dgriffith

@dgriffith@aussie.zone

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨BYD’s hybrid EV ute that could rival Australia’s bestselling vehicles goes on sale⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The depth of the water was about the height of the wheels. Which I’m guessing is past 400mm.

  Hm. Better check your diff/transfer case oils just in case before things get expensive. Outlanders don’t have high mounted diff breathers so you might have got some water in there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hiker provided with assistance, and shoes, after attempting to climb Tasmanian mountain without them⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  For reference, temps at cradle mountain are still a few degrees below zero overnight.

  Soooo, you know, it’s nice to feel connected to nature by going barefoot, but shoes are probably a good idea.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Market operator issues first-ever low-demand warning as solar 'juggernaut' risks grid overload⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Coincidentally I’ve been in Tampere for 6 months for work, going back to Brisbane on Monday. Being in a “short stay” apartment means that sauna power bills aren’t my problem 😎

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Market operator issues first-ever low-demand warning as solar 'juggernaut' risks grid overload⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  You can get smart meters in Aus now with time of use metering. What needs to happen now is that those meters get a simple, non-cloud-connected way to let your appliances know when is a good time to start up.

  So for hard wired devices like your hot water heater or your pool pump you could have a simple relay-like device in your fusebox that can be set to “turn on below X cents per kWh” and it will switch them as needed.

  Your air conditioner could have a linked IR remote that turns it on early in the day of power is cheap and chills the house for the afternoon heat or runs it a bit cooler than usual if it is already running.

  Your fridge or freezer could have an “extra chill” setting.

  Your washing machine and dryer could have simple “start now” “pause now” interfaces and they could just operate during the day whenever.

  All this could be done with the X10 protocol, and it would be great to get something like that standardised and widespread.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pamphlet advising on protection against a nuclear attack (1963-1967) UK⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The effects of modern high density construction make blast zones and lethal distances a bit unknown.

  500ft above St Paul’s cathedral nowadays would mean that several million tons of concrete and steel would block the radiation pulse and mitigate the blast to quite some extent for those in the outer radius.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lebanon’s health minister says 8 killed, 2,750 wounded by exploding pagers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  What I’m asking is how tf did text messages and whatever in the walkie talkies ignite a spark strong enough to ignite the PETN?

  Pager with firmware that activates an output on date/time X/Y and triggers an ignition signal. That signal is sent o an actual detonator in the device, which sets off the explosive.

  Radio with DTMF receiver that activates an output when touchtone 4 is received over the air, or alternatively if the radio has GPS, another date/time activation via firmware.

  Both of these things are relatively trivial for a nation-state to pull off.

  So yes, in both cases it’s possible that faulty devices are still around. However, if all the rest of your group has had exploding pagers and radios, most people in the same group would have dropped their still-working pager or radio into a bucket of water by now. There’s probably a few, and they’re probably being carefully taken apart right now to see how it was done.

  Afaik such an idea was nonsense previously.

  It’s not nonsense, it just takes planning and resources. And now that people know it is possible, buying and using any sort of equipment for your group without having the nagging concern there might be a bomb in it is impossible. And that’s a pretty powerful limiter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Big, massive deterrent': Social media companies could face fines for allowing kids under 14 on their platforms⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Blocking children from online communities

  These are adult online communities. They are not communities for children. My Facebook feed is not something I would like a child to see or interact with, and I would consider it pretty tame. Algorithmic feeds that amplify minor / random views into a torrent of reinforcement is not what kids - or adults, actually - need.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there such a thing as an automotive relay with no resistor?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Horn switches switch to ground. Power for your original horn really is supplied from a fused battery source, passes through the horn relay, and when you press the horn button the button completes the circuit to earth.

  So, you need to wire your relay coil like this -

  12 volts from a fused battery source to:

  Your relay coil, to:

  The horn switch, which then switches to:

  Ground.

  Just like how your current horn relay works.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Worst PC hardware trends that disappeared⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They also came from a time when hard drives could draw several amps and more on spin-up. SATA connectors would simply melt.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I spent ~$35 on new cables and my LAN speed increased 6x⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  True. Hence my caveat of “most cards”. If it’s got LEDs on the port, it’s quite likely to signal which speed it is at with those LEDs.

