utf9k

Most ticketed parking spots in Parnell, Auckland

marcus@utf9k.net (Marcus Crane) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This little project was written back when I worked at Xero, in one of our older Auckland offices.

There was a Slack channel dedicated to sighting of the local parking warden because the surrounding area just really lacked parking. There were some parking buildings but they changed something like $28/day (!)

While I didn’t drive at the time, I was wondering if it would be possible to create a heatmap showing the most commonly ticketed parking spots around Parnell.

I’ll write about it more some other time but in short, I filed an OIA for parking tickets over a 2 year period, converted a big spreadsheet into GeoJSON and then added a time dimension to each ticketed area.

The result is an interactive map where you can change the time of day to see the average ticketing increase and decrease throughout the day.

The idea was that if you invert this information, you can find the spot least likely to be ticketed.

You can play around with the project just below but if you’d like to see a full screen version, or you have iframes disabled, then you can check it out here.

netbox-plugin-azuread

marcus@utf9k.net (Marcus Crane) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A Python plugin for the IPAM tool Netbox, netbox-plugin-azuread adds support for OAuth authentication with Azure Active Directory.

By default, Netbox supports standard username/password logins, SAML logins and logins configured via a remote auth header.

This plugin was my first real attempt at publishing a Python library and has been running for many months within a production deployment.

I mostly just scanned some existing AzureAD auth libraries and pieced together how to transform it into a Netbox/Django plugin.

You can view the plugin on Github or PyPI.

October

marcus@utf9k.net (Marcus Crane) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a user of Readwise which is a service that allows you to import all sorts of highlights from books and articles through to tweets and even comments¹.

There is unofficial official support for Kindle and iBooks, by which I mean Readwise supports those sources but they are still not officially sanctioned (or known!) by Amazon and Apple respectively.

Kobo, which is the primary competitor to Kindle, has lots of nice eReaders but historically Readwise has had no support for them as they don’t have a web UI to scrape.

The other part of the problem is that getting your highlights off of your device is very fiddly for technical users, and nigh-on-impossible for non-technical users as it requires performing SQL queries against a SQLite database.

This is where October comes in. It was created primarily to scratch my own itch. While I’m perfectly capable of extracting highlights from my device, I also aspire to do as little work as possible.

This first version is very sparse and gives the user very little option besides syncing their highlights. It works well for myself, and has helped a few users but it doesn’t provide much ability to introspect the upload process or control eg; which books are uploaded.

I’ve begun work on a rewrite from the ground up which provides more control and insight to the end user.

At the time of writing, October is promoted within Readwise itself as the only option for uploading Kobo highlights. Previously, the Readwise team had released an integration for uploading store-bought highlights via Kobo APIs but this was unfortunately shut down.

On a technical level, October is comprised of a React frontend with the backend being powered by Wails, a relatively new Golang framework for creating applications.

As the React frontend is bundled up into minimised HTML, this results in October weighing in at a measly 12 megabytes.

It features a Windows build, a fully code signed macOS version and a Linux version works experimentally² but is not currently distributed.

Funnily enough, most of the reading I have done over the duration of this project has been making random highlights as a pseudo-integration test.

If I look at things from a big picture view, I would probably read a lot more if I just deleted this project and resorted to manually uploading my highlights!

Links:

There are lots of comments that I want to make notes on but Readwise doesn’t support importing these. It makes sense of course since every website layout is arbitrary but to scratch my own itch, I made a Chrome extension that sends Hacker News and Reddit comments to Readwise. ↩︎
You’re welcome to compile it if this is useful to you! I haven’t looked into distribution and packaging plus last I checked, Linux support for Wails was solid but technically still marked as experimental. ↩︎

Vehicles towed in Auckland, New Zealand

marcus@utf9k.net (Marcus Crane) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Quite a few years ago, I found myself sitting outside of a cafe. I was staring across the street at a carpark and noticed that every so often, a tow truck would pull in, towing a car behind it..

This is perfectly normal of course but after a few of these, it occurred to me that it might be interesting to see what that looks like from a birds eye view. Surely it would look like some of kind of stream where the towing yard is a hot spot with tentacles sprawling out all over the city.

