Apparently the reason they have that odd shape is so that when it’s raining, water can’t make a continuous trickle between the wire and the pylon

That and also to increase the distance any charge has to travel across the surface of the insulator.

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.

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?

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.

The cover art is real, but the words have been changed. The real book is The Sword of Bheleu.

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’.

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…

Yes, while they look interesting there are reasons why saw blade lookalike wheels aren’t commonly used. I hate to think of how the weight of those dirt bike ones would affect the handling (probably not so much of a problem over smooth ice, but rougher terrain would be a challenge).

And it’s a very weird and frightening feeling if I do get disoriented.

I know what you mean, there has been a couple of times in my life where my internal idea of direction has been turned off course and it is a very weird feeling indeed trying to reconcile the direction you internally believe you’re facing against the different direction a map or compass is telling you is actually true.

As a kid I also once spent a weekend in Melbourne feeling somewhat disconcerted due to not being . I’d never been there before and flew in on an overcast day which never ended up letting up until I flew out so never ended up getting my bearings while we were down there (didn’t help that this was before the smartphone era so maps weren’t available at the drop of a hat).

If it’s night and you can see both the Southern Cross and the Pointers it’s pretty trivial to determine south; if you’re in the northern hemisphere you get it even easier with Polaris to mark north.

There is indeed a video of this.

There’s also a video of someone trying a similar setup with a dirt bike, though those guys didn’t reverse the front teeth (did still steer ok, not sure how well it’d brake).

Not including a Golden Gaytime in these options is a real missed opportunity…

Listen to reason, reason is calling on the same handy device every man and his dog has which will provide a north oriented aerial view of the area in question and even a compass display if the map isn’t enough to orient yourself.

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.

Self checkouts that just let you scan items without issue and accept payment are a nice enough idea for a bag or less of shopping, my problem with them is how they are implemented in reality (in Australia anyway). The first implementations I encountered I considered an useful addition but both the machines and the staffing changes due to them have steadily gone downhill in terms of user experience.

Instead of a quick painless experience you get a horribly touchy weight sensor which can’t reliably handle particularly small items, particularly large items, or non-standard bags (and there are no longer standard bags due to plastic bag bans), a machine which demands assistant intervention at the slightest issue (and the assistants are understaffed so never arrive quickly), and when you finally get to payment it makes you click through an annoyingly slow interface to tell it you don’t have a rewards card and don’t care to donate to some charity before it will activate the card reader. To make things worse the manned checkouts are never staffed at a level - if any are even open - to cater for people with full trolleys so these end up clogging up the self checkouts (which have tiny bagging areas and are not intended to handle a trolley load) and making everything slower.

The icing on the cake is the self checkout treating you like a thief and throwing errors if the camera system thinks you didn’t scan something in the trolley or letting off an alarm like you’re trying to make off with something when you just want to buy a can of paint.

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.

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).