I like a properly fast boot time, but a couple of minutes is tolerable. Much more than that and it feels annoyingly slow.

What is truly annoying though is when I have to do something that should be quick but requires booting a computer on my work’s network. I got back into the office once and literally had to wait 20 minutes when all I wanted to do was to print out one jolly document and go home - I guarantee you I cared about boot time that day…

What speeds are normally done on the roads you would be riding it on? Up to 50-60km/h you would be ok with 50cc, if traffic normally flows faster than that then get a larger displacement bike/scooter. Bikes are a more enjoyable method of transport than your average car but it’s noticeably less fun (and more dangerous) if you can’t at least keep up with traffic.

Make sure to allocate some money for protective gear as well as a bike. If you’re sensible bikes are nowhere near as dangerous as some people like to make out but if something does go wrong some proper bike gear does make a big difference.

North orientation is the standard for when just browsing a map, but when in navigation mode applications usually rotate the map to match your direction of travel. If your car has a Android Auto/Carplay head unit or one otherwise capable of displaying maps it will also likely default to autorotating the map when driving even without a destination input.

This behaviour does make it easier to distinguish relative directions to your position (roads on your left as you drive will be on the left on the map and so forth) but also takes away an easy way to orient yourself on a scale broader than the limited section on the screen.

Finally, someone with a good grasp of the proper ratios when comes to house space vs garage/workshop space. Chuck in a few exterior windows and I would be fine with something like this.

I would be checking how much weight above the living space can handle though - I suspect it might not be up to suitable floor loadings for workshop usage.

It’s what the Americans call coriander leaves. If you haven’t come across that name either it is indeed a herb.

The cover art is real, but the words have been changed. The real book is The Sword of Bheleu.

It already is for some specific rail freight, iron ore haulage in Western Australia being one example. Rio Tinto has been running them in WA since 2019.

The Sydney Metro is also driverless, albeit a passenger only line rather than freight.

Still with a knife, but carefully. These labels really just mean ‘don’t come whining to us if you act like an orangutan and stab a knife through the box into the item inside’.

A good multitool to carry around in your pocket, I recommend Leatherman. The Wave+ I have is a nice tool, can also recommend the skeletool for something that’s a bit easier to fit in your average pocket. Don’t buy the cheap multi tools as they’re generally rubbish to use and will not be a good experience.

If you don’t have pockets that can fit a multitool, spend the remaining money on clothing that does have decent pockets and gain another real quality of life improvement.

I think it was 2007, the family upgraded to a 3G modem when Telstra got around to putting up a tower that provided mobile reception where we were living. I was pretty happy as with the quality of rural phone lines we weren’t even getting the full potential of dial up (maxxed out at 30 ish kB/s).

Of course the next problem was trying to keep under the tiny download caps of the time, I remember having to wait until the end of the month (when usage was about to reset) to download large files or risk having my parents and siblings annoyed at me for using up all the quota…

It’s impossible to prevent, only reduce.

And that’s what such efforts aim to do. You can’t prevent everything but you can definitely cut down on what is potentially being introduced. This is particularly true when a place is as geographically isolated as Antarctica. For a relevant example I know that if you were to bring a raw stick into Australia it’d be confiscated (or required to be pest treated at your cost) due to biosecurity concerns, and we get literally millions of people visiting per year so that’s a significantly harder containment job than Antarctica would present. Even within Australia there are biosecurity controls disallowing movement of stuff like fruit and grape vines between some of our states/regions.

I would be surprised if biosecurity controls for our parts of Antarctica were not even stricter, given that it is a largely untouched landscape and reducing impact on it is considered worthwhile to do these days (not so much in the early days of the Antarctic program, but we try to do better now).

I would assume biosecurity concerns

It was really just a matter of how to get a pelican to cooperate rather than it being aggressive or anything - they aren’t intelligent enough to figure out you aren’t going to eat them so will resist attempts be caught.

Dad and my sister were coming back from town one night and saw this pelican by the side of the road moving really awkwardly, so they pulled over to check it out and found it had a punctured lung (and a somewhat wonky beak, but that had healed from a previous injury). Best guess is someone wasn’t as good with a shotgun as they thought they were - being charitable there is a chance someone figured it would struggle with the beak, either that or they were an arsehole.

Anyway the pelican wasn’t up to anything much so they took it home, made up a comfy spot in a cardboard box, gave it some old painkillers, and expected to just give it an easier end than being eaten by whatever came across it that night. Next morning however when the box was opened the pelican was alive and kicking (literally) so we pinned it down and put it in part of the chook pen to recover. After a fortnight or so of hanging around eating bits of fish and scaring the daylights out of the chooks every time they saw it the pelican had healed up enough to be properly active again so we wrestled it down once more (took noticeably more effort this time) and bundled it into the car to release down at the dam.

I actually have wrestled a bit with a pelican and can say that if you’re prepared to take a few scratches you’ll be able to hold one down. You just have to hold the beak and wings, once you’ve got it pinned their legs are too short to really get at you.

Admittedly the pelican in question wasn’t operating at full potential (recovering from a wound) but I was in my early teens at the time so wasn’t exactly an example of peak physical performance myself.

Reminds me of hopping into Mum’s car after several months of not being in it to hear the distinctive grinding metal sound of a bearing on its last legs - asked Mum and my sister when the car started making that noise and got told it always does that…

I reckon Port Arthur is a solid contender with its low population of 251 (known for being the site of a mass shooting that led to significant changes in Australian gun laws). It is fading in name recognition as time goes on though, after all that was approaching 30 years ago and lots of people have been born since then.

My top pick however would be Bega with its population of 5013 and the name recognition the cheese factory has brought. It’s hard to go past a name that’s printed on cheese (and assorted other products now) in the vast majority of supermarkets across Australia, and they even export overseas to get a bit of international cachet.

Yes, while they look interesting there are reasons why saw blade lookalike wheels aren’t commonly used. I hate to think of how the weight of those dirt bike ones would affect the handling (probably not so much of a problem over smooth ice, but rougher terrain would be a challenge).

Fair enough, it does have associations there. Pretty sure I’d toss y’all in the same basket though if I heard anyone trying to make it a thing…

Why bother with importing y’all when we already have yous (or youse depending on how you want to spell it)? Or you could just treat ‘you guys’ as gender neutral, it effectively is these days with how people use it.

And it’s a very weird and frightening feeling if I do get disoriented.

I know what you mean, there has been a couple of times in my life where my internal idea of direction has been turned off course and it is a very weird feeling indeed trying to reconcile the direction you internally believe you’re facing against the different direction a map or compass is telling you is actually true.

As a kid I also once spent a weekend in Melbourne feeling somewhat disconcerted due to not being able to get a sense of direction. I’d never been there before and flew in on an overcast day which never ended up letting up until I flew out so never ended up getting my bearings while we were down there (didn’t help that this was before the smartphone era so maps weren’t available at the drop of a hat).