It took me quite a few years but I managed to go from this idea to a simulation that shows 3 years worth of vehicles, represented as orange lines, flowing throughout the city to their final destination.

You can’t just pluck out where a vehicle was picked up and taken to because that makes a straight line. To have the full effect, you need to figure out a likely route for every single instance and then plot a line across all of the streets in between for your simulated vehicle to follow.

I’m pretty proud of the final result which is probably one of the more advanced side projects I’ve put together, considering it started with a big messy spreadsheet and ended up with an interactive visualisation.

You can play around with the project just below but if you’d like to see a full screen version, or you have iframes disabled, then you can check it out here.

If you’d like to read a detailed write-up on how this was made, or follow along with creating your own version, you can find those details in this blog post.

Yearly review of OIAs redacted or declined by the NZ government

marcus@utf9k.net (Marcus Crane) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This one probably needs a bit of explanation, more than most of my projects.

The short version is that here in New Zealand, we have the Official Information Act of 1982 or OIA for short.

It allows anyone in New Zealand, permanent or otherwise, to request almost any sort of information from members of government.

I once wrote a getting started guide that go through the background and all that here so I can recommend that for extra context.

Anyway, in saying this, there are certain “grounds” that can be invoked to redact or retain secrets such as those that might affect the privacy of a person or cause economic troubles for example.

That got me thinking. While the contents of redacted OIAs may not be accessible to the public, metadata about those OIAs can be just as interesting and so that’s what this project is about.

Each year, I make a request to the Prime Minister’s Office and ask for a list of OIAs that have been redacted or denied each year.

Admittedly, a few years I’ve forgotten to explicitly request the particular date so half of my data set are just time ranges but generally, the titles and grounds for denial are the most interesting.

At some point, I may file a request to backfill some data prior to when this list started but I haven’t had any plans to do much more than keep it updated yearly as of yet.