  I haven’t yet come across a gigabit card that won’t do 10Mbit but sometimes I’ve come across cards that fail to negotiate speeds correctly, eg trying for gigabit when they only actually have a 4 wire connection that can support 100Mbit. Forcing the card to the “correct” speed makes them work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NVIDIA: Copyrighted Books Are Just Statistical Correlations to Our AI Models.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Me: “This binary file is merely an approximate mathematical and statistical transform of the complainant’s “Deadpool 3”, your honour. If you care to glance through a few A4 pages of the binary representation of both items, you can clearly see that there is no direct copying involved, thus, no copyright claim can be upheld.”

  Result: $250k fine, two years community service in anti piracy groups.

  NVIDIA: “Each copyrighted work was ingested and a statistical model was generated that leverages that information for our own profit. We have no intention of compensating copyright owners for their information.”

  Result: Oh you! Get out of here, you scamp! Ruffles hair

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google threatened tech influencers unless they ‘preferred’ the Pixel⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I hate the camera bumps. Just make the entire phone the same thickness and - hey! Maybe then you could then add a bit more structural integrity and put a bigger battery and a SD card slot and a headphone jack in there as well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Huge methane plume from Queensland coal mine explosion underlines case for rapid closure⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They are forced by the state government to put aside money for future rehabilitation.

  Something else to point out is that “huge methane plume” is actually methane that is always there. It’s just that normally there is a huge amount of forced ventilation into (and subsequently out of) underground mines and while that is working this methane plume is diluted to much lower levels.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Queensland’s premier wants publicly owned petrol stations – is that a good idea?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Telecom wasn’t exactly a shining example of a government run service though.

  Side note: Bring back the CES , privatised job search is an absolute fucking disaster.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Huge methane plume from Queensland coal mine explosion underlines case for rapid closure⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The horse has well and truly bolted on this one.

  About 30 years ago, I used to do coal seam sampling around those parts. There are thousands of boreholes going down to the coal seams there. We would drill down to the seam and then take about a 6 metre cross section of the seam.

  You’d pull up the core samples, place them in sealed tubes made out of metre long, 100mm diameter plastic pipe and take them back to the lab to see how much gas came out.

  Over the course of about 48 hours, about 30 litres of gas would come from about 10kg of coal.

  Oh, those boreholes? They were just left uncapped. Sometimes if it was particularly gassy, they’d put a burner on top, sometimes they wouldn’t, and if a bushfire went through the area those boreholes would never go out and you’d see hundreds of them burning away into the distance. There’s thousands of square kilometres with boreholes in them in that area.

  Every kilogram of coal that they take to the surface will vent the same amount of methane as my samples did 30 years ago and the aggregate amount of coal they mine in the Bowen Basin is about 50 million tons a year.

  So when they finally close all the coal mines, and seal all the shafts and fill in all the pits, they’re also going to have to go and cap the thousands upon thousands of boreholes because they’re a direct line to the remaining seams below, and they’ll basically vent forever.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Toyota hybrid among cars found to guzzle more petrol than advertised, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep, I bet after that they’ll think twice before using excessive superlatives again!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Toyota hybrid among cars found to guzzle more petrol than advertised, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mainly take issue with the word “guzzle”. When something “guzzles petrol”, I expect it to be choking down something like twice as much petrol. Not 7 percent.

  7 percent is basically 4.0 versus 4.28 litres/100km. In a motor vehicle that’s the difference between careful driving and slightly less careful driving. Or the difference between a motoring magazine’s figures and factory figures. It’s not “guzzling extra fuel”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Toyota hybrid among cars found to guzzle more petrol than advertised, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “guzzle more petrol”

  “7 percent more”

  Guzzle Def: "to drink quickly, eagerly, and usually in large amounts.

  🤷‍♂️

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I spent ~$35 on new cables and my LAN speed increased 6x⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For later reference, the link light on most network cards is a different colour depending on link speed. Usually orange for 1G, green for 100M and off for 10M (with data light still blinking).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I spent ~$35 on new cables and my LAN speed increased 6x⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I have not cared about or terminated A-spec after network cards gained auto MDI/MDIX about 20 years ago.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The RBA says don’t expect interest rate cuts for 6 months. Here’s why it could be sooner.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a lot of blame to go around here:

