Ask me about heritage railways!
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2026-07-31T18:04:26Z Event JSON
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Last Notes npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants A call for help (kinda). Mark Bau runs http://victorianrailways.net/ , which is an absolutely invaluable source for historical information about the Victorian Railways. As the attached Facebook post shows, he’s having troubles with Adobe - the site is made in Dreamweaver and it’s now become so expensive that he can’t use it and hence can’t update the website. He’s asking for assistance with an alternative program and/or help to port the site to something else. If anyone here can help, please send him an email at: [email protected] npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants https://mediacdn.aus.social/media_attachments/files/116/558/742/464/914/709/original/74a7f756a8fe2527.jpeg npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants :pakidge: npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants PSA: clean out the USB-C port on your mobile phone at least annually. Use a toothpick, compressed air is optional. You will find that the cable won’t fall out nearly as much and it will be a lot easier to charge your phone as a result. npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants CTA has a banger new billboard ad - via https://bsky.app/profile/mattbrown.bsky.social/post/3mj6j6krzm22c npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants I would absolutely buy this npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants A Croydon Tramway contractor in London has a flangeway cleaning truck called “The Traminator” and it looks just like what you’d expect: npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants Amazing things are happening in China npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants A major Australian bank (CBA) gave out the private business phone number of one of their clients - Secret Lab, a software company - to hundreds of angry customers that had disputes with different company with a similar name (Secretlab, who make “gamer” chairs), based this on results from an AI chatbot that was mining CBA’s internal databases. Secret Lab’s phone number was on their private, internal CBA profile(s) as part of Secret Lab’s CBA bank accounts. When questioned, CBA initially denied that they had used ChatGPT to do this, but admitted to it after being pushed. Quite a nasty business privacy breach, and likely systemic at CBA by the sounds of things. npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants Tony Finch’s Pro Skatebirder npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants @nprofile…zj5k Unix: “see this watch? It’s a file. my car? file. my beautiful wife? file. My perfect teeth? file. now get the fuck out of my office” npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants RIP Tom Lehrer npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants @nprofile…c5n8 I’m sorry that kvass is called *what?* npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants @nprofile…c5n8 definitely not just a disability access feature? npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants Check out this neat rock one of my fellow heritage railway volunteers found on the weekend npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants I’m not sure which is the right choice but there sure are wrong ones here. npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants 20 years ago on December 18th, 2004, the first Victorian Goldfields Railway train arrived at Castlemaine Station from Maldon. It was the culmination of 28 years of efforts by the volunteers of the Castlemaine & Maldon Railway Preservation Society to rebuild and reopen the whole 16km line. To this day it remains one of the premier heritage railways in Australia and one of a handful to have a direct connection to the Australian railway network - and still proudly operated by volunteers. npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants @nprofile…mc8d what’s his criticism, is it that the projects were delivered by the wrong political party? npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants This is what happens when you run a heritage railway and don’t do all the “unimportant stuff” like business planning, maintaining good relationships with local government and other stakeholders, and regulatory compliance paperwork. npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants “Japan was facing a national power surplus stemming from the widespread replacement of carbon-filament lightbulbs with more efficient tungsten ones. The energy savings were so remarkable that operations at half of the country’s power plants had to be curtailed. But with utilities distributing Toshiba rice cookers, increased demand for electricity was baked in.” npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants It has been bought to my attention that there is a delightful online mapping project to list the names, photos and locations of bodega cats in New York City: npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants “Transport Infrastructure Minister Danny Pearson said the three existing stations were all within 1500 metres of each other, making them the closest stations on the train network.” npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants https://mediacdn.aus.social/media_attachments/files/112/612/793/617/520/669/original/dd45b7c41ee1cd09.png npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants @npub1au2…2mr6 hmm sounds like they’re extending it for political expedience (making sure that the new contractor honeymoon period is in progress during the 2026 election) npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants In case you were wondering why the government is building the Suburban Rail Loop, I got on a 601 shuttle bus from Monash Uni just as another 601 departed and it filled to crush capacity in like 5 minutes. You can’t fix this problem - and also the crushing car dependency problem that Monash Uni has created for its staff and students, which suppresses public transport demand - just with buses alone. npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants Boost to curse a timeline with the fish train npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants Americans wondering how on earth all the Taylor Swift fans got to last week’s concert at the Melbourne Cricket Ground when there’s no sea of car parking next to the stadium: npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants The DDR (East Germany) invented “unbreakable” drinking glasses for catering that were 5 times harder to break than Western glasses of equivalent thickness. The technology didn’t survive re-unification due to it being “uneconomical” - the “Superfest”glasses were more expensive to produce and because they broke less, you would sell fewer of them. npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants The way to truly honour Franco Cozzo’s legacy is to use this mod/user-made asset of his Footscray furniture store in your game of Cities: Skylines npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants Sign of the times: the local RSL is advertising a D&D night. The new SECV should be tapping Bruce Ruxton's corpse as a renewable energy source npub1jj9ka36xd20m0kuxmwc2gjjqy7l606kyxm6vphg03zfuf3vecunsxlp68k Thermite Be Giants Reading through the Australasian Tourist & Heritage Railway Assocation (ATHRA) conference slide decks this evening and saw this slide about heritage rail in the UK. There's a reason that I consider it the Mecca of old trains, they're world leaders in this stuff just by scale alone:
