Science Media SAVVY

-
I have attended the Science Media SAVVY Workshop over the past couple of days ran by Science Media Centre and funded by MBIE. It was a great experience and connected us with many journalists from TV, Radio, Newspaper, and Magazine media. As a result, I decided to return to blogging, aiming to cover mostly programming languages and in particular Wyvern related issues. This received limited attention in the media last year because of media releases and technical media coverage with occasional humorous angle.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tutorial: Simple Ionic 5 App with React Context (using React Hooks) as well as Local Storage

-
Image
Introduction My name is Alex and I teach SWEN 325 course at Victoria University of Wellington that is called "Software Development for Mobile Platforms": https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/courses/swen/325/2019/offering?crn=30041 While preparing for the 2020 iteration of the course I could not easily find a self-contained tutorial describing a simple Ionic 5 App with React backend that would use both local storage and hooks to utilise contexts to maintain state between different components. The closest I found was easy to follow "Your First Ionic App: React" tutorial that covers storage but not hooks or contexts: https://ionicframework.com/docs/react/your-first-app And separate and somewhat more abstract and thus a little harder to follow blog post that covers hooks for contexts but not storage: https://ionicframework.com/blog/a-state-management-pattern-for-ionic-react-with-react-hooks/ Thus, all this tutorial does is make a simple App which will make use of the l
Read more

An Easy Guide to Import Your Car from NZ to Australia

-
I recently moved to Canberra from Wellington for a job at the Australian National University and had to import my trusty Toyota Corolla Wagon that they do not sell in Australia and that would have been twice the price if I were to sell it in NZ and buy a replacement similar age car in Australia. The process was super easy despite much scare mongering online! Here is what you need to do. *NB!* This assumes that you are importing a family car as part of your move to Australia. :-) 1. Go to the Australian ROVER system, create a simple account and pay around $2 to apply and obtain (takes about a week) a permission to import the vehicle into Australia: https://rover.infrastructure.gov.au/ 2. Go to AutoHub and nobody else as they are by far the easiest and most experienced car mover I got a quote from: https://autohub.co.nz/ - follow their instructions and it costs around $3K including all fees for the valuer etc to ship the car the fast way directly from NZ to Australia and it takes ar
Read more

Comparison of Different Nitrate Leaching Sensors

-
Image
In this post, I will deviate from my usual programming languages research topic and look at using sensors to detect concentration of N in either surface or ground water in NZ. This is in part related to my other project trying to create a marketplace of economic incentives for NZ farmers when it comes to optimising their environmental impact versus the long term economic cost (aka AgriDataTrade). There are the following four options commercially available in NZ as of late 2020. I am not going to cover very very cheap conductivity based sensors available en masse on Ali Express and similar sites as these are not able technologically to gauge the actual presence of N in either soil or water despite what is advertised. The major four options are: Hach HL4 is using pH light bulb, some pellets, conductivity sensor, and Nitrate sensor attachment. It is designed to be placed in running water - such as streams or rivers. It requires weekly calibration to ensure reliable Nitrate read
Read more