willedoo

The NBN technician came today and replaced all their gear. At this stage the NBN is working again but almost unusable. It's very slow and seems to be getting small dropouts frequently. Speed tests show the speed up around 10Mbps but the slow browsing speed doesn't back that figure. Next step is to try a new modem and see if that's the problem. If that doesn't work I'll have to give the NBN the flick as it's substandard as it is. In the meantime, I've gone back to hotspotting with my mobile data which gets around 15 to 20 Mbps.

I wonder if the crows get addicted to the nicotine in the cigarette butts.

That extra $14 per week will fully pay for the 20% council increase in rates this year and give me $7 in reserve to go toward paying the $50 per week the state government might take in land tax with the new unimproved property valuations. Don't you just love governments. I always get a chuckle out of listening to their weasel words about the cost of living crisis. Step one for governments: freeze government charges. It's not rocket science.

The NBN has been kaput for more than a week. There's a technician coming tomorrow to check it out which is not bad considering I only rang my server on Friday. It will be interesting to see what he finds. The NBN used to be fairly reliable with only the odd rare dropout for a matter of seconds. It's been playing up for about four months now, taking about three or four reboots to get it going and a week ago stopped altogether. Generally, once it finally connected when it was playing up, it would stay on with no further problems until the next session. I don't leave the gear on 24 hours per day; before hitting the sack, the NBN network terminating device and my LAN modem get switched off. I know a lot of people who leave them on all the time. So the NBN is on parole. If it plays up again I'll ditch it and just use my mobile data to wirelessly hotspot to the laptop. It's hard for the NBN and retail servers to compete with mobile phone plans these days. As a comparison, my internet plan with my server is $50 per month for 100GB of data. That's all, no rollover, you use it or lose the data. I'm with Aldi with my phone and I can upgrade my plan to $50 per month (same price as my server's NBN plan) and get 120GB of data plus unlimited phone calls and SMS within Australia and twenty overseas countries, plus unlimited rollover. Whatever data you don't use in a one month period rolls over and is added to the total data available. The other advantage with the phone is that it's virtually 100% reliable and faster than the NBN. Speed tests show the phone's slowest speed is around about the fastest speed you can get here with the NBN. Another advantage with the phone pan is that it's a 5G enabled plan. At the moment I'm on 4G and right on the network boundary for 5G. I can only get 4G and my next door neighbour gets 5G. But it will only be a matter of time before a network upgrade provides 5G here, and when that happens a phone plan will be a long way faster than the NBN.

Years ago I rented a place with a similar cooking setup, except it had a recess in the top for the fire and BBQ and grill plates on top. Lucky I only lived there for a winter as it was the only stove and would be hot in summer if you didn't invest in a gas or electric cooker. Also lucky the chimney drew ok so it didn't smoke the place out.

I've been doing a bit of research on gin poles on utes and light trucks. There's some information on places like US welder's forums, but they seem to do a lot of debating about which pole setup is best. They seem very predominant in Texas, no doubt due to their history of use in the oil fields. They have some good points but I have a feeling they would be more appealing if you were born and bred around them. From what I've seen they are used a lot for lifting and emplacing items, hence their use by welders. Lifting a load onto the same deck as the pole setup seems a bit clunky though. My main requirement would be to lift an object off the ground onto the tray and the reverse of that. Taking into account the work involved setting up a pole system, it might be more practical to have a removable small crane boom mounted on a back corner of the tray with a stabilising leg to take the weight. With a rear mount, a load either to the rear or to the side could be picked up and put on the deck easily. It would also work ok with a trailer if the hitch was short enough and the crane boom long enough. You could jacknife the trailer, pick up the load, then move forward to straighten up and plonk the load on the trailer. On the other hand, with the gin poles you could get a longer and higher reach. The main problem is the awkwardness of hoisting a load onto the deck. It's quite doable, just a lot of stuffing around. Flip a coin maybe.

When I used to do the remote work I also got to see that big meteor shower that went for a few days. I don't remember what year it was. There were thousands of them like little glowing specks darting across the sky.

or just go full medieval.

You could make a small panel of mini orb with a timber frame around it containing some insulation behind the orb. Even a couple of layers of sisalation would help if you had some spare stuff lying around. Something along these lines only with mini orb:

I got a good view of Halley's Comet in 1986. Myself and a couple of mates did a short job on Nappamerri Station in SW Queensland and we had a rough maggot camp for a few days on the station's higher country while the comet was passing. Outback night skies and no generator made for good viewing. Those on the coast didn't get a very good view of it but where we were it really stood out.

