Photographer and open source software fan. I’ve also made a few tutorials at http://youtube.com/@AnAustralianPhotographer
Blog: https://anaustralianphotographer.wordpress.com Webshop: https://anaustralianphotographer.threadless.com/ where you can buy prints and other merch featuring my photos.

  • 29 Posts
  • 65 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 6th, 2024

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  • If it was me, I would go in, dressed smart casual, be on time, polite, own up to the issue, say sorry I forgot to get it renewed and I hadn’t realized it needed doing, inform the judge of any mitigating circumstances that might have distracted you and ask that because it’s your first offence if they could be lenient as there were no other aggravating factors (speeding, drunk, crashed car with injuries rtc).

    Was the car or truck in pretty good condition ?. It’s what I’d try if all indications are you are an otherwise legal and safe driver. I’m not asking for you to answer to me, but they seem relevant to a judge. I hope things work out ok for you.

    The only other thing I could think of is if someone could be a character witness but the court might not want to hear them.

    Maybe you have a good reason to ask for the fine to be waived if you have sick kids etc, or have been saving for a worthwhile cause and this would be a major setback or a penalty like losing your license would make you unable to work or look after kids.

    If you are pleasant and don’t make things harder then they might have discretion to adjust the penalty and decide to do so. But the law might also be written so the judge has no say in the penalty or a minimum penalty is required.

    I know of some drivers over here if they have an established safe driving record they can write and ask for a speeding fine to be reviewed and possibly waived (if it was just a few kms over, cant see it work gor 30km/h+ over).

    I think there’s also been a few cases where people who would otherwise have their license suspended over here get an exemption for work etc.


  • While I don’t want to say this is a perfect solution, it is a free solution, and one id checkout early, that said I’d still recommend shopping around to see what best meets your needs.

    You could get a Gmail account for the business/ website and then register for a free WordPress site. WordPress is both software you can download for self hosting and a website service where they take care of everything (for free or a price. The free version may end up with the website having ads served to viewers and only has limited upload).

    As for design, there are a few free as well as paid templates. They can also get your site a domain like yourbusiness.com , but you can get a free subdomain at WordPress like yourbusiness.wordpress.com

    If you wanted to go complex, you could self host or hire a virtual computer to host from a cloud provider, but things like making sure software is up to date and security patches applies are up to you. You might already have a server / network attached storage device which could be the server and get the domain linking to it and have your router forward incoming traffic to it, but it depends on how hands on you want to be.



  • My guess is with the protests that some of the top content creators moved away and never came back.

    I remember sorting by hot once gave a wide variety of things and now it seems to be more drama posts like AITA posts.

    Although it feels like I’m still following an ex, There was one place over there I used to visit a lot and I believe if you took a snapshot of the top ten posts of a random day few years ago and today, they’d be very different. Today’s seems to be a group picking up a trend and running with it and before it was more original content. I remember going there because I knew there’d be something new I’d likely laugh at or be amused by and now it feels heavily recycled.

    The subscriber count is still way up, but I’d you look at the online/active user count, it feels like its around 10% it was off recent highs.

    It felt like the sub had a ship of thecleus moment where it seemed to just be growing, but was also losing people until the group changed but the name was the same.

    Someone else said the new reddit gold allows people to receive real money* if people gild their posts (by spending real money) * receiver must be in certain countries.

    I saw a post recently on a wholesome memes page where someone tagged repost sleuth bot and someone else commented that todays post was literally a copy of the third top voted post of all time. It was.

    I also remember that bot support got affected and this led to a spam detector bot being moved from active development to sunset mode where it was still supported but not actively enhanced.

















  • You have a point of merging the Senate into the House.

    I’m a fan of Australia’s federal voting system. We have a house of Representatives where the country is divided into 151 regions by geography of roughly the same number of people. One in Sydney is a few suburbs, the one in the south of northern Territory is almost the whole territory excluding Darwin.

    Then there’s the Senate, where each State gets to elect twelve(six every 3 years[1]) Senators. Territories (Australian Capital Territory & Northern Territory) elect Two Sentors every election.

    Everyone in the state gets a say in who represents them as Senators and allows minor parties to get representation as only 16% of the total vote is needed to get a seat. (The Greens typically get 1-2 of seats in each State)

    So for areas with geographic issues get to have a say (rural people vote for the National party who represent farmers interest).

    And there’s the occasional independent who gets in too and some other minor parties.

    The other major difference is we have optional fully preferential voting. You can nominate anyone running in your seat as your first preference on voting day and you give everyone on your ballot a number from 1 to however many. When the Australian Electoral Comission counts the votes if the person you put first is eliminated from the count (they only get 175 votes from the 110,000 who cast a ballot), then your voting slip still counts and your vote transfers to your second choice.

    Also we have compulsory* voting here. If you are enrolled, you are required to vote and will get a small fine if you don’t. *You might think all politicians are bastards and cast an unfilled ballot paper into the box, but you have had your ability to have a say. I’ll also note that people may take the time in the polling booth to draw a penis on their slip which isn’t illegal and doesn’t invalidate the vote a long as the intention for who is being voted for is clear. There are also prepoll stations and an option to postal vote exists.

    We also have a tradition of voters getting a “Democracy Sausage” after voting. It’s common that voting stations (elections held on Saturdays) are schools and local clubs have barbecues and sell cakes etc as part of fundraising.

    In summary, I like out two house system as the Senate allows minor parties to get representation where they wouldn’t otherwise if we just had the House of Representatives. [1] we sometimes have double disillusion elections where the government has the options to call one if they keep passing legislation in the house and the Senate keeps rejecting it and in that case all seats are vacated and the states elect 12 Senators, but it’s not normal.