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I always like (need) to have positive things to look forward to. Next week, Mrs Octave and I are headed off to NZ. This is nothing new, every year we do some kind of tour through and end up staying with our son, or we go on a road trip with our son. We are planning to do this later in the year or early next year; however, we have justified to ourselves an extra trip. My son and partner are having a new house built for them. They are painting the place themselves, and the builder has a quite detailed build schedule that they are adhering to strictly. My son and partner have 2 weeks to fully paint the interior, so we have (generously) offered to go over and help paint. We are really looking forward to inspecting the house because it is a little more high-tech than anything we have built or lived in. This house is a SIP build (structural insulated panel). The insulation rating is amazingly good. Another feature is that the house is amazingly airtight. The average Australian home is rated at 15.4; my son's house is 0.38. My initial question was, "Would not this mean that the air quickly became stale?" There is actually a ventilation system called an HRV (heat recovery ventilator), sometimes referred to as an ERV (energy recovery ventilator) Air is constantly pumped in. The air pumped out goes through a heat exchanger and scavenges the heat in the air going out. This place is so thermally efficient that they did calculations for the heat produced by their 2 desktop PCs (a plus in winter and a negative in summer). This house is being built on a jointly owned block that my son owns with is business partner and wife. They have lived in a huge house that is actually 2 houses in one for many years. The business partner couple already have a large house on this block. They are going to tie together their solar batteries and solar panels, which will equal an enormous 45Kw system. From this, they are planning to be at least partially energy independent. Charging 3 EVs has been factored in. Here is the site. The big house in the background has a bottom floor full of workshops for their joint projects. The engineering gear they have is mind- blowing. My son's partner Amazing double-glazed window facing the winter sun ( expensive, I imagine) Ventilation heat exchanger bits and pieces. This was the day they pressure-tested the house.

This is the age of modernist glaring white cabinets and tiles for every modern home. Imagine my surprise to stay at a recently renovated caravan park that is furnished in rustic federation shearer's quarters decor! Our mate OME has started a trend!

Great development if it works.

Can't work my wife out. First she says "Sure! Get yourself a tattoo." Now she's whining about the bagpipers in the garden.

I was on my way to work this morning and thought stuff it, I'm getting a coffee and going to have it at the beach before I start. My daughter told me on the phone it was -4c in tamworth, and here I get to wake up to 9c and this view. It was 14c by the time I got to the beach. I'm starting to catch on life is too short to let this stuff pass us by and work is not everything.

We have a fat white goldfish with a red cap which we've named Trump. Bit insulting to the fish, but they share the same hairstyle, IQ, and belly to height ratio. Also, they both open their mouth constantly but nothing intelligible comes out.

Purtting the intent aside, are those particular words racist? Just on the wording alone, I'd call them nationalistic as only the country was mentioned, not the person's race or religion. As an example, if an anglo saxon descent Australian person told a Pom of anglo saxon descent to piss off back to England, is that rascist even tough both parties are of the same race. Intent can differ, but the wording is the same in both cases. I always thought rascism was bias against someone because of their race, not nationality. If you are white and told two South Africans to piss off back to South Africa and one is black and one is white, is it racism in both cases, only in one case or in none?

Maybe not only an EV issue.....

People who worry that Covid Vaccine might change their genetic make-up, should welcome that possibility.

Which is why neighbourhood batteries and a more distributed grid in general makes sense. Keep generation, storage and usage close where possible.

You have to hand it to short people..... They can't reach it themselves.

Some people don't get what a will is........ I mean, come on, it's a dead giveaway.

This is you being quick?

