You earlier showed interest in video creation for Muppetz. Haven’t heard back from you in a while.
Me and You can discuss and also plan more affordable + effective Video Strategies.
If there is a more suitable Budget, I can share examples that can becreated within the same OR If there is a type of video you liked onour website, I can discuss similar ideas and budgets.
Thanks,
Be Awesome Orko || Director & Producer PH +18664483073
Is it ever the RIGHT time though? Leaves fall from the sky this time of year, the hot air balloons come crashing down all around me while I scream internally “I NEED A VIDEO OF MY LIVER WEARING PYJAMAS”
Has anyone made a video of them eating a whole ream of A4 paper?
Now might be the time for us to shine!! I want to optimise my Search Engine Optimisation, are videos and sitemaps.xml meant to be deployed at the same time or should I work on my same origin policy?
I have some questions about Supermarket News, I am hoping someone there could answer them for me.
Firstly, the banner says “TRUSTED, RESPECTED, PREFERRED” – I have no issue with it being trusted, nor respected. But preferred? I mean I don’t think there’s anything else in the marketplace quite LIKE Supermarket News, is there? I would say you can’t claim to be preferred if you’re the only game in town. Or there is a RIVAL supermarket happenings publication I’m not aware of?
Second, WHY IS THE TWITTER FEED ALWAYS SHOUTING AT US. WHY??? https://twitter.com/NZSupermarket The content is important, no doubt. But you don’t need to keep shouting at us, do you? I mean it’s Supermarket News, not CoronaVirus updates.
Finally, your website isn’t https compatible. It gives certificate errors. You might want to contact your webhost about this.
Finally, my email is repeated in a format that the @NZSupermarket Twitter person will be able to understand, case they’re the person who gets this (HI!)
HI THERE!
I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT SUPERMARKET NEWS, I AM HOPING SOMEONE THERE COULD ANSWER THEM FOR ME.
FIRSTLY, THE BANNER SAYS “TRUSTED, RESPECTED, PREFERRED” – I HAVE NO ISSUE WITH IT BEING TRUSTED, NOR RESPECTED. BUT PREFERRED? I MEAN I DON’T THINK THERE’S ANYTHING ELSE IN THE MARKETPLACE QUITE LIKE SUPERMARKET NEWS, IS THERE? I WOULD SAY YOU CAN’T CLAIM TO BE PREFERRED IF YOU’RE THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN. OR THERE IS A RIVAL SUPERMARKET HAPPENINGS PUBLICATION I’M NOT AWARE OF?
SECOND, WHY IS THE TWITTER FEED ALWAYS SHOUTING AT US. WHY??? HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/NZSUPERMARKET THE CONTENT IS IMPORTANT, NO DOUBT. BUT YOU DON’T NEED TO KEEP SHOUTING AT US, DO YOU? I MEAN IT’S SUPERMARKET NEWS, NOT CORONAVIRUS UPDATES.
FINALLY, YOUR WEBSITE ISN’T HTTPS COMPATIBLE. IT GIVES CERTIFICATE ERRORS. YOU MIGHT WANT TO CONTACT YOUR WEBHOST ABOUT THIS.
Fondest Regards, Tim Harman
Thanks Tim.
I’ll look into the SHOUTING on twitter.
As regards magazines – there are two b2b in the market and about 45 overseas publications that are the same.
As for website ditto above, I’ll look into it.
Can I ask why you are getting in touch with us?
I haven’t heard of you, but then we’ve only been in business since 1923.
Cheers,
(Supermarket News Person)
Hi (Supermarket News Person)!
I only ask because I like to ask questions 😊
You wouldn’t have heard of me, I’ve only been in business since 1976 when I was born, but I didn’t even move to New Zealand until 2000. Yes, I’m an annoying Australian. I work in computers and have nothing at all to do with supermarkets. Well, I used to do nightfill at Purity (now Woolworths) in Sandy Bay, Tasmania back in ~1996 or so, but I don’t think that qualifies me to know much about supermarkets (except how dirty they are out the back, erk!)
I appreciate the reply, most people, strangely enough, never seem reply to my questions!
