Last month, I and three other teachers from my school took a group of thirty (yes, 30) students on a trip to Japan. We survived to tell the tale, twelve days later.

First, getting to spend time with my students was amazing fun. In Aotearoa (New Zealand), we are taught that the best learning comes from teachers that value relationships. I really do like getting to know my students, what they like (Pokémon Go, anime, manga, and rice balls, mainly), what they don't like, what they want from life, etc.

Getting to know these snapshots helps me to understand where they come from, how they learn, how they take in unfamiliar experiences; from this, I build new arsenals of teaching techniques, how to write materials for them, and how to accept their way of living, thinking, and being in my classroom. Read full post…

I wrote a couple of months ago of the problems I have with the Apple Maps app on macOS 26 and later. I recently had a lot of planning to do for a school trip involving Maps and it bothered me so much I re-downgraded from 27 to 15 (umpteeth time I've done it since 27 released in beta).

Today marks a turning point: I needed an API from 27 again so begrudgingly upgraded again. This time, I zipped up the Maps app and kept it safe in my home folder. After upgrading, I couldn't run the preserved Maps app copied from Sequoia; the signature was no longer valid and it relied on frameworks whose symbols had changed.

Well, my husband and I use ChatGPT Pro subscriptions to help with some of our planning for school (don't worry, we never let it see student work and we don't rely on it to make content. Rather, it makes sense of all the competing requirements and tells us if our own hand-made resources pass the muster. Sometimes it helps us transpose CSV files containing dummy data. You know, the non-creative stuff. Read full post…

I just bought a new chair because my couch bought the farm (spring came right through it).

When I tell you this is a game changer for me… it's so comfortable <3

It's not even the electric recliner bit I love but that the back comes up far enough to cushion the back of my head and neck. I remember couches having taller backs when I was a kid. Or maybe I was just smaller

As I've said before, I run a Discord server where some ex-students keep in touch, let me know what's going on with their lives, and just shoot the breeze.

Recently, what with various social media networks doing things like AI-based age verification (requiring uploading photos of oneself, removing a sense of anonymity to which people are otherwise entitled) or, worse, having to upload government-provided ID, we've been talking about alternatives.

The most popular alternative is an IRC server so I set one up (Ergo) and bridged it to the existing Discord server with slightly-modified version of Matterbridge. All of the channels are mirrored, messages from IRC are passed to Discord and vice-versa, and … it's so great. Read full post…

As I wrote a few days ago, I've been back to Hawke's Bay, where my whānau are from (and where I grew up at least half of my childhood) a few times. In my previous couple of trips, I stopped in Palmerston North not once but twice (actually four times; twice going up and twice going back).

So, here are the snaps that are utterly improper to include on a memorial page: barefooting pics!

I stayed at the Vista Motor Lodge on the North Clyde side of the bridge that joins the two sides of the town. Therefore, my first stop was the Portland Island lighthouse placed right next to the northern end of the south bank. It's one of the first things you see. Read full post…

In the past month, I've had two tangihangi (funerals) to attend.

Of the past fifteen days of the school term, I've only worked eight. As I return from the current one, that's another two off. There's a strange sense of impermanence in my life now.

This also makes the third funeral in the whole year. That say death comes in threes, so hopefully that's the last of them. Read full post…

Another quick stop in Palmerston North on the way home from another trip. This time, I went to attend a tangihanga (funeral) that occurred within my whānau (family).

On the way back home, the bus pulled in for the customary driver break in The Square. I popped over to a nearby café for the most underwhelming salad, chips, and fish burger I've ever paid twenty-seven-odd dollars. Nevertheless, I was filled, so I snapped this photo on the grass near the women's rest in The Square whilst I digested it.

If you're wondering "You mean you set up your camera on the ground to take a picture like that? Focused on your feet? Isn't that embarrassing?", I can answer in three parts: Read full post…

I've been thinking about this problem for a while but, as usual, Louie Mantia Jr's post about Maps possibly becoming a useful app one day was an inspiration to get writing*.

Now, he sarcastically, or hopefully (or both), posted that "one day search in Maps will be useful". He gave the example of a search for "lunch", presumably to find some nearby cafés and restaurants, turning up a result called Lunch Lake in Canada (he lives in Japan) which could not be less useful if it tried.

I have a similar gripe. I use Apple Maps a lot when I'm planning my many trips to Japan. I've been twice already (once in 2024, once in 2025). I have another trip coming up for school (10 days of babysitting, yay) and another personal holiday for most of December 2025 and January 2026. I've been using Apple Maps a lot. Read full post…

I updated my Mastodon server's domain, updated my personal website, and changed my profile picture. Probably not to everybody's taste, but it's my server and my website, so there. 🙂

Hand-writing websites is fun. I based the current design on a website that was around in the 2000s and 2010s, feet.net.nz, run by a New Zealand-based photographer called Kyle Carter. I'm not sure why his website is called Feet Gallery, because it doesn't really have any feet on it other than the two in the logo. I'd ask but, to be honest, I don't really care; after all, if anybody were to ask me "why feet?", my answer would be a simple "why not?" and that's good enough for me as an explanation for anything else.

Not that there was anything that links our websites other than the domain name, really. But, given my username has long had the word 'feet' in it somewhere or other, his website used to pop up from time to time in web searches. I'd have a look. So now, I made a sort of tribute to a self-run blog of the best kind: the early 2000s kind! Read full post…

Quick stop in Palmerston North on the way home from a trip to see family. When I lived here as a kid, the Square had a waterfall, more than one pond, and the clock tower didn't have a silly hat.