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:

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.

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).

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

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.

A broken wisdom tooth with one of the parts rubbing against the nerve that passes through that side of the lower jaw. Definitely would not recommend, it did cost me ~$2k to pull those wisdom teeth (or what remained of them for the lower ones) but it was well worth it.

Edit: Found the x-ray image of that tooth, the dentist told me the white line running past the bottom of the broken tooth is a nerve.

It appears to be a 1970s bike (I would take a stab at a Yamaha LT3) and by that period shutter speeds of 1/500 or 1/1000 were readily available amongst better quality cameras. That would be plenty to get a clear shot of the spokes on what would be a relatively slow moving bike (I would assume <40km/h, likely noticeably less). I’ve got several 50s era cameras that have 1/500 top speeds, so even if the bike was new at the time of the photo it didn’t require a new camera to take the shot.

I would not say having the inside foot off the peg and held forward in this situation is an indicator of the photo being fake, seeing as it’s a common behaviour when riding dirt bikes.

A blue ringed octopus - they’re a cute looking tiny octopus but quite capable of killing a human.

What’s worst is that after getting bitten by one you will be mentally alert but completely unable to do anything as you feel your body just stop doing things that keep you alive (like breathing)…

Nutbush City Limits might have a chance then, we’ll see whether Australian public schools are still teaching the dance in a couple of hundred years…

Weirds me out that she’s got the watch in right hand though

If you’re left handed the right hand is the normal hand for a watch, it’s not that unusual.

Admittedly it’s less common to see anyone wearing a watch now, and there’s less of a reason to put it on your right hand now that most people don’t handwrite regularly.

Yes, the move towards integrating the infotainment further into the car with propitiatory parts instead of generic sizes and not separating out vehicle related controls is definitely going to make long term upkeep harder.

All cars could last a lot longer if people kept maintaining them and - importantly - didn’t damage them. Electric cars are not going to be immune to this, I can’t see them lasting much longer on average than ICE cars.

Keep in mind that even when you change out the engine for something with less parts the rest of the car still remains and contains things which will eventually cause issues. For example I bought a cheap van a few months ago and here’s some of the reasons it was cheap that are not ICE specific:

• Steering wheel lock mechanism sticking
• Air distribution flap cables kinked/binding so A/C only blew at feet
• Central locking on side door sticking
• Rear shocks leaking
• Front strut mount bushings worn
• Head unit not functioning

Presumably the previous owner just didn’t want to spend the money on fixing these issues as they arose, and eventually it added up into a lot of potential expense (if you have to pay someone to fix it for you) and more reasons to sell the car. Such behaviour seems pretty common in my experience and I fully expect it to continue with EVs. It’ll be hard enough to get people to even maintain their brakes and change the motor coolant considering the natural reluctance of people to spend money on maintenance and this unfortunately prevalent idea that EVs don’t need it.

Funnily enough the main ICE specific problem with that van was just as much an electrical issue as part of the petrol engine - an intermittent secondary air injection error code which ended up being down to a combination of a sticking valve and a fuse with a hairline crack causing an intermittent connection.