www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025... Very apt: “Like much that exits Trump’s mouth, one needs to consider the timing and purpose of his utter nonsense. Trump is like a criminal fleeing the scene, pulling down the furniture to create obstacles for his pursuers.”

news.cfa.vic.gov.au/news/nearly-... - the quote that stands out for me: "Worryingly, those least concerned, and less likely to be prepared were located just 500 metres to one kilometre from bushland."

Today's review is from @sakienvirotech.com on the much discussed recent release The Turing Protocol by Nick Croydon. Fair to say, he had ... issues.... tinyl.co/3fWn #BookSky ⚡📚💙 #CrimeFiction #AusCrime

Next week I take over as Captain of the local CFA. What a time to be in the hot seat! The ESVF is causing so much heartache, and the morale of the volunteers is plummeting. We already had problems fielding crews, and I'm trying to work out how to encourage people to turn out. Wish me luck.

Today I was in Ballarat for the #ScrapTheTax #NotInOurName rally. The full entourage can be seen in youtu.be/UTZsC8HarVE?... It covers both the start and end.

We finally got some rain in Western Victoria. Drought breaking? I don't think so.

Emergency Services and Volunteers Fund www.parliament.vic.gov.au/get-involved... Please circulate widely - we need to get this tax scrapped and the government start thinking about a fairer way to adequately fund Emergency Services without putting an unfair burden on those already under pressure.

I was at the rally at Spring St yesterday protesting against the unfair and cynical ESVF. A photojournalist captured the breadth of the CFA membership in a single shot. I'm not on FB but I think everyone needs to see what the modern CFA volunteer force looks like: www.facebook.com/cnhop

As a CFA operational volunteer and Lieutenant I fully support the action being taken by brigades statewide today. The action by the state government will result in deaths. People are already doing it tough and something is going to break. Too many single car accidents already.

This is wild. Some folks on Reddit have figured out that if you ask ChatGPT how to implement tariffs, it gives you the same result as what the Trump administration is using. Link for those curious: www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/...

I just did the numbers and this assumption looks to be completely right. Let’s pause for a minute and consider how INSANE this is. 🧵

This one is interesting - 9 vehicles in total responded, it took over 2 hours. I might need to keep track of the interim updates so that information isn't lost. 3 vehicles involved in the crash, car on fire. All occupants safe with some injuries. ...

I'm not sure it is widely understood than there is almost 1000 sq km of Little Desert and 1500 sq km of Gariwerd/Grampians now burnt out. Together that is about double the size of NYC.

This was marked as Safe 2 days ago, so why is it coming up again? Typically this will be that the local crew asked for the job to be kept open so they could monitor it, so ESTA only marks it as closed once they get the go-ahead from them.

I think @emv-alerts.sushifeed.org is now solid enough for prime time. Added some extra config and a mechanism to keep its memory usage low. Happy to hear any suggestions.

Well that is just weird. It means the created timestamp is _after_ the updated. I'll have to look into that.

This is genius!

This one is interesting - it was at Responding a few minutes ago, so it may be that the unit responding couldn't muster a crew or was diverted elsewhere.

The error message in the "From" line is actually in the source data, not, as I thought, a bug in my code. Now detected and elided.

Sizes are only really reported for bushfires and grass and scrub fires. Another thing to clean up.

The SES feed is problematic. Often seem to get the same job with just enough differences to confuse the de-dup logic. Also the tags come from the 2 category fields which seem to always be the same for SES. Will try and clean that up tomorrow.

A Safe status doesn't mean the fire is out. Only that the resources on scene are enough to finish the job so others assigned can be released. Often the local crew will babysit a Safe fire overnight if conditions could result in a reignition.

Only the first update per status is posted. For Responding Resources often shows as 0. This will get updated as trucks are added - that just gets noisy. When it goes to "Not Yet Under Control" or "Controlled" the number is closer. "Safe" numbers can be lower as trucks are released before this.

Resources depend on the service, and get updated as the situation evolves. For CFA they are vehicles or strike teams. For FFMV they include people, tankers, dozers and slip-ons. A strike team usually consists of 4 or 5 trucks and a FCV (Field Command Vehicle). Trucks have up to 5 people.

As a volunteer firefighter with CFA I spend a lot of time looking at emegency.vic.gov.au. Thought I'd try putting together a feed of incidents and warnings to go to bsky. Result is @emv-alerts.sushifeed.org First go at bsky API. Interested in feedback.

Oh I'm sorry, are you crying? Are you crying because your plagiarism machine that made stuff by copying everybody's stuff was used to train another machine that made stuff by copying stuff? Are you going to cry? Cowards, losers, pathetic

Was at a fire yesterday that got big _very_ quickly. It was down to the excellent leadership of the DGOs running the response and the 100 or so CFA volunteers with more than 25 appliances and the private units that got it under control before it could hit the forest and become a major fire...

Was wondering what the temp and humidity were inside yesterday, looked down at my desk at the ESP32 I was testing on the weekend with a DHT22 sensor - looked at the wall where a RaspberryPi is mounted (long story) and 15 minutes later had a little website that shows current temp/humidity

Seeing a lot of crap about water and the #LAFires, so thought I'd run some numbers. It takes at >25,000 litres of water to put out a single small house. 9,000 buildings, not all small, so say 10,000. 2.5x10^4 x 1x10^4 = 2.5 x 10^8 = 100 Olympic pools. And that is just the houses.

For those in the areas under threat from the #LAFires - in addition to watchduty.org there is also bushfire.io - an excellent app that covers both North America and Australia and is information packed. We were glued to the screen during the fires in Gariwerd/Grampians.

Got a few of these kits to upgrade the system we have to keep our chooks (chickens) cool in summer. It comes with a digital timer that I didn't use as I have an Arduino-based system that reacts to temperature: github.com/ajdonnison/s... 1/4

First Strike Team Deployment for the season. Spent the day near Mafeking doing asset protection and containment line monitoring. This fire is now > 20,000ha so I suspect there will be a few more of these deployments over the next weeks or even months.

The cloud is pyrocumulus. It extended to more than 5 kilometres high. These can be very dangerous as they essesntially create their own weather. Luckily this one was stable.

Game on! Somehow I have to get all this back together into a working tractor before the grass gets too high.

This little chappy showed up with its mate in the last few days. Pity I couldn't get a shot when it was flying as the colours under its wings and on the body are just amazing.

Last night the moon through the clouds was a real treat - not sure I did it justice though.

I think Al Gore is starting to get annoyed at having to keep repeating the obvious at the talkfest that COP has become. unfccc.int/event/al-gor...

I don't know why but this stupid joke that my brother loved to tell when we were kids is stuck in my brain today. Hoping that putting it out here will exorcise the demon. How do you get down off an elephant? ...