WaterWaiver @ WaterWaiver @aussie.zone

I once met a person that never drank water, only soft drinks. It's not the

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2 yr. ago

Thanks. Looks like that now to me too, so I think it's been fixed.

These two paragraphs in a row are weirdly similar:

His key fund has spent nearly all of the more than $150 million it raised, and is sitting on less than $4 million, according to the latest numbers available. He’s already dug into his fund for 2024 ads, and borrowed money to post bail in Georgia. And some of his allies are begging for donations, saying he won’t pony up.

After raising more than $150 million, his key fund is sitting on less than $4 million, according to the latest numbers available. He’s already dug into his 2024 super PAC, and borrowed money to post bail in Georgia. Some of his allies are begging for donations, saying he won’t pony up.

Am I seeing both the article and a preview version of the article? Or maybe the author was under time/etc pressure and left a duplicate drafted paragraph in? It doesn't seem ML generated as far as I can tell.

The next two paragraphs end with similar sentences too.

I used to check /r/sysadmin whenever something felt down. Often there would be screaming Australians there mere minutes before I encountered an issue.

Also Microsoft Office300+ is a great product.

Exactly this. Second hand thinkpads are stupidly cheap -- I'm currently typing on my $180AUD laptop. I never buy new.

I've thought of doing hardware design attempts on this before. My rough mental notes:

Ink:

• Ink tech is mostly the heads (either piezo or thermal). There are some projects on the web where people repurpose these for other stuff, so it's doable, but you then have to rely on parts from 1st party printer makers.

Toner (aka "laser"):

• Toner and drums are cheap and made by many 3rd parties. Design around whatever models are easiest to get clones of, don't reinvent the wheel.
• Similar for coated fuser rollers (hot rolly bit that melts the toner to the paper).
• To put the image on the drum you will need either a high res LED bar (only available 1st party?) or a spinning prism + laser (probably easier to get parts for to make).
• Work around prism spinning stability issues by attaching a honking great rotational inertial mass to it.
• Stick to single colour (single laser, single drum, single toner) to begin with; colour is the same thing x4

Paper path:

• Modern printers folder the paper over several times in complicated ways. It's very space efficient.
• Stuff that: do everything flat and linear. The printer will be an awkward shape (long and thin) but will be many times easier to work, test and modify.

Electronics:

• Chuck a small SBC on it and keep the software as portable as possible to other platforms (not tied to the one micro/brand/peripheral set). This means using simple GPIO for paperpath sensors and standard buses like I2C for digital sensors. (My current work project has been burned by a microcontroller going out of stock, it would have been much better if we threw a more generic SBC at the problem).
• Best interface to throw high bandwidth sync'd laser pulse data (image) out of? For compatibility and headache reduction maybe a USB bridge chip to some simple SRAM that gets dumped as a row when the laser starts a row across the drum. Maybe that doesn't exist.

Extras:

• A printer that scans and prints with almost the same mechanism. Feed a page over the drum where the laser hits, record the reflected light intensity, produce a B&W (or maybe even grayscale) image from this.

Legal:

• Do it in a country where you are free to break patents for non-commercial use
• Commercial attempts: LOL I suspect the existing printer companies will own patents on everything including the concept of human vision. Be prepared to spend your entire life savings (and lifetime) in courts. They do NOT want more competitors.

I started reading the Gaunt's Ghosts series of books (I found a recommendation on some 40K subreddit a few years back). Some of them are really interesting with politics and (fantasy) tactics. Others are artificially bleak and evil, which lead me to stop. At one point it felt like the author had started retconning a minor character to be some crazy evil murderer, almost as if the publisher went "needs more bleak", and it really boiled my gills. I didn't feel like this character did anything other than cause random unhappiness and excuses to kill off characters; at no point did it tie into the plot or serve any proper purpose.

Oh and these books are stupidly expensive to get even second hand. I've also never succeeded at finding any in charity shops. For some honest and innocent reason my copies seem to have very bad OCR, but you get used to it.

Thankyou DoisBigo, I didn't know other people liked Kris Longknife and Honor Harrington. I pickup random space operas from charity stores -- which if their shelves are any metric then it seems my entire country wants to read nothing but stories about ordinary people on earth; good stuff is few and far between.

Hal Spacejock is good. I found the second book first, it was a hoot (opening: robot on the spaceship panics after making a mistake, wipes its own memory so nothing can be proven, the ship then starts failing and the robot assumes the captain must be at fault for poor maintenance). Some surreal space-opera travel scenes across planets towards the end mixed in with lots of humour.

