Firefox added web serial support recently (a couple of version points back) so you should now be able to avoid chromium for that use case too.

I never had a bike stolen even during the few years I was using one as my main form of wheeled transit. It helped though that I never had an expensive bike, always locked it up when I left it (average cable lock), and had somewhere secure to leave it at night.

Sounds relatable. Last time I moved I even had several people offer in advance to help but I ended up doing almost everything by myself because I just wanted to be able to do things at my own pace and make sure I was happy with where everything went.

I’d recommend having a furniture dolly and an upright trolley rather than relying on an office chair though, proper tools make the job much easier.

Perhaps this is why I particularly didn’t find the locomotive physics that strange

The reason why you didn’t think it strange is because you don’t know how one works, because there’s multiple things which don’t make sense otherwise.

The drive wheels are not the ones at the back but the ones with the connecting rods and piston rods (the pistons provide the drive force). The rods are placed in a way which would prevent the wheels turning if connected in those positions and would typically be placed on the largest wheels of the locomotive (i.e. that big wheel should be the drive wheel if it’s going to be there).

The smoke should be coming from the very front of the locomotive as the output from the firebox needs to run through the boiler (most of the front of the machine) in order to generate the steam needed to actually drive the locomotive. Having it come from the back makes no sense unless the whole boiler arrangement is also reversed and it isn’t.

Looks pretty thin to me:

The narrow point is about as wide as driving to my nearest beach and that’s a reasonable day trip distance.

People sign up to app intended to share personal information about others without their permission, end up having their own personal information shared without permission - the irony is impressive.

That phrase tends to be much less literal when its said by those who are getting honked at regularly to move off from the lights.

If someone is telling you they get honked at all the time for no reason there usually is a reason (or several) and they just refuse to acknowledge what they’re doing.

Closest I’ve come in a truck is an annoyingly loud alert for everything the computer reckoned was an issue and that was painful enough. Every time I’d drive it it’d be blaring the alarm for some reason or another and if it had been a long term company truck instead of a rental I probably would have ended up removing the speaker.

For example the lane departure warning would fire off every time you moved over to not run into someone parked on the side of the road, the close distance warning would fire off regularly when people merged in front of you, and if it was windy it’d set off an alarm to let you know the truck was being blown around when driving. Could be useful if you’re mentally challenged or blind but that sort of thing is just going to annoy anyone who isn’t. You couldn’t even turn the alarms off properly - you could go through the deliberately prolonged procedure to turn them off temporarily but then they come back again every time you start the truck.

I’ve driven an SUV with lane keep assist and it would pull at the wheel trying to follow lane markings that were outdated or ones it just made up, I hope that particular bit of ‘safety’ tech doesn’t make it to any truck I have to drive.

Brake fluid is hygroscopic and will accumulate water over time despite being in a nominally sealed system. Water in solution with brake fluid noticeably lowers the boiling point which leads to issues under repeated braking (e.g. down long steep hills) as the fluid boiling means you lose braking capacity in that circuit.

You should ideally be changing the brake fluid every few years (2-3 being the typical recommendation) and that applies even if the brakes are used less often.

Electric cars do have oil that will ultimately need changing but it’s less exposed to contaminants than the engine oil in a internal combustion engine and therefore will last a lot longer. EVs typically have a reduction gearbox and differential and these will require oil changes in a similar fashion to a manual gearbox or differential in a ICE vehicle - i.e. barring exceptional circumstances it will last long enough to get out of warranty but don’t believe it will never need changing.

Best if one develops the habit of putting the drink in the freezer then immediately starting a timer on the phone for half an hour or so. Doing that before you do anything else means you actually get to have the nice chilly drink after the inevitable distraction.

I have one in my wallet - they are quite handy for cleaning lint out when the phone charging port inevitably collects enough to be annoying.

The societal reaction though would be very different and in favour of the woman. For an example a few months ago some English tourist was in Sydney, got annoyed at some guy waving a flag around her, sucker punched the guy in the head from behind, and received one punch back plus a free broken jaw as her prize.

Now check out how it was reported - it’s all about how bad it was for the man to punch a woman and the pretty important fact of her assaulting the man before getting said punch is mentioned once in passing (and it being a punch from behind with the man not aware is not mentioned at all, which is relevant because this is normally highlighted as a ‘coward punch’ in Australian media).

I think it was 2007, the family upgraded to a 3G modem when Telstra got around to putting up a tower that provided mobile reception where we were living. I was pretty happy as with the quality of rural phone lines we weren’t even getting the full potential of dial up (maxxed out at 30 ish kB/s).

Of course the next problem was trying to keep under the tiny download caps of the time, I remember having to wait until the end of the month (when usage was about to reset) to download large files or risk having my parents and siblings annoyed at me for using up all the quota…

How’s the serenity?

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.

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).

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.

The watermark is noticeably more readable in the Facebook image I linked though, and it does say photography (even there it is somewhat blurred though, so assuming it was actually clear in the original source that copy is a few recompressions along the chain).

The dates of the other sources however are what really convinces me it’s not AI. After all, who was doing good quality photorealistic AI image generation in 2021?