Are they now?! I'm not sure I want to ask how.

About the only thing there is a grasp of is our system of currency. And wtf is a woket network? I feel old.

With coordination with a lifeboat or other radio base and their RDF, we can triangulate transmissions to a degree of accuracy.

Apart from when those in distress cannot communicate their location, the RDF is invaluable in sanity checking a reported position, as people in distress can inadvertently use their GPS incorrectly, such as reading the cursor position instead of ownship position.

The resolution (coordinates) from RCC or decoded by the RDF will get you within 2km (non-GNSS EPIRB) or 100m (GNSS EPIRB). From there the lifeboats will use RDFs tuned to the 121.5MHz homing signal and mk.1 eyeballs to locate the beacon. Swell, headlands and coves can make this more challenging.

Typically we would not scan for EPIRBs unless we are aware of a nearby activation or have been asked by the Water Police or AMSA Rescue Coordination Centre. Most of the time we will receive a beacon resolution from them first. Nevertheless it is a useful tool that can confirm a nearby activation.

This is the Rhotheta RT-500-M VHF & EPIRB Radio Direction Finder. It is capable of DF'ing and decoding the uplink signal from EPIRBs (if within range). It uses the more modern pseudo-Doppler technique which is very fast and accurate. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppler...

Sat down at one of the ops stations at the marine rescue base yesterday morning at 6am, only to see a possum exit the roof of the 1872 cottage, and walk across the sunshade to a tree. Took a photo and sent it to facilities officer, for him to complain they only just ejected one a week ago.

Another 2 hours trying to find the download for the policy template for Notepad. Finally found it in some random .cab file on the MS website. Installed it. Literally the only setting it offered was to disable Copilot.

Microsoft engineers, are you okay?

New PCs for rescue base. Spent four hours trying to turn off all the copilot integration on windows 11, because didn't want the possibility of search & rescue incident details getting somehow into the cloud. Then opened up notepad and found an additional policy was needed to turn it off in it too.

And are incapable of self assessment. LLMs produce mistakes but never learn from them. Unfortunately this also applies to those who rely on them. They are not AI and I'm not convinced we aren't a very long way before they exhibit more utility than they cost.

I learn through patterns and visualisation. My partner has ADHD and has to learn very differently, more creative doing. It would be amazing if kids were given different strategies early in education to suit their own style, and conditions affecting learning were identified as a part of the process.

I think it's really important to understand that we all learn differently. It would be amazing if somewhere during primary school we are taught to recognise how we individually learn and how we might best structure our study to best attain skills for life and our personal focus.

:( Migraines suck.

I forgot to add "spiritual" crested pigeons to the options.

This guy is trying to build a nest in the bird bath.

I was going to say I think that's highly optimistic of you.

There are three regions in our bed. The spouse's land, the cats' land, and contested territories. The latter often being the most exposed to climatic conditions, because the others keep stealing the doona. It's always over resources.

We then feed the data to our own internal interfaces, to the website, and to weather station networks such as Willy Weather, Windy, Weather Underground, NOAA CWOP & MADIS, WoW and Awekas. We are station number 1 on Willy Weather!