Chirp ran fine on Linux when I needed it to program a UV-5R a year or two back - was provided in a flatpak then but looks like they use a Python wheel file now.

I’m sure I’ve read worse but one that stands out as making me question the time I put into reading it is Out of the Dark by David Weber. I go into it expecting a military sci fi, and for the vast majority of the book that’s what you get - aliens invade Earth and plucky humans resist etc etc. The aliens however have more reserves and air superiority so are slowly winning as the end of the book approaches, at which point you expect the main characters to pull a rabbit out of the hat and do something different. Except that’s not what happens.

I was definitely not satisfied with this ending, even if there was some foreshadowing earlier in the book that made sense after knowing this was a possibility in this universe.

Far from the only one, I think there’s plenty which could plausibly be a duck. It’s just that most people seem to be going for one of these ducks:

Or one of these ducks:

instead of one of these ducks:

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.

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

The ACT does get a bit cold in winter, but I feel like it’s closer to England than Finland (if England was drier and actually got hot in summer anyway). We are after all talking minimums of -5 or -6 for the coldest days in winter and snow normally only settling on the tops of the nearby mountain range (and temporarily at that).

I think the main problem with searching for fediverse posts is not that they’re not indexed but the lack of a singular tag to append when you want to search for them. To search for reddit posts it was easy because you could put in your keywords and stick ‘reddit’ or ‘site:reddit.com’ onto the end, but now there’s too many domains to keep track of and you can’t rely on appending ‘lemmy’ pointing a search engine towards all Lemmy instances, let alone kbin/mbin instances.

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.

I’ve found a plunger useful for a sink occasionally, a bit of back and forth plunging can loosen up a hairball or break a layer of fat/soap scum. On the other hand I’ve never needed to use a plunger on a toilet - I don’t know how much of this is exaggeration on the internet but Australian toilets don’t seem to have anywhere near the amount of issues the American designs do.

A broken wisdom tooth with one of the parts rubbing against the nerve that passes through that side of the lower jaw. Definitely would not recommend, it did cost me ~$2k to pull those wisdom teeth (or what remained of them for the lower ones) but it was well worth it.

Edit: Found the x-ray image of that tooth, the dentist told me the white line running past the bottom of the broken tooth is a nerve.