Chirp ran fine on Linux when I needed it to program a UV-5R a year or two back - was provided in a flatpak then but looks like they use a Python wheel file now.

I’m sure I’ve read worse but one that stands out as making me question the time I put into reading it is Out of the Dark by David Weber. I go into it expecting a military sci fi, and for the vast majority of the book that’s what you get - aliens invade Earth and plucky humans resist etc etc. The aliens however have more reserves and air superiority so are slowly winning as the end of the book approaches, at which point you expect the main characters to pull a rabbit out of the hat and do something different. Except that’s not what happens.

I was definitely not satisfied with this ending, even if there was some foreshadowing earlier in the book that made sense after knowing this was a possibility in this universe.

Far from the only one, I think there’s plenty which could plausibly be a duck. It’s just that most people seem to be going for one of these ducks:

Or one of these ducks:

instead of one of these ducks:

Self checkouts that just let you scan items without issue and accept payment are a nice enough idea for a bag or less of shopping, my problem with them is how they are implemented in reality (in Australia anyway). The first implementations I encountered I considered an useful addition but both the machines and the staffing changes due to them have steadily gone downhill in terms of user experience.

Instead of a quick painless experience you get a horribly touchy weight sensor which can’t reliably handle particularly small items, particularly large items, or non-standard bags (and there are no longer standard bags due to plastic bag bans), a machine which demands assistant intervention at the slightest issue (and the assistants are understaffed so never arrive quickly), and when you finally get to payment it makes you click through an annoyingly slow interface to tell it you don’t have a rewards card and don’t care to donate to some charity before it will activate the card reader. To make things worse the manned checkouts are never staffed at a level - if any are even open - to cater for people with full trolleys so these end up clogging up the self checkouts (which have tiny bagging areas and are not intended to handle a trolley load) and making everything slower.

The icing on the cake is the self checkout treating you like a thief and throwing errors if the camera system thinks you didn’t scan something in the trolley or letting off an alarm like you’re trying to make off with something when you just want to buy a can of paint.

The bees would still overcome the wasp, assuming it’s a large hive. The wasp will have practical limitations on the amount of ammunition for the weapon (also the question of whether it can reload before getting swarmed) and the ceramic armour won’t help against the bees massing together to form a ball of bees around the wasp and overheating it until it dies.

Edit: Apparently it depends on the type of bees as to whether they do the heat ball of death thing, so your mileage may vary.

As in plasterboard sheets? I don’t see why not if hand loading, plenty of vans will fit a 2400x1200 sheet (my Transporter fitted a bunch of plywood with room to spare). Loading one with a forklift is harder due to no side access long enough to fit 2400mm but that’s a problem shared with tub back utes. If however your plasterboard pallet is side accessible a van with barn doors (like you’d buy if pallets were a priority) will allow you load it in fine.

The old boat also has a motor, note how it’s still moving in the photo while the only person in it is in the back holding a tiller (and appears to be facing forwards).

The thinking involved in driving a manual is very minimal once you get used to it, so I reckon any safety issues caused by that would be outweighed by a reduction in the unfortunately common situation of unintended acceleration crashes. You are lot less likely to drive through the nearest wall (or kids) if your instinctual reaction to moving when you should not be is to also go for the clutch and cut power instead of just pressing harder on the wrong pedal.

They have a clutch, but once you’re moving it is possible to shift a manual transmission without using the clutch. What you need to do is first take off the load currently passing through the box (if power is being transmitted either direction it holds the engagement dogs in place), so if accelerating you quickly let off the throttle and if decelerating you quickly tap the throttle. This lets you move into neutral, once in neutral you increase or decrease the engine revs to near (ideally exactly) what they would be in the gear you want to shift into at your current road speed, and holding those revs you can then shift smoothly into the new gear.

