@phoneboy This is the CEO’s announcement about the free “payphones” https://exchange.telstra.com.au/why-were-making-payphones-free-for-calls-around-australia/
// @matigo @variablepulserate
@matigo From October last year, Telstra, the Big Phone Company started removing the coin slots from public phones, having made all Australian calls free as the payphone division no longer contributes significantly to the bottom line.
Some booths are also wifi hotspots for Telstra broadband customers, any data usage being charged to the user’s home internet account.
// @phoneboy @variablepulserate
Growing up on the farm with Mum a schoolteacher, we had a live-in housekeeper for 9 years until the early 1970s. In the last 20 years, we’ve fallen out of contact but one of my friends is her cousin’s son. I was able to contact him & his mother gave my phone number to the former housekeeper. She called a few minutes ago & I was able to give her Mum’s funeral details.
I was awake to observe the date & time as 22:22 hours on the 22nd day of the 2nd month of the year 2022.
Gone. My 91-yr-old mother’s suffering is over. She stepped on a a rainbow 35 minutes ago in the nursing home where she’d been a resident for the last 14 months.
Wasn’t paying attention when I bought a can of condensed milk. It’s the plant-based variant, consisting of sugar, water & rice & oat flours. Horrid filthy brown colour & just plain weird taste. I fixed it by adding a little more water then thickening the mess up with instanrt milk powder.
We (my sisters & brothers) are clearing out Mum’s clutter, especially the garage. I’m hiring a small trailer tomorrow & a friend with a towing hitch on his new car will help me transport Mum’s mobility scooter to my place. once there I can investigate the cost of having the batteries replaced & try to work out why the front brakes only work on the left wheel.
No other family member had a use for it, some days I’d be grateful for the enhanced mobility when my crook knee & hip are misbehaving.
The Mac User group I joined in 2003 hasn’t held a physical face-to-face meeting for two years, now using Zoom for its various meetings. Back in the day, we’d start at 9am and finish at 4pm on the first Saturday of each month, excluding January. The venue we used is a big Baptist Church complex & we used to hire three classrooms & an auditorium to run the interest groups held each hour in each classroom plus the auditorium for an hour-long main presentation conducted by our chosen guest speaker. Membership numbers have taken a big hit due to COVID and paying out over $1500 per day for that venue is unsustainable on just 300 members.
Nw we run the day on Zoom & members are missing the access to their friends and to the onsite café which the Church manned especially for us, normally it’s closed on weekends.
The Group’s management has come up with a hybrid structure to satisfy all needs as well as to save $1000 per hire day.
The interest group/classes will still be on Zoom on the first Saturday of each month, with no main presentation & a short lunch break, 30 minutes instead of the current 90.
Then, on the third Saturday of each month, we hire the auditorium for $400 for the day, run the main presentation for 90 minutes instead of the current 60. After that we can solve the problems of the world in the auditorium or café. The plan is to hire the room from 10am to 2pm only.
I really like this plan.
I’ve been using this device https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/B01GHKL7HQ/ref=ppxyodtbasintitleo01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 to scan & save Dad’s slide collection, or at least those of which I don’t already have copies. It’s really effective with the thicker plastic-framed transparencies because one of the feed-in attachments is a quick change magazine that can take up to 12 slides in its hopper. That attachment is useless with the thin cardboard-framed slides, they get jammed in the mechanism. For those there is a hinged frame that holds four slides at a time and you manually insert that into the slot in the side. There are indentations to enable accurate placement of the images to be copied. You can select between 5 MP & 10 MP jpgs which are stored on an SD card.
Very fast & effective with slides.
@whoisashygirl And of course, the late Qld Premier Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen referred to news conferences as “feeding the chooks.”
// @variablepulserate