Went to see Twisters. Needs more tornado, less pointless romance.
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2024
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Seems to be getting decent reviews. Was the plot decent?
Depends on what you consider decent. Plucky science girl has bad tornado experience, 5 years later she returns at the behest of an old friend. She's there to science but hello loud but attractive rival storm chaser. The plot you would expect from this set-up ensues.
Ah right. Standard hollywood plot applied to a twister theme. Enjoyable enough if you're in the right mood but nothing special and nothing ground breaking.
It really needed like 30% more tornado and better cinematography. Oklahoma big sky did not get the screen time it could have had..
Does anyone know what happened to kbin.social its been down for weeks and im missing my UFC threads.
After a lot of research I can say no one knows, Ernest who runs and develops it hasn't been heard from, and it may well be dead. Ernest had health issues he talked about last year, and there has been no activity on the Kbin code since last year. No one else has access to do anything with the site. Many people are giving up.
Were the UFC threads specifically on kbin.social? Or just something you accessed through Kbin? A team forked (copied) the code and have been developing Mbin as an alternative to Kbin. You can see servers here, including many that used to run Kbin. That won't help if the UFC stuff was in kbin.social magazines, though. I didn't work out where the UFC content came from.
It was a community on kbin social but i think someone made a Lemmy community for mma to replace it.
Hmm I can see [email protected] but it's not very active. Maybe you can change that!
Yeah UFC cards have been very shit lately so maybe it can be revived once a good card is put on.
What would your ideal hold 'music' be?
I've always hated these things and think music is a terrible choice as it can only ever reinforce the 'middle of the road' tastes (something I have big problems with in NZ).
But the ringer sound just reduces your brain to mush after a few minutes as well...
Would silence work, with the occasional 'you're _n_th in the queue' update? I think that's my best choice
Not silence, then people will think they got cut off.
Ambient and soothing sounds. Like waves on a beach or something.
Yes! Beach waves and bird noises or something? Sounds great!
Probably lofi or classical music but silence also works well.
I like music. You can put the phone down and still hear the constant "still on hold" sound, when it stops you know it's being answered.
Given to me it's a tool for that purpose, the actual music doesn't really matter as long as it's constant and lound enough. Probably best not to be any music I like, I'm never waiting on hold for good reasons so best not to associate songs I like with a bad experience.
I hate how the music gets stuck in my head or has associations I'd rather not mix with my displeasure when dealing with.
That and my cynical view of aussie companies trying to look local using kiwi music (while the call taker is wherever is cheapest)
Thanks to 2degrees broadband call centre wait times, I can not listen to Radioactive by Imagine Dragons without becoming annoyed.
Finally got annoyed enough with google at a glance and it's inaccurate weather that I downloaded Nova launcher so I could banish the widget. I hadn't bothered before because the latest Android versions had most of the same functionality
I'm a weirdo and so I use a launcher called KISS. There are different options but how I have it set up, it's mostly a clear screen except a search bar at the bottom with some favourites pinned above it. Then if you tap the search bar, it fills the screen with a list of the most commonly used apps. Or you can tap a button on the side of the search bar to see all apps, or start typing the app you want.
I also have gestures set up, so I swipe different directions on that blank home screen to open different apps.
I was previously using Pie Launcher, where there are no apps or widgets on your screen until you tap and hold and a circle of your pinned apps appear, then you swipe to the one you want to open. KISS was a bit less frustrating for others to use, but still a bit haha.
I love it though. For a long time I had the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day on my wallpaper, so having a clean home page meant I could see the picture really well.
Oh wow, I forgot about APOD!
I loved some of their colourised nebula images
That sounds fun actually.
I just have some folders with frequently used stuff, and one whole screen devoted to a non crap weather widget (Weawow) a search widget, and Agenda Widget.
I use persistent notifications for a few things, and occasionally apps get promoted to the home screen temporary, for example when I go to the USA in September I'll dig up the airnz app out of the app drawer.
Some of that's general laziness but also at some point I just lost interest in customisation for the sake of customisation and I tend to only go looking for options when I'm annoyed with something or if the amount of slack I can gain from customising will outweigh the effort.
I had the same background picture for like 6 years. Got bored enough during lockdown that I changed it, but then had to redo my colour and icon scheme.
Someone gave me a tandem kayak! It's a Sisson Southern Light, a very old design, and possibly older than me. It needs a few maintenance items, a few scrapes being painted over, and some new lines, but is overall in amazing condition.
The hull length is 6.2m, with the rudder adding further to that. I plan to take it out Sunday.
Awesome! My mother-in-law calls tandem kayaks "divorce boats".
