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• Post #4470475

  This guy is making a real, physical #SpaceCadetPinball table using #3DPrinting and off-the-shelf electronics. I don't think you could target a project more accurately at me if you tried, so I've been following along pretty religiously. The third instalment is out, covering how he's designed *the wormholes* to work. There's also a playtest section at the end with a partially assembled table, and there's something special about seeing it come to life: https...

• Post #4225665

  Hey #solar power enthusiasts of #Australia and/or #Canberra, how big a system (ballpark) would you expect a household of 2 people to have? I've just been quoted $18-20k for a system with 9kW of panels and either a 9 or an 18kWh battery and that sounds like A Lot for a little townhouse. My power bill spreadsheet says I use about 18kW/day of power during winter (11-12 in summer), and that's before I add the insulation I've also been quoted on so I expect that to drop dramatically.

• Post #4114176

  Hey. Has someone made your work life a bit easier this week? Wrote a tool you found useful, invited you along for coffee, managed an office disruption, emptied your bin, shown you a cool keyboard shortcut, caught an embarassing egg that you dropped? Take a moment today to thank them for it. Give them a reason to end their week on a high. Even a one-sentence email could absolutely make their day. Boost this so others can think to do the same.

• Post #4104286

  Important question: does 'scone' - as in the baked treat - rhyme with 'gone' or 'cone' for you? Bonus: roughly where are you from, because I expect some stark regional differences?

• Post #4012638

  I made a mildly irresponsible retro gaming collection purchase this week. Price anchoring is a terrible thing - when you've seen something desirable frequently go for a thousand bucks or more, suddenly seeing one going for only several hundred looks like the bargain of the century. Especially when it's something I'd resigned myself to never collecting... but apparently it was still desirable enough to me to jump on it. Anyway - I look forward to showing a rare SEGA MegaDrive here...

• Post #3989774

  Here's a thread on how the Gravis GamePad Pro - a game controller with ten digital buttons - was made to work on the PC gameport interface, which actually only supports a total of four buttons. You've probably never actually wondered about that, but you very probably *have* wondered about where all those zeroes and ones they talk about in computing come into things, and this thread has that, too! 🧵 #retrogaming #retrocomputing #GravisGrIP #GravisGamePad

• Post #3976352

  When did active matrix LCDs become a thing in consumer #electronics? I think I've stumbled on an unasked and unanswered question in #retrogaming history and the answer hinges on the above question. #AskFedi

• Post #3926688

  She came out of the factory a bit wrong, but we still love her dearly. #Cats #CatsOfMastodon #SiameseCat #Caturday

• Post #3705968

  Today I learned, and you should too: heatshrink label printers are a thing. They look like a normal laser printer except you feed them cartridges with white heatshrink tubing, they print text *directly onto the heatshrink* and then you put that on your wiring. Looks like they're maybe AU$100 for a bundle with some supplies. Not entirely impulse purchase territory, but the next time I'm tearing down and recabling a desk from scratch or some other massive wiring project, I'm getting...

• Post #3684769

  "...connection issues were mostly being reported in Australia's eastern states". Is this not simply a map of #Australia's population density? #Telstra (Article here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-09/telstra-outage-still-impacting-triple-zero-calls/106895430)

• Post #3596171

  Google having some issues in Australia maybe? Gmail and Youtube are dead in the water to me.

• Post #3596170

  So goose is out, fish is in now?

• Post #3524818

  Welp, that's it I guess. As of today #Reddit is requiring me to log in in order to keep using old dot Reddit dot com. That's just fucked off the last little bit of usefulness I had for that site.

• Post #3502830

  It has been zero (0) days since I compulsively tried ticking/selecting different boxes on an online form to see what, if any, logic nonsense I can make occur

• Post #3478338

  I think I have a cold and don't feel like cooking, and my usual Chinese restaurant isn't open on Mondays, so I'm scoping out other places for comfort food tonight and... oh. Oh dear. Oh no. The text on this "sign" is almost identical to what he wrote in the Facebook post, so clearly that was just copied and pasted into Meta AI as a prompt, but... this travesty was just so unnecessary.

