willedoo

That's not too bad compared with what I get. The NBN is 6,8, or 10ish. The phone data with Aldi is 17 to 20 on 4G. The NBN technician who was here the other day said he was getting 5G on his phone at my place. A mate is going to bring his 5G phone over so I can try the download speed as I suspect it might be limited by signal strength. If the speed is worth it, the next step is buy a 5G phone and stick to that.

It's sad to see good companies go bad. I've been with the same server since we first had ADSL. They were Adelaide based, and employed locals with no foreign call centres. They even used to have little old ladies post them a cheque for their monthly plan fees. The customer tech help was done mainly by IT uni students working to pay their way through their uni course. None of those jobs exist any more. It's all hard to understand people from India and the Philippines who struggle to get a grip on the issue. The company doesn't have a very good reputation these days and that started when one of the big mobs bought them out. One thing you learn is that it's pointless harbouring misguided loyalty to any particular company or brand as it's not reciprocated.

Jerry, I'm rural on fixed wireless. FTTN, FTTP, FTTC and HFC in the cities probably don't have as many reliability issues. A mate and his wife just came back from a couple of months in Thailand where they were getting 300Mbps. He was a bit shocked when I told him the NBN fixed wireless delivers 10Mbps at best.

A bit off topic, but I occasionally encounter a bloke in our local shopping centre car park. Every time he has the same old story - he's lost his job and is putting the bite on people for money for groceries. Same story month after month. The first time I thought he might be a druggie or an alcoholic, but after a subsequent encounter I formed the opinion he was neither, just a professional bum who prefers it to working at a job. I've never been dumb enough to give him any money. If you tell him about the free groceries donation bin outside Coles just 50 metres from the patch he works, he thanks you for telling him. Naturally he doesn't go over there; he heads straight to the next potential sucker he spots in the car park to put the bite on them. It's a steady income he's after, not food. Good luck to him.

Still no joy from the NBN. I'm trying an upgraded phone plan for the month to see how that goes. $49 per month gets me a 5G enabled plan of 120GB of data with unlimited rollover, unlimited phone calls and SMS in Australia and 20 other countries, and seemingly no problems. I had 30GB of rollover data from my old phone plan so started the month with 150GB of data up my sleeve for $49. It's plenty fast enough and virtually 100% reliable. On the other hand, my usual server charges me $50 per month for an unreliable 100GB slow speed, no rollover, sometimes connection with the added bonus of customer service via overseas call centres manned by people extremely difficult to understand and who seem to delight in jerking customers chains. Observing them trying to resolve an issue reminds me of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet following their own footprints around and around in the snow. The choice is rapidly becoming a no brainer. If the NBN and the server can't combine to fix it in the next week or so, I'll ring them up and tell them to come and get their junk off my roof.

I saw some video a while back of the Ukrainians floating captured Russian tanks and other heavy equipment back to Ukraine. They seem fairly well organised. In Soviet times, a lot of the tanks were built in Kharkiv. I think the tank plant is still operating there.

spacey, another one that's popular for that is Whatsapp. My sister uses it all the time to video chat to family members who live overseas. I use it without video to ring a mate who has bad mobile phone reception.

Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen said when Trump plays the air accordion, it's a tell tale sign he's lying: “When you see the accordion hands start going, what that means is that he’s lying,” Cohen, who was Trump’s longtime fixer and personal attorney, told CNN’s Jim Acosta on Tuesday. “It’s a tell with Donald. Anytime that the accordion hands start, that means that he’s not telling the truth.”

FB is awful for that side of it. Posts on FB groups are like ADD; they disappear down the whirlpool one after the other, here today, sucked into the abyss and forgotten tomorrow. I've found some older posts by using terms in the search box, but it's difficult to track things down. I think FB is a terrible format for certain things. Maybe it's ok for small single topic niche groups.

I can remember with thread for sewing leather, just using a block of beeswax and running the thread over the block to wax it.

They sell both types, waxed and unwaxed.

Some may already know this tip. If you've had too many hamburgers lately and are popping buttons on the work pants, sew them on with waxed dental floss and you won't have to do it again. Same principle as the waxed thread they use in saddlery and leather sewing.

Another alternative is voluntary donations like the Rec flying site. Then it's a matter of seeing if it's enough to cover costs.

The problem with the FB group I'm a member of is that it's too big. It has thousands of members but probably at least 100 active at any time. It's like having a single thread forum with 100 people posting on it. A smaller, less popular FB group would probably be more user friendly.

I'm all for funding the existing site. It would cost each of us less than a bag of groceries per year. Possibly there's some way of new membership approval to weed out spammers. For that I'd refer to the way FB groups have certain application criteria and waiting periods. The only difference with that is that a member of the public wanting to see what the forum is about can't access it without membership approval. To attract new members there would have to be a site description attractive enough to warrant them going through the approval process. On FB groups it's usually fairly basic - often just a 'tell us about your interests' type of thing. Having said that, most FB groups are very much specific interest groups whereas this forum is a much broader interest platform (how much broader can you get?). I'm a member of a couple of FB groups and personally I think FB is totally unsuitable for what we do here. It's the clunky format that's the problem. The advantage of forums like this is ease of navigation and layout and it can be structured in a much more user friendly way. My vote is a resounding no to FB. I'm a member of a FB ALSE group but only because there's no alternative. We had a Yahoo email group going but Yahoo shut down groups and that disappeared. One of the Brit members started up a forum on his website but that didn't take off for some unknown reason. A Dutch member tried a Teams group but the same story. The Teams format was too clunky. So it was a case of migrate to the FB group by necessity but I wouldn't do it by choice.

That would mean a log 500mm diameter at the base would weigh a bit less than 900kg at 4 metres length. A bit less because of the round profile and tapering of the log.

Crikey, how do you compete with that. I was about to post how great it was to find half a drum of steel offcuts I thought I'd lost, but after reading Litespeed's story, I'll just go back and hide in my shed.

I knew a couple of blokes who ran in to the rocks at Noosa in a steel prawn trawler. They were heading home at full steaming speed and did the old trick of falling asleep with the autopilot on. One was asleep at the wheel, the other asleep in his bunk in the forecastle. The bloke down below said he was woken with a big crash and looked around to see a huge rock protruding through the bow only inches from his head. When the trawler recoiled it pulled itself off the rock and a big column of water flooded in. The hole was just above the waterline so they set up extra bilge pumps and had a very slow trip down to the port at Mooloolaba. When they were under way, the water would come in at a quicker rate than the pumps could remove it, so they would periodically stop and pump the bilge dry then steam off again. One advantage of a steel boat - they were back in the water two days later after a bit of gas axe, welder and paintbrush work. Every trawler I know of that's hit Australia in that area has been due to falling asleep on autopilot. The autopilot is locked on to the home port and that's roughly where you will end up. The more cautious skippers don't use autopilot when heading toward land.

I thought she died in Forrest Gump.

The teeth give it a chunky steampunk look, but I think I'd play it safe and use a mud bucket.

Back to that subject of fireplaces earlier in the week, I bet there's been a few sore shins in this household.

I remember him saying his wife was crook and in hospital. That was about ten days ago.

Are you thinking of the permanently sloshed Medvedev? He probably also forgot to wear trousers which could explain the cropped photo.

It's hard to guess. I have a billet from a brush box outside. I could weigh that and do the mathematics.

A mate of mine is on a property in western Queensland and he's on satellite internet with the NBN. He said on the occasions you can get a connection it's dial-up speed and sometimes worse. I have terrible memories of dial-up. I used to go and make a cup of coffee waiting for a basic HTML page to load.