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4 Mar 2025

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Te Matatini: Opening a window into te ao Maori
Te Matatini o Te Kahui Maunga brought thousands of visitors to Taranaki, injecting millions of dollars into the province in the process, and opening a window into te ao Maori.

Microsoft adds JPEG XL support to Windows 11 with a quick download
Windows 11 users can now use the JPEG XL image extension. All you need to do is download JPEG XL Image Extension from the Microsoft Store, which will enable the OS to view and save images in the new format. In order to be eligible for using the JPEG XL image extension, you’ll need to be on Windows 11 24H2. Once you’re on 24H2 and after you’ve downloaded and installed the extension, you can start viewing and saving image files with the .jxl extension in apps. With the extension installed, existing JPEG files can also be converted to the lossless JPEG XL format, significantly reducing the file size without harming its quality. Conversely, JPEG XL files can easily be converted back to the original JPEG format as needed. What are the advantages of JPEG XL? Not only does JPEG XL offer better compression versus old-school JPEG, the format (ISO/IEC 18181) is optimized for web environments so that content can be displayed on a wide range of devices. It was developed to meet the image requirements for both web content and professional photography, as the old JPEG format is quite outdated. JPEG XL supports a wide color scale (32 bits) and images with a high bit depth and dynamic range. Furthermore, features like animation, alpha channels, layers, thumbnails, and both lossless and progressive coding are supported to cover as many modern applications as possible. The new format offers significantly better image quality and compression compared to the older JPEG format, and the codec is designed for computationally efficient encoding and decoding. The codec isn’t dependent on any additional hardware acceleration, which is particularly beneficial for mobile devices. Further reading: JPEG is dying. Check out these successors

MSI bumps prices for RTX 50-series cards — goodbye, MSRP
You knew that Nvidia’s newest graphics cards wouldn’t be cheap, even if you could find one to buy. But between scalpers and tariffs, finding one at anything resembling Nvidia’s suggested retail price is all but impossible. MSI is doing its part to make sure it stays that way with an across-the-board price increase. VideoCardz.com noticed that MSI raised the price on its OEM version of the “base” RTX 5070 Ti Shadow 3X, from $750 at launch to $819.99 now. That $70 bump means there isn’t a single card in MSI’s US store showing the base price that Nvidia promoted at the CES 2025 announcement. The least expensive RTX 5080 is $1,140 instead of $1,000, and the cheapest MSI RTX 5090 is now a whopping $2,400 (that’s $400 over MSRP). To be fair, these results don’t appear to have changed much since early February, according to the Internet Archive. And there’s no cached version of the site showing that $750 RTX 5070 Ti, so I can’t independently confirm that MSI raised the price on the cheapest 50-series card. And all of this is a bit academic, since there isn’t a single card available to buy at any price on MSI’s US store in any case. There are a lot of factors in play driving these prices up. You have the usual relationship between Nvidia and OEM card manufacturers, who relish the chance to splash adjectives on their cards and pretend that a shiny cooler or a 5 percent overclock justifies a much higher price tag. You also have the huge demand from both PC gamers and the AI industry that makes these cards hard to find in the first place. And in the US, you have the Trump regime’s import tariffs, which are taxes that manufacturers and retailers tend to pass directly onto consumers to keep their profit margins intact. It’s a perfect storm driving prices higher. VideoCardz says that MSI “has now become a scalper themselves.” I wouldn’t go that far — scalpers trying to flip hard-to-find retail items on the gray market will usually shoot for double their money right away. And the practice of offering only a tiny number of cards at MSRP, followed by the vast majority of OEM cards in these more expensive, profitable configurations, is nothing new. But that doesn’t make the ballooning prices any more tolerable, especially coming from a source that’s supposed to be as close to the manufacturer as possible. It gives AMD and Intel an opportunity to make their affordable cards look all the more appealing.

Deep sea power cable across the Tasman designed to trade surplus electricity
A deep sea power cable hopes to bring cheaper electricity to both New Zealand and Australia.

This Ryzen 7 OLED laptop with 16GB of RAM is only $610 right now
Matt Smith called the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED a “budget laptop star” when he reviewed it last year, and it’s still a popular model for anyone looking for great parts at a low price. Today, you can get an even better deal with Newegg (via eBay) offering a refurbished model with a touchscreen, Ryzen 7 processor, and 16GB of RAM for just $609.99. That’s over $350 off the current price on Newegg, which is already fairly low for a premium design. And despite being refurbished, this one comes with a 2-year Allstate warranty. That’s double the term of the usual manufacturer warranty… though results for actually making a claim appear to be mixed. Even so, it’s a lot better than the 90 days you usually get. The Asus Zenbook 14 OLED is already a bargain with its 8-core processor and generous RAM, plus some surprisingly good build quality for a less-expensive laptop. The Radeon RX 780M integrated GPU means it has some surprising graphical power for a small machine, and it’s among the best in its class for battery life, beating out similar laptops and earning a PCWorld Editors’ Choice award. Newegg tends to have a lot of these laptops in stock, but steep discounts mean they can disappear quickly. I’d get an order in fast if you’ve made your decision because this deal likely won’t last long. Get an Asus Zenbook 14 OLED for shockingly cheap: $610Buy now on eBay

School attendance shows early signs of improvement
More children have been attending school each day than at the same time last year, according to the latest data.

'It's not a way to run a health service' - the cost of health redundancies
The amount spent on health redundancies shows again the government's cuts are impacting people's services, Labour says.