sylverstream

Kia ora! My wife and I were born in The Netherlands. Ten years ago we decided to try living in New Zealand for two years. At that time we had a 1 yo, we now have two kids.

It felt really good so we decided to stay longer. Fast forward, here we are, ten years later. The pink clouds are definitely gone, but we've learned to appreciate NZ. Obviously it's a beautiful country and it's not densely populated. The Netherlands is 6 times smaller with 4 times more people.

People in NZ are generally friendly and keen to help. Also, people have respect for service people like police, firemen, train conductors, etc. In the NL it happens daily that they are spat on, verbally abused, or even injured. Kids in NL more and more bring knives to school. People randomly throw rocks, bombs, eg at fireman, police, and ambulance people.

NY eve in NL counted more than 200 arrests and counting. People were injured or killed because of fireworks. In every major city police was bombarded with illegal fireworks, multiple officers hurt with hearing damage. Buildings were set on fire, firemen came, were bombarded with fireworks as well.

Talking to other friends in Europe it's not getting better in other countries.

Writing this makes me emotional. Why can't we treat other people like we want to be treated?

NZ isn't perfect, there is crime here of course, but it definitely seems better than the rest of the world at the moment.

I love New Zealand. I've become a proud citizen 2 years ago and definitely now call this home. The Netherlands is now just a place where my family lives and where I can celebrate holidays.

Thanks for reading and I want to wish you all an awesome 2024. Stay strong.

Happy New Year everyone. Hope you all have a good 2024.

I'm interested to read about discoveries regarding health, food and longevity as I'm planning to stick around as long as possible. I already found Stanfords publications on longevity. Just wondering if you have any other reading tips? Ideally with an Rss feed.

I'm only interested in information backed by science as much as possible.

I've got a Sureflap cat flap operated by 4 AA batteries. It doesn't work well on rechargeables, it seems to need 1.5v batteries.

I'm thinking to hardwire it with battery backup (like a Ups). I'm not very experienced in electronics, are there any off the shelf products I could use? I'm assuming the flap runs at 6v and that I can just attach two cables, one to plus, one to min.

If there are no off the shelve products, any recommendations for what I should buy?

We've got contents insurance with AA and from next year we'll be paying 33% more. We have had 2 claims for a different policy this year, one at fault, one not, and they said it wouldn't impact our premiums. Is this common for everyone? I understand it goes up because of all the floods, but 33% is very significant.

Our car is insured comprehensive, but I'm wondering from what amount it would make sense to claim? AA no longer has a no claims bonus, but obviously premiums can go up if you claim. We have some cosmetic damage which we caused ourselves, so would mean we'd pay our excess. Would it be wise to discuss with our insurer AA? Advice welcome, thanks.

We're currently with AA, who decided to increase prices by almost 10% for our upcoming renewal. Cove is much cheaper and has got good reviews, mainly about their website and sign up process. However I can't find any reviews about their claims process. In the past AA has been very good for us whenever we had a claim. Anyone got experience claiming something with Cove?

My daughter has a low specced Android Go phone, just for Whatsapp, Signal and txting. She likes it as it's also quite small compared to most other smartphones.

I don't mind it's not fast, but I've noticed that notifications for Signal & Whatsapp are not coming through after being idle for some time.

I've disabled battery saver for these apps, but after a couple of hours, notifications are not coming through again. What else could I change?

My 9yo daughter has a tablet with family link, so I can monitor what apps she wants to install. As the garbage games are mostly at the top free, she keeps asking for games that I reject, in most cases because it's riddled with ads.

The Play Store has a section for kids, which seems to have better quality apps and games. Also thinking to subscribe to Play Pass so she can try out paid games.

Any other tips? Especially how to find good free / paid games. I don't mind paying for good games.

Also I'm aware I can block ads using eg Pi Hole (already doing that) or sometimes putting it on airplane mode, but that's not my point. I want to find and support quality games.