willedoo

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.

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.