Australia Post blames the increase in online shopping and have done so for decades.

They keep making “normal” mail more expensive, keep reducing delivery routes and increase time for post to arrive.

Parcels regularly travel across the globe in hours, sit at Australia Post for a week, get shipped across the country in a process that takes days, then sits in a warehouse 17 km away for 10 business days before a delivery is even attempted.

As far as I can tell, they’re in a self induced death spiral and they managed to get the one person who was actually turning it around, fired.

She now runs Team Global Express (formerly known as Toll Global Express), you might have heard of her, the first female CEO of the Year in 2015, Christine Holgate.

Given their past performance and processes … it’s entirely possible for this to actually happen.

In Australia you don’t even need to have a bowel movement to miss a delivery. Here Australia Post just drops the “Sorry we missed you!” card straight into the letterbox, without even ringing the doorbell, let alone actually having the parcel with them.

As a result, we no longer accept mail to our house and get it delivered to a post office box instead. Pick-up is at our convenience.

Thank you. Glad I’m not alone in this quest with that kind of history.

My current desktop is Wheezy inside a VM - also across several platforms, but VMware, by design , doing the heavy lifting.

Anything of note, essentially everything except Audacity, is running on a Bookworm Docker host with X11 forwarding and reverse mount sshfs, so all the container “sees” is the directory I give it.

I’ve made several attempts to move away from Wheezy, but there’s too many scripts in my ~/bin directory to make that simple.

The “fresh paint smell” experience for me comes from a docker pull or docker build, but it does require hardware capabilities that died eight months or so ago, when my 64 GB RAM iMac died. No data loss, just endless frustration.

At the moment I’m exploring EC2 on demand. I suspect that for the $10k I previously spent on hardware, I can always have the latest on tap, but I’m still trying to get real-time audio editing to not be a weekly disaster. Getting closer, but not quite there yet.

I’ll have a squiz at NixOS, seems like an interesting approach.

Much obliged for sharing your experience!

Unfortunately I can’t run Debian on my M3 MacBook Air :-(

Wow, that brings back memories. Forgot about the whole Palm thing. That was a wild ride at the time.

Thank you!

I got a T-shirt from Mozilla in the early 1990’s and foolishly wore it to death. My Linux tie pin is somewhere, but I’m sure that my penguin tie has died, as have the Debian Potato CDs with boot disks for x86, PowerPC and SPARC.

Forgot about BeOS (and NetBSD for that matter), and wonder what came of BeOS.

Why NixOS? I’ve been using Debian since Slink and am interested to hear, what made you move?

Debian Slink

Before that, Windows NT, A/UX, Solaris and VAX/VMS.

Before that, Vic 20 and Apple II

Still using Debian every day whilst navigating the perils of MacOS.

Talk to your vet.

Cat 1: “Yay, play time!”

Cat 2: “No … fuck right off and leave me alone!”

I’ve been using Linux for over a quarter of a century. Initially I spent hours attempting to come up with the best partitioning scheme but these days I pick LVM and use the defaults.

If I run out of space, I add a drive (or grow the virtual one) and grow the filesystem into the extra space.

Sometimes I need temporary space and use sshfs to mount a directory from another machine.

In other words, today you have infinite options to adjust according to need, partition schemes are not nearly as important.

Even swap space can live as a file on a normal partition if required.

That said. If you have specific use cases, check what’s required. Specifically because different uses need different attributes, it pays to check.

I miss Galeon …

• https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL112433
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_solar_building_design
• https://greenbuildingsolutions.org/harnessing-the-sun-a-guide-to-passive-solar-design-in-buildings/

There is research that shows that white coloured roofing causes increased heating elsewhere, so it’s not a fix-all solution.

I live in Australia and during summer use a lawn sprinkler on the roof. Using a tap timer, it runs for 10 to 30 seconds every 10 minutes.

Just enough to wet the roof, so that the water evaporates and cools it down.

Other things you can do is growing creeper vines over a wall where the sun hits in the afternoon to keep direct sunlight off the wall.

If you have sash windows, you can open it at the top and bottom, creating a thermal airflow that will cool the house.

Adding sunshades and building housing with awnings makes a massive difference.

Lots of research associated with passive solar temperature regulation.

Wallpaper, yeah, there’s a lot of that going around. The main feature discussed with the recent new release of apt discussed colour as the primary new feature. No mention of any actual substantive changes or reference to the impact on apt-get et al., or even a link to the detailed change log.

Why do you care about votes?

What makes you think that a defederated instance votes are still captured?

Why do you care about what happens on another instance?

At no point in your post does your question about mental health get a mention.

What are you attempting to really ask?

Yeah, all nice and peachy.

Two years ago I submitted an application for an expression of interest with a globally significant project. I received an automated response advising me that I’d be considered for every role.

A year later, after attempting to contact the organisation repeatedly, I get an email from a recruiter within the organisation saying the same.

A year later, last week, after more attempts to contact the organisation, I attempted to update my resume and discover that I cannot because I’ve been “disqualified for the role” without any indication why or when this happened.

I’ve been in my profession for over 40 years, I want to work in an interesting environment and eat food.

That combination does not appear to exist on this planet, at least not where I can find it.

I’ll note that overall job search is so broken that at one point I was told that my experience as an ICT Consultant would be suitable for the role of dog walker.