There…are…no…words
Went for an adventure tonight out west to escape the glare of Sydney and try to get a glimpse at the Aurora Australis that is currently visible across most of southern Australia.
All of these photos were taken on my phone with a small tripod holding it using the Expert RAW plugin in Astrophotography mode.
My dear friend has been going through some NCAT Rental issues and has decided to document it for everyone else to learn from.
Go and follow her on Tiktok now.
Thanks in no part to Domicron Pairoftits we are now leading the way in new cases. And I know, the company line is now about how many are in hospital or ICU, but even the people getting sick and not going to hospital are still having a dire effect on the community. How many businesses have had to shutdown for a fortnight or so due to having no staff?
Either we start treating this like the common cold, an endemic – accept that everyone will get it and just go about our lives like normal, or we treat it like a pandemic and still have people isolating.
| Fortnight ending | AUS | NSW | VIC |
| Jan 8 2022 | 559,058 | 301,901 | 143,518 |
| Dec 25 2021 | 65,194 | 39,002 | 20,626 |
| Dec 11 2021 | 20,619 | 4,276 | 16,071 |
That means that in the last fortnight we have had 65% of our total case count of 850,349 nationally.
Looking at those numbers, it would mean we have at least 1 million people in their own lockdowns; 559,058 due to being positive and at least that number again in close contacts. Thankfully the number of people in hospital is less than 3000 but of those in lockdown, only the positive people that don’t have sick leave or annual leave are entitled to the government support (which is taxable) of $750. The close contacts don’t get any support now unless they can’t work because they are caring for a positive case.
Let me tell you a tale that you couldn’t make up if you tried. It all starts on the 21st of December.
I don’t know why but I had a craving to return to the original colours of Lankyland from 20 years ago. That’s right. Twenty years.
There are no words to explain how it feels to have had a website going for this long, I mean the World Wide Web got started around Christmas 1990 and Lankyland kicked off in August 2001. Yes, I know that the internet has been around for a lot longer but websites didn’t start popping up till 1990.
As of today’s post Lankyland has been online for almost 65% of the World Wide Web’s life. And I have no plans to stop.
I often get asked, “What is it that you do?” when I tell people I’m out in the middle of nowhere doing a recon.
The stability of the the railway is dependent on the rocks and dirt underneath the steel and sleepers. There are three layers to the rail, a stabiliser mix (basically rocks with a bit of concrete), a capping layer, then the ballast. The ballast is usually 40-70mm rocks that are shaped perfectly to fit together when weight is applied to it. The more weight, the tighter it grips to itself.
Occasionally parts of the rail line get filled with mud and water and that causes the whole section to sink and slide about which makes the track bumpy and dangerous. When that happens, it is time for a track recon.
An update to the list of blocked websites in Australia was announced today via the Federal Courts system to block proxies and torrent websites. I’m not going to get into the moral or ethical debate over pirating material in this post but what I am going to do is show just how mind-numbingly easy it is to circumvent the blocking process that Australian internet providers have implemented it to keep the courts happy.
DNS is how your computer translates a domain name into the IP address of the server hosting the requested content. It was first developed decades ago and started off as a manually maintained text file. Back then, there weren’t that many computers on the “internet” such as it was. Whenever a new machine was added to the network a new entry was added to the text file, then that file was sent around to all the computers. Obviously not a scalable solution.
Technically true but everyone currently screaming that back at people who are saying BlackLivesMatter is completely missing the point.
No one is trying to diminish anyone’s rights to live a safe and secure life, what they are trying to do is ensure that everyone is living to the same standards, to lift up people of colour so that they may experience the same level that White people do.
Should you hear anyone loudly declaring that AllLivesMatter tell them you agree but right now we need to prioritise the Lives that are most in peril. Or just show them the comic below, it points out just how stupid AllLivesMatter is right now.
Musical Covers. Often cause for much disagreement and usually poor quality. I have managed to find an artist that can cover songs and make them better. Much better.
An example you ask for? Ok.
As the SETI@home project has stopped handing out work units I was on the lookout for a new project to donate some spare compute cycles to and given the current state of affairs, the best option was the Folding@Home project which is researching protein folding of the corona virus.
And since you can setup teams for it, of course that is what I did.
head to https://foldingathome.org/ and hit the Start Folding Now button, download the app, get it running.
Open up the Web Control interface once you have it installed, click Change Identity in the top left and add in these details.
Then sit back and smile a smug smile as your computer churns through data to help find a cure for the corona virus.