Nath

I know - you're very probably already sixteen. That's why we are here.

If you've managed to miss the coming change in the law, I envy you. This silly law has taken up several hours of my year that could have been spent doing something more productive like watching Golden Girls.

But, the law is here now and we need to take "Reasonable Steps" to ensure that everyone is over sixteen. If you are wondering what "reasonable steps" is, then join the club. Nobody really knows. What I do know is that we have to start to make an effort to be sure that no young'uns are here against the law.

To that end, we have hired a helpful bot called Molly. She's an expert at being sixteen and she's just been told that it's her job is to verify all your ages. Here she is:

What's next? Well, in the first phase we ask that you drop her a Message that verifies you are over 16. She doesn't want to see your government ID. Some ideas that she would accept are:

1. A passenger takes a photo of your username on a sheet of paper with you driving (please don't make this one a selfie). Faces not required.
2. A photo of your username with a glass of alcohol at a bar.
3. A convincing spiel that would only come from someone older than sixteen (Can you tell Molly who Samantha is?). Can you tell her about the Breakfast Club that only 70's/80's kids from Queensland would know?
4. Anything else you can think of that only someone over sixteen could/would do.

There's no need to spend a lot of time on this. At this point, I'll go through the users who have messaged her and compile a list of people who have verified their age. You can be creative. Just be aware that there's an infinitesimal chance (but not zero) that whatever you send may be sent to some government agency to demonstrate that we are complying with the law.

Frequently Asked Questions:

1. How do you know that the user isn't faking their submission? I don't. No method is perfect, we saw kids defeating intricate and expensive verification systems earlier this year. Kids are smart.
2. How do you stop a kid from moving their account to one of the thousands of non-Australian Lemmy Instances and just continuing on with their day? I can't. The fact that the law is totally ineffectual in the context of Lemmy is beside the point. We clearly meet the definition of a Social Media platform according to the law, and we are based in Australia. So we have to comply, even if it is pointless.
3. Are you aware that this is pointless and kids are going to get around it? I know that teenage-me sure would have. But again, that's beside the point. We need to comply with the law.
4. Will you accept a photo of me in my undies? Ok, this one isn't frequent from previous discussions on the law, but I wanted to include it in case. Please don't send NSFW photos to show you are over age.

... and twenty percent of the web.

The timing of this being posted right before Melbourne Cup day is obviously intentional. It's the few days of the year most Australians pay any attention to horse racing.

This was a brutal read. I knew horses and jockeys died occasionally, I didn't realize how frequently horses died. I also had no idea how many people worked in the industry, nor how much money was in it.

As I'm sure several people noticed, we had an outage this morning. The cause was the aussie.zone SSL certificate expiring.

That's not supposed to happen, certbot and letsencrypt are supposed to handle that renewal automatically without bothering a human. I'll add some sort of monitor on the certbot log to look for errors and notify me going forward.

It also occurred to me that while my unofficial policy in the event of an outage is to make a post from my aus.social mastodon account, I haven't exactly communicated this to anyone. Nor have I communicated that I'll get a notification pretty quickly if you @ me there.

If the site is down for more than 10 minutes and I haven't made a post on aus.social about it, I probably don't know about the outage. Feel free to ping me on mastodon to bring it to my attention.

On the face of it, my old work laptop should be perfect for Linux. It's Intel based, drivers are very mature, it has a hefty CPU, 16 GB RAM and a zippy SSD. It was a beast in its day, and it should be able to re-live its glory days as a Fedora box.

My problem is Fedora has moved away from x11 and gone all-in on wayland. But the GeForce 650M GPU this thing shiped with is no longer supported by Nvidia drivers. I need to use the 470 version, which doesn't seem to work with wayland.

Has anyone gotten akmod-nvidia-470xx/xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-470xx working on Fedora 42? Would I have better luck trying a XFCE spin and installing KDE onto that?

UPDATE 24 Hours Later:
I had mostly answered my question with the idea of changing to the XFCE spin. I wiped it and reinstalled that spin which loads LightDM and an x11 environment. I got it working with that starting point. The irony is: I think I may have actually got there on the old spin also - for some reason the 6.16.9-200.fc42.x86_64 kernel won't display the LUKS prompt with those 470 drivers loaded. I thought it just wasn't booting. I'll never know now.

It's still a bit glitchy, but I think I'll sort the remaining issues out. Sometimes when something calls OpenGL, the display goes glitchy, but loading nvidia-settings restores things.

Hi, this is Joe Brumm, the creator of Bluey.

I’m writing this to share some Bluey news – some good, some trifficult.

Let’s start with the good – after some time spent away from the series, working on another project, an old idea resurfaced and before I knew it, I’d written a Bluey feature script that I really love. Fast forward through a tonne of contracting and we’re about to embark on making an animated Bluey movie!

Now, for the trifficult. I always said I wouldn’t keep making the show if I thought I couldn’t make any new season as good as the last. This would have been the case for me with a potential season four, so I’ve decided to take a break from my involvement in the TV series. In the event I can’t wrap my head around doing more seasons myself, The Sign will mark my TV finale for Bluey and I wrote it as such.

Bluey has completely changed my life. It’s been an immensely satisfying thing to be a part of, more than I can really put into words. To walk away from it while it’s at such a height will seem crazy to some but, for now, I am finding it difficult to reach back genuinely into that four to six year old world and write authentically.

My Bluey crew and all the creative people in my life completely understand my decision. Working with that wonderful group of people has been the absolute highlight of my animation career and I hope Bluey on their CV is a badge of pride for them.

To be clear, this is not an announcement about the end of the show, but it is an acknowledgment that my focus will be on the film.

Thank you for taking this show into your homes, the whole experience has been an impossible experience to describe.
Joe Brumm. Creator of ‘Bluey’

#The West Australian - 06 August 1951

PERTH'S COLDEST DAY WE HAVE SEEN EVER
On one of the State's most boisterous winter days, Perth yesterday had its coldest day on record, with a maximum temperature of 48deg. Sharp falls of snow occurred in the Stirling Ranges and almost continuous hail fell at Albany.
A record was established for Perth when the mercury reached its highest point of 48deg. at 12.40 p.m.
This followed a temperature of 46deg. at 9 a.m. and 45deg. at noon. Temperatures after noon were: 1 p.m., 47deg.; 2 p.m., 46deg.; 3 p.m., 47.1deg.. The lowest maximum temperature ever reported in Perth previously was 49deg. on July 20, 1890. The coldest day was June 20, 1905, when the maximum temperature was 49.4deg. The lowest maximums recorded in August were 50deg. on the 20th of the month in 1892 and on the seventh of the month in 1900. An officer of the Weather Bureau said last night that the cold weather would continue in the southern-half of the State for the next day or two. Showers were expected gradually to contract to the south coast. From 9 a.m. on Saturday to 7 o'clock last night 106 points of rain fell in Perth. This raised the month's total to 215 points compared with the August average of 570 points.

Perth is hosting a series of friendly games between Australia and India. The fourth and final game is 6pm Thursday evening at Perth Hockey Stadium (next to Curtain Uni).

The skill and speed of these guys is incredible to watch. I was at the game on Saturday and had a great time. Hockey is huge in India compared to here, so don't be surprised if the crowd is a lot closer to 50/50 that a home game in Australia would normally be.

Games are free. Get there around 5:30 to get decent seats.