Much Love,
Tim
Not 2 hours after I sent this email, the Twitter feed stopped shouting at us:
Today I purchased a Tuckers Ridge Pie. Overall it was very tasty and I thoroughly enjoyed it, however I became alarmed when reading the back of the pie’s packaging.It states on the back of the pie packet that “We’re up before the sun perfecting our classic recipes” and I got a chill down my spine. Was this a thinly veiled cry for help? Is a product development team at Goodman Fielder being held against their will, forced to rise before the sun every morning, pressured to make what was, in my opinion, an already excellent pie even better?
It goes on to state that they are “continuing our worldwide search for new ingredients to storm the mouths of New Zealand pie-hards”. Wonderful prose indeed, but why do they have to get up so exhaustingly early to do this? Do they live a very long way away from the Goodman Fielder office and have an extensive commute time?
The more I think about it, the more questions I have!
1) Who’s the “We” in “We’re”. Is it the pastry chefs? The team making the fillings? The people who print the pie packets? Or is is ALL Goodman Fielder staff being forced awake pre-sunup? Did you, person who has to read (and unfortunately, probably respond to) this email, get up before the sun today? Was it of your own accord? Given it’s Summer at present, this means the sun is rising at approx 5:40am. Ouch.
2) Are they prised out of bed in the dark because they must catch the first plane of the day, made to scour distant locations for these prized exotic ingredients? (Are they given a decent travel budget if so?)
3) Finally and I think this is the most important question I have: Do they get to go to bed early?
Thank you for any reassurance you are able to give me.
Kind Regards, Tim Harman
PS: If your emails are being monitored and you’re unable to respond in plain text about the oppressive conditions you’re working under, just capitalise every important letter in your reply and I’ll decode it and raise the alarm.
From: ParkMate Sent: Friday, 28 September 2018 12:20 PM To: tim@muppetz.com Subject: Host Park has launched and check out the newly added features in ParkMate. Be sure to update on 02/10/18
NEW PARKMATE FEATURES AVAILABLE FROM 02/10/18 UPDATE Have you ever paid for parking with the wrong rego….
perhaps selected the same product twice….
or had a transaction declined resulting in an invalid parking session?
If you’ve ever had to contact us for a refund request, we’ve felt your pain so have made some key changes to help reduce the need for refund requests.
Active Rego Change If you have multiple vehicle registrations loaded to your ParkMate account and accidentally start a parking session with the wrong rego, you now have 15 minutes to change to the correct rego. You can change rego by selecting your current session and then adding your correct registration.
Duplicate Products We have removed the possibility of purchasing duplicate parking sessions. No longer will you be able to accidentally purchase the same parking product, therefore only paying for the session you use!
Multiple Payment Options You now have the ability to load multiple credit or debit cards against your ParkMate account. You can simply switch between payment options on the confirmation screen – just in case one of your cards is running a little low on funds.
Hi!
Thank you for your email.
Some options I would like to see:
The app hears when you get a parking ticket and automatically transcribes all the swear words into a nice email and sends it to the owner of the parking space.
A sister app called “ParkEnemy” where you can buy someone else’s ticket off them in real time (at an inflated price to make it less likely to happen, and they don’t know it’s happened), thus ensuring that person gets a ticket. Used when you see some idiot in their BMW taking up 2 spaces, or you just want to see your workmate crying at their desk.
Upgrade of all parking metres to say things like “Hey you’re looking mighty fine today Tim” as you walk past them. If you have just paid $20 or more for a park it’s even more complementary “Those glasses really suit you Tim, have you lost weight?” etc.
The app detects when you’re riding a bicycle and sends abusive text messages to your friends “Look at me being all high and mighty riding a bike, I should be in a car like normal people, who am I, Lance Armstrong??”
I’m posting this because every day there’s a new post on /r/pushbullet about people not getting their Pushbullet messages until they open the Pushbullet app. There’s a number of reasons that this issue can arise, some of them are unrelated to Pushbullet itself, but will cause the symptoms, some are related to Pushbullet though no definitive answer has been found for this yet. This article will help you to diagnose issues unrelated to Pushbullet – if following the steps and suggestions don’t help then escalating to Pushbullet’s support would be a good next step.