I’m due to file my next update sometime around August or September 2021

Request Date	Subject	Denied Under
09/02/2016	Detention and deporation of New Zealanders from Australia	6(a)
30/03/2016	Prime Minister’s recent visit to Sri Lanka	6(a)
06/04/2016	Communications regarding the 2016 US Presidential Election	6(a)
25/05/2016	Britain possibly leaving the European Union	6(a)
07/06/2016	Panama Papers	6(a)
16/08/2016	Decision to extend New Zealand’s training mission to Iraq	6(a)
2016 - 2017	Intelligence and advice to the NZ government related to the 9/11 event	6(a)
2016 - 2017	Record of OIAs from February 2017	6
2016 - 2017	Preparation for Trump Administration	6(a), 6(b)
2016 - 2017	NSS handbook examples of 1080 and domestic incident	6(a)
2016 - 2017	The steel industry and trade issues	6(a)
2016 - 2017	Meetings with Australian officials on social security	6(a), 6(b)
2016 - 2017	Interactions with United States Film Industry representatives	6(a)
13/04/2018	Advice relating to Labour Party summer schools	6(c)
18/04/2018	Weekly reports provided to the Minister for National Security and Intelligence	6(a), 6(b)(i)
20/04/2018	Correspondence with the Office of the President of the United States	6(a)
18/05/2018	Information including individual costs of gifts given during visit to Europe and the UK	6(a)
28/06/2018	Prime Minister’s diary	6(a)
03/07/2018	Records of meeting with former President of the United States	6(a)
13/07/2018	Documents received as Minister for Arts, Culture & Heritage, Minister for Child Poverty Reduction and Minister for National Security & Intelligence	6(b)(i)
24/07/2018	Records relating to visit to NZ by former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton	6(a), 6(c)
30/07/2018	Correspondence with the President of the United States	6(a)
11/09/2018	Inquiry into the appointment process for the Deputy Police Commissioner	6(c)
03/10/2018	Phone calls to heads of state	6(a)
2018 - 2019	Request relating to F-16 Lease Arrangement ERD Papers 14 March 2000	6(a)
2018 - 2019	Request relating to information held by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet concerning extending NZ Iraq deployment	6(a)
2018 - 2019	Request about the Government’s desire for greater transparency regarding military deployments	6(a)
2018 - 2019	Request about the status of information that was subject to previous Official Information Act requests (that’s me!)	6
2018 - 2019	Request relating to discussions referred to in published Aide Memoire about possible NZDF contribution to counter-ISIS coalition	6(a)
2018 - 2019	Request for a Government report into the hijacking of Air New Zealand TE24	6(a)
2018 - 2019	Request relating to telecommunication issues associated with Huawei between 1 October 2017 and 30 September 2018	6(a), 6(b)(i)
2018 - 2019	Request relating to the Cyber Credentials Scheme	6(a)
2018 - 2019	Request relating to discussions referred to in published Aide Memoire about possible NZDF contribution to counter-ISIS coalition (follow up request)	6(a)
2018 - 2019	Request for briefings provided to Attorney-General in relation to the Five Country Ministerial and Quintet Meeting	6(a), 6(b)
2018 - 2019	Request for information relating to white nationalism, and meetings with the Islamic Women’s Council	6(a)
2018 - 2019	Request relating to DPMC policy advice and the Policy Project	6(a)
2018 - 2019	Request on various matters relating to national security and counter-terrorism	6(a)
2018 - 2019	Request relating to advice provided to the Prime Minister on camps in Xinjiang, China	6(a)
2018 - 2019	Request for the number of National Assessment Bureau Employees, the number who speak Mandarin and Cantonese and the number with a security clearance	6(a)
2018 - 2019	Request relating to the July inter-agency cyber meeting	6(a)
2019 - 2020	Request relating to Moonshot CVE	6(a), 6(b)
2019 - 2020	Request relating to Y2K	6(a), 6(b)
2019 - 2020	Request for information relating to the Whakaari/White Island eruption on 9 December 2019 and the subsequent recovery operation	6(a)
2019 - 2020	Request regarding Zoom conference clearance	6(a)
2019 - 2020	Request for titles and dates of formal reports relating to COVID-19	6(a)
2019 - 2020	Request relating to women’s involvement in Radical-extremist groups	6(a)
2019 - 2020	Request relating to Asian organised crime	6(a)
2019 - 2020	Request relating to the Trans-Tasman bubble	6(a)
2020 - 2021	Request relating to Five Country Ministerial meetings	6(a), 6(b), 6(c)
2020 - 2021	Request relating to foreign interference in the 2020 New Zealand General Election	6(a)
2020 - 2021	Request relating to counter terrorism and the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Terrorist Attack on Christchurch mosques	6(a), 6(b)(i)
2020 - 2021	Request relating to the Arotake Report	6(a), 6(c)
2020 - 2021	Request for a copy of a briefing relating to 5G Security	6(a)
2020 - 2021	Request for briefings relating to Cyber Ransom and strengthening NZ’s resilience to disinformation	6(a), 6(b)(i)
2020 - 2021	Request relating to ODESC governance boards and sub committees	6(a)
2020 - 2021	Request relating to briefing papers prepared for the Prime Minister on the sources of a book	6(a)
2020 - 2021	Request relating to documents on the governments COVID-19 response in 2020	6(a), 6(c)
2020 - 2021	Request for briefings and Cabinet papers relating to New Zealand’s involvement in Afghanistan	6(a)
2020 - 2021	Request for information relating to the Whaakari Event	6(a)
2020 - 2021	Request for correspondence with COVID-19 advertisers	6(c)

Sources

2016 - 2017: FOIA Sections S6 (a) and S (6) b (i) - fyi.govt.nz
2017 - 2018: Withheld / Rejected OIA Filings - fyi.govt.nz
2018 - 2019: FOIA Sections S6(a) and S(6)b(i) - Oct 2018 - Oct 2019
2019 - 2020: FOIA Sections S6(a) and S(6)b(i) - Nov 2019 - Aug 2020
2020 - 2021: [DPMC] OIAs affected by Section 6 | Aug 2020 - Aug 2021

Spotted something wrong with the table or just want a copy of the data?

Job opportunities recinded due to this project: 2