It’s ok, they’re licked clean between use. What sort of barbarians do you take us for?

I’ll reiterate that this place has been a safe space. Much nicer than reddit, a much happier place I’d rather be. Thankyou, every ounce has been appreciated even if you think it not :)

+1

Tiny filters are a scam in the soldering world too. A few mm thick sheet of carbon impregnated open-cell foam isn’t going to have even a 50% impact on the fumes. Proper rated fume filtration systems are between the size of a large dog and a washing machine; and cost crazy amounts of money.

Plumbing it outside is cheap, extremely effective, small and if something breaks you can tell immediately.

Tried my local cafe a month back. $7 hot chocolate. Didn’t have luck seeing someone to strike up a conversation with, everyone looked stressed.

Meanwhile at where I volunteer: free hot chocolate, free tea, free instant if that’s your thing. And nice people to chat to. (Actually I think I bought the last bottle of milk, but that’s still only $3ish).

Maybe I have to be more picky about the cafe or time of day?

Blue Mountains food security fair yesterday was mostly good. Came away with plants (ouch my wallet), a jar of chocolate honey and wish I bought a book on weeds. Was smaller than I thought. Talks I chose were fun.

97% goes towards paying suppliers, staff, utilities and covering other operating costs.

I’m looking at the Woolworths 2026 Annual report and I do not know how you got those numbers. These reports are beautifully formatted cryptic messes designed to hide stuff, not to properly inform debate on government ownership or how the books would change under government operation.

Their raw revenue was 72 billion, then they claim most of that is spent on these vague categories:

• Cost of sales
• Branch expenses
• Administration expenses
• Other expenses

Some of these things contain some components of suppliers, staff and utilities. But there is a lot going other places.

“Profit” is a very dangerous term because it’s intentionally gamed in the reporting by all companies to reduce tax liability. Woolworths claims they are only left with 1 billion in profit after they do their sums, but, under government control you’d realise that this number is really misleading. Eg checkout these things in their report:

• 3 billion of asset depreciation
• ~1 billion of shareholder dividends (remember that’s not “profit”!)
• ~1 billion for underpaid staff rumeneration (it’s cheaper to pay them right in the first place and not have to do court costs, dear god)
• (probably a lot more interesting stuff I’ve missed, on a train RN)

I’m going to say their headline tiny profitability is not what you think it is, and that they’re not poor Woolies struggling with borderline profitability because of big employee and big supplier. For more fun on creative book keeping: checkout airlines. Some of them intentionally teeter themselves to reported non-profitability when it suits them.

My family is scared of driving a smaller car because all the other cars are bigger now. I would not be surprised if fear is the core motivating psychology.

I feel torn. I also want to troll my friends. A bad UX is what they deserve, especially that friend who works in the printer industry and complains all the time about how badly documented many minecraft mods are.

One of the ways to get my portal to work was to hold exactly 7 items in your current hand. This is also how I want Firefox’s new UI to work.

nobody can know about this

Omni Owl works as a private contractor for shady intermediaries. Omni Owl’s job is to steal your Yubikeys. Omni Owl also steals your dinner afterwards, even through window glass.

EDIT: Also thankyou for the drawing, it’s awesome :)

I used to play a bit of Luanti, but it was hard to convince my friends to join. This is a compromise they are willing to do though.

Its not server-side modding (Minecraft has obviously had that for ages), its a full LUA interpreter with an in-game interface for clients to write scripts, and upload them to the server on the fly.

Nope. It’s server side modding. The clients don’t get to execute arbitrary lua on the server (unless they are hosting or opped) and only someone with access to the server filesystem can upload scripts.

From a friend:

An Owl but it’s a wearing nightvision goggles

EDIT: Awww too late.

Not really, unless AMEX counts. RIP Bankcard

Behind the scenes there are several routes your card can be charged via. IIRC EFTPOS is one of the cheapest, but doesn’t support card tap, instead you have to insert and use your pin?