I've heard that one a few times before actually, it's not entirely unfair either.
The annual fucking of Wellington commuter trains by icy overhead lines has begun. If only there was some kind of power source nearby that could be tapped into and used to deice the lines...
Other options are a deicing spray, like what is used on aircraft, both at airports and in flight, or some type of heater that has a heating element directly on the wire.
Turning an old unit into a deicing train wouldn't be massively difficult, I would think.
I'm wondering about the heating thing. The cables already carry current. Normally for electric heating you'd have electricity going through a wire with high resistance to make the heat. So you'd think you'd run such a wire along the length of the cable. Putting fan heaters everywhere isn't going to be efficient, you need it on the wire in the place it's needed.
But if it's on a live wire, can that work? Or would it just become part of the larger wire and not heat up as the electricity flows through the path of lower resistance? Plus the risk of the pantograph damaging the heating wire.
This is how power line deicing works on systems overseas. You need two legs to the circuit, so it would involve either isolating lines from each other on double track, or earthing out the end of the lines, and using the tracks as a return path.
The option I was actually thinking about was having a heated pantograph of some type.
That's really cool! It sounds like they switch the section to a separate circuit and then pile a carefully controlled high voltage current into it to warm up the line without melting it. But it also says the line remains operational, if I'm reading it right. Not sure how you send too much power through the line without affecting the trains using the line.
Anyway, it sounds like this is the only system like it in the world, and it was installed after heavy snow caused a collapse of much of the network. What I take from that is that it's probably really expensive to install, and probably not worth it in Wellington. One of the ice scraping pantograph options probably makes more sense.
I guess for your heated pantograph option you'd run it on a special de-icer train at low speed? I would think melting the ice off via a pantograph would take a really long time.
The line is out of action while deicing is taking place, but only for the shortest amount of time necessary.
That's what I'm thinking, yes. Although you could pump a lot of heat into the pantograph, and pair it up with a scraper at the same time.
It wouldn't be able to run line speed, but it would be reasonably fast, I'd think.
Ah yes paired with a scaper that would be quite effective. I was thinking you melt it but then the heat is gone and the cable is still frozen so it would refreeze. But if you soften it with the heat then scape it, that could work quite well.
Probably not much chance of getting it implemented in Wellington, though. There might be a slim chance if there was an off the shelf solution, but from my reading into this is seems everything is quite custom.
It's been done with power lines overseas, where they somehow increase the current in the lines to heat them up to shed ice.
No idea how it actually works though, I'll have to look into it.
I'd love to write the business case for a deicing unit.
I guess the question is how to efficiently heat the lines. Not really feasible to install fan heaters all the way along. Heating up the wire itself may not be that easy.
I went looking and found that some solutions are to either use a specially equipped ice cutting diesel engine, or some trains have a separate pantograph (the thing that goes against the wire) that is designed to scrape the ice off just ahead of where the power collecting pantograph is. Some interesting bits in this blog post.
It links through to this page that has photos of the ice cutting pantographs, though not in action.
Oh neat. Unlikely to happen here, I think.
I've been looking at our electricity usage and discovered our meter stopped reporting it's usage a few months ago - that really skews things!
I chucked in a manual reading which wasn't too far off their estimate, but I'm irked that 'something' has stopped talking. Gave it a few pokes to see but no new data. On the ph to provider now, jooyyyeeee. Powershop really do have some strangely funky hold music, it's quite enjoyable - pity it's mono and basically 8kHz or whatever the phone lines do to muddy everything!
Also, is it just me or have many of the gentailers stopped publishing their actual rates / seeking new customers?
My son bought a cold home last week which is working it's way through the house. Sucks...
A few years back we would jump broadband and power companies every 12 months because there were always great signup deals. These days it's really hard to find great deals! Plus the move to having plans between providers all slightly different so you can't directly compare them.
We also have a cold going through the house. My brain hasn't been working since last week so I'm guessing my body is fighting (and maybe losing) a battle against the cold.
Hi everyone! My big news is when I got my last covid jab I bounced back from it in just over a week. Didn't mention it earlier in case I jinxed myself. This is the first time ever that it hasn't knocked me back hard.
So I sort of feel like this year I've got an extra 6 weeks in the year!
Used some of it to visit family for a week. Also, got to hang out with a really cute dog. I love how earnest dogs can be about stuff, it's really endearing.
Exciting! I guess practice makes perfect.
Maybe they mixed it up wrong and forgot to put the vaccine in? Just kidding 😋
That seriously did cross my mind when I found I wasn't bed bound! I did get the dead arm and that hard sore red patch around the site though, so they definitely injected me with something!
But yeah super happy about it. 😃
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