Framework have been shipping to Australia for ages. I ordered in December 2022 and it drop shipped from Taiwan to rural Australia in about a week. It was faster than ordering parts from pccasegear though that isn’t saying much.

I have been a fan of System76 since I saw some stickers at a conference nearly two decades ago. I think they have good intentions but unfortunately a badge engineering company for most of their existence. The quality hasn’t always been there from their ODMs and foreign RMA bothers me. You can buy a clevo or tong fang from local resellers and cover it in linux stickers.

The used market in Australia is bad for most things unfortunately.

A camera in every pocket isn’t so good for the ASD kid being mainstreamed into high school with a severe phobia of having his picture taken.

Got several kids at regular public schools (not in US) and their policy never allowed phones during school hours from the start. It is pragmatic and doesn’t cause any drama. The kids get messages home if needed and can collect phones when they leave. It is a relatively normal society where kids walk and ride to school by themselves and parents aren’t obsessed with stalking kids or bubble wrapping them.

Schools have a duty of care and sadly are as much baby sitters for working parents as they are places of learning and phones create more problems than they introduce opportunities.

They are in linux forums spruiking chatgpt/copilot as well. Mods deleted my comment the last time I told them to get lost. The rampant commercialism is so frustrating. The FOSS community has done so much to empower users/developers and give everyone the tools to learn, grow and customise their systems with amazing documentation and access to source code. And it is going to be Disneyfied within a generation with the fruits of our labor locked up behind billionaire controlled subscription services in flagrant disregard of our copyright and licences. Our kids won’t know how to tie their shoelaces without paying Nadella, Altman and their shareholders for instructions.

Most of these platforms make no money but have taken huge amounts of VC funding which they have burned through. For the VCs to unload it and cash out they need to show the product can be monetised and them try and shift it before the users leave the platform. Idiot users want all the features of a product developed by lots of talented full time paid staff but don’t want to pay for it themselves so they leap from startup to startup then complain when the inevitable happens while dismissing open source alternatives as inadequate for their needs. Why should we care? I don’t.

I made an effort to only use Firefox because browser diversity is important for the web. It can be rough sometimes when things like.chromecast only work.via unstable extensions but I persist even on mobile.

I suspect the Mozilla corporate structure and leadership needs to be reviewed. They don’t seem to know where they are going and get sidetracked.

Things like lack of good cross platform support for passkeys (fido2/ctap stuff) is going to hurt them even more as people won’t be able to use Firefox to login to many sites on Linux where there is currently no blessed platform libraries for this. Unfortunately stuff like that is going to drag me back to Chrome for some stuff which handles this fine on Linux.

Prodigy is excellent. A lot of people who would have enjoyed it never got the chance to watch it.

We had the first few episodes on one of our streaming services and the whole family enjoyed them but they must have lost the rights and we never got any more. I signed up to Paramount which wasn’t always available in our part of the world mainly to watch SNW. It was very disappointing to see Prodigy episodes listed but showing video unavailable. They had a fantastic entry point into the franchise for younger viewers that still managed to keep adults engaged.

My junior high school kid said nobody his age even knows what Star Trek is. This seemed crazy to me but then I realized most people have Netflix and or Disney and Paramount+ is practically unheard of here. The movie reboots stopped ages ago. The franchise really is dead for young viewers in large parts of the world. Which makes it even more amazing how badly Paramount has handled the licensing and promotion of Prodigy.

As much as I hate the Disney Borg, they should consider licensing it to the mouse for close to free to save the franchise and create a market for licensed toys and merch. It is as good as any of the Star Wars or Marvel spin offs and it is where all the families are subscribed. Even the BBC is moving Doctor Who there.

If I didn’t have yt premium I would be ad blocking or give up and go elsewhere so I don’t know what youtube ads look like. I don’t tolerate advertising well. Do they really monetise their channel promotions? I guess that is because Paramount is going broke, and also perhaps part of why they are going broke.

It is ridiculous how Paramount region locks promotional content. They operate a global streaming service and I am a legit paid subscriber in a non-US market and probably amongst the first to view new episodes due to my timezone. They are very out of touch.

Yeah, Dawn’s Ballet or something very like it. Cool reference.

Did I hear a bit of the music from Once More With Feeling in engineering near the start?