In spite of all the stuff going on so far, It's gone beyond just a case of 'What has tRump done now?'.... Quoted from Pearls & Wisdom: "a group of 36 senior neurologists, forensic psychiatrists, general psychiatrists and mental health professionals experienced in the diagnosis of cognitive disorders and evaluation of dangerousness, who had signed an earlier statement in 2024, issued an update on 30 April of this year. They cited examples of Trump’s “marked deterioration in cognitive functioning, evidenced by disorganised and tangential speech, rambling digressions, factual confusions, unexplained sudden changes of course in strategic matters, both national and international, episodes of apparent somnolence during crucial public proceeding. Grandiose and delusional beliefs, including assertions of infallibility…claims that his decision-making authority is unlimited – with no need to consider domestic and international laws and constrained only by his ‘own morality’. Severely impaired judgment and impulse control…Significant loss of self-control (disinhibition) and getting stuck on the same thoughts or actions, unable to let go or move on (perseveration), including seemingly compulsive, manic-like late-night communications – e.g., 150 social media posts in one night.” They conclude: “it is our expert opinion that Donald J. Trump is mentally unfit to be the President of the United States, and that steps to remove him from office must be undertaken with the greatest urgency”. And this bloke has 24/7/365 access to instantly start launching numerous preplanned nuclear ATTACKS. https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/07/for-president-trump-starting-nuclear-war-as-easy-as-sending-a-tweet/

Why are we surprised? Trump admires dictators and despots. He has stripped the top level of administration of anyone with knowledge and brains, and replaced them with yes-men. The only required attribute is loyalty (and tribute). He has openly said that the American public won't have to vote again, and is actively dismantling democracy. He has used his position to gain him and his equally disgusting family billions - the most corrupt public figure, let alone president, ever. He supports and enables the worst white supremacists in the country, allows and encourages political violence when it's against his adversaries, and is racist himself. And we're surprised when something like this happens?

It's a bit cool here in Nyngan. We are camped by the river, enjoying a glass of red whilst dinner simmers on our little fire pot. Life's good.

So when my son and partner picked us up from the airport they were planning to go to their sea shanty at the pub club. They asked if we would like to come? We had a brilliant time drinking beer and singing shanties. Many obscure shanties. They also make up the verses for the crowd to join in at the chorus. They have written shanties about public transport and current political issues. The crowd varies in age from 10 to very old. Most people seem to be in their 20s or 30s They sang this shanty bellow in honour token Australian. We had an absolute ball and intend to find a club like this near us.

Just pointing out something many may not have known.

Have been visiting the extended family. Well at least those around SEQ. Really enjoying catching up with all. Especially the younger ones. Last night we booked in to a Gold Coast hotel for a rest. In spite of my general dislike for this part of the world, it is nice to wake up to the sound of surf on a beach.

Nah, he just edited out all his keyboard errors.

Speak for yourself. The other senator is just as much an Australian as Hanson and has a right to her opinion. While her comment was a bit bolshie, that's because she's a Greens senator and probably nothing to do with her country of origin. And if you think about her words they are 100% correct, and also stand up for the original Australians. Pauline responded in your classical racist manner and deserves to lose. Maybe she should give up HER well paid position, her overseas holidays, clothes, plane and food all paid for by a billionaire buying influence, and piss off back to Ipswich.

So the Iran invasion achieved its purpose.

Jerry? Is that you?

What is happening in the ME will give a real Impetus to EV sales. People don't want to be hung out to dry every time someone does silly things with supply.. Nev

After the rain finally came a month or so ago, the earth burst forth with mallow weed which took over where I would have liked to have had a lawn, save for two years of drought. It had grown to shin-deep in thick patches, and I knew I had to cut it down. Unfortunately, my lawn mower hasn't been used for two years, either. I pulled it out of the shed, and put in some fuel, which had been in the can for two years as well. You knop already that teh mower would not start. So I had been thinking for a while that the mower had probably had it, and I done some looking around at the price of a new one - about $400. As a last resort, I tipped out the old fuel and oput in some freash stuff. I rejoiced when the mower fired up. I set about attacking one section of my yard and will knock over teh rest of it tomorrow. Eight bucks worth of fresh fuel save me a coulple of hundred bucks, abd gave me a bit of satisfaction for finally starting a job that was high on the To Do list.

Where there's a Will there's a bunch of squabbling relatives.

To appreciate The Goodies one had to have been exposed to English humour. The show involving pizza and hot dogs suggests to me that it was American, and we all know that American humour is not as intelligent as that of the British. The British made excellent children's programmes. Did anyone ever watch Worzel Gummage starring Jon Pertwee and Una Stubbs? Pertwee was, of course the third Dr Who.

