlist, is that albums (at least back in the day, or perhaps at least good ones) order their songs in a specific order so that playing from the start through to the end is an experience.

    I tried to find my old CD collection a few years back and couldn’t. I had a whole folder full of CDs, but the only thing I could find was the empty cases 🙁



  • And both of those outcrops look like a harness and belay situation to me, great job getting to the top even if the clouds rolled in to obstruct your view.

    It was not the top one we climbed, but the short bit on the side. It comes about 1/4 of the way up on the right, not close to the top at all. There were ropes and chains along the path, and only one really nerve wracking part (not so bad on the way up, only on the way down after it rained and the rock was wet).

    I didn’t get a good shot of it but found this online. This is at the bottom, it gets steeper further up with ropes and small foot spots cut into the rock. This photo doesn’t show it well but this is the most nerve wracking bit, where you’re sorta on the edge of a cliff. The bit further up has some dirt and vegitation on the outer edge which made it feel a bit safer, even if only because you couldn’t see the cliff below you.

    Chain for holding on to

    photo showing rock face, with track lined with a chain for holding on to. The chain is in the side of the rock face on the left, the rock face goes straight up. On the right the track drops away, but you can't really see it from this photo

    Here’s another I cut out of one I found online that shows that first bit that drops away, you wouldn’t want to slip…

    North face track

    Drone shot of the side of "The Needle" that shows a big rock, with a track up the close side. You can see the lower bit is exposed but the higher bit has vegetation on the outer edge

    How was the temperature? Hot and humid im guessing.

    Definitely shorts and T-shirt weather but not too bad. It was cloudy most of the time we were there, and a little wet at times. I think it was probably mid 20s most days so it wasn’t uncomfortably warm, and never cold.

    With so many of you did you book out a house or a resort?

    We stayed at a resort. Booked a bunch of villas at one of the bigger resorts. All up we had about 20 people.

    Good advertisment. Im going to have to try a trip to Raro i think! Loved Samoa when i went.

    I’ve never really been interested in the islands because they are normally hot and I thought people went to sit around and relax. But it turns out it can be a nice temperature and there is heaps to do. The one thing we didn’t get to do is whale watching. It’s the end of humpback whale season, but while we were there the conditions weren’t great. We were rebooking things a lot around the weather and sea conditions.

    One tip is to avoid the school holidays haha (both NZ and Australia). Most of the stuff didn’t have many booking spots available.



  • Someone else posted a video that covered this. Some dishwashers (not mine) have a pre-wash spot for putting the soap. In the video, the guy had his spot actually on top of the soap door, so it would be measured but falls straight in with the dishes when you close the door for the pre-wash. He said in the video to just add a tablespoon of dishwashing powder on the door or in the bottom if yours doesn’t have a prewash spot.

    I have learnt a lot from that video and all the comments here!


  • I went on holiday to Rarotonga! With the kids and a bunch of extended family too.

    Here’s snorkelling with turtles:

    photo of a sea turtle underwater

    I climbed this:

    photo of "The Needle" in Rarotonga. It's a big rock jutting up from the trees. On the left there is a separate rock just as tall as the main one, but separate and leaning out at an angle, looking like a big penis. On the right there is a part much lower that juts out and has a steep walking/climbing track on it

    Ok I didn’t climb it to the top, but you can go on that bit on the right, so long as you don’t read the sign until you’re back: Sign saying: Danger, the walking track ends here. Look carefully and think BEFORE you decide to climb up the north face track. Climb at your own risk!

    Apparently the view is amazing, someone told us as they were climbing back down (it was ropes and chains and cliffs). But it started raining by the time we got up there.

    Photo of tree covered hills, with draw distance set to low due to rain

    Another photo from the track:

    Photo of tree covered valleys, with the sea visible between hills in the distance

    We actually walked from the main road in town at the north of Rarotonga, right through to the main road by the coast in the south. It’s called the cross island track, and it took us 6 hours (we had someone with an arthritic knee that really struggled with the straight up and straight down parts of the track). The signposted time is 3-6 hours - quite a range!

    Also saw a cultural show:

    Photo of Te Vara Nui - a stage over a lagoon, with people in local traditional dress singing and dancing

    And spent a little time relaxing too:

    Photo of sunset over ocean between two palm trees, with kids playing in sand underneath




  • Nah, someone else posted a video that goes through it in detail. The pre-rinse is 10 mins (depending on dishwasher) of splashing plain water around and around to get the grubbiest bits off, then it dumps the prerinse water and gets clean water for the main cycle where the detergent goes in.

    One of the key tips in the video was to add detergent in the prerinse detergent section (some open section that lets it go in straight away), or if your dishwasher doesn’t have one then just straight on the door or in the bottom. Just a small amount so the pre-rinse cycle has detergent in it so can get more off before the main cycle.

    The only thing I’ve found about putting dishes in dirty is that some fancy dishwashers on the “auto” setting will sense how dirty the pre-rinse water is and set an appropriate wash cycle. If you’ve pre-rinsed, then it won’t find much and will put it on a light cycle. This can lead to dishes not being clean if they are actually really dirty but you rinsed off the loose stuff already. But it can be worked around by just setting the cycle instead of leaving it on auto.

    The QI monkeys are just buzzing around on the net finding factoids for the show, you can often find untrue or misrepresented ones.





  • Unfortunately fediverse.observer went down about a day back. But there was a noticeable drop in Lemmy activity. From memory it went from 53k to 50k or something like that. Now you’re gonna ask “50k of what?”, well I don’t remember. Perhaps posts or comments.

    I wanted to see per-instance but they didn’t seem to track daily stats per instance. And now it’s all gone 🙁


  • That was fantastic, thanks!

    Some of the key things were to put separate powder in for the pre-wash (mine doesn’t have a separate pre-wash section as far as I can tell), and to not put so much detergent in. We have soft water, and apparently that means if you fill the thing up (or use a tablet/pod) then you might be using too much detergent which means it might not all come off in the final rinsing stage.