I love the volcanic black sand. I experienced it in Vanuatu. It is super rough on hot days if your feet are bare however. 🔥

I love you for sharing it with is on the opposite end of the globe! It’s 17,000km from Reykjavik to Melbourne - about 85% to antipode distance!

This post has been reported for possibly questionable source. Given that many people outside Australia won’t be familiar with Green Left Weekly, I’ll explain a couple of things:

1. Green Left Weekly is absolutely biased. It is not a broad news source, rather it selects articles that covers topics it and its readers are interested in. It will interview people that will talk about issues it cares about.
2. It often uses language that will trigger a more emotional response that a straight-talking site would avoid, they also skip providing sources sometimes.
3. That said, it is not factually incorrect. The very website used to report it as a questionable source also concedes that Green Left Weekly has never failed a fact check.
4. Australians generally know all this. Take the story with a grain of salt, but if the publication says a mining company is challenging for its right to dig up rare earths in Greenland in courts, you can accept it as given that a mining company is indeed doing that thing.

In Australia at least, those cards are everywhere in populated areas. Supermarkets and department stores pretty-much all stock them. I’d say that over 90% of Australians live within 3km of a store that sells Steam cards and takes cash. Most of us even closer than that.

Your point is sound because I usually use a credit card for this, but most of my Steam purchases come from buying gift cards. However, I could easily buy those gift cards with cash.

Your comment implies this is not possible/common.

deleted by creator

I’m not about to defend Google, but I think Apple are worse. Google are upfront about what they collect and let you download (takeout) or delete everything they have on you at any time you want.

Apple don’t tell you what they are collecting, don’t let you opt-out of data collection and it’s a manual process to access/delete what they have on you.

Neither company is good on their privacy fronts and to champion one over the other is silly.

It has been reported, yes. I got the report because it was an aussie.zone user who reported it. As an admin, I can remove the post, but that will only remove it for aussie.zone users.

For reports on communities on other instances, I rarely take action unless one of my users is causing issues or the post is spam/something super nasty.

My client is spending waaaaaaay more money on Microsoft Online than it ever used to on software licenses. Every single user in the business is costing 🇦🇺$30 per month alone just for their Office suite. That’s before you get to the Azure stuff. Some hosted apps cost over 🇦🇺$1k/month to host in Azure.

Before you go too strongly after Microsoft for charging so much, this is cheaper than what we used to pay for running our own SharePoint, Exchange etc farms as well as the infrastructure required to host websites/database etc. All that has been outsourced to Microsoft Online and saves significant money.

Microsoft is doing very well out of its own cloud fees and can cope with AWS, Google and all the smaller private cloud operations getting some of that action.

I agree with your first statement, but disagree with the rest. I am not their target market. I enjoy playing their games, but primarily because I am spending time with the kids as I do. Not many of their games are targeted to my demographic.

I disagree that they focus only on digital. Every single Nintendo game comes out on a physical chip. And sales on digital copies are rare and minor (30% off maybe). It is often cheaper to get a physical copy on sale cheaper than digital. And you can then sell it / buy it second-hand. I’ve read that with Switch 2, even the digital codes can be transferred to a new owner. Nintendo for all their faults have never forced you to lock in a digital library you can never resell.

The problem is the standard apps are just that - standard. I can hop onto any Redhat, Debian or Solaris 10 box at work and use ls, cat etc.

If I went all-in on some bespoke alternatives on my special snowflake machine, I’d constantly be going nuts entering incorrect commands on remote machines and losing efficiency. Then, I’d go back to just using the standard commands everywhere.

I bought it second hand. Nintendo got $0 from the sale. In fact, two thirds of our physical games have been purchased second hand.

You might be surprised. I came to the Switch party super late when I bought my kid a switch Christmas 2023. He’s all over Zelda now, has BotW, TotK and even Skyward Sword on his Switch. For him, these games are all from the last year. He turned 2 the year BotW was released.

It’ll be the same story with Switch 2. Some kid who might not even be born yet will get a Switch 2 in 8-9 years and come across these games with all his school friends.

I doubt I’ll go the Switch 2 path with the kids. I haven’t seen a reason to upgrade, yet. I’m thinking of the Steam Deck - while the Nintendo had a fairly cheap entry point to get on the platform, I’ve spent enough on games to negate the difference between a Switch and a Steam Deck - where I already have a 500+ game library to play on it.

13 Minutes to the Moon

Season 1 is essential listening. It’s not very long, and takes you through the journey of putting astronauts on the moon with tech far less advanced that what you’re reading this on. It came sooooo close to failure on more than one occasion. When that lander touched down, it had something like 8 seconds of fuel left.

Season 2 is the story in detail of the Apollo 13 mission. If you loved Season 1 and want more, then go right ahead. I liked season 2, but nowhere near as much.

Alice’s Restaurant by Arlo Gurhtie. Actually, just about anything by Arlo Guthrie and his dad, Woody.
Indian Ira Hayes by Johnny Cash. It’s not very long, but a poignant story that shouldn’t be forgotten.

This is all true, but there’s more:

• Our election campaigns are six weeks by definition. No political ads filling the airwaves the rest of the time.
• We have preferential voting. You don’t have to choose only between the shit and shit-lite parties. You can vote for someone else, and still put shit-lite as your preferred option if the independent you voted first for didn’t get in.
• The electoral commission will help pay for your campaigning if you secured 5% of the vote. Evens the field a bit for not-rich people to run.
• Political signs on houses are pretty rare. Maybe a couple of diehard fans.
• Nobody gets real angry at you if you vote for someone different.

Dance. In a troupe full of girls. Honestly, it was me and 15-20 girls.

Other boys literally called me gay for dancing, while they went and played whatever sports they did and then all went into a locker room and showered together etc.

I honestly never understood how they thought dance was gay. I don’t understand it now.

If you are on a diet, this meal has very few kilojoules/calories. Fewer than a single slice of bread.

It feels like everything in All is about an election in the USA, and that’s really not very engaging to the rest of us. So I mostly hang out in Local for the most part.