Archives

Hivemind: laptop repair without extortion?

Con­sid­er, hypo­thet­i­cal­ly, that one had dropped one’s lap­top, break­ing the back­light to the LCD screen but leav­ing the screen itself intact. Con­sid­er also that the autho­rised repair com­pa­ny for the lap­top man­u­fac­tur­er (name omit­ted to pro­tect the thiev­ing monop­o­lis­tic b*st*rds inno­cent) said that the whole screen has to be replaced at a cost of near­ly $500, when it seems that it is the­o­ret­i­cal­ly quite pos­si­ble to replace just the lamp, a com­po­nent that is worth in the region of $20.

Now sup­pose, hypo­thet­i­cal­ly of course, that the own­er of said lap­top is too stingy envi­ron­men­tal­ly respon­si­ble to throw away a per­fect­ly good LCD screen. Where in Welling­ton might that the­o­ret­i­cal own­er find a reli­able, rea­son­ably-priced inde­pen­dent lap­top repair­er?

snapped? (toru)

Today, read­er Dav­eK let us know that Snap­per cards have final­ly gone on sale at a cou­ple of retail­ers in town, at least. They’re also avail­able, along with the card read­ers that allow WinIE types to do refills at home, from the Snap­per web­site.

Of course there’s been a few more teething trou­bles report­ed; dif­fi­cult ques­tions haven’t been answered; not all bus­es (or dri­vers for that mat­ter) seem to be enabled for the new tech­nol­o­gy; and retail­ers still don’t seem all that fussed. Mean­while, as Poneke has report­ed, the 10-trip tick­ets will be with­drawn from sale from August 29.

But while the whole thing seems very much a work in progress, we’re just glad they’ve start­ed on the roll­out to us, the pub­lic trans­port pun­ters. It’s the Future™, you know.

So in the spir­it of the week we’re in, we’ll offer some words of encour­age­ment:

He ika kai ake i raro, he rāpa­ki ake i raro.

Pink Tagger Vests Wanted (crosspost)

Appar­ent­ly there’s a dire short­age of pink Hi-Glo tag­ger vests in parts of the East­ern Sub­urbs, and a pub­lic appeal has been launched.

Stuff: The mes­sage is a reac­tion to Welling­ton City Coun­cil-fund­ed pink vests that school-aged tag­gers are being made to wear as pun­ish­ment when clean­ing up their hand­i­work.

Read more on Drinks After Work…

Let’s go shwopping

Want new threads but can’t afford them in these strait­ened times? Got some old clothes that you want to see go to a good home? Wor­ried about the envi­ron­men­tal obscen­i­ty of our throw-away fash­ion cul­ture? Then The Big Shwop is for you.

The con­cept of “swish­ing”, clothes-swap­ping par­ties for eco-con­scious fash­ion­istas, has been around for a while. Our love­ly love­ly love­ly friends at Pret­ty Pret­ty Pret­ty also had a “dud-swap” for cos­met­ic prod­ucts at their big par­ty. But The Big Shwop takes it to a more pub­lic lev­el, with their first Shwop hap­pen­ing at the South­ern Cross on Sat­ur­day August the 2nd. For more details on how it works, see their web site.

Afterblaster: Awesomeness in a ring

I’ve said it before and I’ll no doubt say it again, but there are few things as fun as going to the wrestling. Just check out the audio of the video below if you don’t believe me.

Yes, that’s the almighty Lazarus Volt kick­ing the Con­dor’s ass quite sound­ly, and he’ll be doing the same thing to the crotchety old Brute this Fri­day July 24 at Afterblaster and you should be there to see it. Details are on the Kiwi Pro Wrestling site, but what you need to know is that doors open at 7.30pm and tick­ets are $15 pre­sales, or $20 on the door.

Furverts of the world unite!

Fur Patrol are a band with an agen­da.

A hid­den agen­da.

Actu­al­ly it’s not so hid­den. They want to teach the world to sing, in fur­fect har­mo­ny…

*Cough*

I’m all punned out. So I’ll cut to the chase…

Fur Patrol are back! And they’re in pog form. And they also have a new album com­ing out.

Local Kid, due out in Sep­tem­ber, is their third full length album, and their first since Steve Wells left the band.

To cel­e­brate their new sin­gle ‘Hid­den Agen­da’, our favourite boys and girl are tour­ing NZ, most impor­tant­ly play­ing Bar Bode­ga in Welling­ton on 22 August.

Be there or hate kit­tens.

If you’re not lucky enough to be in Welling­ton but wan­na catch a gig, check out the oth­er dates here.

And if you sim­ply can­not wait that long, here is their last sin­gle, ‘Great Leap For­ward’ after the jump.

