I was updating a GP website today to add “COVID vaccines currently free”. Bossman says “it’ll be in state gov’s hands soon so we don’t know”.

Flu shots are not free though, unless you hit some specific criteria.

I don’t think shots were intended to be fired at the Mozilla corporation, who can’t stop talking about their default, opt-out AI, but it paints a stark picture of the difference between a company that preaches privacy and choice, versus a company that actually provides those things.

I think they’re also taking shots on telemetry. Firefox uses telemetry as evidence to support their decisions in ways that sometimes seem contrived or statistically incorrect (similar to only x% of people turned this default feature off, therefore it is good), making me feel as a user that contributing my telemetry to them is actually a bad thing that is encouraging their behaviour. Meanwhile TDF makes great software that follows what the community wants and needs without any telemetry collection.

Higher price != better printer.

My Qidi Q1 pro has has lots of print quality and reliability problems. I ended up fixing them by disabling lots of printer features, including filament width detection piezo bed height sensor. Despite it being housed I had to do a lot of modifications to duct it properly because it has lots of holes and fans.

My $300AUD bedslinger i3 clone has only ever had two problems, the non-metal hot end having PTFE tube expansion (great since I replaced it) and the gantry getting crooked (once I knew this it became 1000x easier to use). Not as fast acceleration as the Qidi but much more reliable.

I borrowed a Mk3 Prusa from work a few years ago. If I had to pay for it I would have been really pissed, out of the box it was really slow.

My old boss spend thousands on an even slower printer… lets not go there :D

I’ve heard that even the Enders are much better out of the box these days. Maybe try one of those?

Short answer: It depends. Doing full flash reads of your USB sticks and SD cards (dd if=/dev/XXX of=/dev/null bs=4k status=progress) may help for a lot of them. But not all. The only solution I can actually recommend (for any storage media) is backup them up and regularly testing/moving the backups.

If the read of the disk is particularly slow then that indicates the flash cells are degraded. If a second read of the disk is much faster then that indicates some action may have been taken by the flash controller IC to fix this.

Long answer:

NAND flash cells slowly leak charge, making their state indistinguishable. A flash controller IC (usually separate to the NAND flash IC or ICs) has the job of noticing and fixing this (by rewriting the data to another or the same cell) before it gets too bad. That doesn’t necessarily mean it does it particularly well.

Some (few?) flash controllers periodically scan for weak cells and rewrite to fix them. Some (most?) flash controllers notice weak cells only when you read them. Some (many?) flash controllers are shit and don’t do any of this.

Flash controllers also have a bunch of other features and jobs, like maintaining a spare pool of cells (over-provisioning) to swap out for bad ones and even forcing the USB stick into read-only mode if they think things have gone particularly bad. Again this varies a lot depending on implem, some do it, some don’t, and for different reasons (out of over-provis cells, corrupt mapping metadata, arbitrary thresholds, etc).

Thankyou! Yes this is exactly what I’m after.

I’ve used Organic (now CoMaps) for a while now. Mostly been great. Interface is so much faster than OSMand (slow rendering) and Google maps (no networking needed).

Driving route planning doesn’t know about traffic, so it’s always optimistic about time.

Some rural towns in my country disappear unless you zoom in more, which is a pain sometimes.

TBH they changed the recipe a few years back and now taste far worse. But my brain has already been corrupted by the fandom, so I continue to use timtams as a way of visualising how much money I’m spending. $170 flight? That’s 510 timtams! Almost 2 a day for an entire year.

Hmm. I think you’re trying to lead me into niche investments!

What are they like? Texture & flavour similar, or completely different?

You free tonight? Or Sat morn, Sun arvo? I can try to drag you with with some other friends.

Going to try it with some friends soon (maybe tonight?). We loved PEAK, it was magical.

A particularly diabolical friend in PEAK:

DO NOT TRUST WHAT HE SAYS

o.o I had completely forgotten this.

Next you’re going to tell me that strlcpy() is not real. I will not believe you. I will choose not to believe you.

Unit pedant here: Just 166W. Watts are joules per second (they already have time in them, adding another unit of time confuses things).

This might seem silly, but it will help avoid confusion when you encounter Wh (watts * hours).

I am using this one. Texting or messaging my phone (on anything that makes a notification popup) with the text “fmd password location” gives me GPS coords. More than enough for me, and works even from a borrowed stranger’s phone.

Setup steps require ADB though, because in the phone ecosystem getting “unusual” permissions usually requires business deals with Google/Apple.

For extra joy #define ellen(A) ln(A)

We both think the other does all the work on the site. 😃

Secretly you’re both binchickens! Ty muchly.

requiring a not insignificant fee to write the exam

What does this mean?

As of this month, applicants now face a record application fee of $11,710 — up $2,345 from the previous charge

That’s 5x what it was. Hmm, that’s odd. EDIT: Nope, see brisk’s reply.

In an interview with SBS Nepali, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said he did not accept the way the visa fee increase has been characterised, arguing visa fees needed to be considered alongside other costs involved in moving overseas.

“Just remember with the costs as well, anybody who’s travelling overseas for an extended period of time has already decided that they’ve got the cost of an airfare and, you know, the visa fees are, are well below that,” he said.

WTF?

Has this guy ever booked his own flights? Brownwyn Bishop’s helicopter rides were cheaper than that.

Maybe he’s imagining moving a whole house of furniture and appliances overseas too? Does he imagine that’s how people do this?

As long as it’s not gambling or a scam. (Points are most “tech” companies and their products)

Canola is a brassica. Canola!