"Revelation Space" by Alastair Reynolds was definitely interesting. At times a bit stretched out, but it had some cool concepts in it (like safely arresting your fall down an elevator shaft by reversing the thrust of an entire spaceship). Scale was insane (crazy time & space) but then it all focuses on a few smaller points, which felt a bit too distilled for what felt like a big universe moments before. Characters were 50/50 and I didn't enjoy some of their arcs, but the others were good.

A few months back I finished "Crystal Healer" (the dodgiest book title ever if you didn't know it was a space opera) by S.L. Viehl. I remember almost nothing from it, except a hot cat-woman that was enslaved to the main character. No mental staying power whatsoever, but I think I enjoyed reading it.

I recently found a book on my shelf "War Games" by Brian Stableford. I thought I hadn't read this. I opened the first page and found:

2013-02-25 I want to crush this novel. Why? ... because the author did not write a sequel.

No idea what it's about :D

Thankyou everyone in this topic for suggestions. If you want any of the books I mention then just poke me, it's better I send them to someone else rather than let them sit on my shelf forever. I'm in Australia.

++ with the exact section you will be renting highlighted.

Too many properties are listed by the number of rooms of the entire property, not the section you will be renting.

44USD (65AUD) per month for 25/5 in Sydney, Australia. Ditto AussieBB.

From what I hear the NBN (evil monopoly that owns infrastructure for your internet connection in Australia) wants to increase wholesale pricing so that the 25/5 tier costs as much to ISPs as the 50/x tier.

My whole family house is on 25/5 in Australia. Most of laptops in the house are 1366x768 (so 720p youtube video) and we use adblockers.

The key is setting up proper queue control on your router (Openwrt + SQM) so that one person downloading or uploading doesn't ruin the latency for everyone else browsing the web; before I did that a single person downloading a steam game or uploading something to Google drive made the web unbrowsable for everyone. Sadly this only works if your internet connection link speed is stable and reliable.

I’m not entirely facetious: with trackers and ads and “web 2.0” nonsense and way over provisioning , I’ve seen “simple” web sites bog down on much faster connections.

A lot of web 2.0 nonsense slowness is caused by executing megabytes of javascript. Fetching the few MB itself isn't the bottleneck for us :)

TL;DR:

• Clear PET: sure!
• All other plastics: probably wont' get recycled. Maybe a few % as a downcycled product.

I believe the rates for paper and glass are much better.

Perhaps people that buy lots of chocolate and confectionery? That's the biggest theoretical demographic I can think of (my only other thought are people that buy new clothes and underwear rather than using a washing machine, but I don't think that would be many).

There is an open source port that works natively on Windows, Linux and other platforms. I played it quite a bit :)

Interesting note in the project readme:

On 64-bit bug that killed the game

I did not find it, decompiled game worked in x64 mode on the first try.
\ It was either lost in decompilation or introduced in x64 port/not present in x86 build.
\ Based on public description of the bug (no ball collision), I guess that the bug was in TEdgeManager::TestGridBox

This would be a good demoscene category. Sadly it looks like pouet.net doesn't have a "platform" category for raw x86 (I think some of the DOS entries will be this, but not all) and I only saw one entry for x86.

At the end of the day: I think MS-DOS is a more attractive target than raw x86. It does a few things for you, but then mostly gets out of the way if you don't want to use its features, and has better accessibility (thanks to DOSBOX) for most users.

Something nice to see when I searched the steam forum for this game:

FoV is in the settings

Yay!

A few years back I tried playing the original Halo 1. It gave me headaches and my brain simply couldn't enjoy it.

On a similar note: a lot of modern games using Unity or Unreal seem to be magnets for mouse delay and filtering; which makes me very uncomfortable when playing. Those that have bought Killer Frequency: does it have any of this?

I second the suggestion of asking on whirlpool.

Crazytel has a two-way email<->SMS service, that could potentially work for you. I believe you reply to the email and it gets converted to an SMS reply? Multiple people could be logged into the same email account, but you would also then risk multiple people replying if your staff are too quick, so some further thought would be needed.

Especially handy when your university has contracts with Microsoft so you aren’t supposed to use competitive software

What...

Well it's a good thing that Microsoft has embedded linux + its userspace in windows via WSL 2. That means using Linux + its userspace in Alpine is completely Koscher as long as you rename the root Alpine project to be "OceaneAlpine", right?

Thankyou for the link. I now love this guy. He's goofy, he seems to care and he constantly overlays relevant Australian Standard excerpts. Rambles a bit in some videos but that's the worst I can complain about.