Dave

Kiwi actor Sir Sam Neill has died, his family has announced.

"It is with immense sadness that the whānau of Sam Neill share the news of his passing on Monday 13th July, in Sydney Australia.

"Sam was surrounded by family and passed with the dignity that has characterised his whole life."

The statement says Neill's death was sudden and unexpected but they were "blessed by the fact that Sam remained cancer free".

RNZ asked for votes and now have released the top 100 NZ songs. I didn't find an easy way to copy a list here.

Spotify playlist

Last thread here

Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!

This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.

It’s for talking about anything that might not justify a full post. For example:

• Something interesting that happened to you
• Something humourous that happened to you
• Something frustrating that happened to you
• A quick question
• A request for recommendations
• Pictures of your pet
• A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like an elephant
• Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)

So how’s it going?

Welcome back for our second financial update. See the first one here.

This quarter we added a little bit of hard drive space and 1GB of RAM but haven't been charged for it yet. As I paid for the VPS for 6 months in February, there are no further VPS charges this quarter.

Expenses for April-June 2026: $28.33

The expenses are made up of:

• VPS: $0
• Image and backup storage: $28.33

Expenses are allocated to the period they were paid, not to the period they cover. This is based on the actual amount charged to my card.

Contributions in April-June 2026: $140

We received five donations totalling $140 this quarter. Donations are based on the amount the person donated, as listed by Buy Me A Coffee (before their fees). At the end of the year I'll do a match up to try to match actual payout to donated amount to see what this difference is.

Overall position: -$177.86

• Opening balance: -$289.53
• Contributions: $140
• Expenses: -$28.33
• Total: -$177.86
• Percent of expenses paid for by contributions (this year): 55%

An update on our VPS

During the quarter we added 10GB of storage space and 1GB more RAM but otherwise the VPS seems to be sized appropriately. Last time I mentioned bandwidth usage and the potential to move away from Cloudflare. As a step towards this, I have disabled Cloudflare image caching, so all images should come via the server. This could also impact the load speed for geolocation reasons so we will see how this goes.

Donations

If you want to contribute to the cost of running Lemmy.nz, see the post here. Or the direct link: https://buymeacoffee.com/lemmynz

The usual caveat: Please don't contribute if it will impact you financially. I don't want to see anyone saying "I only had $5 in my bank account but Lemmy is important so I donated my last $5" like I've seen on other instances. If you can't afford it then don't feel bad, this round is on me. I don't mind, truly. But if you can easily chip in a few bucks a month, then it is appreciated 🙂

Pātai

As usual, feel free to ask any questions!

Last thread here

Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!

This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.

It’s for talking about anything that might not justify a full post. For example:

• Something interesting that happened to you
• Something humourous that happened to you
• Something frustrating that happened to you
• A quick question
• A request for recommendations
• Pictures of your pet
• A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like an elephant
• Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)

So how’s it going?

A bite sized action comedy about two secret agents is hoping to be a catalyst to help learners of te reo Māori overcome the barrier of whakamā.

Anthony Butters creates and stars in the self-funded show Te Tari Tūtai, which is intertwined with his own journey with te reo.

He didn't grow up with te reo and wasn't in a position to study full-time, instead he taught himself through books, podcasts and TV shows.

"I wished there was something that was kind of pure entertainment for entertainment's sake that was in te reo that I could just watch and absorb and consume.

"We have so many amazing resources, but they are either educational or they are very high level. And I just thought, wouldn't it be great if there was something that was entertaining, but it was at a very simple level, but not for kids either, there's resources for children. So there's all these amazing resources, but I felt like there was just a gap for people my age, grown-ups, who can't take a year off to study full-time."

Episode 1 here on Youtube, 2 mins long. Te reo audio but it's got English speech bubbles so you can understand it even if you don't speak te reo.

RNZ is tracking the money flowing to the parties this election year and where it is coming from.

Here's where things stand.

Canvas starts on the 18th of July, less than 3 weeks away. It's an annual event where we place one pixel at a time and work together to create a masterpiece.

Here are efforts from previous years:

• 2025
• 2024
• 2023

2024 and 2025 have canvas atlases to tell you about the different parts.

Looking for ideas on what to do for this year. Full plans or just suggestions for items to incorporate are appreciated!

A week back I posted a poll for LemmyNZ users to vote for a new logo.

The results are in.

The winner was the globe by @Manticore@lemmy.nz!

Out of the LemmyNZ users, we had 8 votes for the winning entry, 2 votes for Kimmy, and 1 vote to keep the existing logo. I even made some graphs:

Pie

Bar

Last thread here

Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!

This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.

It’s for talking about anything that might not justify a full post. For example:

• Something interesting that happened to you
• Something humourous that happened to you
• Something frustrating that happened to you
• A quick question
• A request for recommendations
• Pictures of your pet
• A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like an elephant
• Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)

So how’s it going?

On level nine of one of the older blocks at Wellington Hospital, plastic patients lie in the beds, and one room is taken up by half a plane.

This is the simulation and skills centre, and it's designed to give medical staff hands-on experience with all kinds of scenarios - from operating theatre to air transfer, complete with turbulence.

Life Flight runs the planes, and they're staffed by ICU doctors, tasked with bringing patients from other centres into Wellington to access treatments not available at the hospital in their own region.

Hi all,

TL;DR: If you're a LemmyNZ user, go and vote for your preferred logo here:

A few weeks back there was some discussion in the weekly kōrero posts about replacing out logo. The logo was AI generated, was done using the really early tools available at that time, and was our logo before there were any users other than me. I've always hated it, and have wanted to replace it for a long time.

Of the back of that discussion, I started a vote. I underestimated how much people cared, and so cancelled the vote but learnt that people seem to like the banner (Laser kiwi).

I asked for help in this post, and one user played with some ideas for us (various versions in that post) and has come up with a cool logo with NZ the centre stage of the world. For good measure, I have kept the existing logo and the one from the previous vote in the poll.

I have also left the banner out this time. Last time I had them grouped and it wasn't clear if people liked the banner or the logo. We don't have a good suggestion to replace the banner so unless people have suggestions we can leave the laser kiwi.

The images in this vote are:

"Revenge for not being on so many world maps. Now its our turn to be the world map" by @Manticore@lemmy.nz

Kimmy the kiwi/lemmy logo hybrid, that I made and came about from the chat in the weekly kōrero:

And the existing one:

This is a vote for the logo of the LemmyNZ instance, so please only vote if your account is on LemmyNZ.

You can vote here.