The world has gone mad. This bloke wants $20 per sheet for this old corrugated iron.

Funny you should mention that. On another thread I mentioned that I got rid of five truck and trailer loads of scrap steel, aluminium, vehicle bodies etc. when I was cleaning up to sell and move in 2021. Plans changed and I'm staying for the foreseeable future and regret getting rid of three quarters of the stuff. Yesterday I was having a wander around and picking up every rusty scrap of steel I could find lying around the place. That was brought on by checking the steel prices lately. What a shock.

I wonder how long it would take to burn the oil smell out of the diff housing. I imagine it would be cast steel. A hot drum made from a 44 takes a bit of burning in depending on what's been in it. Burning the paint off is a bit smelly. This is my old hot drum. It's on it's second drum but all the add-ons are the same as the original one I built. The first one was full length but it's now 2/3 length to fit this space. It was all made from scrap I found on the junk heap at my dad's farm in the late 1980's. The hatch is an old boiler hatch with an old horse drawn plough handle bolted to a scrap piece of plate steel. The lower vent I made out of scrap steel with the welder and gas axe. The semi-circular cradle the drum sits on is a wooden spoke car wheel rim cut in half. In hindsight, it's probably off my grandfather's T Ford. The rest of the support is just old pipe and angle iron. The collar the flue sits over is a round thread protector from an oilfield drill pipe.

I think that's why she appointed Tim Walz as point man. Normally VP candidates are almost invisible, but he's everywhere. He even sat in with her in her first ever candidate press interview.

Witchetty grubs are very nice to eat. They have a slight peanut flavoured scrambled egg taste. A bit of work involved finding them though.

This is dated 14 years ago but it gives some idea of the variation in laws between the States and Commonwealth. https://www.alrc.gov.au/publication/recognition-of-aboriginal-customary-laws-alrc-report-31/35-aboriginal-hunting-fishing-and-gathering-rights-current-australian-legislation/australian-legislation-on-hunting-fishing-and-gathering-an-overview/

That's the catch. They want an arm and leg for chimney flue sections these days.

Thanks onetrack, I love Pinterest. You can get so many ideas from that site.

A novel use for an old diff housing:

Apparently OSHA is the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

I've made a start. Today I picked up two stub axles and hubs from a bloke on Facebook marketplace. They're a perfect fit for the two wheels I have and about one third the price of buying new ones. It looks like he's even repacked and adjusted the bearings.

The only left hand drive vehicle I've ever driven was an old Peterbilt ex pole truck that was being used for a water truck. The good thing about pole trucks is that the poles and snatch block brackets all pack away in recesses flush with the deck, so you can have a crane truck capability or a flat deck, whichever you need. A big powerful winch and a full width roller at the rear tops it off. Just a straight winch truck is a handy item as well. One mob I used to know had semi trailer winch trucks. They had no sleeper cabs as the winch took up that space so you'd always see a swag tied on the back of the prime mover. The rear of the prime mover chassis behind the turntable was sloped and had a roller at the end similar to that on the rear of the trailer. The trailer legs could fold up parallel with the trailer deck so when the winch cable was connected to the trailer front, all they had to do was pull the turntable pin and drive forward dropping the front of the trailer on the ground. The front of the trailer was rounded off to move easily down the back of the prime mover chassis and roller. I had one of them move a D7G once. I drove the machine straight on the back as there was a high ramp available. There was no ramp at the destination so the winch truck driver dropped the front of the trailer on the ground and I drove the tractor straight off. You just had to be careful crossing his winch cable that you didn't damage it with the track grousers. After I was clear he sucked the empty trailer back up with the winch.

The idea for those lifting arches on the back of trailers and utes would have come from pole trucks which are used in the oilfields for moving rigs and equipment. The basic principle is the same except the pole truck winches pull horizontally to a snatch block on the rear of the deck then up to the top. The lifting arches pull directly from the top of the arch. They still use pole trucks but not quite as much as they used to. Mobile cranes are used a lot these days.

There's still bargains on FB marketplace and even some good stuff for free but you have to be quick and basically first cab off the ranks. Today I contacted a bloke who was selling a tandem 7x5 trailer. It was a solid trailer with ladder racks, large toolbox, sunraysia wheels and about a month's rego left. It had surface rust and needed a cleanup and a coat of paint. He had $1500 on it as is. He messaged me back saying it was sold and he'd dropped the price to $500 as there was a couple of holes in the side he didn't notice when he listed it. I'd say the buyer played him like a fish. The four wheel hubs would be worth that.