I haven’t done any myself, but the Tharwa forge runs a few knife making courses that look interesting (and from what I’ve read elsewhere they seem to get positive feedback).

It’s a Gang Gang Cockatoo - one of the less common parrot species found mainly in areas of higher country bushland like around Canberra. They’re also the faunal emblem of the ACT. Up in the bush in the Brindabellas or in the Botanic Gardens are good places to see or hear one of these interesting birds (they make a very distinctive call so you often hear them before seeing them).

Pretty happy it’s Friday, looking like a nice weekend coming up.

Floriade kicks off this weekend, it’s looking like nice weather for it too. Best to avoid Commonwealth Avenue if you’re not planning on going as I expect there’ll be a fair amount of traffic…

Probably you mean “before I was voting age” rather than “before I was born”. The last referendum wasn’t that long ago

I mean I too feel the 90s weren’t that long ago, but it has been long enough that I wouldn’t assume they misspoke on that one. After all someone born when that referendum happened would turn 24 this November, so there’s a good number of people old enough to vote in this referendum who weren’t around in '99.

Looking at the forecast you’ll be wanting the summer clothes by the end of next week, though in classic Canberra fashion there’s likely another cold snap or two waiting in the wings.

Yes, that many people trying to get in and out does tend to clog up the surrounding roads.

As a related tip I’ve found that approaching from the north and using the secondary entry/exit a little north of the main gates on Flemington Rd is usually faster - not as many people access the carpark that way and those that do are generally less confused as to where they’re going.

Friday/Saturday was a pretty good attempt at second winter, pity I was working on Friday or I’d have gone up chasing the snow that was forecast to be falling then.

Welcome to the first daily thread for this corner of the world.

I’ve used lemmy-post-bot to generate this post as helpfully suggested in the post that prompted this, it should create one automatically each day from now on. If it’s all looking a bit too quiet in the daily threads I’ll consider modifying things to make a weekly discussion thread instead, but I figured this is worth starting with.

Thanks, I’ll check it out

Sounds like a good idea, I’ll have a look into what’s available for lemmy bot options over the next few days.

I’m quite happy to be preempted on that though if anyone wants to start their own bot posting daily threads before I get organised.

As an aside, how about that storm going over now? Some pretty good lightning and thunder happening over my way…

I’ll wait a little bit for a manned register, particularly if I’ve got a lot of stuff or items that will give me grief at the self checkout (e.g. really light things). I’m not going to hang around for ages but I’ll take the inconvenience of losing a couple of minutes over the inconvenience of dealing with a self serve checkout.

Yes,that was a concerning scenario - all it’d take is changing the radio station or something interesting on the side of the road and you’d likely not have enough time left to swerve.

Rider was very lucky in that last clip, few cm over and it would have got their leg/foot.

The Queanbeyan-Cooma section is beyond use for trains due to loss of bridges and being cut off by the highway a couple of times, but it does seem a pity to also lose the Cooma-Bombala section if there’s a chance of running trains on it again (particularly as someone who likes the idea of historic trains). Unfortunately the rail trail group isn’t wrong about the expense of duplicating a trail alongside the track - it’d be a lot of money to keep both ideas. Maybe the rail trail could start with just the Queanbeyan-Cooma run, I reckon that’d attract a few people even without the Bombala extension.

NSW already does this and it doesn’t seem to have reduced the rise of larger vehicles, though admittedly the price difference isn’t massive for most cars (e.g. a Camry would fall into the $330 category while a Hilux would be $505).

Better be quick, I hear you have to deal with that sort of problem within 3-5 minutes…

Seems like people should stop spending effort on finding a good walking stick mid walk and instead just look around at the start of the track for one that was good enough for someone else to bring all the way back…

I’d be happy to reduce the amount of times I have to deal with providing multiple forms of ID, particularly the insanity of having to get copies certified for places that then expect you to email a image of said copies (therefore defeating the whole point of a certified copy).

I am dubious that a digital ID will actually end up making things easier though, I give it pretty good odds that it’ll just be an additional hoop to jump through. I also have reservations about what happens when the digital IDs are compromised, because that’ll happen at some point no matter how secure the system is claimed to be.

Edit: Relevant XKCD

I would certainly have appreciated that last month - did a ~1000k run up the coast (and back a couple of weeks later) with the vast majority of that on dual carriageway highways that could have been driven at much higher speeds without compromising safety. As it was I just stuck at a true 115 most of the way, but shaving a couple of hours off that trip would have been nice.