Volunteering our tech skills at Te Puea Marae

by | Sep 5, 2017 | Anywhere Anytime, Event

Located in South Auckland, Te Puea Memorial Marae has opened its doors as a safe haven for the homeless of Auckland. Focused on helping families, children and the elderly, the marae has stepped up to help social services tackle Auckland’s homelessness crisis. From sleeping in cars and garages, the Manaaki Tangata program seeks to help families into temporary or permanent housing.  In the winter of 2016, Te Puea helped place 130 families in homes, thanks to the efforts of 1,200 volunteers. As they prepared to do the same in 2017, a group of individuals from Auckland’s tech community, including Aerorock, stepped in to upgrade the marae’s infrastructure. Access to the Internet and computers is an essential way of helping these families reach the resources they need – but it can be daunting for the average person to even set up a router, let alone build a whole network from scratch. Te Puea had enough on their plates already and are doing a fantastic job, so we were happy to offer our expertise. Fun fun fun! Volunteering our tech skillz at Te Puea [email protected] @rafaelmagu @duckalini @NatDudley @Amy_Hoops pic.twitter.com/KCC5S3KQHH — Jason Danner (@jpdanner) July 15, 2017 We’d refurbished several laptops for the residents and social support staff to use. There are endless forms to fill out and resumes to write – all they have to do is run Office, so you don’t need flash kit! Even on these old machines, patching through Windows Update to keep everything secure is the most important part… with help from the smallest, furriest member of the team. Patching a bunch of old laptops and...

eCentre Event: Internet of Things

by | May 28, 2015 | Cloud, Event

On May 27th our good friends at the eCentre hosted an event at the Takapuna Boat Club all about the Internet of Things. This emerging technology offers both fascinating new possibilities and serious concerns. A guest panel discussed the pros and cons of having everyday objects connected to the Internet. So what is ‘The Internet of Things’? It is the idea that inter-connectivity between objects and devices in our lives is becoming more and more prevalent. As the Internet and the interactions between devices becomes more and more ubiquitous, the idea of having everything on a network is not such a far fetched idea. Moderator Dr. Mack Saraswat (Lifeonics) Speakers Andy Punnett (Lifeonics) Hannes Nel (Microsoft) Mohit Baweja (Datacom) Paul Caples (Spark Digital) Peregrine Lobb (Spark Digital) You’ll find more information about this event on the eCentre website. I had the pleasure of running the audio for the event. Here’s my recording of the panel discussion.  ...