The bloggers who drank Molesworth

It’s one thing to look for food in the gov­ern­ment quar­ter, but what a politi­co barfly wants to know is “Where can I get a decent Cham­pagne with­in crawl­ing dis­tance of Par­lia­ment?”. As DPF and Cac­tus Kate found out (stan­dard Kiwiblog warn­ing: com­ments con­tain copi­ous amounts of poo), there is noth­ing worth­while at the Back Bencher (Kate evi­dent­ly shares my lack of excite­ment for Mumm).

Apart from Maria Pia’s and Le Canard (which pre­sum­ably have fine selec­tions, but don’t count as bars), there real­ly is not much prop­er bub­bly around in Thorn­don. Fol­low­ing the Welling­ton­ista tra­di­tion of pre­fer­ring use­ful infor­ma­tion to vin­dic­tive invec­tive, after the jump I have pro­vid­ed a list, in approx­i­mate order of dis­tance from the Back Bencher, of Cham­pagne selec­tions at near­by bars and pubs.

Petone Carnival

The mag­nif­i­cent Petone Win­ter Car­ni­val has been post­poned until tomor­row night, which is lucky, since I for­got to men­tion it is on until today. It real­ly is worth a vis­it, and great for kids. Unlike the Guy Fawkes dis­play, the fire­works kick off at a very civilised hour, 7.30pm. Pri­or to that there are heaps of activ­i­ties along the Esplanade to keep every­one in the fam­i­ly enter­tained. For those with a per­verse desire to feel extreme­ly uncom­fort­able, there is a polar plunge at 2.30pm, it is for a good cause (Wes­ley Com­mu­ni­ty Action), so if this floats your boat, get nekkid! Actu­al­ly, nekkid isn’t real­ly part of the pro­gramme, but I’m all for ini­ti­at­ing fun.

And while you’re out here, grab a bite to eat. There are mass­es of excel­lent estab­lish­ments, my favourite at the moment is the mag­nif­i­cent Gus­to, and if you go, I rec­om­mend the steak. Mmmm steak.

Cinephilia: Film Festival preview

The Film Fes­ti­val has been a fix­ture of Welling­ton’s win­ter cal­en­dar for near­ly 40 years and for those of us who organ­ise our lives around glow­ing rec­tan­gles of one kind or anoth­er there is no bet­ter way to spend a cold and wet after­noon than in the com­fy leather chairs at the Embassy, engrossed in a work of art.

Pro­gram­ming a Fes­ti­val like Welling­ton may seem easy but I can assure you it’s get­ting tougher every year. The sheer vol­ume of inde­pen­dent film is grow­ing beyond all rea­son (I read that there were around 5,000 films sub­mit­ted to Sun­dance last year) and atten­tion must be paid to all four cor­ners of the globe nowa­days.

The glossy pro­gramme (doing dou­ble-duty this year as Fes­ti­val Guide Book and Sou­venir Pro­gramme) is 90 pages long and I direct you to it forth­with — my role here is, with the help of some pre­views from the Fes­ti­val office, to point your atten­tion towards some of the unher­ald­ed titles avail­able amongst the hun­dreds on offer. This year I only men­tion films I have seen and read­ers are asked to add their picks/hopes/reports in the com­ments.

The first thing to point out is that, unlike the old days, there is noth­ing to be gained in try­ing to guess which films will return for a com­mer­cial sea­son. With the loss of the three (oth­er­wise unla­ment­ed) Rial­to screens in June, there is even less chance of a film com­ing back than before and the gen­er­al down­turn in atten­dance this year has made dis­trib­u­tors wary. At the moment there are no plans to release The Sav­ages (a well-observed, superbly act­ed dra­ma with plen­ty of black humour star­ring Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man and Lau­ra Lin­ney) and even the Jack Black — Michel Gondry com­e­dy Be Kind Rewind is expect­ed to go straight to DVD post-Fes­ti­val (although strong local sales may pro­voke a change of mind). Rec­om­men­da­tion: if the big screen expe­ri­ence is impor­tant to you, don’t wait.

[Pre­view con­tin­ues after the jump]

Holy Mac Truck

Check out the Par­ty of the Uni­verse the Mighty is putting on for Welling­ton NEXT WEEK!!!!!

(click image to see larg­er ver­sion of the poster)

For those of you who don’t know CW Stonek­ing — you should. He’s nev­er played NZ before and he’s some­thing. Check him out on myspace.

And for the oth­er nights, the finest in NZ bands from around the coun­try cov­er­ing a pret­ty diverse range of gen­res. There’s the Amer­i­cana night kick­ing things off, extreme neon for the Heavy Pet­ting elec­tro night, fol­lowed by a total mash up of rock­a­bil­ly and elec­tron­ics from Bang Bang Eche, and then a Wild Trash extrav­a­gan­za of Welling­ton’s own to top things off.

There’ll be pole dancers, lim­bo com­pe­ti­tions, a vod­ka slide and so much more. Chose your night. Bring your friends and come and par­ty at the Cas­tle that Cares!