gnu

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As in plasterboard sheets? I don't see why not if hand loading, plenty of vans will fit a 2400x1200 sheet (my Transporter fitted a bunch of plywood with room to spare). Loading one with a forklift is harder due to no side access long enough to fit 2400mm but that's a problem shared with tub back utes. If however your plasterboard pallet is side accessible a van with barn doors (like you'd buy if pallets were a priority) will allow you load it in fine.

The thinking involved in driving a manual is very minimal once you get used to it, so I reckon any safety issues caused by that would be outweighed by a reduction in the unfortunately common situation of unintended acceleration crashes. You are lot less likely to drive through the nearest wall (or kids) if your instinctual reaction to moving when you should not be is to also go for the clutch and cut power instead of just pressing harder on the wrong pedal.

They have a clutch, but once you're moving it is possible to shift a manual transmission without using the clutch. What you need to do is first take off the load currently passing through the box (if power is being transmitted either direction it holds the engagement dogs in place), so if accelerating you quickly let off the throttle and if decelerating you quickly tap the throttle. This lets you move into neutral, once in neutral you increase or decrease the engine revs to near (ideally exactly) what they would be in the gear you want to shift into at your current road speed, and holding those revs you can then shift smoothly into the new gear.

It is not something I would recommend unless in a jam with synchromesh transmissions (e.g. regular cars, light trucks) as most people aren't going to get it exactly right every time and will just burn out the synchros. If you're unfamiliar with the term these are the parts of the transmission that let you shift from one gear to another in one motion without having to stop in neutral, let the clutch out, and increase/decrease the engine revs to suit your desired gear before clutching in and shifting into it.

Clutchless shifting can and does work well in non-synchro transmissions (e.g. motorbikes, many heavy trucks) once you get the knack, as these transmissions are both more forgiving of not being exactly rev matched and will provide a strong auditory signal if you don't get it close enough (i.e. you'll know if you got it right or not so won't half arse it). Many motorbikes now actually automate this process with devices known as quickshifters - named so because even when doing it by hand clutchless shifts on a bike are noticeably faster than using the clutch.

A blue ringed octopus - they're a cute looking tiny octopus but quite capable of killing a human.

What's worst is that after getting bitten by one you will be mentally alert but completely unable to do anything as you feel your body just stop doing things that keep you alive (like breathing)...

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All cars could last a lot longer if people kept maintaining them and - importantly - didn't damage them. Electric cars are not going to be immune to this, I can't see them lasting much longer on average than ICE cars.

Keep in mind that even when you change out the engine for something with less parts the rest of the car still remains and contains things which will eventually cause issues. For example I bought a cheap van a few months ago and here's some of the reasons it was cheap that are not ICE specific:

  • Steering wheel lock mechanism sticking
  • Air distribution flap cables kinked/binding so A/C only blew at feet
  • Central locking on side door sticking
  • Rear shocks leaking
  • Front strut mount bushings worn
  • Head unit not functioning

Presumably the previous owner just didn't want to spend the money on fixing these issues as they arose, and eventually it added up into a lot of potential expense (if you have to pay someone to fix it for you) and more reasons to sell the car. Such behaviour seems pretty common in my experience and I fully expect it to continue with EVs. It'll be hard enough to get people to even maintain their brakes and change the motor coolant considering the natural reluctance of people to spend money on maintenance and this unfortunately prevalent idea that EVs don't need it.

Funnily enough the main ICE specific problem with that van was just as much an electrical issue as part of the petrol engine - an intermittent secondary air injection error code which ended up being down to a combination of a sticking valve and a fuse with a hairline crack causing an intermittent connection.

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I never had a problem with walking around cows as a kid and I did it pretty often. Visitors would get spooked occasionally because cows love to follow you and see what you're up to, but I never got chased or anything. That was beef cattle country though so these cows were mainly cows (female) and steers (castrated males). I've heard that some bulls could be territorial however so your mileage may vary if one is around - the couple I've walked around were fine but your chances of issues are higher with them.

Yes, the move towards integrating the infotainment further into the car with propitiatory parts instead of generic sizes and not separating out vehicle related controls is definitely going to make long term upkeep harder.

I do like Whirlpool, an Australian forum primarily centred on technology. It's still active despite the general decline of forums, has a lot of useful info to turn up in searches, and I appreciate how it has remained clean and fast without the visual clutter and wasted data of modern web design.

You pour a bit of boiling water down the side of the cylinder then run your hand down where you poured the water - you will feel a clear delineation in the temperature of the cylinder at the level of the liquid gas inside.

Seems legit enough to me. The next rack of tomatoes would only be ~2m away after all given the gaps between rows aren't going to be massive. Pretty sure the sharpness issues are primarily from repeated JPEG recompression data loss - you can find a better quality version of the image by searching 'carmine spina tomatoes' which both looks less compressed in the far ground and dates from at least 2022 (so before mass popularity of AI generation).

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Weirds me out that she’s got the watch in right hand though

If you're left handed the right hand is the normal hand for a watch, it's not that unusual.

Admittedly it's less common to see anyone wearing a watch now, and there's less of a reason to put it on your right hand now that most people don't handwrite regularly.

The one I was thinking of is this one from a Facebook page, but looking around a bit more there's also this one from someone's instagram. The instagram one is mainly notable because it dates the image back further to at least 2021, making it even more unlikely to be AI generated.

The common attribution appears to be this Instagram account but google images didn't show me one from that account when looking for other version of the photo and I'm not about to make an instagram account in order to scroll through years of photos looking for the potential original.

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Reading the news while having breakfast, though it's now on my laptop instead of the newspapers I started this habit with.

Nutbush City Limits might have a chance then, we'll see whether Australian public schools are still teaching the dance in a couple of hundred years...

Boiling the jug and pouring a bit of hot water on the cylinder seems like it'd be less work than digging out the Wii fit gear, unless of course they use it more regularly rather than just for weighing gas bottles.

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The watermark is noticeably more readable in the Facebook image I linked though, and it does say photography (even there it is somewhat blurred though, so assuming it was actually clear in the original source that copy is a few recompressions along the chain).

The dates of the other sources however are what really convinces me it's not AI. After all, who was doing good quality photorealistic AI image generation in 2021?

The old boat also has a motor, note how it's still moving in the photo while the only person in it is in the back holding a tiller (and appears to be facing forwards).

The sun would be the most obvious choice for such a reference point, though it'd be amusing to make it Greenwich and therefore make everyone deal with Earth's rotation and orbit if they want extremely precise calculations (though I expect there wouldn't really be a practical difference on that scale).