Al Williams

Detailed design plans for the replacement of Tairua's troublesome 80-year-old one-lane Pepe Stream bridge are set to go out to tender in the coming months as the Coromandel braces for another busy peak summer season.

Where do I even begin? Firstly, I want to say what a pleasure and honour it has been to have served the people of Hauraki-Coromandel, even if it was just for a short time.

Al Williams is forced to bid the paper farewell after only 9 months on the job.

If you program in C, strings are just in your imagination. What you really have is a character pointer, and we all agree that a string is every character from that point up until one of the characters is zero. While that’s simple and useful, it is also the source of many errors. For example, writing a 32-byte string to a 16-byte array or failing to terminal a string with a zero byte. [Thasso] has been experimenting with a different way to represent strings that is still fairly simple but helps keep things straight.

Keira Hayidakis rescued two children swept into the surf at Pokohino Beach. Emergency services, including helicopters, responded and airlifted the children to Auckland.

A $10,000 barrier arm has been installed at Whitianga Wharf and options for a multi-million-dollar waterfront redevelopment proposal have been made public.

Danger, frustration and rubbish dumping on Whitianga Wharf.

Every scout knows how to read a compass, and that there is a magnetic north and a true north. That’s because the Earth’s magnetic field isn’t exactly aligned with the North Pole. Every five years, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the British Geological Survey (BGS) get together to decide if magnetic north is still the same as it was before. This time, it isn’t.

While you tend to think of diamonds as ornamental gemstones, diamonds also have many important industrial uses, and many of those diamonds are now synthetic polycrystalline diamonds. How are they made? [JerryRigEverything] takes us behind the scenes at a diamond manufacturing facility, something you don’t get to see every day. Check out the giant presses that exert about a million pounds of pressure in the video below.

Are you familiar with huffman encoding? That’s where you pick shorter codes for more frequent letters. Morse code is the same way. Shorter characters are the ones you are most likely to use. [Matheus Richard] had the same idea for optimizing your workflow in the Linux shell. The idea is to measure what commands you use the most and make them shorter.