Holy crap, there is lemmy but with categories combining many communities:

https://piefed.social/topic/gaming

I hate having to choose between visiting each community individually or seeing all my subscriptions in one place (I'm not always in the mood for news and gaming and memes and niche cartoons and soil science).

Took a while to find the sourcecode , for some reason my search engine doesn't want to show codeberg:

PieFed A Lemmy/Mbin alternative written in Python with Flask.

• Clean, simple code that is easy to understand and contribute to. No fancy design patterns or algorithms.
• Easy setup, easy to manage - few dependencies and extra software required.
• AGPL.
• First class moderation tools.

Feels like lemmy. Smells like lemmy. Talks like lemmy. Technically isn't a 'variant' but an 'alternative' because the code isn't a fork, but from my lazy ass user perspective it's totally a variant.

Image vs link posts are more clearly presented too. On lemmy I have to squint at the icon in the corner of an image to work out if clicking on it will make it bigger or take me to a different website. Inconsistent and fiddly, especially when I'm tired.

Anyone here tried hosting it and can comment on whether it's a PITA or not? It's an interpreted language so the presumption is it would be crap, but for all I know it might have a better architecture that makes up for it.

Also, would I be considered an aussie.zone traitor if I started using https://piefed.au/ more? Anyone know the people running it to make sure they're not secretly kiwis?

Anyone else?

Apparently it's not unheard of when there is lots of rain. https://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/news/sydney-water-reveals-reason-metro-households-are-reporting-funky-tasting-tap-water/news-story/20364e971f104eaeb7a2a0a7e58ec8e5 (anyone got some non-Murdoch sources?)

Link is to 9minute 48second mark.

Anyone found anything else about this? Or is this the first the ABC is saying on it?

It looks like they chose August 1st as a date to disable access to the old interface. I'm very sad, I really don't like the new one:

• Padding everywhere (touchscreen-shique, even for things you can't tap on like paragraphs)
• Bigger text on narrower text columns (a LOT more scrolling)
• News articles arranged left-right as well as up-down (not as nice to navigate as a single list).
• News articles summaries/blurbs often just one sentence, far too little. I have to click on a lot more articles now to even find out what they're about. (I worry this is an engagement metric that makes them think the new interface is working better).
• Defaults to only showing you articles for your state. This makes me really uncomfortable (is the average person only expected to care about what happens in their state?).

/vent

Source: https://lcsc.com/product-detail/Vibration-Motors_Lian-Xin-Technology-XDMD-YB200-08_C47118014.html

Applying current changes the vertical position. You would glue a lens onto this and place it above your camera sensor.

Machine-translated page from the datasheet:

I can't begin to fathom how stupid this is.

1. My mum and I sat down with the energymadeeasy website and a copy of her last bill. We found what looked like a good plan: Sumo Spark SUM874100MRE2 (archived) single-rate at 73.15c/day and 29.70c/kwh.

2. My mum rang them up and asked to change to it.

3. My mum quoted the exact prices (73.15c/day and 29.70c/kwh) as well as the plan code (SUM874100MRE2). They replied by saying those prices will change on July 1st and quoted us back some numbers a few percent higher than those two. Mum said yes.

4. Sumo emailed us the following "Offer Summary":

Wat. That's a completely different plan.

5. Mum rang them today and asked them about it, they said it's all they can do because our new smart meter is of that tariff type. We told them we have never been told about a tariff change or agreed to one. They said that because we're in the cooling off period with them we can cancel and we "should" go back to our old provider and old tariff, so my mum did.

We're left feeling dazed, scammed and confused. I've just looked through my mum's emails from the old electricity provider (dodo) and they notified us about the smart meter change, but no mentions have been made about tariff changes. I double checked and our last bill from them was single tariff.

Q1: Who do we complain to about the bait and switch? AER?

Q2: Who actually changes the tariff? The old supplier (silently), the new supplier (silently), the grid operator (ausgrid), someone else?

Q3: How do we work out what tariff we're going to be on? Can I lookup the meter number and find out, or just have to wait for the old supplier to re-enable our account (we can't login today) to find out?

Q4: Do we get to choose what tariff we're on?

...as I fumbled for my Opal card through a pair of socks I was wearing as gloves.

transportnsw: No warnings.

bom: Thunder outside the wires

3 animations, choc with metaphors on the wastes of car infrastructure and the robbing of choice.

I do not know if the author intended for these to be dystopic or utopic, I have a hunch they are playing both games. They try to improve supermarket visit efficiency by expanding the use of cars at the cost of everything else.

Concept 1 (main link): Indoor drive-through shopping. . Less than a few percent of floor space is actual store, the rest is road. The store sprawls across multiple levels because there is no longer any safe space for humans to work or walk in the customer areas.

There is also no basket or trolley to store things in and change your mind. You grab an item and within seconds one of the approximately (by my count) 100 cashiers scans it and bags it. Made a mistake? Just buy your way out of it, you're holding valuable customers up, tut tut.

Concept 2: Drive-through shopping in private. How awfully lonely. A car keeps you apart from others even when you're not in it. Who wants do be vulnerable when not behind the armour of steel and glass? All aspects of life should be like being in a car.

Concept 3: Outdoor drive-through shopping.. After all of this driving we realised we're missing our connection with the outdoor world. Nature.

We could go camping. Shopping outside is a more practical compromise.

Also all the employees were getting hypoxiated from concept 1, so we decided to hide them underground. Now they are kept alert by road debris falling on the pre-sliced kiwifruit trays.

I was reading up on the life expectancy of different building materials when I came across this gem.

Screenshot is of page 122 https://www.portseattle.org/sites/default/files/2025-02/SEA-SIPP%20Technical%20Report%20Appendix%20C%20Life%20Expectancy%20of%20Building%20Materials.pdf

I guess the ethernet cables could last that long, but they rate house wiring to a lower lifetime. Ethernet cables are not "wireless", however.

The only other wireless systems I can think of are garage door openers, but they are definitely not expected to last 50 years.

You can do all sorts of nifty things when you're designing silicon. Including this abomination.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation

Source: datasheet for LM161, a high speed (20ns delay) moderately high voltage (30V) comparator. I'm going to try and make a discrete version of some bits of it and see how well it works. Maybe not this triple-emitter NPN though, I draw the line at components that require livestock sacrifices.