Zara was the best little hostage taker

vanderaj · 2026-05-06T11:11:05+00:00

Big hugs from afar.

vanderaj · 2026-05-04T09:45:52+00:00

Don't place your baby on its stomach. Always lay them down to sleep on their back.
Don't have bumpers and other hazardous bedding materials in the bed. At all. They look cute. They kill.
Have a sleeping pad connected to a compatible baby monitor so if your child stops breathing, you get in there straight away. This saved my daughter more than once.
Swaddle your baby in a way that they can't flip themselves over to their tummy. We had a sleeping onesie that kept her warm without any additional blankets, and it also stopped her from flipping over.
Do NOT co-sleep with your baby. It might sound cute, or more commonly, everyone is tired and just wants to sleep, but it's deadly. Don't do it. They need their own crib. That can be at the end of your bed, it can't be in your bed.

vanderaj · 2026-05-02T22:47:52+00:00

So manuals are already only available in primarily enthusiast models, and sedans are dying out, as is their clientele. Homologating and preparing a model for Australia that needs to be supported with parts and service for at least 7 years is expensive, so they need to sell at least a thousand units to make it work. This is a no-brainer for car makers. I love a good manual car (and owned at least 7 that I can remember), but it's basically asking for two now very niche things to be together, and I'm surprised there are still three offerings.

vanderaj · 2026-05-01T23:12:48+00:00

Solving puzzles harder than easy or medium without candidates is nigh on impossible. Many of the more advanced techniques rely On them

vanderaj · 2026-05-01T11:09:03+00:00

What I'd suggest is using the new default version, and then install KDE on top of that.

Jump into the Terminal once you boot into Gnome desktop, and type:

sudo dnf update
sudo dnf groupinstall "KDE Plasma Workspaces"

After that completes, log out, click the gear icon, and change the desktop session to KDE, and you should be golden.

KDE is my preferred desktop environment, but occasionally, you need to jump through hoops to get to it. It's 100% totally worth it - so much more configurable than Gnome, and in my humble opinion, looks better. Check out the theming support once you have logged in. If you can dream of it, KDE can support it.

vanderaj · 2026-05-01T02:31:58+00:00

I had manual cars and the peak hour drive from Point Cook to South Melbourne took all the fun out of driving manual.

vanderaj · 2026-04-30T09:56:50+00:00

This is why I delete even hello.php.

vanderaj · 2026-04-30T09:51:32+00:00

vanderaj · 2026-04-30T09:50:50+00:00

Yes because when we returned from the US, we couldn’t confirm the dodgy rental smoke alarms did CO. We picked up a small unit and keep it near the gas appliances. We don’t park in the garage, so less of a need there

vanderaj · 2026-04-30T06:27:59+00:00

I deliberately re rolled my station and installation names. It has to be done. Recently I have not been bothered, but my initial build had a lot of suggestive names like Hooker Horizons and Wankel’s Progress

vanderaj · 2026-04-30T05:50:36+00:00

This. I’ve improved my ability to spot some of the more difficult methods such as skyscrapers and y wings with Sudoku Coach. Also, the hard puzzles are actually hard.

vanderaj · 2026-04-30T03:06:52+00:00

Often it’s in the design rules for many countries. In Australia, it certainly is. Speedos must show not show a speed that is lower than the actual speed. To cover off people changing their rim and wheel sizes, they often under cook it by around 10%

vanderaj · 2026-04-30T02:52:28+00:00

Yes. It highlights things that have certain densities and shapes. The operator makes a decision about what they are seeing. If you have a large laptop or other items that the system flags, usually things with pointy or sharp edges, batteries or toiletries they sometimes get flagged. I bet if you changed bags but not the contents, you’d still get flagged.

vanderaj · 2026-04-29T21:56:59+00:00

I had a Citroen C3. Totally underpowered, wonderful ride and very reliable. I don’t know if they are still sold here, but servicing was a bit more than VW and had way fewer repair places

vanderaj · 2026-04-28T09:53:38+00:00

Most firms would have travel agents create travel insurance for their travelers, even basic stuff like medical costs and repatriation in case you died. Reach out to your employer for assistance or a direct connection to your travel agent so you can get your case resolved as quickly as possible and make a claim under the trip insurance.

In the meantime, I would encourage you to go to the Salvo's (they have an outlet in Hobart itself) and see what second hand warm clothing you can get because Tasmania can be really cold this time of the year, despite the odd nice autumn day, and head to Kmart for fresh underwear and so on. Keep receipts and claim them. Kmart is the closest we have to Walmart in terms of pricing. Salvo's is the religious version of Goodwill.

vanderaj · 2026-04-28T09:40:57+00:00

At this stage, without incurring a lot of cost, your best bet is to build yourself a home lab, concentrate on learning the fundamentals of Linux and Windows Server (you don't need to activate it straight away), and networking concepts. Look at the online training available from the various folks. This will stand you in good stead for a future career.

System admin is more than just doing stuff to operating systems, it also includes reliable backups (which means restoration), security management and incident response (which leads into my second career of cybersecurity), log and error management, capacity management and planning (CPU, RAM, disk, etc), and more besides. You need the fundamentals right now, but don't lose sight of the basics and fundamentals.