It is not something I would recommend unless in a jam with synchromesh transmissions (e.g. regular cars, light trucks) as most people aren’t going to get it exactly right every time and will just burn out the synchros. If you’re unfamiliar with the term these are the parts of the transmission that let you shift from one gear to another in one motion without having to stop in neutral, let the clutch out, and increase/decrease the engine revs to suit your desired gear before clutching in and shifting into it.

Clutchless shifting can and does work well in non-synchro transmissions (e.g. motorbikes, many heavy trucks) once you get the knack, as these transmissions are both more forgiving of not being exactly rev matched and will provide a strong auditory signal if you don’t get it close enough (i.e. you’ll know if you got it right or not so won’t half arse it). Many motorbikes now actually automate this process with devices known as quickshifters - named so because even when doing it by hand clutchless shifts on a bike are noticeably faster than using the clutch.

I find it a bit amusing that the sepia toning effectively colourised the image.

The sun would be the most obvious choice for such a reference point, though it’d be amusing to make it Greenwich and therefore make everyone deal with Earth’s rotation and orbit if they want extremely precise calculations (though I expect there wouldn’t really be a practical difference on that scale).

The design of the front forks also assists with stability - having some rake and trail means the front wheel has a tendency to self centre (particularly at speed).

Reading the news while having breakfast, though it’s now on my laptop instead of the newspapers I started this habit with.

Learning on a transmission with >6 speeds is hard mode, they do take a little more thinking with the gear pattern than in a car. Synchro versions are not that hard if you’re used to a regular manual but adding another thing to learn is not ideal when starting out. If it was a non-synchro variant then good luck getting someone to pick that up without a few solid hours of learning time.

If you were being taught by someone used to heavy trucks it makes sense why they didn’t tell you to push the pedal right in - on many (all?) non synchro transmissions pushing the clutch all the way in brakes the input shaft and if you’re moving you then have to resynchronise it with the gear speed in order to get into gear.

Note you don’t actually have to push the clutch in all the way in a car either, all that really matters is getting it past the point where the clutch is fully disengaged. After all the clutch plate is either touching the flywheel to some degree or it’s not touching, once it stops making contact pushing it further away doesn’t make a difference. When first starting out though it’s easier to just push the pedal all the way in - save thinking about finer details until you’re comfortable with the basics.

If I’m doing a small shop I’ll take a bag in, fill it up as I go, then everything goes out at the checkout and ends up back in the bag. I’ve never had anyone care about this and I’ve been doing it for a few years now (ever since the old plastic bags got banned in my area).

The ACT does get a bit cold in winter, but I feel like it’s closer to England than Finland (if England was drier and actually got hot in summer anyway). We are after all talking minimums of -5 or -6 for the coldest days in winter and snow normally only settling on the tops of the nearby mountain range (and temporarily at that).

I think the main problem with searching for fediverse posts is not that they’re not indexed but the lack of a singular tag to append when you want to search for them. To search for reddit posts it was easy because you could put in your keywords and stick ‘reddit’ or ‘site:reddit.com’ onto the end, but now there’s too many domains to keep track of and you can’t rely on appending ‘lemmy’ pointing a search engine towards all Lemmy instances, let alone kbin/mbin instances.

Apart from family and my own number about the only one I can think of is the Reading Writing Hotline (1300 655506) due to the sheer amount of their radio ads I’ve heard over the years while driving around.

Even within family I’ve only got one left that actually works though - Dad hasn’t changed his mobile number since circa 2000 but Mum did at one point and I never remembered her new one.

I do like Whirlpool, an Australian forum primarily centred on technology. It’s still active despite the general decline of forums, has a lot of useful info to turn up in searches, and I appreciate how it has remained clean and fast without the visual clutter and wasted data of modern web design.

I’ve found a plunger useful for a sink occasionally, a bit of back and forth plunging can loosen up a hairball or break a layer of fat/soap scum. On the other hand I’ve never needed to use a plunger on a toilet - I don’t know how much of this is exaggeration on the internet but Australian toilets don’t seem to have anywhere near the amount of issues the American designs do.