No one I know Mentioned it. Men's shed tomorrow. I'll ask there. They did something like this over 20 years ago. I was randomly selected to be on the group in the MT Macedon area that formulated various aspects of it. The idea has Merit.. I support the idea of doing such things. It's acting responsibly. Nev.

I can't believe the people whinging about it and wanting to know if they can opt out. Hopefully just a minority. On a similar subject, whilst on my recent NZ trip, my phone sounded an unusual alarm at around 4AM. It was an earthquake warning. I assumed it was from a government service but it was not. It was actually from Google, which uses its millions of Android phones to detect P or Primary waves. For some people, the alert sounded before the quake could be felt. Why phones woke thousands before 5.9 magnitude Taumarunui earthquake "The Android Earthquake Alerts system uses the accelerometers built into millions of smartphones to detect the first seismic waves generated by an earthquake. Known as primary, or P-waves, these travel faster than the stronger secondary (S) waves that typically cause the most noticeable shaking and damage. This data is automatically anonymised and reported in the background to Google, and once there are enough matching reports, an alert gets pinged out to all Android users who might be affected. Depending on the estimated strength of the earthquake, users receive one of two alerts. A 'Be Aware' notification is sent for earthquakes below magnitude 4.5, while larger events trigger a louder 'Take Action' alert designed to grab people's attention, even if their phone is on silent. The system is not an earthquake predictor, but rather rapidly detects an earthquake after it begins and uses the difference in speed between the initial P-waves and the slower, more destructive shaking to provide advance warning to people further from the epicentre. The technology is now available in more than 90 countries, although its effectiveness depends on how many Android devices are nearby."

Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic??????

Canola time was always a pretty time to fly.

I don't have a lot of time, so. I will try to be quick (given I have only skimmed the posts since OME asked the question). The algorithm is not predictive in the sense of predicting the future. The predict what you meant by what you typed, and whether or not their response will make sense. For example, if you asked how many legs a dog normally has, it will predict that 4 is the correct answer; not that my some genetic mutation caused by increasing radiation in the atmosphere, they will grow 5 legs in the future. Well, not unless you ask it, anyway. But even if you did, it would use existing data to try and predict the correct answer based on the data it has, not to perform its own scientific analysis and determine for itself. It may take the factors and apply it to an existing theory to mimic scientific analysis and intelligent conclusion drawing, but it is not doing that itself. In terms of AI implementation, it is likely to be a lower level language such as C or C++ = not python because it is too slow; the end point AI functions can be done in Python, but that is on a precomputed large dataset - usually. The algorithm will be surprising small.. usual Bayes theorem or something similar. It is able to be repeated over billions of nodes - or data points. The code will likely be recursive in building the precomputed data set to apply simpler probability maps across the data you provide. And it will likely be recursive in using that map to answer your question. By recursion we mean the same code calls itself.. So, you will be able to crawl heterogenous data sets, over and over using the same code developing deep nested stacks (well, heaps to be accurate) of responses from which it will map as many of the different types of data that can be used to probably represent what ever bit of data it actually is. Tagging data is old these days.. That is what these maps do. This of something like if you type the number 4 into your LLM. That is easy, because it is represented by whatever coding mechanism you are using... and there are only a handful of coding mechanisms - ASCII, EBCDIC (not used anymore) UTF-8, UTF-16 and a few others. But, they are translated to the discrete representation of 4 to AI. No thinking required. Now, say you provide it a scanned doc, which contains the number 4 somewhere. It has to read all of the pixels and look at the shape of each character to determine if it is a letter, number, whitespace, part of a diagram, etc. Say it worked out it was a digit. Now it was to work out what digit it is? It has to look through its maps/nodes and get the most likely digit it is.. it predicts what digit is is because it spits out a probability index of what it has been taught what that digit could possibly be, across any digit which it may match. Is it a 4, or is it a H.. It also has to take into account font. As you know, a 4 can be represented very differently in different fonts... So, the sort answer to your question is that there will be a set of probability algorithms that will read data, build probability maps, and then apply the same probability algorithms to inputs and compare to what it has learned. Machine learning means it constantly refines its probability maps. The technical implementation is likely to to be a lower level language (a lot of Python maths/stats libraries are written in C++).. and there will be a lot of recursion.

