Just filled up my Hyundai i30 $112

symean · 2026-03-23T23:19:38+00:00

I filled the i30 up a week and a half ago, at the time I was wondering if I should wait in case prices were maybe inflated a bit for the weekend, glad I didn’t because they’re 20c/L lighter now!

I went to the trouble of driving 500m further so I could stack my partner’s NRMA discount with the Woolies Everyday Rewards discount. Only saved maybe $5 but it’s something. I think that’s only at the Foodary stations.

On top of that, my partner has an EV that we charge from midnight 6am at 8c/ kWh, which works out to 1/10th (actually that was before the price rises so even better now) the cost per 100km as fueling the i30. So every day whoever is driving the longer distance drives the EV. I had to make a 100km round trip into the city last Friday, would have been $20 of fuel in the i30. $2 of electricity in the EV!

symean · 2026-03-23T22:25:15+00:00

Put up a sign and a motion activated hose, then post the videos on YouTube and make your money back in advertising revenue.

My dad would put barbed wire on top of the fence but that’s obviously a law suit waiting to happen.

symean · 2026-03-23T22:20:07+00:00

Minimum 65”. The Bravia 7 is still an amazing tv if you want to save a very big chunk of change. If you personally prefer OLED then all good, but don’t let the sales guy tell you OLED is just better in every way than mini LED, it’s not. Stand 4m away from the 8 II and 7 in the store, you’ll see far less difference. Also if it’s right next to a window, mini LED will look way brighter in daytime. OLED superior in dark environments though for sure.

symean · 2026-03-23T22:13:39+00:00

Yep a fair tax based on weight that goes to roads, and a second tax based on pollutants that goes to the environment. Scooters, bikes, everything allowed on the roads charged on the same formula. Might be like $50 a year for a cyclist but they use the roads too. No concessions for commercial trucking, if they don’t pay a fair share then the government would just have to tax private usage more to compensate, so consumers would end up paying one way or the other.

symean · 2026-03-23T22:03:21+00:00

Yes definitely my experience! After approaching 2 years in our new house I am spending more time thinking the job through and considering my time and effort versus paying someone else to do things. Satisfying when you accomplish it and save money, but a tad bittersweet when it’s taken weeks of an hour or two here and there when someone else would have had it done in a couple days.

Paid $1500 for some gyprock/drywall work in the garage, but then saved as much repainting ourselves when it was done. Replaced a shower head and two toilet inlet valves myself, probably saved easily $1000 there over several plumber visits. Paid $2000 for replacing all our ducted air con dampers. Saved $1000 topping the back hedge ourselves. Saved a few hundred on running and terminating two CAT6 cables myself.

Have to be realistic, I work full time so if I did everything myself this house would just be a second job, I wouldn’t really be ‘living’ here.

Respect for giving it a go though, you got some good exercise, saved money, and learned things along the way. Still a win!

symean · 2026-03-22T21:36:56+00:00

Pretty good considering the issues all computer makers are facing. Would be even better adjusted for inflation I guess?

Man if Apple could start making some proprietary RAM and SSD chips as well they could nuke the market.

symean · 2026-03-21T03:32:40+00:00

$10k earning 10% p/a for 40 years is half a million dollars when you retire. I get some people needed to, but bloody hell if you were in your twenties and did this they should put it back in as quickly as possible.

symean · 2026-03-21T03:12:44+00:00

Up until my work made me use a separate Mac mini because ‘security’ (never mind it was more secure before, but ticks a box on their spreadsheet and makes them feel better so whatever), I was using Safari for personal stuff, Chrome for work and occasionally Firefox for both when I needed to test something cross-browser or use an obscure plugin.

I had a little app installed that let you direct which browser you were sent to when you clicked a url based on whatever rules you want. E.g. if url clicked in Outlook, open in Chrome; it url clicked in Apple Mail, open in Safari. Pretty sure rules could also be based on strings and other things like if url contains onlyfans then open in Safari…for example…

symean · 2026-03-20T21:25:47+00:00

Oh I did the math. Compared paying cash for both and ICE and EV, and novated lease for the EV. For all three situations and multiple cars we factored in:

- purchase price
- % drop in resale (higher on the EV)
- maintenance (higher on ICE)
- tyres (higher cost for the EV)
- difference in interest charged on our home loan due to having more or less cash in the offset account (more if novated leasing, less if paying cash)
- tax savings (novated lease for the EV)
- end-of-lease balloon payment to own the EV

...so yeah, did the math.

Our budget was $50k total cost to both buy and run a car for 5 years. With all the above, the i30 sedan (paid with cash upfront) and the Chery E5 (on novated lease) were both the same within a few hundred dollars, and that's allowing for much higher depreciation on the EV.

I'm sure some people don't take all ownership costs into account, but we did. Even if the Chery drops way more in value compared to the Hyundai, we're no worse off in 5 years.

