dgriffith
@dgriffith@aussie.zone
- Comment on trying to test washing machine motor; saw a white flash, voltage dropped, what happened? 5 days ago:
Possibly your motor is having an insulation breakdown when 220v is applied. Looks fine when testing with an ordinary multimeter and it’s low supply voltage.
So everything looks fine until it powers up. This flashover would likely fry whatever control components are in your main board, and it’s possible that your safety capacitor has a set of polyfuses in it that temporarily go high resistance when excess load is applied.
To check for an insulation breakdown you’d really need a megger which can apply 250/500v to the motor windings to check the leakage to ground/between windings.
- Comment on Private parking rules review prompted by £2,000 five-minute fine 2 weeks ago:
In Australia with similar parking companies they have to prove that the losses incurred would amount to what they are trying to invoice.
That is, the invoiced amount can’t be a penalty, it can only be up to the amount required to recoup the financial loss they would incur from being unable to rent out that spot for the duration under their usual rates. This is the basic “making them whole again” principle of compensation that applies in the legal system when parties are injured.
The “penalty” amount that they attempt to invoice is thus pretty difficult for them to justify, seeing that all day parking can usually be had for $20 or so.
- Comment on If me and a bunch of my lemmy friends got on a yacht. Went into international waters what could we get away with legally and what would still be illegal? 3 weeks ago:
Not carrying the flag I think is a big crime basically everywhere
Hence why flying the pirate flag is a big deal. You’re indicating “no laws here”.
- Comment on If me and a bunch of my lemmy friends got on a yacht. Went into international waters what could we get away with legally and what would still be illegal? 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on Facebook and Instagram to Unleash AI-Generated ‘Users’ No One Asked For 4 weeks ago:
And holy shit does their algorithm latch onto any minor interest in their content.
Accidentally tapped on a floor tiling video the other day, three days of tiling and handyman videos jammed into my feed and me pressing the “not interested” button on every single one.
Facebook, I am there for the rare post from my 150 or so friends and family. That’s it. Nothing else.
The reason we don’t use it anymore is because actual posts from real humans we know are buried under a torrent of shit. Sometimes their posts take days to surface leading to all sorts of chain-mail posts on how to “get your feed back”. None of which work because the whole business model is about jamming sponsored shit down your throat.
- Comment on Embodied Is Actually Trying To Release ‘Moxie’ Robots To The Open Source Community 4 weeks ago:
Trying to, because there is no more money to continue development.
Hopefully they can pull it off and do the same as Pebble did when they released a last firmware update for their watches that allowed third party servers to be used.
- Comment on Australian bosses on notice as 'deliberate' wage theft becomes a crime 4 weeks ago:
The ATO would know, and while they are slow, once it is raised with them they get there in the end. About 5 years after I left a job I got a letter out of the blue from the ATO saying that they’d chased down a quarter’s worth of super payments that the business didn’t pay when I left.
Perhaps not 15 years later though, but it’s worth a shot.
- Comment on The loyalty tax shoppers willingly pay despite push for supermarket competition 5 weeks ago:
The range just isn’t there.
Apart from a few name brand food items, they generally only stock one type of item. So you don’t have 5 different types of alfoil you can buy, but you can still buy alfoil.
- Comment on So what are we going to do with all this social media age-gate stuff? 1 month ago:
I certainly wouldn’t stake my money on just being deemed “too small to care about”
Something to consider on that point is that there might be a spike in the userbase once the major players put in whatever irritating form of age verification the govt dreams up.
- Comment on An unwritten 'country code' is putting Rob's life at risk on the road, and all he's doing is turning right 1 month ago:
Get on uhf40 at the top of the gateway bridge in Brisbane, you can hear every whinging/gossiping truckie in the city all at once haha.
- Comment on An unwritten 'country code' is putting Rob's life at risk on the road, and all he's doing is turning right 1 month ago:
I’ve seen plenty of trucks do the single right hand indicator blink, usually b-doubles and larger.
I interpret that as a few things:
- Old mate has noticed me behind them and has judged the road ahead to be suitably clear, so I can nose out and have a look and go for it if I think it’s ok, and
- That they in turn have a good bit of road ahead of them so they can attempt to nudge all the trailers to the left for me as I come past.
- Comment on One in five Australian renters are living without essential items and in poverty, peak body study finds 1 month ago:
$80k was a good salary 10 years ago. I don’t know how you could raise a family on it, today. And half of Australia is making less than that!
You can do it, but:
- You can’t live within 1.5 hours of capital cities or major regional cities.
- You can’t live in a mining town.
- You can’t live in a tourist town.
Unfortunately all the left over places have shit job opportunities, shit services, and are generally classified as shit areas as a result.
So until you advance enough in a career that you can pull a tree change to somewhere less pricey and still keep your income, you’re screwed.
- Comment on BYD’s hybrid EV ute that could rival Australia’s bestselling vehicles goes on sale 2 months 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 3 months 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 3 months 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 3 months 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 4 months 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 4 months 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 4 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? 4 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 5 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 5 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. 5 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 5 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 5 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? 5 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 5 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 5 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 5 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 5 months ago:
“guzzle more petrol”
“7 percent more”
Guzzle Def: "to drink quickly, eagerly, and usually in large amounts.
🤷♂️
