@liampomfret@mastodon.social
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liampomfret

@liampomfret@mastodon.social

Consumer privacy researcher, Australian Privacy Foundation Board Member.
That Bulbagarden guy.
He/Him

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liampomfret, to random
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Well, it took him more than 10 years, but he finally got his wish and got to be popular.

liampomfret, to Eurovision
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Alright Aussie fans. Prepare your livers, our prime time broadcast of Semi Final 1 is about to begin!

liampomfret, to Eurovision
@liampomfret@mastodon.social avatar

Seems like a missed opportunity for IKEA to not be holding parties at all of their stores globally whenever the event is hosted in Sweden. Just set up some big TVs in the restaurants, get a bunch of comfy couches from the display room floor, and you’d be good to go.

liampomfret, to Eurovision
@liampomfret@mastodon.social avatar

Trying to stay off social media for a while to avoid spoilers. Us here in Australia who can’t wake up early have to wait for the prime time replays. It’s not as fun making snarky toots and hot takes if you already know who did and didn’t get through!

liampomfret, to random
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There's no way I could really go to that ZeMKI conference myself (I expect I'll be in recovery from surgery around that time), but one of these days I really need to submit a paper to something like that. Would love an excuse to write up an auto-ethnography on my 20+ years in moderation and administration of major online gaming communities.

gwit, to auspol
@gwit@aus.social avatar

This is Australia. I didn't really expect better from this country (or western Sydney cough cough), but this is just par for the course everywhere now. We've returned to an era of censoring any mention of queer people.

Being clear, this is one council, and it might not even be legal. But its part of an American-style right wing advance in Australia.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-08/same-sex-parenting-book-banned-from-libraries/103819476

liampomfret,
@liampomfret@mastodon.social avatar

@gwit Am I correct in understanding what happened here that they were only able to pass this because four councillors (out of the 15 total for that council), who would've voted against it, were not present to vote when he raised it?

liampomfret, to random
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A shout out to all the other people in Queensland with insecure casual teaching work in tertiary education, who are currently using our Labour Day public holiday as an opportunity to do assignment and exam marking, even though our timesheets will say we did it on any other day so that we're denied any public holiday loading, just because there's no other way to fit it into the week otherwise.

liampomfret, to random
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The argument that "solar can't provide baseload power" always struck me as a bit silly, even before I got our solar panels, simply because solar was never intended to be the sole provider of power, but rather part of a mix of a variety of renewable sources that combined were still cheaper than polluting fossil fuels.

Since getting the solar panels, the argument seems even more silly to me, since even on cloudy, rainy days my modest system is fully providing for our daytime electricity usage.

liampomfret,
@liampomfret@mastodon.social avatar

Heck, this little 5KW system would be fully providing for our nighttime electricity usage on most days as well, if we had a battery to store the excess power generated during the day.

I don't feel like we're doing anything special to reduce our energy consumption either. If anything, we're using more electricity now that we're not worried about having to pay for our daytime usage.

liampomfret,
@liampomfret@mastodon.social avatar

About the only thing we have done to reduce energy usage besides getting the solar panels was to invest in a new, 7 star energy efficient fridge when we moved to this new house back in late 2022. As the one appliance that you can't really ever turn off, it's no wonder that had a big impact on our electricity bills. I have to admit I really underestimated just how big an impact it would have though.

liampomfret,
@liampomfret@mastodon.social avatar

Oh, and before I forget...

I'm sure some might be thinking "so you're covering daytime electricity usage, that's nothing compared to nighttime usage".

Given that I work from home with a beefy multi-monitor setup, and with our hot water heater set to operate during daytime hours (one hour in the morning after sunrise, one hour in the late afternoon), our electricity usage during the day is typically more than our nighttime usage, even before adding an air conditioner to the mix.

liampomfret, to random
@liampomfret@mastodon.social avatar

Interested in getting a proper NAS set up. Without having used one before, am I better off just buying one off the shelf, or is it reasonable/cheaper to build one using open source software? I've still got an old Fractal Design Define R4 that would fit plenty of drives, though I expect I'd need to buy everything else — wouldn't want to run it on an old i5-4690.

liampomfret,
@liampomfret@mastodon.social avatar

@avlcharlie How much cheaper? I’m trying to move away from Windows fully before Windows 10 goes EOL, so I don’t really have much option but to get more familiar with the command prompt if I’m going to be using Linux all the time anyway. I presume rolling my own gives more flexibility for running various home services as well in addition to data storage?

liampomfret,
@liampomfret@mastodon.social avatar

@avlcharlie I figured I wanted to avoid USB drives at all. Just find some cheap modern motherboard and CPU combo that can support a ton of SATA drives on top at least 2 m.2 slots. Preferably with extremely low power requirements, so I can leave it on in idle rather than having to boot it every day.