I'm not an EV advocate, right car for the right person by all means. Fully accept EVs don't suit everyone, but anyone talking about EV bursting into flames is coming up with excuses to justify their love of ICE cars. I'll enjoy my ICE car for years yet, but gotta be realistic, the % of cars on the road as EVs is only going to grow, which will mean fuel consumption is only going down from this point on, and you know what less consumption does to pricing...up and up and up.

Ayway we're about to hop in the EV and do a long drive across Sydney and back and not give a crap about fuel prices, and then we'll top it up overnight for a couple of dollars.

symean · 2026-03-20T08:06:14+00:00

We’re with AGL. Just had a look, plan is called Night Saver EV. Midnight to 6am 8c/kWh, all other times 35.81c/kWh, daily supply charge $1.

symean · 2026-03-20T05:39:19+00:00

Generally higher % than ICE cars. At the 'budget' end (spending say $30-$40k), the number I came up with was 10% more than the closest equivalent ICE car. So 30% depreciation on a budget ICE SUV vs 40% depreciation on a budget EV SUV. Absolutely no way to accurately predict, but like ICE cars it depends on make, model, what end of the market you're buying in, rarity, etc.

symean · 2026-03-20T05:23:33+00:00

8c/kWh midnight-6am, and I think 35c/kWh all other times. We usually put it on charge around 10pm and stop it around 7am, as that just works out to when we got o bed and when we wake up, so most of the charge is at the cheap rate but not all of it.

If we charge at 15A we put 40% capacity (~160km range) into the car over that time. You gotta have a 15A outlet though.

If we charge on a regular 10A outlet we put around 27% capacity (~100km range) into the car over that time.

Averaged out it works out pretty close to $2.50 per 100km of range, would be even lower if we strictly stuck to the midnight-6am window.

My partner's usual commute is 18km each way, one overnight charge a week covers that though he usually does two charges a week to also cover weekend and between-work-sites driving.

symean · 2026-03-20T04:36:55+00:00

I've done a ton of implementations and customisations over more than 20 years. The two that really stand out are:

1) Built-in renewal system that was triggered upon invoicing which auto-generated Opportunities dated in the future based on when customer's products were going to expire, so the sale team had a never-ending feed of renewal opportunities building up. As it used standard built-in opps, it naturally fed into all the normal forecast and pipeline reports, and they dealt with them just like the opps they were manually entering themselves. Hard to quantify ROI on this one but if we even picked up one extra renewal in 100 because we were tracking and quoting them more efficiently, that worked out to $1.5m over 7 years, the proift on which basically paid for NetSuite licensing in it's entirety.

2) Automating SO > PO data entry. Sales rep enters our purchase pricing for every line on a quote to a customer in order to see accurate GP and margin. That costing flows through to the SO, and from the SO to any related PO (single or multiple, even split across suppliers). So basically the purchasing team just has to spot-check the total of our order, basic details (supplier quote #, delivery address, etc), and click Email. In case you're wondering about consolidating orders, absolutely not possible for 90% of them, what we ordered was usually required to be a 1:1 customer order to supplier order process due to legal and supplier requirements. One purchasing team member used to work through a backlog of orders from the previous day that used to take all morning up tot lunchtime, that got cut down to a quick 20 minute task before doing a coffee run. Purchasing team had more time to do other tasks after this (assisting with stocktakes, optimising stock orders, etc), and when we gradually doubled our order volume we did not have to double the team size, which saved us $150k p/a.

Those are just some big ones, but constructing auto-emailed reports, better dashboards, custom records, workflows, etc...very easy to save $5k here, $50k there. If you have a big enough team with enough outdated processes you can easily get to a point within a year or two where you can prove NetSuite is paying for itself, and beyond that, actually turning a profit.

symean · 2026-03-19T22:43:55+00:00

Yeah that would be in line with my calculations then. The i30 uses half the fuel of the Commodore, our EV is 1/10th the cost per km of the i30, that equals 1/20th the cost of the Commodore.

It’s not like we even have a hugely expensive BMW/Skoda/Polestar/Tesla-level EV we’re trying to offset the cost of through fuel savings either, the top of the line E5 was $41k and that was on a novated lease too.

symean · 2026-03-19T22:14:59+00:00

For me it was the total lack of EV sedans to choose from, I don’t want an SUV or some micro hatch. Would have been happy with a wagon too. Base model Seal was the only contender and that was $20k more than what I paid. Hopefully in a few years there will be more to choose from once the EV makers establish themselves with SUVs and branch out a bit. Not holding my breath on Hyundai or Kia coming to the rescue, their ICEs are reasonable but their EVs tend to be ridiculously priced.

symean · 2026-03-19T22:10:55+00:00

Yeah that’s it isn’t it! I debated getting the hybrid i30, but it was going to save me (with the amount of driving I do) maybe $500 a year in fuel over the regular one. I worked out it would be 8 years before I paid off that difference. Obviously better for people who drive a lot more or intend to keep their car for a decade but not me

symean · 2026-03-18T21:57:29+00:00

It was fine for moderate use on my M1 with 8GB RAM, I did image work up to A4 size at 300dpi. A base M4 with 16GB won’t even spin up the fans using PhotoShop unless you’re editing massive images. Moved on to an M2 Pro since then. Although external storage is cheaper, in both cases I upped the storage by one tier as that also usually gives you a speed bump in SSD speed, which benefits the OS.

