willedoo

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.

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/