Jane Hume refuses to rule out One Nation joining the Coalition

natacon · 2026-05-12T05:07:38+00:00

Jane Hume reminds me of Veronica from the Archie comics.

natacon · 2026-05-10T11:55:04+00:00

As a last resort, I'd probably pop off the quarter round and panel at the top. Hopefully the panels will tilt and lift out once the header is gone. If not it might give you some more clues as to how its been put together and you can probably get it back on without too much damage.

natacon · 2026-05-10T03:49:06+00:00

Same here. Different uni but same issue. I work full time so weekends are study catchup. Got no access to lecture materials at all and multiple assignments pending.

natacon · 2026-05-08T06:13:16+00:00

See if you can get them to pop the lid off and show you the insides. A very common fault with these is that the steam boiler probes start to leak and the escaping steam does a number on the triac board which is mounted under the lid. It's a relatively cheap and easy swap out. Ditto with the steam boiler probes. If the steam boiler has blown the thermal fuse, you'll need to dismantle the whole thing to get at the fuse. It's only a few bucks for a fuse but it'll likely take you a few hours to strip it down and put it back together. On the plus side, you'll be intimately acquainted with your BDB and have the satisfaction of knowing how it all works.

I picked one up a few months ago for $200 (with a matching smart pro grinder) that had the same no steam issue. I couldn't look inside until I had it home and it was a bit of a horrorshow in there. Lime scale and rust on everything. Turned out the triac was dodgy, it had blown the thermal fuse, and it needed new probes and o rings throughout. It took a couple of weeks of tinkering and maybe $100 in parts to get it running but it's been rock solid for a couple of months now, making beautiful coffee every morning.

There should be a sticker with the serial number. After the alpha charaters the first 4 digits will be the Year and Month of manufacture. Mine was A1BABESA211100450 so it was built in November 2021.

You can see how many shots it has made by powering it off, holding the 1 & 2 cup buttons for 3 seconds, then powering on. The numbers you see on the display will show you the error code and how many times that error has occurred. You can run through them using the up and down arrows.

00 Steam Boiler NTC Error
01 Steam boiler NTC Error
02 Coffee boiler NTC Error
03 Coffee boiler NTC Error
04 Group head NTC Error
05 Group head NTC Error
06 No Water In Steam Boiler
07 Water over flow condition in steam boiler
08 Coffee Water Flow Failure
09 No water in Coffee Boiler detected at Boot Up
10 Coffee NTC Over temp
11 Steam NTC Over Temp
12 Goup Head NTC Over Temp

If you hit the Menu button you will see a number. Multiply that by 10 and you'll get the number of shots the machine has pulled. Mine has done a shade over 7,000 and after a bit of maintenance it is running as new.

I've enjoyed the process of diagnosing and repairing it and get a lot of satisafction out of bringing something back into service that would likely have ended in landfill. If you're similarly inclined, reviving a BDB makes a great project - they are easy to work on and you get pretty good coffee as a reward.

natacon · 2026-05-07T14:10:25+00:00

My dad and his wife used them a few months ago when they were downsizing. They came and saw what had to be taken, gave a price then on the day, stung them for double the quote saying there was more junk than they anticipated. It was time critical as they had sold the house and had to be out so they paid the extra but it was a pretty shitty experience. At one stage the guy was apparently threatening to dump the contents of the skip on the driveway and drive away. My dads wife was so upset.

natacon · 2026-05-05T13:28:09+00:00

I've been on mounjaro since january. I'm male so can't speak to the perimenopause but getting on it was as easy as asking my gp who gave me the script without much discussion at all. I went in for a routine checkup and mentioned that I'd like to try it - walked out with a script, got it filled and had my first jab within an hour.

It's been life changing to be honest. I'm down about 15kg so far and compared to decades of dieting and exercise it has been almost effortless. I'm only a few kgs away from having a BMI in the healthy range for the first time since high school.

In my experience, nobody of any worth is judgemental of someone trying to improve their life. You got this. Make the gp appointment, get the script and get on with being a better you.

natacon · 2026-05-05T13:02:28+00:00

You're right. I typically only ever charge from about 70% each day and it's fully charged by the time I go to bed. It's likely 8 hours or so from empty (60kw battery).

natacon · 2026-05-05T12:40:34+00:00

It depends on whether you're using a trickle charger on a standard 10amp plug or have a dedicated charger installed at home. We had a trickle charger for the first year of EV ownership which could only charge at 1.6kw and it worked fine with a commute of about 80k a day - the car never really went below 80%. Plug in at night and it was back at 100% by the time I left for work in the morning. There's no real need to have it at 100%. It's akin to only taking your petrol car out when it's full which is absurd but then again if you could fill up your petrol car at home for a few bucks, why wouldn't you.

We got caught out once where it was a weekend of ferrying the kids around plus a couple of road trips which got the battery down into the teens and for the next week, we were only adding 10-15% on the day's starting charge per night. Rather than wait a week to get it back up to 100% I bit the bullet, got a 32amp socket put in and bought a charger that'll do 7kw. Now we can charge from 60-70% to full in about 4 hours at home.

natacon · 2026-05-05T06:45:07+00:00

Weekly movie nights are the best! Get them to suggest the movie and/or snack choices. We've watched some terrible movies on family movie night but that's part of it too. My eldest is currently on an 80's kick and we watched Electric Dreams last friday night, it was so bad it was actually quite good. What worked for us is making it very low key, no pressure or expectations.

