I read that cats can develop dementia in similar ways to humans and my personal experience is that this is totally true.

Our elder cat tends to vocalize randomly, ignores us when we call it, tends to stare at walls for no good reason, wanders from corner to corner of the house, looks surprised and offended when we try and pet it.

Contrast that with our kitten which tends to vocalize randomly, ignores us when we call it, tends to stare at walls for no good reason, wanders from corner to corner of the house, looks surprised and offended when we try and pet it.

So yeah, I'm totally on board with older cats getting dementia just like humans.

#caturday #cat #dementia

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce93rn5g848o

Just upgraded the home router to #OPNSense 25.7 which not only updates a ton of packages, it also upgrades the underlying OS to #FreeBSD 14.3.

As usual, the upgrade was flawless and retained/converted all of my config including a bucketload of VLANs and ipv4/ipv6 BGP sessions to my ISP.

Maybe overkill if you just want a set-and-forget home router, but if you want to tinker a bit or have custom requirements, I cannot recommend #OPNSense highly enough.

Unfortunately they are not on the fediverse, but if enough of us ask, perhaps that will change...

https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=48072.msg242434#msg242434

I've just released a command-line tool from $DAYJOB called "fad" for Find Active Directories.

Written in #go for #Unix #Linux I think it demonstrates just how well suited #golang is for writing such tools and how the concurrency features can be seamlessly integrated to significantly reduce command latency. If you are new to #go, you might find it instructive.

It's at https://github.com/markdingo/fad

Give it a shot. You might find it as useful as I do!

The scariest thing I learnt from "fad"?

Running it on a Windows machine and realising just how much un-prompted download activity goes on in the background and fills up your home directory with all sorts of goop. Scary stuff!

Few creatures better embody the notion of peaceful coexistence than the manatee. Slow-moving and largely indifferent to human affairs, these aquatic herbivores graze on seagrasses and algae in the shallow coastal waters of the Americas and West Africa. Yet despite their unassuming nature, manatees are increasingly at the mercy of human activity.

#ManateeAppreciationDay

By Rhett Butler
https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/03/manatees-in-peril-as-human-pressures-push-gentle-giants-toward-the-brink/

The greatest tragedy of modern democracy is that the skills and knowledge needed to win an election and the skills and knowledge needed to govern are two completely different things. Sometimes diametrically opposed actually.

One of my favourite countries is #Denmark. Nice people and compassionate political policies - not forgetting a ton of push-bikes!

Anyhow, I was looking at the size of Denmark recently and realised that from North to South it is just a tad longer than my next turn according to my map app (total trip was about 2,000km one-way).

It's sometimes easy to forget the vastness of our distances here in Australia and how that influences our thinking. Not that everyone embarks on marathon trips, but it's not uncommon.

Not sure it's entirely scientific in terms of participant selection, but there is an interesting survey on Men's perception of child play run by someone at Monash Uni (my alma mater).

https://monash.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9S2nMOFhByUFRRk

To my mind, the undercurrent is that well-meaning men have severely curtailed their interaction with children because pedophile arseholes have tainted the landscape beyond repair.

I'm not looking for sympathy and I'm certainly not looking for "just some men" excuses, but it hurts me to the bone that I will never be able freely interact with children excepting under very constrained circumstances.

I know @NewtonMark is an avid observer of the first annual sightings of #HotCrossBun sales but at this stage I think the vendors are just trolling us with an availability date just two weeks after Christmas.

After all, it's still more than four months to Easter for Christ's sake!

Not sure I'll get much reach with this, but if you're in #Australia perhaps boost if you can't answer directly?

We have a simple proposition. Our non-profit club would like to reward some volunteers with fungible cash for their extraordinary efforts as opposed to tacky t-shirts or unwanted coffee mugs.

Gift cards seem to be a total scam or at the very least "captured money" according to the brilliant Chris Kohler.

So is cash the only realistic option for a totally frictionless gift in 2024?

Who knew? SEA-ME-WE3 was retired a few days ago.

39 cable landing stations (including Perth), 33 countries and 39,000km of cable. Owned by a consortium of 92 investors (mainly Telcos).

Doubt we'll see a cable system like that again.

https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/asia-australia/smw3/smw3-retire

I get that #openBSD, #netBSD, #FreeBSD and #DragonFlyBSD have different agendas and ideologies and a certain amount of, shall we say, uncomfortable history.

But for the greater good of #BSD is it really the case that these projects are better separate?

The #BSD world has vastly fewer resources and proponents than Linux, so one has to wonder whether seperate projects dilute this tiny pool of developers to such an extent that extinction is a likelihood for some of them.

So let me get this right. 56 #CHOGM heads of government, along with their massive entourage flew into Samoa - a tiny Pacific Island about as far away from everywhere as is possible - on their government jets to talk about climate change and ecological breakdown.

Betcha one of the topics was dealing with the pesky problem of how to reduce carbon emissions.

Luckily King Charles was on hand to lend a sense of practicality and realism to the whole circus.

#AUSpol

So a completely non-essential entity that survives entirely on the largesse of the Australian taxpayer somehow feels they have the right to lambast a government for not showering them in billions and billions of dollars so they can run their little sports parade. The gall of it all is pretty impressive. #auspol

What Craig Phillips really doesn't like is his descent into irrelevance.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-23/commonwealth-games-craig-phillips-victoria-glasgow/104509444

No rational person seriously questions the absurdity of the King of England also being the King of Australia.

But the decline in deference and forelock tugging between the last royal visit and the current one could not be more stark.

The ARM joke about this being the "royal farewell tour", but the message is crystal clear: the royals are now persona non grata and they know it.

I predict they will not embarrass themselves by visiting again. Ever.

#auspol

https://www.npr.org/2024/10/21/g-s1-29159/indigenous-australia-senator-yells-king-charles

The ABC really let the side down with the Voice Referendum. Only 1 out of a 1,000 articles on ABC Country addressed the referendum in any way shape or form.

1 in a 1,000. Let that sink in.

https://michaelwest.com.au/the-voice-referendum-and-abc-country-bias/

Why do we need these "Right to disconnect" laws?

After all, how many businesses have routine emergencies such that they regularly need to contact their employees out of hours?

Surely not a fish & chip shop, or an accountant or builder or a hair-dresser or a car-yard or ...

What exactly *are* these myriad recurring emergencies which can't wait until working hours?

Is it that Australia is full of shitty bosses who insist on their paper-jam being fixed at 2am on a Saturday morning?

#Auspol

#SilentSunday A bit hard to see, but the lake is teeming with swans. They are the specks on the lake foreshore.

Just subscribed to https://www.citationneeded.news/ by @molly0xfff

A great way to stay on top of what's happening in the Blockchain/Crypto-Bro world when you're *not* infused with the Kool-Aid.

Molly is a genuine authority on the topic but is an independent author who relies on subscribers. Sign up if you can.

Edit: And if that's not enough, Molly is also responsible for @web3isgreat which is also a must-follow.

#crypto

I don't understand why so many folk on #mastodon are recommending against running your own #mail server.

The fundamental premise of the #fediverse is distributed diversity yet when it comes to email apparently centralising the whole planet to @gmail is the preferred outcome.

This is broken and dangerously wrong.

Running your own mail server is equally as valid as running your own #mastodon instance.

For the record, the memory I use is two sticks of Crucial 32GB (1x32GB) 3200MHz SODIMM DDR4 RAM (CT32G4SFD832A).

Kingston and other quality manufacturers have equally good alternatives.

Admittedly the system doesn't supports ECC, but I've never had a problem... that I've noticed!