zerosleeps

I don’t know how to answer this question on the New Zealand passenger entry card.

Are you bring into New Zealand… Goods obtained overseas and/or purchased duty-free in New Zealand: with a total value of more than NZ$700 (including gifts)?

Yes. Everyone is. Got an iPhone? Bam, there’s your NZ$700. Just a decent suitcase full of shoes and clothes will get you there, never mind the technology everyone carries around with them all the time.

I’ve been travelling to and from New Zealand a fair bit recently, and have observed that answering truthfully to this question (“yes”) results in a conversation with a customs officer, while giving the less honest answer leads to instant freedom.

If everyone answered truthfully then there would be Airbus A380 sized queues in front of some poor customs officer at Auckland airport all day every day. But there isn’t, from which we can deduce that nobody answers the question truthfully, which means there’s absolutely no point to this question.

Get rid of it New Zealand. You know we’re all lying to you anyway.

Air New Zealand presents Summer Wonderland

Air New Zealand are at it again, this time with a funny and touching take on a Christmas classic. Almost all of it applies to Australia as well, although there was some Kiwi in there that I didn’t understand.

The whole things summarises my experience of Christmas in the southern hemisphere quite nicely: cards with wintry scenes and songs about roaring fires do not work here.

Doesn’t stop retailers trying though…

How the Circle Line rogue train was caught with data

A mystery, data cleansing, charts, pattern recognition, Python, and trains. This one’s got it all!

What’s the point in buying a game on physical media, only to be asked to download over 9GB of software before even playing it once? This is Dishonoured 2 on PS4, and I’d like to give a shout-out to Arkane Studios for doing a piss-poor job. Asking players to download such an enormous amount of data is careless, and there will be a significant number of players even in well-developed areas of the globe who cannot even consider a download of this size.