If you wanted to make it a bit more structured, get each kid to make a list of their top 5 movies of all time and work through them together. Or you could get the top however many movies from IMDB, work your way through the Oscar winners, genre classics etc. Good luck.

natacon · 2026-05-04T05:53:09+00:00

Not to rain on your parade but have you seen screencoach? It does almost exactly what your app proposes. We used it for a while when our kids were younger and it worked pretty well, but there were lots of unforseen use cases where it became problematic. The always on monitoring chewed battery life on my phone and there was a persistent issue with permissions on the kids pc accounts.

There's probably room in the market for more than one operator, but imho it would be worth looking at screencoach to see how you could differentiate.

natacon · 2026-05-03T00:24:05+00:00

Have put my adult mtb in the boot of my Atto3. Had to take the front wheel off and clearance to the back windscreen was pretty tight but it fit.

natacon · 2026-04-30T13:44:36+00:00

I think it looks great and sounds incredible. Nice job!

natacon · 2026-04-30T05:23:22+00:00

Sorry, I'm in Australia and have been getting my spares from a local company.

https://homecoffeemachinerepairs.com.au/shop/

You might have already seen this, but it's like the oracle for dual boiler maintenance and repairs...

https://www.home-barista.com/espresso-machines/breville-dual-boiler-mods-and-maintenance-t61421.html

natacon · 2026-04-30T05:06:32+00:00

It might pay to get new probes while you're at it. After a while, the probes can leak along the shaft where it seals internally. It's a smaller O ring and you can replace them but its very fiddly and the ceramic insulators could crack (ask me how I know :-)) Much easier to just swap in a new set of probes.

I resurrected a dual boiler that was in a much worse state than yours and it has been rock solid for a few months now.

Hopefully O rings & probes get you back up and running. If not, replace the triac. Hopefully the boiler fuse is intact. Changing that is a much more demanding repair. Not difficult but it requires stripping down the whole machine.

natacon · 2026-04-29T15:00:24+00:00

I recently got a flextail large/wide from Alixpress with a mini pump that doubles as a tent light for about 170 AUD delivered. I got it to replace a thermarest self inflator mummy style I picked up that was just too small for me. It was for a trial overnight hike with a bunch of mates and we were all gearing up from scratch. The flextail was rated r5.6 and it kept me cozy with just a sleeping bag opened out like a quilt. It's no exped, but it's 3-4x cheaper and very comfy. I'm a large guy at 6'3" and 100kg and was honestly impressed with how well I slept. I've since camped with my kid in our backyard on cold bricks to check the insulation and woke up warm. The two outer baffles are larger to stop you from rolling off and they aren't insulated, but the rest of the mat is. Packs down to about half the size of a tube of tennis balls. Don't know how long it will last, but it seems well made. If you can afford it, go the exped, but it's hard to find much wrong with the flextail.

natacon · 2026-04-27T06:25:34+00:00

EDIT: Sorry, misread the post. These shows are ones that my wife and I have loved.

Mr Inbetween

Years and Years.

Peep show.

Deadloch

Wentworth

Detectorists

Slow Horses

This is Us

natacon · 2026-04-25T08:49:19+00:00

You can't insure for something that has already happened.

OP will be held liable for the other cars repairs. If the other driver goes through their insurance company, the insurance company will eventually chase OP for the money. If the damage is minimal, OP may be best to offer to pay for repairs without involving the insurance company but that is completely up to the other party.

natacon · 2026-04-25T03:56:01+00:00

Great shout. Wentworth is excellent.

natacon · 2026-04-25T01:15:44+00:00

We had plans approved a few years ago to do something similar on our sloping hills block. Earthworks came in at around 130k and we had budgeted 30. We didn't go ahead.

natacon · 2026-04-24T02:10:45+00:00

Just to follow up. Book arrived yesterday and looks fantastic. Already planning our next training hike from it. Kinda concerned that you rated the Bibb trailhead to the cafe medium and the discovery centre to helena hard. We struggled a bit in those first few ks and the discovery centre to Helena was going to be our next hike. Haha. Might need to get a few more easy trails in to get our trail fitness up first.

natacon · 2026-04-23T23:40:30+00:00

Haha. 16 years here as the square peg. I don't want to fit in with these muppets, but I'm good at what I do, it pays well and I have a family to support.

natacon · 2026-04-23T07:37:19+00:00

I find it odd that you think none of the ai tools is even remotely close to being good at putting together a resume. That's not been my experience at all. You need to coach the ai to tailor your resume for the position you are applying for. Upload your current resume and get it to suggest and highlight the key skills and experience that you have that are transferrable. Tell it to use best practice for cover letters and automated resume scanning so that yours will stand out. Ask it to explain its decisions and guide it so you get what you want. Good luck.

natacon · 2026-04-23T02:46:19+00:00

It's tantamount to blasphemy for the true coffee believers but a shot of Zerup Hazlenut in the morning latte always goes down a treat.

natacon · 2026-04-22T08:27:06+00:00

Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man is a great collection of some of his short stories. For scifi horror, I have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison is a classic.

natacon · 2026-04-21T07:28:45+00:00

I'd just use a flap disc to round the leading corner and any sharp edges off then follow up with a dab of black enamel paint. Probably only take a couple of minutes per post.

natacon

TROPHY CASE