EDIT: Yes

https://choice.community/t/do-we-pay-more-for-credit-card-purchases-when-we-tap-instead-of-insert/31743

When a card is waved OR is a credit card it is processed by the credit network and receives the ‘valuable protections’ attributed to credit cards regardless of whether it is a credit or branded (eg Visa or Mastercard) debit card. If it is inserted and identified as an EFTPOS card it is processed through the interbank (cheaper) network; if a debit card it depends on the selection (eg savings, cheque, or credit).

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-22/inserting-your-card-could-help-reduce-card-surcharges/104105544

If you use a debit card, it’s likely a “dual network” card, meaning it can be used to make payments via the Mastercard/Visa network (depending on the issuer) as well as the eftpos system.

Using the lower-cost eftpos system can help reduce card surcharges and sometimes avoid them completely.

To do this, you typically swipe or insert your card and pay using the “savings” option.

I guess I know what I’m doing from now on.

Yes I play nintendo. You mean romhacks, right?

I was updating a GP website today to add “COVID vaccines currently free”. Bossman says “it’ll be in state gov’s hands soon so we don’t know”.

Flu shots are not free though, unless you hit some specific criteria.

I don’t think shots were intended to be fired at the Mozilla corporation, who can’t stop talking about their default, opt-out AI, but it paints a stark picture of the difference between a company that preaches privacy and choice, versus a company that actually provides those things.

I think they’re also taking shots on telemetry. Firefox uses telemetry as evidence to support their decisions in ways that sometimes seem contrived or statistically incorrect (similar to only x% of people turned this default feature off, therefore it is good), making me feel as a user that contributing my telemetry to them is actually a bad thing that is encouraging their behaviour. Meanwhile TDF makes great software that follows what the community wants and needs without any telemetry collection.

Higher price != better printer.

My Qidi Q1 pro has has lots of print quality and reliability problems. I ended up fixing them by disabling lots of printer features, including filament width detection piezo bed height sensor. Despite it being housed I had to do a lot of modifications to duct it properly because it has lots of holes and fans.

My $300AUD bedslinger i3 clone has only ever had two problems, the non-metal hot end having PTFE tube expansion (great since I replaced it) and the gantry getting crooked (once I knew this it became 1000x easier to use). Not as fast acceleration as the Qidi but much more reliable.

I borrowed a Mk3 Prusa from work a few years ago. If I had to pay for it I would have been really pissed, out of the box it was really slow.

My old boss spend thousands on an even slower printer… lets not go there :D

I’ve heard that even the Enders are much better out of the box these days. Maybe try one of those?

Short answer: It depends. Doing full flash reads of your USB sticks and SD cards (dd if=/dev/XXX of=/dev/null bs=4k status=progress) may help for a lot of them. But not all. The only solution I can actually recommend (for any storage media) is backup them up and regularly testing/moving the backups.

If the read of the disk is particularly slow then that indicates the flash cells are degraded. If a second read of the disk is much faster then that indicates some action may have been taken by the flash controller IC to fix this.

Long answer:

NAND flash cells slowly leak charge, making their state indistinguishable. A flash controller IC (usually separate to the NAND flash IC or ICs) has the job of noticing and fixing this (by rewriting the data to another or the same cell) before it gets too bad. That doesn’t necessarily mean it does it particularly well.

Some (few?) flash controllers periodically scan for weak cells and rewrite to fix them. Some (most?) flash controllers notice weak cells only when you read them. Some (many?) flash controllers are shit and don’t do any of this.

Flash controllers also have a bunch of other features and jobs, like maintaining a spare pool of cells (over-provisioning) to swap out for bad ones and even forcing the USB stick into read-only mode if they think things have gone particularly bad. Again this varies a lot depending on implem, some do it, some don’t, and for different reasons (out of over-provis cells, corrupt mapping metadata, arbitrary thresholds, etc).

I guess it depends on what you mean by bike lanes.

Good bike lanes = independent, spaced from a road, or barricaded if near either parking or roads.

Bad bike lanes = minimal repainting on a street, often ignored because they’re so unsafe, worse than sharing the roads.

I have a mix of all types in my area. Some of them let me go places cars cannot, others follow the car roads safely, others are designed by people who have never cycled and want to murder me (so I ride in the traffic lane instead).