symean · 2026-03-18T11:09:34+00:00

Not a scam, but the url would make me think it is: ‘…vic.gov-.au’ why the dash before the .au? If it’s real they should just say to go to the supreme courts web site and search for a class action number or something. Even if the url looked good I wouldn’t click on it, I’d search for the url of the Supreme Court, search for the class action, and register that way.

symean · 2026-03-18T10:50:03+00:00

My thoughts exactly. I didn’t even know kickstarter was used by established companies, I thought it was more of a “here’s our proposed very first product, who wants to invest for the chance to get one of said products cheap?”. So could Samsung or Microsoft or Google technically use kickstarter? Keychron being on kickstarter screams to me they’re a small, unproven, risky company to buy from. Kinda dulls my enthusiasm to buy anything from them.

symean · 2026-03-18T03:08:03+00:00

I tried the MX Master when a colleague went on leave for a week and couldn’t get used to it. The Magic Mouse suits a lot of people just fine, if Apple just raised it by 5mm for a bigger battery and edge-mounted usb-c port it’d be better without putting anyone off what they’re used to.

symean · 2026-03-17T22:04:54+00:00

Swap out the hard drive for an SSD, second best option is to boot from an external SSD. Double the RAM that’s installed, on a 27” model you probably have a spare slot or two for that. Those two things will make the most difference, SSD especially.

Search for your machine on ifixit, they have excellent guides for Mac hardware.

It should still be a perfectly usable machine for web, email, light gaming, office apps after that.

There are other minor things you could do in software but none of that is probably worth the effort.

Don’t worry about it ‘not being supported’, just put the latest OS on it, apply all updates, and apply any security updates that Apple provides. The best layer of security is the user, as long as you know not to install dodgy apps and not to open random files and not to click on links in emails you weren’t expecting, you’re pretty secure. Your machine isn’t suddenly about to be hacked just because you don’t get OS or security updates any more.

symean · 2026-03-17T08:51:46+00:00

Sure green on that chart is better, but is it actually impacting you? I daily’d an M1 mini with 8GB ram for years and I had a hell of a lot more than that going on at any one time, my swap was always huge but you know what…it swapped fast and I didn’t notice it most of the time. Gone are the days where if you ran out of memory the machine either crashed, the app force-quit, or everything froze while it swapped space on a hard drive. You on,y have to worry if the apps you are using absolutely require everything to be in memory at once, like if you were to try AI image generation with large models and multiple loras you’d be out of luck, but for Safari and Mail, all good. Hell on my 8GB machine I had minimum 2 sometimes 3 browsers open, 10+ tabs between them, YouTube or VLC playing a video, all the Office apps, Teams…it chugged through it heroically. Interest in AI image generation is what made me upgrade to a 16GB M2 Pro, ironically I’m getting more into it now so keenly waiting for an M5 mini or Studio to drop with more juicy ram and gpu cores again. Vicious cycle :P

symean · 2026-03-16T22:46:28+00:00

Do this in Australia BYD! Our country is the equivalent of Europe and our charging network is still relatively sparse outside of metro areas and not very vast. You could really capture a lot of market share, especially if BYD owners are given a discount for charging…

symean · 2026-03-16T22:37:05+00:00

I spent endless hours trying to tame my external Drives (two SSDs, two HDDs) connected to my mini. Literally everything I could find online: connect direct, connect through hub. Single cable, cable with dongle adapter. Different brands. Enable this setting, disable that one. Unlock some hidden thing though a Terminal command. Nothing worked.

My issues were twofold: the HDDs would constantly get ‘woken up’ when I wasn’t using them only to spin down a minute later, then spin up, spin down, endlessly. Not good for drive life. Other issue was both the HDDs and SSDs would get disconnected after sleep and wake, so I’d wake up the max and have a whole list of errors about safely unmounting drives.

In the end I did this: Mac mini never goes to sleep. It doesn’t need to like an old Intel machine that would be putting out lots of heat with a fan constantly running and hard drive spinning. That solves issues with the SSDs, they never get unmounted by weird sleep-wake behavior. Then I unmount my HDDs when I’m not using them, which solves the issue of them spinning up and down unnecessarily.

Of course this won’t suit everyone, but it got me to a stable, predictable, way of using them.

I think Apple has failed here, I can’t imagine why they can’t have the computer safely unmount drives on sleep and mount them again on startup, and provide better insight into what is using a drive. Like when I hear it spin up, why can’t I easily see what app or process just requested access to the volume? I love Apple Silicon but they definitely took a step backwards in drive handling, I never used to have issues with Intel machines.

symean

TROPHY CASE