To kick off this article, I’ll explain briefly how push notifications work for most applications, but not all on Android. Almost every Android phone out there has Google Play Services installed. This “App” is pre-installed on your phone and is the support library that all Google Apps and many others rely on. One of it’s many jobs is to provide the “Google Cloud Messaging” (GCM) service.
2019 update. GCM is now FCM (Firebase Cloud Messaging) but I’m not going to update this blog post to change it all, it’s still the same basic thing.
This, very simply, allows a server/service hosted somewhere to send a message to Google, and Google will then, using GCM, push a message to the user’s phone.
The reason that GCM is so useful is that apps can register with it when they’re installed. This means that each app doesn’t have to have it’s own network/infrastructure for pushing messages to your phone, but rather there is a single push service on your phone that all apps can use. This helps with battery life and means that App developers can focus on writing apps, not having to also host and maintain a network dedicated to pushing messages to phones. It also means your phone only has to have one network connection open to get push messages, instead of each app having to keep a network connection open, which is a drain on resources and battery life.
The Problem
Now the problem comes about with Pushbullet when it doesn’t get messages from GCM. These messages should “Wake it up” so that you instantly get the push on your phone.
But if Pushbullet doesn’t get the GCM notification, it has no idea that anything new has happened. It only realises when you open the app and it Sets up it’s own connection to the Pushbullet Servers and gets the latest notifications. In fact, that’s all a GCM message is, a message to say “Hey, wake up and check your server for the message waiting for you, Pushbullet”.
So if this isn’t working for you, there’s a few things you can do to debug (and hopefully resolve) the issues so that your Pushbullet app starts working as you expect. Depending on the problem, you might find other apps you didn’t even realise were lagging seem to be a lot faster too!
Debugging Google Play Services
Thankfully, Google have included a way to find out the status of Google Play Services and whether or not it has an active connection to the GCM services. Type the following code into your dialer and you’ll open up the Google Play Services status page:
Dialer Debug Code
*#*#426#*#*
You will open up a screen that looks like this:
GCM Connected
Notice the following things about this image:
Device ID: The Device ID that Google has assigned your device. Connected: This is the key we’re looking for! We want to see that it says connected and a lot of information about how it’s connected.
This is what a bad/broken/non-working GCM screen looks like:
GCM Disconnected
What follows is a list of reasons (and some workarounds/fixes) as to why Google Play Services might not have a connection…
Why doesn’t it work?
IPv6 is enabled. For me, IPv6 works fine. But for a lot if people, if their router/WiFi is giving them an IPv6 connection, but it’s not properly routed, then it won’t work. But for reasons unknown, Google will keep trying to use the IPv6 connection, even though it’s broken. Sadly on Android the only way to disable IPv6 is via root methods, there is no simple way for a non-rooted person to do it. The best option if you’re not rooted is to disable the router/WiFi you’re connected to from giving you an IPv6 address. Of course if you’re at work etc then getting the IT people to do this is probably an impossible task.
The GCM Ports are Firewalled. This is less likely, but certainly possible if your work environment only allows port 80/443 out. GCM uses TCP Port 5228 (The standard Jabber Port!), but it can also sometimes use TCP Port 5229 and 5230. If these ports are blocked, you won’t get a stable GCM connection.
Your Firewall has dumb sessions timeout. I’m not sure how valid this one is with later versions of GCM, but if you have a firewall that times out TCP sessions after 5 minutes, you could well have issues with GCM which only sends keepalives every ~29 minutes (This is not confirmed yet).
The Fixes
Use Mobile data (disable WiFi).
Annoying, but great as a quick workaround to see if it fixes the problem.
Run a VPN.
This is what I did at a place of employment where IPv6 was broken. The VPN gives your phone a IPv4 only address and Google Play Services will connect via it and work fine.
Is GCM not the issue?