I’m using Kubuntu on my desktop for now, though with all of the snap stuff ripped out.

liampomfret,
@liampomfret@mastodon.social avatar

@avlcharlie Yeah, RAID is something I intend to set up.

I'll admit that I'm honestly wondering at this point if it wouldn't be easiest to just take my current AM4 desktop CPU & B550 Motherboard, whack those in the old case to use as the base of the NAS, then buy myself a desktop upgrade. The local enthusiast stores here in Australia don't seem like they carry much at the lower tier for something like this.

liampomfret,
@liampomfret@mastodon.social avatar

@avlcharlie Most of the things that would use the NAS are connected to the router via WiFi 6. The NAS would be connected to the router via 2x 1GbE ports with aggregation. Shouldn’t be an issue for any spinning disc drives.

liampomfret,
@liampomfret@mastodon.social avatar

@OaaSvc If I did build my own, what CPU, Motherboard, etc, should I be buying for it to have very low idle power draw?

liampomfret, to random
@liampomfret@mastodon.social avatar

So between the solar panels we got put in a couple of months ago, and the QLD government's Cost of Living Rebate for electricity bills starting July 1st, my approximate electricity bill for the next financial year is.... $0. Got to admit, I wasn't expecting things to be quite that dramatic after I got the panels in.

liampomfret, (edited ) to Eurovision
@liampomfret@mastodon.social avatar

For those following me, this is your warning ahead of time that you may want to mute the hashtag prior to the Australian broadcasts of this coming week.

Unless of course you enjoy snarky tooting and hot takes fuelled by about 1/3 of my annual alcohol intake, in which case, I hope you'll join us for the broadcast!

drrimmer, to auslaw
@drrimmer@aus.social avatar

One of Australia’s largest superannuation funds, UniSuper, stands accused of “greenwashing” some of its investment products by mislabelling them “sustainable”. https://www.edo.org.au/2024/04/22/unisuper-faces-fresh-allegations-of-greenwashing/

UniSuper member Dr Christopher Standen has, through the Environmental Defenders Office (EDO), lodged a complaint with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).

Two of the funds that UniSuper markets as “sustainable” have significant investments in the Transurban Group, one of the world’s largest toll road operators.

“Transurban Group’s business model relies on increasing road traffic, which increases climate and other pollution,” Dr Standen said.

liampomfret,
@liampomfret@mastodon.social avatar

@drrimmer Figures. A good chunk of my super is in both the names options. Hopefully they’ll divest of this as they did Santos.

liampomfret,
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@drrimmer It does beg the question exactly how they felt it qualified for the category in the first place.

liampomfret, to random
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Received an email this morning claiming to be from the ATO, which even spoofed an official looking email (ato at gov.au), making threats. Thankfully, there were some obvious signs of a fake, like making references to “Article 1446 of the Tax Code”, which is a US thing, so I didn’t click on anything in the email. Could easily see this catching a lot of people out before they’ve had their morning caffeine though.

dgar, (edited ) to random
@dgar@aus.social avatar

liampomfret,
@liampomfret@mastodon.social avatar

@dgar If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.

liampomfret, to random
@liampomfret@mastodon.social avatar

A counterpoint to those saying the Australian government deciding to geoblock X/Twitter would be pointless given that people can get around it with VPNs.

Australian-based organisations won't be using a VPN to get around it. They'll stop using it entirely. That means lots of companies, news organisations, and federal, state, and local government entities. They're going to need to go somewhere, and that could trigger regular Australian users to follow them.

liampomfret,
@liampomfret@mastodon.social avatar

Honestly, I'm also a little sceptical that this would be the thing to get people who don't already have VPNs to start using them. Especially those who already balked at paying for an X subscription. Sure, certain power users may remain, but the bulk of Australian users of the platform are more likely to just find somewhere else to post.

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