They were becoming a pest up on the mid north coast 20 years ago when I was a kid, used to sneak up and nibble at stuff in the house paddock at night time (as an aside they make a weird noise when disturbed). Hate to think how many must be in the bush up there now.

More recently I’ve seen a few bouncing across the road heading through the forestry areas on the way to Bega. Hope they don’t become too common as hitting one would be even worse damage/safety wise than collecting a large kangaroo and I do go up and down that way reasonably often.

I think that is another reason why articles like this always choose examples that everyone will agree are frivolous (along with the obvious answer of these being the attention grabbing ones). Mentioning something closer to an actual emergency could well do as you say and put off someone with a problem that sounds similar but is actually important.

Publicising the non-emergency number more would be a good idea I think, it’s around but is not something that will come to most people’s minds without looking it up. I’ve never had to call it so I’m not sure how well staffed it is but making sure people ringing the non-emergency line can get answered by a real person in reasonable time to discover what their problem is would be important (even if it’s a triage like situation where you get put back on hold for low priority things).

It’s more that after 2 weeks of concerted searching in the area you expect anyone still mobile or able to actively respond to have been found, and then it becomes more likely that they’ve fallen down between boulders or some other difficult location (in which case finding them within any reasonable time period is unlikely).

I do find it interesting that they found him near Blue Lake. I wonder what the plan was there - getting above the tree line is actually a decent idea if you want to be found in that country but from that description he seems a fair way away from where they would have been walking (maybe aiming for Charlottes Pass?). If they were near Geehi I would have thought it’d be easier to head downhill and aim to follow the river to the Alpine Way.

I really wasn’t expecting they’d find him alive given how long it had been - now that’s a nice thing to be wrong about.

The Starks do look nice - it’s good to see more ADR compliant bikes come out. I’ve actually been tossing around the idea of getting a Surron Ultra Bee for a while as I think it’d be good for single track and more technical fire trails (light weight and reasonable power/range, though would ultimately want a 21/18" wheel setup instead of 19/19"). Range is something that would have to be planned around for fire trail exploration (definitely still more limiting than petrol bikes) but for single track within an area the Ultra Bee would work well for me (I take my bike back and forth in the van already, and generally clock up <50km).

The more powerful e-MTBs seem a good idea for exploring behind gates, I do keep a bit of an eye out for these on the secondhand market as if I found a cheap good one I’d consider it. It’d have to have both decent power and range though as 250w doesn’t really do that much going up steep hills and I wouldn’t want to be pedalling the added weight back without charge for the motor.

It does sound like it could be fun. I do prefer my bikes to have motors though - I took the mountain bike out the other day and a comparatively very small ~9km climb up a bit over 800m elevation to my destination peak had me severely disliking whoever decided to put a locked gate across a perfectly good fire trail. At least the way back was more fun, downhill almost the whole way made for a much more reasonable pace. I think it’d definitely take me more than a week to cover 1000km relying on pedals only…

It would be quite a bit, as you’d effectively be duplicating the water main infrastructure. In greenfield developments it would be more cost effective as you’re already digging for one set of pipes so installing another alongside wouldn’t be so expensive (also less chance of pinging other infrastructure as it’s either not there or better marked, and new suburbs won’t have gas mains to dodge).

NSW at least has found though that you can reduce toilet water usage by making people use rainwater to feed them, and you get to make the house owner pay for it that way rather than the government installing and maintaining supply infrastructure. I’m not sure whether the ACT requires this in new builds but I suspect if it doesn’t it will in the future.

Seems like something that’s better to have when you need it than otherwise, even if my natural instinct is to avoid treated sewage where possible. Luckily we’re in one of the better situations water wise (for an inland city) with the Cotter and Queanbeyan catchments providing pretty clean water along with the Murrumbidgee, but the population is growing pretty quickly so more options is better in the long run.

The signs pointing to Batman Street have been moved higher up the poles to help deter theft

I did find that one amusing, particularly as moving it higher up might result in people having to bring along gadgetry (or a batladder) to make for a higher tech heist.

It’s interesting that Firth claims double meanings “didn’t really come into it”.

That does seem a little unlikely, I suspect someone in the planning department back in the day had a sensible chuckle at Iron Knob St before approving that one - safe in the knowledge that it could be justified as a legitimate entry into the naming scheme. I would imagine that selecting out double entendres definitely would come into it in current day street naming.

Honorable mention on the modifying street name front should go to Bellenden Street, which I have rarely seen sporting its actual name because the sign is so easily turned into Bellend street…

This part is a cool idea

It is a good idea, even with modern day electronic maps particularly long names can be hard to display let alone with hard copy maps.

Did pretty well, but I should hope so since I’ve seen his material before.