If you’ve looked at the above but you’re finding that you’re still missing push messages, one “fix” is to uninstall and re-install Pushbullet. Why this is required is still under investigated by the PB devs. A way to test if only Pushbullet is affected is to get someone to send you a test Google Hangouts message, or to send yourself a Gmail (has to be Gmail, not an IMAP account). These both notify your phone of a new message by using GCM. If you’re getting Gmail/Hangouts notifications instantly with no delay, but getting delays with Pushbullet, then the issue isn’t GCM and something else is wrong. Might be time to contact the PB Devs and see if there’s any information you can give them to help debug the issue.
There’s a reason I don’t use Twitter Cards on my blog. They’re silly, they clutter up Twitter and only idiots who want lots of pageviews on their crappy personal blog (that’s always full of nothing but blather and slather) use them.
I am writing to kindly ask that my $1 “Other ATM” fee this morning be refunded. I had to go to the smelly Westpac ATM because the ASB ATM in Taradale was out of service.
I trust you will see kindness in your heart and realise that I would be much better to spend that $1 on a Mars Bar for a morning snack.
From: Tim Harman [mailto:tim@muppetz.com] Sent: Sunday, 10 August 2014 9:37 p.m. To: Info Subject: Winning Wheel Question
Hello There!
I have a question which I am hoping you can answer for me.
Tonight my wife and I were discussing what is/isn’t allowed when it comes to being on the “Winning Wheel” segment. The conversation arose because I expressed my desire to wear a large chicken costume and do nothing but cluck through the whole segment, if we were so lucky as to win a spot on the segment.
My wife, being the smarter of the two of us, said that there’s no way she’d let me wear a chicken costume and/or cluck, and that NZ Lotto almost certainly wouldn’t allow someone to dress up as a chicken anyway.
So my question is: What are “the rules” around the Winning Wheel segment? Can a contestant wear a large chicken suit if they so desire?
Many Thanks,
Tim Harman ———————————————————————————– Hi Tim,
Thank you for your enquiry.
While we have guidelines we follow during filming to ensure the integrity of our products, we remain flexible as each winner’s story is very different.
There is no current ruling on wearing chicken suits.
Thanks for taking the time to write to us and good luck with your tickets.
Best regards, <name removed> Corporate Communications Advisor
PO Box 8929, Symonds Street, Auckland 1150 73 Remuera Road, Remuera, Auckland 1050, New Zealand
—–Original Message—– From: Tim Harman [mailto:tim@muppetz.com] Sent: Tuesday, 26 November 2013 9:11 p.m. To: info Subject: Would you? Would You Really?
Hi!
Every time I get down your packet of cones from the top shelf of our pantry, I see the little message on the side that says “We’d love to hear from you” and I always think to myself “Would they? Would they LOVE to hear from me?”. Then I make an Icecream, slide the cones back up onto the top shelf and think to myself “I should ask them that one day”
So I guess this me asking “Would you really love to hear from me?”
Look at it from my point of view: I’m a 37 yo man. I work in IT, doing network designs (You’ve probably fallen alseep by now, right?) I don’t even _eat_ the icecream cones, I make them for my wife. She loves Goody Goody gumdrops. (I’m not so sure myself, I’m more of a plain old chocolate icecream guy myself.) I just don’t think there’s that much about me worth hearing about, at least in the context of Icecream Cones.
Anyway, I hope you have loved hearing from me? If you haven’t, I would suggest updating the wording on future packets to say something like “We might like to hear from you, but only if it’s Icecream related”. Though that probably wouldn’t fit on the box as easily.
Yours in a love of having burning questions answered,
Tim
PS: At least I have enjoyed writing to you! 🙂
——————————————–
To: tim@muppetz.com
Hi Tim!
Thanks for asking a great question. I hope I can offer a satisfactory answer to you.
Absolutely!
There are a few reasons why we really do love to hear from people.
I am sure you can appreciate the value in receiving feedback on our products. We learn what people enjoy about our cones and sometimes we get ideas for new cones coming through too.
But most importantly, and simply, is that it subsequently provides us with an opportunity to personally thank people for choosing our products.
Your family may have been purchasing our cones for years without us knowing about it. But now, since you took the time to make contact, we can finally say it – thank you for choosing our products!!
Tim, have a great Summer. Enjoy some chocolate ice-cream (perhaps even in a cone!) and next time you pick one of our products off the shelf you’ll know that we appreciate you making that choice.
.