Zagorath
@Zagorath@aussie.zone
- Comment on As of December 10th, You need to be sixteen to use Aussie.Zone 7 hours ago:
Haha fair enough! I guess it’s not quite as widely spread as I thought.
- Comment on As of December 10th, You need to be sixteen to use Aussie.Zone 7 hours ago:
Haha yeah I know! I was actually watching a streamer (who mostly streams completely unrelated stuff—Photoshopping thumbnails for others’ aoe2 YouTube channels) just a few weeks ago, and the topic of Zoombinis came up. She’s apparently the moderator of the Zoombinis speedrunning records. Which…is apparently a thing.
- Comment on As of December 10th, You need to be sixteen to use Aussie.Zone 7 hours ago:
What do you mean Lodion and you. I thought Molly was doing the verification!
- Comment on As of December 10th, You need to be sixteen to use Aussie.Zone 8 hours ago:
Yes, I can confirm I had a birthday at some point between 16 June 2023 and 2 December 2025.
- Comment on As of December 10th, You need to be sixteen to use Aussie.Zone 1 day ago:
Damn, that’s just wild to me. As I said above, I came in near the end of their era, so just storing one project on there was at times stretching the limits of what they could do. It’s kind of incredible to think of how far we’ve come.
- Comment on As of December 10th, You need to be sixteen to use Aussie.Zone 1 day ago:
To be honest, I’ve never seen it myself. I only know it through cultural osmosis. I’ve seen parodies and homages done in a bunch of TV shows.
I have heard it’s very good though, so enjoy!
- Comment on As of December 10th, You need to be sixteen to use Aussie.Zone 1 day ago:
Dayum, you were using floppies to hold multiple different unrelated files? Like a USB today?
- Comment on As of December 10th, You need to be sixteen to use Aussie.Zone 1 day ago:
Wait, you’ve never heard of it? Not having seen it is one thing, but never heard of it‽
- Comment on Shiny beer cans and a crowd save party-loving pet parrot 1 day ago:
Not an important story. Just a fun little feel-good. We can all use a break from the gloom of important issues now and then.
- Submitted 1 day ago to australia@aussie.zone | 3 comments
- Comment on As of December 10th, You need to be sixteen to use Aussie.Zone 1 day ago:
Oof, you just have to say that today‽ After my terrible performance on yesterday’s Connections?
- Comment on As of December 10th, You need to be sixteen to use Aussie.Zone 1 day ago:
This one’s more my era: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoombinis
- Comment on As of December 10th, You need to be sixteen to use Aussie.Zone 1 day ago:
I was under 30 when I made this account.
I no longer am.
Dunno if that counts.
- Comment on As of December 10th, You need to be sixteen to use Aussie.Zone 1 day ago:
Am I allowed to deliberately ignore that part of the message because it’s more fun to be verified in public?
- Comment on As of December 10th, You need to be sixteen to use Aussie.Zone 1 day ago:
Oh and if that’s not enough, hopefully you can believe that I didn’t have Reddit at the age of 3 years old on an account that is today 13?
- Comment on As of December 10th, You need to be sixteen to use Aussie.Zone 1 day ago:
gaming off floppy discs as a child
Dang. I’m a little younger than you. We had floppy disks when I was in year 1 & 2, but I remember having a Powerpoint project where some of the kids’ Powerpoint files were too big to fit on a floppy.
- Comment on As of December 10th, You need to be sixteen to use Aussie.Zone 2 days ago:
Proof of age:
I’m using method 3 and telling you that I never watched a lot of the show, but I have a very strong distinct memory of one episode of Round the Twist (last released in 2001, 24 years ago) where one of the characters gains the ability to read minds. But then it messes up and suddenly it reverses, so everyone can read their mind instead. That’s the only episode that’s absolutely seared into my brain for some reason.
I also distinctly remember at one point somewhere in the range '99-'04, a block of children’s programming (I think it was on the ABC) on a Friday, which you knew was over when the MASH theme started playing. I’ve never properly watched the show, but Suicide is Painless is stuck in my head because of that fact. I don’t even know how long that block of programming lasted.
- Comment on As of December 10th, You need to be sixteen to use Aussie.Zone 2 days ago:
how about a HRT label pic
Definitely should qualify if you’re in Queensland!
- Comment on As of December 10th, You need to be sixteen to use Aussie.Zone 2 days ago:
Fwiw although the legislation says it applies to all social media, it seems as though the regulation that’s been imposed by the eSafety commissioner to actually implement that legislation relies on designating platforms. And AZ has not been designated. Only “Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X, YouTube, Kick and Reddit are age-restricted platforms”. So it seems as though there may not be any obligation for us to comply.
IANAL though, so take this with salt.
But if you are going to preemptively comply, taking the chinwag approach as you have seems like a pretty good method.
- Comment on E-bike rules in Australia will soon change with possible ban on sale of bikes faster than 25km/h 5 days ago:
Yeah, I won’t disagree with you there. You can check elsewhere in the thread if you want to see more details, but in summary: the specific combination of heavy loads and steep hills (take away either one, and 250 W is easily sufficient) do make a 500 W limit more necessary.