The advice really is catered for the lowest common denominator though (I guess one has to in this sort of article), so I’ll note that if you can actually swim you don’t have to float along passively once you’ve figured out which direction the rip is taking you. Swimming perpendicular to the current is a valid strategy once you know which direction that will be, as is swimming back in if a rip has taken you out (just choose somewhere the rip isn’t…).

Living on top of a shopping centre wouldn’t bother me in itself, though it’d lose points in my book if the operator had a controlling interest in the strata.

What would really cause me to avoid such apartments is the same thing that goes for apartments in general - I need somewhere secure to store my motorbikes and tools, and somewhere to work on things. An underground car space and a small chook wire storage cage simply does not work for this - I wouldn’t be able to work on my vehicles or use many of my tools, and they’d all get five finger discounted by the end of the first week. I don’t care as much about my actual living space (I can get by with small or old places) but being able to easily do stuff like pull my van into the driveway, weld up a copy of VW’s special engine support tool, and change the timing belt is pretty important to me and a big reason why I would prefer to avoid apartment living.

What’s wrong is that too much of our society is developing a moral panic about carrying knives. It doesn’t help that the knife in question is black with an angular design and therefore scary looking to the pearl-clutchers despite being something that appears to be an reasonable everyday carry.

The article says they were searching people at Central, which isn’t even an unreasonable place to have a pocketknife on you. I’ve carried my pocketknives through Central plenty of times without even considering not bringing them.

I just read the ABC version of this article, which has some zingers from the comedian I think are worth quoting:

She said the lawyers told her she was “damaging” breakdancer Rachael Gunn’s brand, and joked, “She doesn’t need me to do that”.

“They also said I wasn’t allowed to do the dance, because she owns the kangaroo dance. That one did puzzle me. I mean, that’s an Olympic-level dance. How would I possibly be able to do that without any formal breakdancing training?”

Your comment and post only just appeared today (3/12) for me and other people not on lemmy.world, it’s an example of an annoying federation delay between lemmy.world and aussie.zone (the instance where this community is hosted). Currently it appears to take about five days for actions to filter through from lemmy.world due to this delay, so for example if you were to reply to this comment other users viewing from lemmy.world would see your response right away but it’ll take ~5 days for me to receive it.

This has been an ongoing issue for months unfortunately, and does lead to situations like this where posts/comments are seemingly ignored by the broader community. As far as my understanding of the matter goes the problem comes down to the Lemmy software sending actions one at a time and lemmy.world being a big (and active) enough instance that the posts/comments/votes its users generate simply cannot send fast enough through to a lot of other instances. The output level is at the point where the extra milliseconds from being physically further away from lemmy.world’s hosting location makes a noticeable difference in how far behind an instance falls in receiving lemmy.world actions, and aussie.zone is hosted about as far away as one can get (hence the large delay that has built up).

One of the most recent versions of Lemmy has apparently included a way to fix the issue but lemmy.world is still running several versions behind (0.19.3 when current is 0.19.7). Sadly this delay will continue until either lemmy.world updates to a version which can send multiple actions at once or people slow down with posting/commenting/voting on lemmy.world (not an ideal solution, given I want the fediverse to continue being popular). In the mean time if you want to keep up to date with aussie.zone communities the only option I can think of is to use another Lemmy/Kbin account - an aussie.zone account is one way but using basically any instance that’s not lemmy.world should work.

I have yet to try it out myself, public transport doesn’t really work for my commute down here so I only catch it once in a blue moon. I did hear that the new system wasn’t particularly functional on launch - one does expect a few teething issues but ideally you’d get more minor ones instead of the system straight up not working for people.

The destruction of tender plants and evergreen trees by fire and the nurturance of plants that are tough and high in oils seems like a recipe for fire.

One problem is though that in much of Australia* we’ve had tens of thousands of years of people modifying the (presumably biased towards flammable to start off with) environment through repeated fires, so we already have an awful lot of vegetation that’s adapted to a regime of regular fire.

* Exceptions that come to mind are rainforests and alpine areas, which must not have been burnt often since the vegetation in these places doesn’t cope with fire well.

Judging from stage one and Sydney’s light rail efforts I’m sure we can make 2km of track take at least a few more years, then after that we can spend a few more years thinking about plans for stage 2B instead of doing that while building 2A…

The idea of like having to put on a comedicly overwrought accent to make a machine understand you is 👌

I’ve tried this to good effect before when I got my current motorbike helmet headset - the voice commands on default settings worked much better when hamming it up with an American accent like one was trying to audition for a part in a Western. Luckily though I ended up finding out that Cardo also trained a British accent option in the settings, and that works a lot better if you want to talk like a normal person.

There are a few actual streets like that in that suburb - I had a look to see if I could find the location of the photo and I think it’s Ganges St.

Thanks :)

I’ve clicked around a bit this morning and so far so good, so all might be well again after your changes.