I think a wombat would be cool to have around the place, assuming domestication allowed for some level of trainability.

One of my old uni lecturers was very keen on the idea of domesticating the spotted quoll. He reckoned they would make a great pet for those who would otherwise get a cat (a convincing argument actually).

The number of people who would even know how to change a tyre is unfortunately decreasing. Manufacturers therefore have less reason to include something that requires allocating space, carrying extra weight, and a small extra cost for each car, because they know not enough people are going to care about the loss of a spare to make a difference to sales. I’d wager this is particularly true for EVs as they seem to attract a lot of people who are scared of basic maintenance. It’s pretty poor of a company to not include a spare on something that’s advertised for use on dirt though, even if the model in question doesn’t actually seem like something that its buyers will actually take off the tar.

I personally would want a proper full sized spare in any of my vehicles, though I’m prepared to make an exception for my motorbikes due to the obvious logistical problems. Space savers are better than nothing but then you have to deal with speed restrictions and having to change wheels twice if you get a flat on the front. It’s rare for me to get a puncture but it’s nice to know that I can just quickly change wheels and carry on even if I somehow managed to put a big gash in a tyre or bend a rim. Even for just a basic puncture in town I can’t imagine wanting to faff around on the side of a road for ages waiting for roadside assistance to come and fix something I could have done myself and been back on the road in 15 minutes.

My unicorn phone would be one that is both small enough to use with one hand (currently have a Zenfone 10 largely for this reason) and has a secondary camera lens that’s a telephoto rather than an ultra ultra wide.

It bugs me that phones with a long lens are so comparatively rare, it’s always just wide (verging on ultrawide) as default and when a second lens is added it’s even wider again because people love distortions or taking photos in tiny rooms or something. Sometimes I just want to take a photo of something further away than a few metres and actually have it visible without zooming in, I’d even take a normal lens FoV as an improvement over ultrawide. Those phones that do have one tend to have it as a third lens and also tend to be huge, so get disqualified by the ‘usable with one hand’ criteria even before I reach the massively expensive part.

I’d also like an Instax back for the Hasselblad V series that was cheap enough that I could actually justify the cost of buying (say ~$200 AUD or less) though I will admit that’s a pretty niche thing to be after.

The only time I’ve resorted to the screwdriver technique (due to not having enough room to tighten and then turn a strap/chain wrench) the screwdriver shank just tore through the filter when I tried to turn it, a broader tool like a wide chisel might have a better chance of success.

What I ended up using that time was an air hammer with a broad headed chisel (pushing on the side where the impact would unscrew the filter). The angles wouldn’t work well for this in OPs case but if you have enough side access to get the air hammer through it’s a decent last resort.

My primary school bought one of these, I thought it was a pretty cool camera back then. It wasn’t the best image quality available even at the time and writing to the floppy was slow but being able to swap to other disks easily was a big thing (a stack of floppies was a lot cheaper than memory cards) and being able to just stick the floppy in any computer and see the images was a real game changer compared to dealing with camera drivers to download images.

The societal reaction though would be very different and in favour of the woman. For an example a few months ago some English tourist was in Sydney, got annoyed at some guy waving a flag around her, sucker punched the guy in the head from behind, and received one punch back plus a free broken jaw as her prize.

Now check out how it was reported - it’s all about how bad it was for the man to punch a woman and the pretty important fact of her assaulting the man before getting said punch is mentioned once in passing (and it being a punch from behind with the man not aware is not mentioned at all, which is relevant because this is normally highlighted as a ‘coward punch’ in Australian media).

I am also not opposed to banning x links - appreciate wider feedback on this though

I would generally prefer to see a screenshot of a xitter post rather than having to follow a link to it, for both my own ease of use and for reducing traffic to their site. However I do think a link to said xitter post should be able to be posted in either the body text under the screenshot or in a comment as a way to show the source of said screenshot.

Because men are statistically more likely to commit violent crimes.

So you’re saying it’s ok to make negative statements about a subset of people as long as they are statistically more likely to commit violent crimes?

That’s pretty rough - one breaking that quickly is annoying but could just be unlucky, two breaking quickly should definitely not happen considering they’re not cheap tools.

What part(s) broke on yours? Did they replace the second one as well? I’d hope so, though I could understand only wanting a replacement to sell and get some money back at that point.

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).