- Comment on E-bike rules in Australia will soon change with possible ban on sale of bikes faster than 25km/h 6 days ago:
Please explain what you think the appropriate solution is, then, and why it’s better than mine.
- Comment on E-bike rules in Australia will soon change with possible ban on sale of bikes faster than 25km/h 6 days ago:
Well, no. For starters, you’re forgetting that gravity it’s probably the only force acting on a bike that’s linear with speed. And even it technically isn’t linear—just close enough to be a good approximation over human scales. But air resistance goes with the square of speed. i.e., to double your speed requires quadrupling the power.
More importantly though, there’s also a speed cap. EN15194 has a hard cap of 25 km/h. It can provide up to 250 W of assistance if you’re doing 24.9 km/h, but the motor must cut out entirely and be no help at 25.1 km/h. It also must be pedal assist, meaning it can only provide power while you are also providing power through your legs. The exception is up to 6 km/h it is allowed to assist with a button or throttle, sometimes called “walk mode”.
The NSW law is a 500 W cap at present, but the law specifically calls out that it must “progressively reduce as the bicycle’s speed increases beyond 6km/h”, in addition to cutting off at 25 km/h, and the pedal-assist requirement.
- Comment on E-bike rules in Australia will soon change with possible ban on sale of bikes faster than 25km/h 1 week ago:
I think I take a slightly softer position than you do, because in my view 250 W is a viable alternative to a car the majority of the time. It becomes a problem on very steep hills when carrying heavy loads, but most people are not doing that very often, and a better cycling network buildout (which is always my first priority) would reduce the need for it even further, if people had safe convenient routes around hills that didn’t force them up and over unless either they want to take the shorter, harder route, or their destination is actually on the hill.
But I do still ultimately agree with you. Ideal world, we’d change it to allow them. It’s more accessible to more people, and I cannot see much disadvantage, if the speed regulators work correctly.
- Comment on E-bike rules in Australia will soon change with possible ban on sale of bikes faster than 25km/h 1 week ago:
I don’t know in what world any comment ending with “I don’t know why you think it is” could be read as anything but condescending.
You’re complaiing [sic] about legal e-bikes not doing specific tasks you want them to
Yes, she is. So am I. Because I want cycling to be accessible to everybody. Because of the massively lower cost of a bike compared to a car, and the massively lower risk of them, they have the inherent power to be much more accessible to a lot more people. Building better infrastructure is the most important part of that and we mustn’t lose sight of that fact, but the laws governing how you ride are also relevant. In this case, ebike laws. EN15194 comes out of famously flat parts of the European peninsula. Hills are not as much of a factor there as they are here. For most people, most of the time, that’s still sufficient.
But something as basic as being allowed to use your bike to go grocery shopping, or if somebody wanted to do something like Martin Broer in the UK and run a small tradie business out of an electric bakfiets, should be a legal option. In Dutton Park and Highgate Hill in Brisbane’s inner south, or around Everton Park/Arana Hills in the northwest, that’s just not going to work very well if you’re not allowed any more than 250 W on your motor. Heck, even the lesser but still noticeable hills of St Lucia/Toowong/Indooroopilly might be a struggle if you’re carrying a bunch of stuff.
If there’s any task that forms part of people’s daily lives that a bike can’t do, I’m going to ask “why not?” and wonder if it would be appropriate to change things so that they can. In this case, the solution is obvious and simple.
- Comment on E-bike rules in Australia will soon change with possible ban on sale of bikes faster than 25km/h 1 week ago:
Can you explain why?
Look at the comparison I did elsewhere in the thread. One hill I know of and have climbed many times, going up at just 12 km/h, I’m putting out over 500 W at some points. And that’s on a carbon analogue bike, as a lighter-than-average dude, carrying nothing more than a bottle of water. I’m out of the saddle, working my arse off to get up that hill.
As a cycling advocate, that’s unacceptably difficult. Great for when cycling for fun or fitness, but as an advocate, I do not want people to have to exert themselves that much just to get around. I try to set a baseline effort of 100 W, but up to 200 W for brief periods is not unreasonable. 250 W (plus a 250 W motor) when climbing up a hill even with the lightest possible load, which would easily become 500+ W (plus the 250 W motor) on the way home from shopping or transporting kids to their cricket training, is not reasonable. I want cycling to be accessible to as many people as possible. It has the potential to be a far more accessible form of transport than driving is, if our network design and laws allow it to be. A Dutch-style network is by far the most important thing and would work for 80%+ of potential cyclists, 60%ish of the time.
But to get that last 20% of cyclists 100% of the time, laws designed for the famously flat Netherlands are not necessarily appropriate. And that could include allowing up to 500 W motors. Especially with the NSW law, which states the power must be
progressively reduced as the bicycle’s speed increases beyond 6km/h.
