There’s this thing about being a New Zealander that feels strange to someone like me who wasn’t born here. If I go overseas to another city and mention I’m from New Zealand, people will say, do you know X who lives there? At least half the time I do.
Likewise my late mother-in-law was visiting and travelled to the South Island for a few days where on two occasions she struck up conversations with strangers. When she told them she was visiting Jo and me… both people told her they knew us.
Someone should write an alternative reality novel where Google didn’t close Google+.
By accident more than design I managed to sample a wide variety of Hot Cross Buns from Auckland bakers and supermarkets. There’s no science here, just an aficionado’s tasting notes.
The best all round buns I tasted so far in 2023 are from the Wild Wheat outlet on Hinemoa Street in Birkenhead. They are made sour dough style, have plenty of fruit and are well spiced.
They are somewhat puddingy, not that this was a real word until ten minutes ago. You could, at a pinch, warm them a little and eat them with cream or custard for dessert. I sometimes eat them with blue cheese, it’s an unlikely sounding combination that could change your life.
From memory they cost around $15 (sorry, I should have taken notes) for half a dozen. I found they last the longest and are excellent toasted.
My other favourite buns are from Ott Patisserie at the start of Birkenhead Avenue. Somehow the baker has managed to give them a different flavour without departing too far from tradition. It just works.
The buns are lighter in colour and in composition, you could even say delicate when comparing them with Wild Wheat’s robust buns. They are also lighter on the pocket. Half a dozen costs $10.
At $22 for half a dozen, Daily Bread’s Belmont shop has the most expensive hot cross buns I’ve seen this year. They are excellent, although as my Dad used to say: at that price they ought to be.
Like Wild Wheat’s buns, they are sour dough based and have plenty of spice and fruit. While I like the look and texture of Daily Bread’s buns, I prefer the taste of Wild Wheat and Ott’s offerings.
The other notable hot cross bun I tasted was New World Birkenhead’s non-traditional brioche style buns. These are quite different in look and taste. Despite that, they still feel like real hot cross buns. At $4.50 for six they are a bargain. Last year I used a pack to make a terrific bread and butter pudding.
The Hot Cross Buns from the Birkenhead Bakers Delight shop were among my least favourite buns. In terms of taste they are on a par with everyday supermarket buns, but at $12 for half a dozen they are more than twice the price.
There is nothing wrong with them. All the buns tested here are perfectly acceptable. They taste fine, but the are neither exciting nor in any way remarkable. In contrast, all the buns mentioned earlier are special.
The everyday Hot Cross Buns from New World are not at all bad. At $4.50 for half a dozen they are a fine alternative if the supermarket is out of the brioche buns. A $4.70 pack of six everyday hot cross buns from the Pak’n Save supermarket on Lincoln Road were the most ordinary tasting buns. They had less fruit, less intense spice and more of a soft roll feel.
Looking at the prices, Daily Bread’s buns are one and a half times the price of Wild Wheat’s, more than twice the price of Ott’s and close to five times the price of New World’s. They’re good, but there’s no way they are five times as good. I’d certainly make the trip back to Ott or Wild Wheat for a luxury treat.
Impressed by Simone Silvestroni’s De-brand blog post. It covers some of the things I’ve been wrestling with as a journalist.
My Bill Bennett micro.blog site was set up from the outset along similar lines. It’s hard to totally debrand the Ghost site because it’s a business. But let’s work on it.
If you have to ask a customer to leave a review on one of the big sites about your product or service, that’s a sure fire indication that you aren’t confident your customers are so happy they’d go and do it off their own bat.
Earlier this week I wrote about linkrot.
This post missed a similar annoying trend. Today’s link check of my site hit four 403 errors. There are a few every week.
Over the last year or so I’ve been killing the links when I find them because I fear lots of 403s can make my site look suspect to search engines. (I’d be interested to hear if my fears are real or imaginary).
The pages are there, you can click through to them all but something tells the bot that access is forbidden.
Often 403 means there’s a poorly maintained site at the other end. It’s not linkrot as such, but the growing number of 403s is a sign the web is deteriorating.
Have you seen a rising number of 403s on your outgoing links and, if so, how do you deal with them?
At least three quarters of the attempted phishing emails in my inbox aren’t really trying…
It never ceases to amaze me how many people take my clearly deranged joke microblogs, tweets and toots seriously - but then when you look at the general ratio of actually deranged material floating around online I guess it shouldn’t be surprising.
Impressed that Apple has released an iPhone especially for Villarreal and Wellington Phoenix football supporters.
Every week I check the links on my other website. And every single week a handful are broken and need fixing or just plain gone.
Link rot - where links no longer point to their original target - is real.
At one point there were 1500 individual web pages on my site and around 6000 links. Today there are around 1000 pages and ~2800 links.