• Post #3438481

  Hi, I'm a #Samsung washing machine, and I think the solution to not being able to drain water out is to ADD MORE WATER TO THE PROBLEM

• Post #3386505

  France: Nuclear power reactors are having to shut down because the rivers they source cooling water from are too hot (28C!), the Louvre shuts early because its climate control can't handle the afternoon heat from its patrons, and people are drowning in rivers trying desperately to cool off. I wish I was reading these things in a Michael Crichton novel, not the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/23/heatwave-france-spain-italy-europe

• Post #3339044

  Every time scientists come along and announce they've discovered the absolute highest cuteness quotient possible in the known universe, this creature simply rolls over and proves them wrong once again. #Cats #CatsOfMastodon #SiameseCat

• Post #2635732

  Recruiters and hiring folks of #Australia - full stops after dot points in a CV, or no?

• Post #2546461

  #Electronics fedi, what make and model are these tactile switches? They don't match anything I'm seeing when searching for "slim round smd tactile" and the like - everything has too big a base and often the wrong colour. Is it possible they've just rolled their own mechanism to make it super tiny? They snap satisfyingly in and out but take a surprising amount of force. These are in a weirdo gamepad I want to write about this week. EDIT: solved, they&am...

• Post #2285546

  When a website newly and suddenly demands you install an app, or create an account, or disable your ad blocker, or positively identify yourself in order to keep using it, it's telling you its charter has changed and it is no longer fit for purpose, and you should simply stop using it. The cause of this thought today is Reddit blocking its mobile site with an undismissable beg to install the app instead. It's still possible to use old dot reddit but that's frankly too muc...

• Post #2015640

  There isn't enough space in this box to *fully* explain WTF I was actually doing here and why, but I can confirm Windows 10 absolutely does not enjoy being forced to run in 640x480 resolution.

• Post #1950032

  Starting to properly look into an alternative to #Dropbox or #OneDrive. I'm currently paying AU$109/year ($9/month) for my home Office subscription which includes a terabyte of OD space. Dropbox is $184/year ($15/mo) for 2TB of space. I currently have about 100GB of data to house. Looks like it costs about AU$80/month to put 100GB of data on a webhost in Australia. Can anyone suggest somewhere priced in between that'd let me use NextCloud or similar? Boosts and suggestions welc...

• Post #1870418

  Hey #Australia / #Canberra specifically, what's the go with new water heaters these days? I've just discovered my 170L gas one is over 33 years old at this point (what a champ) and I'm thinking about replacing it pre-emptively. The current one can't quite fill my bathtub before getting tepid, I like the idea of an instant system but would a modern gas one the same size be better? Do I want a heat pump unit? The ACT has another couple decades to go with gas and I don't have s...

• Post #1601918

  The best part about seeing my metric tap-and-die set arriving in this condition is knowing that, because AliExpress fucked up, charged me for and posted two of these, I expect a second set to show up tomorrow as well, equally messed up.

• Post #1455248

  Proponents of daylight savings as a concept have never had to explain to a stroppy housecat why their dinner is an hour late. #Cats #CatsOfMastodon

• Post #1378309

  TV series pitch: neurodivergent and neurotypical are the other way around in society and being able to hyperfocus on the same thing for five hours is the norm and folks spend their time doing hobbies and making art for a living while the "divvies" do the menial tasks like cleaning and doing laundry and getting the car serviced regularly because that's what their brains are good at getting done

• Post #1271617

  Oh cool - because I turned off "connected experiences" in OneNote forever ago, it's decided today that my main notebook is "broken" in some way, and it is now in read-only mode and I must copy and paste things into a new notebook. This is for a file that has only ever lived on this computer. I turned "connected experiences" - an option under account privacy - back on, and then off again, and I can edit my notebook again. What in th...

• Post #1144176

  ⚠️ Heads up - there's a #Mastodon #scam bot doing the rounds. Mastodon does not "temporarily restrict your visibility" - that is simply not a thing here. If you see a DM or post to that effect begging you to click a link to restore anything, do not click it - report it instead.

• Post #1117614

  Have you had that "Upcoming price change for your Microsoft 365 subscription" email yet? They want to charge you an extra 50%ish for AI features, and they do *not* make it easy to find the way to turn it off. It took me minutes of searching - this is a particularly evil dark pattern. "Switch plan" just lets you pick between annual and monthly billing. You want "Turn off recurring billing" and then "Current subscription without AI&am...