A husband walks into Victoria’s Secret to buy his wife a sheer nightgown. The clerk shows him several options ranging from $250 to $500 - the more sheer, the higher the price. He picks the sheerest one for $500 and heads home. He gives it to his wife and asks her to go upstairs, try it on, and model it for him. Upstairs, his wife thinks, "It's so sheer it might as well be nothing! I'll just model naked, return it tomorrow, and keep the $500 refund for myself." She appears naked on the balcony and strikes a pose. The husband looks up and says, "Good grief! For $500, you'd think they'd at least iron it!" He didn't see the punch coming and should be able to see out of at least one eye by the weekend.

How do you writ up the insurance claim?

No point posting them here then, Nev.

The first thing they'd do is start sending friendly emails to random blokes......

The Trump administration has just instructed the FBI not to investigate any incidents involving ICE anymore, saying that ICE will do that themselves. That’s not going to work out well. ICE is becoming Trump’s racist paramilitary wing like Hitler’s brownshirts.

Some guys formed a band they called 999 megabytes. Still haven't got a gig.

That's my excuse too. I'm really much younger than I look.

Well, a week has passed since I arrived on these fair shores.. I decided to travel up to Tocumwal today to look at some land that may feature in my retirement. But, a nice surprise - I reconnected with my ab initio flight instructor of over 30 years ago! It was fantastic to meet up We flapped the gums chatted about old times and of course our different journeys; and I happen to be in town of the evening of the local aero club meet. So, will do the three S's and trundle off shortly to meet the local aviation fraternity, Doesn't get much better than that!

We messaged our son in NZ to remind him of our flight details. My wife referred to us as FIFO workers. My son's message back was "f***ing Australians, coming here and taking all the jobs"😆

In similar news, because I was born with brown eyes I've never had a period.

My Dad had one also, it was his first rangefinder camera after trying to use an old clapped out bakelite camera that someone must have given him. He took lots of family photos with the Neoca during the 1950s. In his latter years he gave me all the negatives which I still have, stored safely. He developed them himself and they look pretty good. Unfortunately Dad's Neoca was stolen, so, for nostalgia, I bought one as part of my collection, and also as a bit of family memorabilia.

In a post near the beginning of this thread I mentioned that I became interested in photography when a workmate of my father gave me a 35mm camera. Neoca 35mm - my first camera I later purchased a twin lens reflex camera which took a 2+1//4" film negative. I never got into film processing, taking my negatives and transparency films to a chemist or camera shop for processing. Twin lens reflex Then I went digital so I could do post processing on the computer. I bought a Panasonic Lumix FZ20 camera which had a 12x zoom lens, great for airport photos. Unfortunately I lost it at an Avalon Air Show. It was a particularly hot day, and at the end of the show I was heading to the exit, suffering from a bit of heat exhaustion. A staff person on a golf buggy offered me a lift to the first aid room. I placed all my goods, chair, esky, camera, etc. on the back seat. When we got to the first aid room the camera was missing. I was pretty devistated. I assumed it had fallen off when we bumped over a gutter. My wife found a secondhand Lumix FZ40 which had a 24x zoom lens in the Trading Post for much less than I paid for the FZ20. It had belonged to the late father of the advertiser. That is the camera I use today in addition to my phone cameras. Lumix FZ40 I have an old iPhone 6 whichhas been decommossioned as a phone, it has no sim card. However it takes good photos, is small and light and fits in a tee shirt pocket, and is very easy to transfer images to the computer. My actual phone, a Samsung Galaxy, takes probably slightly better photos than the iPhone, but is large, heavy, like a brick to carry, and is a nightmare to transfer photos.

Nuclear puts out a lot of heat and needs water, cost heaps to build reflected in the Price Private enterprise wants to do it. Nuclear test site will remain dangerous forever, effectively.Can't be used for quick response either, like Batteries or Hydro. Todays demand fluctuates wildly. Nev

I wish someone would tip a barrowload of sand on each of those Trevago guys.