That number drops by a handful each week. This week’s check was exceptionally bad because hundreds of Twitter links stopped working and there is a problem with the web archive.
Integrity, an excellent linking checking program for the Mac, found 493 bad links.
Not every link flagged by Integrity is broken… some were missing temporarily when the bot visited. In other cases the page took too long to load.
While some flagged links are redirects. This week’s 493 bad links only included a single redirect.
It’s good practice to recheck any links Integrity flags… and then manually check before removing a terminally broken link with no obvious alternative.
The web archive is a good source of alternative links. Often a publisher will remove a link, but there’s an archive of the page. Where possible I will link to these.
In recent months, more and more archived pages have been missing in action.
Twitter’s meltdown probably won’t won’t be the last mass-extinction event for web links, but it is a reminder that online history is constantly rewritten, revised and in many cases, deleted.
Attempting to copy 3.7 TB of data over Wi-Fi because I optimistically assumed Wi-Fi 6e could handle the transfer faster than it would take for the MacBook Pro to Ethernet dongle to arrive by courier. It’s like a 21st century tortoise versus hare race.
I used to think those “we have delivered your package” emails and texts from online retailers were a bit weird… after all, most of the time I open the door to the courier…. so I know.
And then we got a delivery of fresh food while out at an appointment and knew to rush home to get it out of the sun rather than meander back via cafe coffee and lunch.
(We live in Auckland so this year we’re talking potential sun, not real sun).
I guess most people living in New Zealand’s North Island now have a much better understanding of why “May you live in interesting times” is a curse.
I haven’t needed to look at the Contacts app on my iPhone for ages. Did just now and it seems every person who has emailed me with a signature including their phone number is now a listed contact. At least 20 per cent are cold callers who I never want to hear from again
I write most of my news stories, features and blog posts using Markdown. If it is a paid job, I convert to .docx or Google Docs format depending on the client. In the past most expected, even demanded, .docx and would struggle with anything else. Nowadays most prefer Docs.
I left the UK 35 years ago to live in New Zealand and still get the occasional urge to have mushy peas with my fish and chips.
The new Micro Blog Mastodon hook up is welcome and I’m definitely going to use it but I think I’ll keep it seperate from my other Mastodon account, I don’t want my clean Micro Blog feed swamped.
Read a post online where someone talks about “your favourite programming languages”.
Made me wonder. Do people actually have favourite programming languages? I guess they do, but I always thought they were just neutral tools, where people use one for this job and another for that job.
I’m not a programmer, but would welcome insight from someone who is.
My brain has been so conditioned by years of watching sport that when I see or hear the name Chelsea, I think of the club. The word “Arsenal” is also, automatically the football club.
Dislike free apps that tell you there are in-app purchases, but don ’t reveal what the purchases are until after you’ve downloaded and installed. In some cases the app can’t function without the purchase. It’s a form of bait and switch.
It never fails to get me that in some cultures a chicken omelette is known as “mother and child reunion”.
Is there a pot of gold at the end of the spectrum or does it only apply to rainbows?
As anyone in New Zealand knows, Auckland had a serious rain storm yesterday. Two people died, two are missing, the main roads and many suburbs flooded.
There’s damage everywhere. My house dodged a bullet. Another 10mm in my storm drain and the downstairs would have been innundated.
More rain fell in ten hours than the city normally gets in an entire summer.
It’s the kind of event where, despite everything, Twitter continues to shine.
I found constant updates and weather information there. Lots of first hand reports, photos and video footage. There were questions and answers. Fast-evolving coverage dominated my Twitter feed. It was what the social media site does best.
Mastodon not so much. In fact not much at all on the accounts I follow. That’s not say there was zero coverage, but it was far from comprehensive. At best it was sporadic. None of the important civil agencies or news media organisations have a Mastodon presence.
Otherwise, there was less material because I’ve carefully honed my Twitter feed over the years and use lists extensively to zoom in on different groups of accounts. I’ve done this with Mastodon, but there are far fewer Aucklanders in my feed. And some that I know are on both sites spent the day, like me, mainly on Twitter.
Mastodon may improve. Twitter may worsen. Yet for now, when there’s a local civil emergency Twitter is the more important channel.
Every single phone notification is turned off, although messages from familiy members (and two important clients) are enabled.
When I switched mobile provider, I deliberately didn’t activate voicemail.
If I’m called from a no-identity number, I rarely answer. It’s different if I’m expecting a call.
There are no social media apps on my phone.
It might not be convenient for other people, but these are my best productivity hacks. I can get so much more done by not being at every bot’s beck and call.
I’m back on the NZ Tech Podcast with Paul Spain discussing technology news with a New Zealand perspective.
#podcast