  • A string of governments going back 30+ years cooking the housing market via investment opportunities/tax breaks.
  • Rental market being an absolute shitshow due to the above.
  • Some dickhead at the RBA, the group that sets cash interest rates, saying in 2021 that interest rate rises weren’t going to happen for a fair while and then 6 months later ratcheting up the rates.
  • People taking 2.05 percent variable rate loans during that time for the maximum they can when a simple chart of mortgage interest rates over the last 40 years would suggest that budgeting for a 6-10 percent mortgage would be a good idea.
  • Banks, mortgage brokers, etc, all pushing for - and allowing - people to get the biggest mortgage they can handle right now.
  • The warped Australian dream of getting the biggest house you can and living the best life you can with the best cars and toys, pushed by advertising from corporations.
  • And then we get to quasi-monopolistic companies that get between the consumer and basic goods and services, cranking up the margins to provide maximum return to investors. That’s Coles/Woolies/banks/Ampol/Caltex/etc.

  The whole thing is a pressure cooker designed to get as much as possible out of the general public.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My homelab had the stupidest outage ever⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah , it’s really a little strange in OPs case, I can’t really recall changing a CMOS battery in ages, like decades of computer use.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My homelab had the stupidest outage ever⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
  1. Replace CMOS battery
  2. Get small UPS
  3. Discover that small UPS batteries fail regularly.
  4. Add maintenance routine for UPS battery.
  5. Begin to wonder if this is really worth it when the rest of the house has no power.
  6. Get small generator.
  7. Discover that small generators also need maintenance and exercise.
  8. Decide to get a whole house battery back a-la Tesla Powerwall topped off by solar and a dedicated generator.
  9. In the end times a roving band of thugs comes around and kills you and strips your house of valuable technology, leaving your homelab setup behind.l and without power.

  Conclusion: just replace the CMOS battery on a yearly basis during planned system downtime.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In just three months Bonza has collapsed and Rex is on the brink. What’s gone wrong?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a race to the bottom for providers, everyone’s margin gets squeezed to compete, and services suffer as a result.

  So you can buy a $69 hop from BNE to SYD, but there’s no guarantee on timeliness, no practical refunds, and you will be provided the bare minimum of comfort and facilities on your trip.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Our US friends see the Olympic Medal table differently⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I wonder how medal tally per capita would work out. Surely Australia would be up there. 🤔

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cars Are Now Rolling Computers Now. So What Happens When They Stop Getting Updates?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  ECU remapping has been done since there were programmable ECUs.

  There’s plenty of custom ROMs for cars from all major manufacturers, you just don’t know where to look.Google “ECU remap” or “dpf delete” for an idea.

  Apart from engine/drive line tinkering, there are also plenty of third party software that can tinker with body computers for “lifestyle” adjustments.

  Is it easy and accessible? No. Because of environmental laws, and vendor lock in you can’t generally and easily dick around with the control software in your car. But it does exist.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Australian passport is now more powerful. Here's where you can travel visa-free⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m honestly surprised how well the Australian passport performs considering Australia effectively has a universal visa requirement.

  Look at it from another country’s immigration perspective:

  • G20 country
  • Modern public health system
  • Stable democracy/part of Commonwealth
  • Generally high per-capita earnings and education
  • Generally plays nice/aligned with local nations
  • Generally plays nice on the world stage

  Ticks a lot of boxes, as in, we’d likely not cause any issues, we’ve got plenty of cash for our stay, and we’ll go home once our visit is over.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do so many people use NGINX?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  From the nginx home page:

  nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, a mail proxy server, and a generic TCP/UDP proxy server, originally written by Igor Sysoev.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨77% Of Employees Report AI Has Increased Workloads And Hampered Productivity, Study Finds⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  As an Australian I find the name Freddy quite apt then.

  There is an old saying in Aus that runs along the lines of, “even Blind Freddy could see that…”, indicating that the solution is so obvious that even a blind person could see it.

  Having your Freddy be Blind Freddy makes its useless answers completely expected.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Capacitive controls could be the cause of a spate of VW ID.4 crashes⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But, critically, it’s not a fucking CAPACITIVE BUTTON, and I’ve never accidentally hit it once.

  Yeah. I use resume a fair bit because you can set it to the speed you want and if your cruising gets interrupted by a slow truck or roadworks, or by passing through a town you can just press it and the car will accelerate back up to the set speed. Not like a rocket, maybe a couple of km/hr per second.

  But still, like you say, easily-triggered capacitive buttons for critical functions, holy shit that is a bad idea.