Or maybe midgets.

It could be bunnies

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The astronauts in the ISS predominantly conduct science research and maintain the station. The only maneuvering it does is orienting itself for thermal management, orbit raising and occasional collision avoidance. A ship like Dragon 2 is highly automated. Yet a lot of astronauts are still pilots and many from the military.

Nobody would be surprised to travel on a commercial aircraft flown by an ex-military pilot.

Star Trek space combat doesn’t seem very realistic but I can understand the value of having an experienced pilot who can function under pressure. It makes a hell of a lot more sense than handing the helm of the flagship full of families over to an unqualified teenage Wesley Crusher. Picard was fortunate there aren’t more mountains in space or that could have turned out like Aeroflot 593.

It is great to see characters who were undeveloped in TOS get fleshed out. The characters feel real and motivated by their history. It beats interpersonal drama designed purely to create conflict within the crew.

I know Orville was widely disliked by critics for uneven tone because they wanted to shove it in a pigeon hole but variety is where episodal tv really shines. I don’t think Orville did this as effortlessly as SNW is currently doing but it had its moments. Given the substantial departure from Discovery and Picard I wonder if Lower Decks or SNW could have existed in Kurtzman’s Star Trek without MacFarlane showing there was still demand.

I hope they use the release of inhibitions in the musical episode to delve into the inner thoughts and feelings of some of the characters as they did in Buffy’s Once More With Feeling. The characters revealed a hell of a lot in that episode. It would be a waste to back off after this episode and not use what on the surface looks like a lightweight episode to dig deeper.

My home lemmy instance doesn’t federate with NSFW instances to reduce legal risks which I totally support for their protection. In addition to the things which are outright illegal just about everywhere there is content that may or may not be legal in some places and an individual running a small instance doesn’t have the legal funds or the protection from liability enjoyed by huge corporations. It is nice not having to worry about it when using the app in public or around family.

My kids who are now teens had ipod touches practically from birth (we got the first versions of the Ipad, raspberry pi etc). They looked so clever to non-technical people fluidly swiping puzzle pieces around on a screen in a UI language most adults at the time barely understood. Then one day I put a wooden puzzle in front of them and realised their touch puzzle apps lacked several degree of freedom available in the physical world and they didn’t know how to rotate. The physical world is so much richer in many ways and skills learned in it are often more widely applicable.

It isn’t that technology isn’t valuable and can provide a benefit. It isn’t automatically superior or more complete and some people fetishize it to a ridiculous extent. For decades kids spent a huge amount of time cutting and pasting content into powerpoint in primary schools here at the expense of illustrating, reading and hand writing because companies like Microsoft were engaged in a war for mind share. Most technical people like myself thought this was a very poor use of technology but less technical people probably thought we were luddites. I have seen my kids do animation and story telling with apps that I think is quite a good use of technology but I wouldn’t deny them the experience of doing art with physical materials which I think in most ways is more foundational.

Phones like vapes in schools are there so businesses can profit by exploiting kids. The device hardware is powerful and potentially useful with the right software but the most popular apps are generally exploitative and potentially dangerous to mental health and privacy and because the industry uses dark patterns based on gambling to drive up engagement they are a distraction and reduce attention.

My kids have a lot of access to technology and the Internet at home. I am not opposed to them having phones when they show the right level of maturity and demonstrate a real need but they don’t need them in class. Their school has had a phone policy for a long time which I support. Kids should have the freedom to be themselves at school and make mistakes without them being captured and spread via mobile devices.

I pay for Nebula but watch nebula creators on Youtube. Watching on Youtube boosts them in the algorithm and gives them a small share of premium and it is more discoverable. The problem with distributed alternatives is that using them would disadvantage creators on youtube which is their primary outlet. We may need to concede that unlike Reddit or Twitter that clearly can and should be replaced by distributed alternatives, Youtube has proven to be a natural monopoly and as such needs to be regulated to protect consumers and creators from monopolistic abuses.

As with all monopolies/cartels/prohibitions unsatisfied demand always finds alternatives. If the rules get in the way people circumvent them. Youtube premium price increases will create a bigger demand for ad blocking. Just as the balkanisation of streaming services and reduced value will return many people to piracy. The people who run these organisations are idiots who destroy brands and shareholder value to get short term attention and bonuses.