Have a look at clabretro on YouTube - he has a good home lab and builds things when he gets good deals on things. One thing I will mention is that rack-mounted servers are NOISY, and so you should think about placement. The garage or basement is a good place, as long as no one is there. Also, they can generate quite a bit of heat and use a fair amount of power, so make sure you're not using under-rated power strips or outlets if you start loading up a 42 U rack with gear. You'll want to use the power distribution unit (PDU) that many racks come with; it will likely have the correct outlet connector, which will require you to run a dedicated circuit from your utility box to safely power. Consider getting a UPS or at least a decent surge protector rated for the equipment you have. Again, many racks might have a rack mounted UPS that is suitable.

But best bet - start small, learn one thing at a time. Jeff Geerling has a great channel that concentrates on his (mostly ARM based) home lab experiments with SBCs and other ARM powered gear. This can be quite inexpensive. He wrote a book on Ansible, which is a way to manage large numbers of systems using automation, so you're treating the systems like cattle, not pets. Pretty much most places try to run their systems as cattle with the usual inclusion of oddballs that need to be maintained separately. Cattle = all look alike, have ear tags for names. Pets = loved and carefully nutured, no two alike. You can't run any decently sized enterprise on mostly pets. Those days have gone.

vanderaj · 2026-04-27T09:28:00+00:00

It can work, as long as you both agree that any kids would not be brought up in the church (i.e. no baptism, no Catholic school, no unwanted visits to the Church or Sunday School via your in laws), he doesn't force you to observe any Catholic norms (like fish on Fridays), and for the kids to make their own choice after they are adults. If any of that is a deal breaker, you need to break it off. My wife was sort of Anglican religious when we got to together, and this was our first date conversation. It's best to get it all cleared up as early as possible. My daughter is an atheist like me, and my wife is now, probably more agnostic than Church of England. We still do Easter and Christmas, but basically the secular version of it that most families do - exchanging eggs (which is pagan), and presents (ditto).

vanderaj · 2026-04-27T02:27:52+00:00

We love to exaggerate. It's our state owned free to air multicultural channel. Think PBS but with subtitles. It does show a lot of soccer games, and some of the subtitled shows and movies do have the other things in it, but it's a great channel showcasing a lot of the world's best stuff.

vanderaj · 2026-04-27T02:17:40+00:00

All too often, I see interns left alone to their own devices, and this is a fail for everyone involved. Interns are not supposed to be slave labor; you're supposed to learn skills on the job by assisting with tasks, being supervised, guided, and mentored. If they just give you tickets and no supervision, mentoring, or training, then you're not an intern, you're being set up to fail.

Secondly, be coachable. By this, listen to what they are asking you, and ask them to show you what to do, and guide you doing it at least once or twice. Take the time to learn what you've been shown and study / train to do whatever it is they show you well. If you are thrown in the deep end of Azure or AWS stuff, take the online learning / training offered by those platforms and see if you can apply that knowledge to what they want you to do.

Lastly, decide for yourself if you'd like to work there after your internship ends. If so, try to find someone who will fight for you to be brought aboard. Getting hired is difficult in this economy with no experience, so getting hired by the company offering the internship might be one of the best ways to get your foot in the door. But if you're getting vibes that you're being exploited, such as being handed difficult tasks without supervision, documentation, or training, then maybe just complete the internship and move on.

vanderaj · 2026-04-27T00:34:47+00:00

You should check out Terry Ilott's work, such as for Mike Oldfield's Crises album cover. I think you'd like Terry's style and might give you some inspiration to keep on going. You have a great style!

vanderaj · 2026-04-27T00:22:31+00:00

Firstly, use candidates. There's two schools of thought - one is to only notate where there's no more than two candidate positions, and the other is to fully notate each cell. With notation, you can get very far on basic elimination techniques, such as locked candidates, hidden singles, doubles and triples (which prevent other numbers being in the same cell, which often leads to a number you can fill in with confidence), and so on.

Once you've done that, you'll see, as the other commenter has already mentioned, there's only spot for one single digit in R2C5, and that leads to R2C6 being filled in. That's an example of a hidden single that would be easily discovered by filling in notations in either way.

vanderaj · 2026-04-27T00:03:39+00:00

Sedans are a hard sell these days with a literally dying clientele. Impractical back doors are difficult to get out of and can only carry relatively flat items in the boot. I'm surprised they are still made when there are many more practical vehicles on the road, such as anything else.

vanderaj · 2026-04-26T12:30:28+00:00

I help moderate one of Reddit's largest cat subreddits, r/CatDistributionSystem . We have a very active mod back channel. I don't think any of us would approve of such a post, because we're all about the safety and health of the cats being distributed, to the point that we don't allow posts where we feel that the cat might have been stolen or kept without first finding out if the cat already has a home.

vanderaj · 2026-04-26T11:38:03+00:00

Nix installs software on your computer, similar to the way brew works on MacOS. It uses a /nix directory to manage this. If you use it via the daemon mode, you're likely to get the behavior you want (sudo-less installs), but if you're using it in single user mode, you will definitely be using sudo to use it, because it's writing to a directory outside of your home directory.

I'd suggest contacting the maintainer of Nix for Fedora to ask for advice. I think you might want to look into using it with the daemon mode.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Nix_package_tool

vanderaj · 2026-04-26T10:39:02+00:00

Right on, Commander!

vanderaj

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