I have a bicycle crate in my rear rack (40L from memory). I can just throw my backpack and/or shopping in there and be on my way. No issues transporting when empty. I avoid riding in the rain but I guess a waterproof bag would help for that. It’s durable, the main concern is the rear rack. I had to replace the cheaper rack that I bought last year after the welding snapped in a few places over time (I had it held together with duct tape for a while). My new rack should be much more sturdy this time around.

I have access to borrow a car which I do every few weeks so I don’t need to over engineer my bike setup too much.

Yeah 100% agree. I put in a submission to the joint select committee on social media a while back saying as much. The concept has Meta, X, Microsoft, Google and the big players in mind. Even if it is just the big players it’ll have unintended consequences, privacy being the main one. Digital ID providers, public or private, not using standards and only supporting Google Play and Apple App Store is a big issue.

I personally don’t care about the concept of the eSafety Commissioner that much. I think the idea of a government body that looks at cyberbullying cases is possibly misguided (way too high up) but I’m not overly concerned with that aspect. Julie Inman Grant is ex-Microsoft and ex-Adobe, two organisations which are pretty hostile to users’ rights. She is constantly requesting more powers to solve an unsolvable problem. There are massive problems with X and Meta, but some of the solutions she puts forward are just draconian like mandatory ID and client-side scanning. Their strategy page is a thinly veiled pro-big tech piece talking about concerns about potential lack of authority in decentralised computing.

Yeah, eKaren is really not far off the mark as far as name calling goes.

On one hand, the hate that’s being directed to the e-Safety commish is disgraceful.

On the other hand she is effectively proposing an internet licence for all Australians to be able to interact online via mandatory age verification. It applies to all social media sites but the definition of social media is so vague it basically just says a digital service which can be used to communicate with other people. She is deserving of our scrutiny.

https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Joint/Social_Media/SocialMedia/Terms_of_Reference

Yeah it is a bit of a pain. I currently only have a few users. Tooling-wise there are ways to tail the journals (if you’re using journalctl) and collate them but I haven’t gotten around to doing this myself yet.

That’s awesome - great to hear about Linux desktops bring used by non-techies especially in a company.

How was it received out of interest?

At work we use separate clusters for various things. We built an Ansible collection to manage the lot so it’s not too much overhead.

For home use I skipped K8s and went to rootless Quadlet manifests. Each quadlet is in a separate non-root user with lingering enabled to reduce exposure from a container breakout.

The company behind GitLab is seeking buyout offers, so make of that what you will.

My employer uses GitLab CE and it’s pretty good, and it is FOSS. The EE version is “open core” so not really FOSS.

If I were starting from scratch I’d be looking into Gitea/Forgejo as well.

Maybe a bit of a case of sour grapes on both sides? The Greens nearly took Fiona’s seat last election at 47.7% to LNP’s 52.3%. The ward office window was smashed and tensions were high. No excuse for it but the garbage that the LNP posted out was… truly garbage.

In my country that would be a civil offence, not criminal.

I’d recommend at least taking some precautions (e.g. use TLS or Wireguard, firewall if possible).

There have been many improvements in making documentation more inclusive across the IT industry which shouldn’t be scoffed at. The first that comes to mind is changing “master” and “slave” to “primary” and “secondary” (or “replica” etc.) because references to slavery is inconsiderate to many.

I don’t think pile-ons are productive, but I think inclusive language and thinking is important.

I stand corrected, thank you. I’ll have to try that out.

The biggest issue I’ve had with I2P so far has been lack of content.

postman.i2p only permits torrents which includes its tracker in the torrent file, which means popular torrents from 1337x, TPB et al can’t be uploaded there (at least not without changing the infohash). Torrent clients like qBittorrent and BiglyBT can cross-seed on I2P and clearnet networks which is a recent development since libtorrent 2.0 came out (software packages take a while to bump to.the latest library), but from what I’ve tested nearly all of the infohashes I put into my client from “clearnet” torrent sites have stalled, probably because I2P is a little too bespoke at the moment.

The potential is definitely there IMO, but unless you’re just watching mainstream movies and TV it’s not a replacement for clearnet/VPN.

If I’m missing something I’d like to know :)

It will use tons of public sector resources and attention regardless if it’s PPP or a state asset.

Just look at the recent Logan/Gateway Motorway upgrade (Logan Enhancement Project) which Transurban financed for $512M. There was least $30M of government spending directly afterwards on an adjacent road, and likely more than $100M to come.

No doubt a $7b tunnel will similarly result in $100Ms or even billions in adjacent road spending.

There are different types of cycling. I would always wear a helmet to work because I live 6km away and it’s a decent ride. There are hills and I often get to a reasonable speed.

Compare that to someone living in South Brisbane commuting to the CBD, or someone going for a leisurely bike stroll on the riverwalk - they may not go fast at all. We don’t wear helmets whilst walking or jogging, but why is it mandatory for a slow ride?

The big reason helmets can be offputting is because they can mess up your hair. If the city wants to encourage people who live relatively close to their jobs to ride in, more flexibility on helmets could be a good thing.

FWIW I do think helmet safety should always be encouraged. Riding down a hill? Going more than a leisurely stroll? Wear a helmet. Makes sense. But it’s really not that necessary for people who are riding slow.

You can definitely work in an office job, bring your clothes in your bag and get changed at work.

If that’s not your thing, catch PT. Nobody’s saying you have to do the cycling thing. But plenty of people ride into offices for work and wear their smart clothes just fine.

I ride all year round in Brissie. I find my comfort level depends on when I ride, distance, speed and my bike setup.

First, I ride to and from work in the morning and arvo when it’s cooler, not in the middle of the day.

I ride 6km each direction which is manageable. In winter I barely break a sweat. In summer I have a shower on each side. I can and sometimes do get away without showering by riding slowly. Or I just catch PT if I’m going somewhere else after work.

The other thing I noticed is that not wearing a bag helps a lot with reducing sweat on my back. I have a basket on the back of my bike and just throw my bag in. A lot of other people use pannier bags.

Everywhere that I’ve worked so far has had an End of Trip facility except for my supermarket job as a teenager.

Same guy who talks about woke greenies attacking his “way of life”. The more I hear from that guy the less respect I have for him.

Meanwhile I’ve been arguing with council about getting bike racks at a new-ish shopping centre (a few years old) that is legally required to have one.

(Technically they do have a bike rack, but it’s on B2 of the carpark hidden behind a car wash and completely unsigned)

Bash scripts will only get you so far and I can wholly recommend Ansible for automation.

Basically the main advantage of Ansible is that its builtin tasks are “idempotent” which means you can re-run them and end up with the same result. Of course it is possible to do the same with bash scripts, but you may require more checks in place.

The other advantage of Ansible is that there are hundreds of modules for configuring a lot of different things on your system(s) and most are clear and easy to understand.