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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: September 30th, 2023

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  • Holden and Ford Australia. Partly for personal nostalgic reasons but also because of local engineering and manufacturing. A bit of our national identity disappeared when they shut down, although they were owned by US companies they were still a source of Aussie pride. Nowadays we have no local industry and it all just feels a bit hollow. Like watching sports when you have no local team.

    I doubt they’d be able to make them these days but seeing as we’re talking hypotheticals, there’s something about a big cube V8 or turbo 6 that’s missing from everything since. Yes I know on here the hive mind demands we boo ands hiss if someone dares to like anything ICE, and when our current runabout goes it’ll likely be replaced by an EV of some sort. But for us, cars are a hobby and a source of enjoyment too, and I dare say we’ll have at least one ICE vehicle for a long as it’s feasible for us to do so. And if I can get a semi-modern nod to the past that would be perfect.

    And if the Japanese car industry could go back to the 90s I’d be pretty stoked about that too!








  • I just run on two mini PCs.

    One running OPNsense, fanless N5105, 4x 2.5Gb, it doesn’t need much disk or memory but at the time it was a negligible additional cost to go to 16GB and 500GB.

    The other is running Proxmox, on a Ryzen 7 7840HS, 96GB RAM, 500GB SSD, and with two 5TB USB HDDs plugged in (rotated with a third that I keep at a friend’s place as a cheap but fit for purpose offsite backup).

    It’s just them plus a managed 2.5Gb switch and a couple of wifi routers in AP-only mode. It costs very little to run power-wise and is more than enough grunt for my needs.





  • I was forced to bin my original C64, tape deck, disk drive, joysticks, a couple of printers (one was a daisy wheel lol), many many games and apps and my own projects etc. It still saddens me thinking about it.

    These stories rub a bit of salt in the wound but it’s pretty cool that there’s still interest in them. They were a fantastic thing - easy to use for the basics, powerful enough that once you moved past those basics (and BASIC itself) it still had plenty to offer. And crucially, in a modern context, it’s not so advanced that it leaves nothing for you to do - you still need to figure things out for yourself, and there’s a lot of satisfaction in figuring out a hack to make it do something. So good.

    I’m tempted to get one but that’s a rabbit hole I’m not sure I have the time for these days!



  • I’m not an expert but have worked in these kinds of environments on and off over the years.

    It’s hard to offer broad advice as every encounter is different. Your workplace might offer training though to give you some tools, which will likely also teach you the things not to say (eg promising a result, stoking the fire, preaching, etc).

    Calming someone down isn’t always the goal either, sometimes people just need to process difficult information or grieve for the loss of a loved one. All you can do in this situation is to offer a safe place to do that, and maybe a sympathetic ear if they need to talk, and perhaps to validate their feelings. Otherwise just being present is often enough, as is knowing when to give someone space.


  • It’s been ages but if my memory isn’t lying to me…

    Hidden in case anyone hasn't seen or is going to rewatch

    you’re right about the bad guy end up being a VP, the whole story unravels in front of Robocop and the company’s board, and the dude is standing there smugly because one of Robocop’s core directives is he can’t kill an executive of the company. The CEO in standard 80s action movie style says “hey <name>… you’re fired”, Robocop pauses long enough for the bad guy to realise what just happened, then shoots the guy

    Also the above is for the first movie, I think the second movie is where the sentry thing does the deed.

    I should dust these off and watch them again lol