Baku

Article text (via 12ft.io):

Three train stations in central Brunswick will be closed and replaced with two new stations as part of level-crossing removal works in the rapidly growing inner-north suburb.

Jewell, Brunswick and Anstey stations will shut when a 2.1-kilometre stretch of elevated “sky rail” is built along the Upfield Line between Albion Street and Park Street, in Parkville, by 2030.

Consultation documents show a new “southern station” will be located adjacent to the RMIT campus between Union and Dawson streets – 200 metres north of Jewell Station and 450 metres south of Brunswick Station.

The second “northern station” will be between Hope and West streets, 450 metres north of Brunswick Station and 200 metres south of Anstey.

The loss of one station is likely to be controversial. Merri-bek Council has previously called on the Department of Transport and Planning to keep three stations in the area to maintain the existing level of access for nearby residents.

Jewell and Brunswick stations are also listed on the Victorian Heritage Register

Transport Infrastructure Minister Danny Pearson said the three existing stations were all within 1500 metres of each other, making them the closest stations on the train network.

He said the decision to merge them followed 18 months of technical and engineering assessments that showed it would create more open space.

Removing one stop and delivering new tracks and signalling would also improve reliability and open the door to more frequent services, Pearson said.

Upfield has the worst timetable of any major Metro line, with waits of between 15 and 20 minutes during peak times – but that is because a section of single track between Gowrie and Upfield limits how often trains can operate [paywall bypass and previous aussie.zone discussion here].

“This project will be a game changer for Brunswick and Parkville – it will reduce congestion, deliver two brand new and accessible stations and pave the way for extra trains on the Upfield Line in the future,” Pearson said. But the single-track bottleneck remains.

The new rail bridge will allow the removal of boom gates at eight level crossings, according to state government plans to be released on Thursday. It’s part of a program to take out 110 level crossings across Melbourne by the end of the decade – so far, 84 have been removed.

Brunswick is undergoing rapid growth along the Upfield rail corridor, with new medium-rise apartments built or planned close to the three stations, including some that are likely to be affected by construction of the rail bridge.

Pearson said the two new stations would have entrances on both platform ends for easy access.

Elevating the rail line would also create new open space and allow the popular – but narrow – Upfield bike path to be rebuilt and expanded, he said.

Work is slated to begin in 2028 with the two new stations to be open by 2030.

Level crossings have already been removed further north on the Upfield Line, with a 2.5-kilometre section of elevated rail built between new stations at Bell Street, Coburg, and Moreland Road, Brunswick.

The Allan government previously intended to extend the level-crossing removal work through Brunswick by 2027, but pushed the work back to 2030 in this year’s budget.

This lady is so wholesome and an absolute legend

I've noticed a lot of broken images around the place and can't quite work out what's happening. It doesn't seem to be a caching issue, at least not on my end, as trying to visit the image URL directly returns a 404.

As noted in a post in the Melbourne daily thread a few weeks ago, there are also a lot of broken community icons about the place. And as I think was raised a while ago, thumbnails seem to be broken most of the time as well.

As an example, here's what the trending communities tab looks like:

The communities page is a little better, but it's about 50/50 as to whether the icon does or doesn't load:

Here's a list of my own posts with missing images I've noticed recently

That last image seems to be super broken at the time of writing. Instead of just returning a generic 404, it returns:
{"error":"unknown","message":"Request error: error sending request for url (http://pictrs:8080/image/original/b4df332b-82a9-4ec8-b115-ac1b1b1824b0.jpeg): connection error: Connection reset by peer (os error 104)"}

Additionally, this is how thumbnails on links have been previewing:

Right-clicking and opening in new tab, it seems to be pulling a random pixel from somewhere in the image and then enlarging it and proxying it (500% zoom):

Example URL

But then other URL thumbnails don't work at all, for instance this post on trending:

Which links to Wikipedia, but fails for whatever reason, then tries to load an image called "broken-image-fallback.png", and, ironically, can't even load that (leads to a 404 page).

And some thumbnails on working images don't work, for example this post in c/GardeningAustralia doesn't load - even if I click on the thumbnail (which should normally load the full size/original image), but does work if I click the image URL itself.

One more thing: this new image proxy thing is getting super annoying. I realise it's a Lemmy-side implementation issue, but a couple of sites (Imgur, for example), don't like all the image requests from a single server/IP and end up rate limiting us. This effectively means that Imgur is unusable and no images load.

I actually thought there might have been another mass image purge like last years' incident which required the purging of 48 hours of images, but there hasn't been any announcements about it, and the other broken images dotted around the joint makes me think Pictrs is on its deathbed.

Any ideas what's going on?

Sidenote: image uploads whether in posts or as embedded images within posts/comments seem to fail about half the time for me on both mobile and desktop. I thought this was an issue with Boost again, but it's happening to me on PC as well. On mobile, it usually either returns no error at all, or a 500. On PC, no UI errors are displayed, it just doesn't embed the image, but network tools tell me that something somewhere is returning a 500, likely the image uploader thingy.

The guardian has started covering the protests. Much better coverage than newscorp as usual, too.

Apparently they just casually drove a tank into the city at 3am on Saturday morning and nobody noticed. So that's fun. Apparently they've also called in cops from interstate to help

Not sure if this quite qualifies for this community (after all - the ultimate frugal move would be to cancel Spotify and either just listen to the radio, or use YouTube/YouTube Music Revanced or UBlock Origin), but you can save a couple bucks a month on Spotify by buying gift cards and using those

Spotify gift cards are sold at a set number of months for a specific price, both of which are printed on the gift card, so they haven't gotten around to reprinting or redesigning the cards with the up to date values yet, so they're still sold in packs of 3, 6, or 12 months for $36, $72, or $144 ($12 a month), versus online where it's sold as $14 a month ($13.99 if you want to be fussy). Which works out to 2 free months per year using gift cards

The gift cards last for 3 years (although I don't know if they last on your account forever once redeemed), so you could theoretically buy 3 X 12 month cards for $432, then redeem them all, which saves $72, or 6 months worth of premium.

But they seem to be putting the prices up every year, so by the time they expire, a month of premium will probably be going for $16 or $17. Or $20 if they do what everyone else seems to be doing and shooting prices up disproportionate to replacement

Not much, and it basically only benefits people with enough money to actually drop 400 bucks on Spotify at once, but even buying a 3 month voucher saves about $6

Warning: newscorp (sorry, they're the only ones covering it at the moment)