So (assuming it’s linear), at 16 km/h you’d be getting about 250 W of assistance, maximum. At 20 km/h you’re down to 132 W, and at 23 km/h it’s just 52 W. To do that 12 km/h up the hill I was talking about, you’d get about 340 W of assistance, or go down to 10 km/h and get 390 W, plus 1–200 W from your legs, which should be enough to get an older or less physically capable cyclist up the hill with their shopping or (grand)kids.
- Comment on E-bike rules in Australia will soon change with possible ban on sale of bikes faster than 25km/h 1 week ago:
The real problem that’s not being explicitly talked about here is unregistered electric motorbikes being sold (often to children) as “ebikes”. Vehicles that don’t have pedals, or have only vestigial pedals, and are reaching speeds well over 25 km/h (often fast enough to keep up with cars in traffic) without any pedalling. Morrison’s Government changed the rules to allow importing of these electric motorbikes, and there have been multiple deaths in SEQ over the past few months as a result. The change to ban the import and sale of these vehicles is absolutely a good one. Even if you think, as I do, that EN15194 is a bit too strict.
Also, as much as I am a vocal supporter of !fuckcars@lemmy.world and related movements, it’s not exactly the same comparison. Ebikes can be ridden on bike paths, shared paths, and (except in 2 states) footpaths with pedestrians. They require zero licensing, and are often ridden by children. Quite different from driving a car, on roads (where a speed limit does apply), after qualifying for a driver’s licence.
- Comment on E-bike rules in Australia will soon change with possible ban on sale of bikes faster than 25km/h 1 week ago:
Yeah I think NSW’s approach is pretty good. As you say, 250 W is a bit limited with heavy loads up hills. To put this into perspective, on my analogue bike, up one of the steepest hills I’ve ever climbed in Brisbane, I do about 400–500 W for about 20 seconds. Ebikes are all required to be pedal-assist, so let’s assume a baseline of 100 W from the cyclist’s legs (about what a casual cyclist who just wants to cruise along would do), plus the 250 W maximum output. That’s 20 seconds where they’re having to pedal extra hard, even if their total load (including bike, rider, and water) is comfortably under 90 kg. Make that a serious cargo bike (++kg) loaded with shopping, sports equipment, or kids (+++kg) and you’re likely going to end up putting out more power with your legs than I do on my analogue bike even after you account for your motor assistance.
NSW also has a rule requiring the motors to smoothly taper their power. So at the 12 km/h I climb this particular hill at, you might get 400 W of assistance, but if you’re getting up to 22 km/h it might be just 100 W[^1]. Basically, it naturally self-corrects for any risk that might be associated with higher power at higher speeds. EN15194, otoh, is 250 W flat. It allows peaking above that amount for a short time, but from what I can tell it’s not clear how long that time is, or how it works in practice on compliant bikes.
A counterpoint to this take would be: the hill I’m describing is extremely steep, and chosen in part because it’s steep. I’d go a different, easier route, if I wasn’t on a training ride. And 90% of the time, most utility cyclists will have options that avoid climbs that steep. And also that perhaps it’s not unreasonable to expect ebike users to put out more effort on hills than they do on the flat. Personally I find both of these arguments convincing enough if used against even higher power limits, but not convincing enough for me to oppose 500 W. Especially since I’m also in favour of increasing the speed cap from 25 km/h to 30 or 32 km/h (20 mph), since that’s the speed I feel I can comfortably reach without too much effort on the flat, on an analogue bike.
[^1]: I made no attempt to actually do the maths on this. And I’m not sure if it’s meant to be a linear drop-off or if some curve is applied anyway.
- Comment on E-bike rules in Australia will soon change with possible ban on sale of bikes faster than 25km/h 1 week ago:
A mandatory import approval through the federal government providing evidence a bike met the definition of an e-bike was removed in 2021, and replaced with an optional advisory notice.
So, the Morrison government is responsible for starting this whole thing by allowing people to import vehicles that are dangerous and illegal to actually ride.
However, a communiqué released on Friday reveals federal, state and territory transport ministers have agreed to reinstate reference to the European standard, EN15194, into the Road Vehicle Standards (Classes of Vehicles that are not Road Vehicles) Determination by the end of the year.
Thankfully, that loophole is being restricted. The vehicles already in the country are a problem, but at least no more will be entering.
In all states except NSW, currently EN15194 is used for what’s road-legal, except NSW, where 500 W is allowed. But
“NSW will rapidly move to harmonise with that standard and with other states’ approach,” he said.
They’re going to be moving to a more standardised approach.
Personally, I think NSW’s 500 W might not be unreasonable, considering their laws also require the amount of power put out to smoothly decrease as you get above 6 km/h, whereas EN15194 is 250 W, flat, until you hit 25 km/h. Having more power might be especially useful for people with cargo bikes who need to go up steep hills with their shopping, sport gear, or kids.
- E-bike rules in Australia will soon change with possible ban on sale of bikes faster than 25km/hwww.brisbanetimes.com.au ↗Submitted 1 week ago to australia@aussie.zone | 34 comments
- GPs [in Queensland] given ability to diagnose adults with ADHD in bid to cut wait times [starting 1 December]www.abc.net.au ↗Submitted 1 week ago to australia@aussie.zone | 1 comment