🗓️ Weekendnote 2026-W17

2026-04-27 16:45

Today the Autumn colours were out in full swing. Temperatures were fresh, but not glove weather. I went to Bunnings to pick up nail punches for my pergola build (wrong size, should've just used screws), The Warehouse to pick up cheap coffee, and Pack N Save to get a Sunday roast (currently cooking) and some other weekly supplies. Hardware store, department store, supermarket - the NZ dream. Bleh.

On the ride back I stopped at a loaded apple tree, put a couple in my backpack (it was a heavy pack by now), and ate one while I rolled on home. A friend and her little bub waved me down at a playground so had a nice chat enroute.

This is the Shotover Bridge, going over the Shotover River, which is the only way into town from the East and North, and my home. On this side of the bridge there are three big suburbs locally, and commuters from Wanaka and Cromwell join the party too. With only one lane each way it bottlenecks regularly. On the other side is Frankton, the main shopping area - industrial area, supermarkets, department stores etc, and then beyond is the main town, Queenstown, or a departure South.

Shotover Bridge and main road into town.

There is a footbridge to the right out of shot, which is where I ride my bike, then swing under the Shotover Bridge before coming up the other side to join a bike lane alongside the road. At the top of the hill I'm basically at the start of all the shops. It's just over an hour round trip to do some errands.

I built most of a pergola this weekend. It was difficult. Don't look too close. I'm not confident it is stable enough so will throw in some upper braces in the coming weeks, hopefully before it topples over. If I were to do it again I'd use 4-sided post supports, not 2 sided, or at least would have turned two of them 90 degrees so there's a bit more anchoring each direction. I'll add some palings across the top for a little more cover, and stability. I got tired and bored so this will do for now. When I stain the house again, I'll whack a coat or two on this too. One day I might pave the area. BBQ and seating required.

Before shot.
After shot.

I'm really just writing this post to test out my new website design. I wanted to play with <figcaption>s, which I only just realised were a thing. I figured I would try and keep the theme going. Simple and bold, hard edges etc. The photos displayed on this page are small GIFs stretched to 100% width, so they should load fast, but are also clickable to the larger, but also compressed, photos. I actually like how the GIFs look all blury. Almost like a dithered effect I see around the traps a lot.

I need to figure out how to make a shortcut in Helix to paste in the complete <figure> HTML code snippet. I'm also using <span> which is a bit limiting. Flexing is probably the way to go.

Anyway, the style of the site has given me more joy than expected. The dark mode yellow/black looks kind of like a chalkboard. The mobile responsiveness on the menu bar is surprisingly stylish with the angled buttons. I'll pretend I planned that.

TOOLS

Latest finds. For a full history of all the tools I've discovered and used over my years of blogging see the tools page. It's an interesting journey. I didn't know what SSH was just two years ago!

  • iNaturalist mobile app - A great little app to capture and discovery flora and fauna in the area. When I have a spare 5 minutes I've been loading the map and just looking up some local discoveries. It's a good way to learn some names. Our area has a huge collection so the tool must be used by a lot of folk.

  • rss-bridge FilterBridge - I cannot for the life of me get filters to work in FreshRSS, but managed to do it via this tool. Bye bye hashtag spammers.

  • Little Snitch via Rodrigo - Tidy looking network monitor. I couldn't get it to work unfortunately.

  • ncal - quickly check calendar in the terminal. I like ncal -bw -A 2 which shows weeknumbers and the next two months, and highlights the current day.

zkbro@laptop:~$ ncal -bw -A 2
                                   2026
          April                       May                       June             
 w| Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa    w| Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa    w| Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa   
14|           1  2  3  4   18|                 1  2   23|     1  2  3  4  5  6   
15|  5  6  7  8  9 10 11   19|  3  4  5  6  7  8  9   24|  7  8  9 10 11 12 13   
16| 12 13 14 15 16 17 18   20| 10 11 12 13 14 15 16   25| 14 15 16 17 18 19 20   
17| 19 20 21 22 23 24 25   21| 17 18 19 20 21 22 23   26| 21 22 23 24 25 26 27   
18| 26 27 28 29 30         22| 24 25 26 27 28 29 30   27| 28 29 30               
                           23| 31

  • paste image rename Obsidian plugin - using to retain original image filenames when adding from my phone. It is the default setting so absolutely no config changes required.

  • surfshark-vpn - CLI tool for the Surfshark VPN. I had no idea this was available. Looks like it is discontinued for whatever reason, but it works fine with my same account.

  • DitherEffect - Webtool for dithering (and othering) images.