Some things are going to depend on your climate, so what has worked for me may not be a good fit for you.

That said, things I’ve had success with as a lazy gardener in a cool temperate climate:

• beans: pick every few days and eat fresh; keeps producing through the season
• lettuce: choose a variety from which you can pick a few leaves at a time rather than harvesting the whole head
• silverbeet/chard and spinach: pick leaves as needed
• Jerusalem artichokes: takes all season to grow, but produces an abundance of tubers; use them like potatoes
• leeks and spring onions: use the green part, leave the roots in the ground and it will regrow
• radishes: quick to grow, can be eaten fresh or cooked
• beets: can pick occasional leaves to eat while the roots are growing
• perennial herbs (rosemary, thyme, oregano, chives)
• parsley
• Asian greens (pak choy, choy sum, tatsoi, etc)

Mostly those things have grown with little attention from me apart from water when it’s dry. Many of them can be grown easily from seed, which is cheaper than seedlings but takes longer.

Let a plant go to seed and you get more for free. Leeks, spring onions, radishes, leafy greens, parsley are very easy to do this with. Save a few Jerusalem artichoke tubers for next season’s crop. Let a couple of bean pods dry on the plant, save the beans and plant them next season.

If there is a community garden near you, that’s a great place to ask for advice about what grows well in your area. They may also be able to help you get started with seeds or cuttings.

This.

And there are options that store the data locally on your phone rather than on a company server. This is the safest option.

Regional Australia (New South Wales).

Petrol prices are the highest I’ve ever seen. I guess that’s true everywhere.

But also, on Weds when we went to Canberra we drove past two petrol stations with their signs turned off (suggesting they were completely out) — one in the city and one in the country. I’ve never seen that before. The country station was back on when we passed again a couple of hours later.

I grew up in the USA and live in Australia. I think of and refer to myself as both ‘expat’ and ‘immigrant’.

Which word I use depends on context. I’m an American expat (context: my relationship with USA), but I’m an immigrant in Australia (context: my relationship with Australia).

I guess I’m really just using “expat” to mean “emigrant”. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

My current cats have Opinions (capital O) about what is or isn’t food. I tried giving them variety, at least in flavour. They don’t want it. The want one specific brand of fish-flavored wet food (in jelly, not gravy). They’ll eat some kinds of fish-flavored kibble if wet food isn’t available. Anything else, they have to be pretty desperate.

At least they both like the same stuff! But the lack of variety is 100% on them, not me.

(My previous cats would eat most things. These two are just weird.)

I think it depends on how you use them.

I spend a lot of time lurking on Lemmy. I read discussions. I don’t post or comment much. There’s no social element to that experience. (This is an indictment of me, not Lemmy.)

I just recently rejoined Mastodon, and there I find myself replying to people’s posts and having short discussions even though I don’t “know” anyone. It’s not “community” at this stage, but it could become that if I continue using the platform that way. And when I made a post introducing myself, there were several comments offering direction toward finding “my people” (a.k.a. community) on that platform. It’s just up to me to make it happen.

I’m currently playing around with Debian on an old laptop of mine. If I can get the setup to a place where it feels sufficient for me to take my hands off, it could be the answer for this other computer.

(Thanks for DE recommendations. It does my head in trying to keep straight which ones are suited to which uses.)

I had Zorin on my own computer for a while and really liked it, but it was crashing every few days and I decided I didn’t want to put up with that. I’ll give it another try one of these days - the issue may have been resolved, or my hardware my be different by then. But I won’t use it on a computer whose user can’t do thryr own tech support.

98% of the time when they’ve had a problem with Windows, they just needed to restart the computer. (It has been impossible to convince them that computers need a full shutdown periodically, and Windows doesn’t cope with ‘always on’.)

When it’s something more than that, they either have to find someone closer to help or wait until we visit. Doing tech support long-distance for people who can’t adequately describe the problem is a losing game.

There were some broken package dependencies which I had to fix manually (a non-issue on my own device; a major red flag for this device). And after one set of updates, it needed about three tries to boot successfully (requiring hopping into recovery mode to smooth out the wrinkle - again, a non-issue if it were my own device, but…).

As best I can tell at the moment, it’s working fine with Mint installed. My concern is what happens next time something is updated or installed and I’m not there to resolve an issue.

Cats aren’t pack animals, but they do socialise with humans, other cats, and other animals. They don’t all have the same personality and some will tend to be more social than others.

In general, I would say that if a cat normally has human company most of the day (e.g. a human who doesn’t work or works from home), human company can be enough (circumstances vary). But in general, if the human(s) are gone a lot of the time then it can be lonely for a single cat. In that case it’s worth getting them a four-footed companion.

We had a cat who preferred having us to herself rather than sharing us with another cat. But we could see that she got lonely when we had to leave her by herself, so it seemed better that she had a companion cat even if she didn’t want a friend.

At our current house, the yard is open and various neighbourhood cats will come into the space. Our boy accepts two of them. I don’t know if they are “friends”, but they come to visit and he’s chill with them. Any other cat coming into the yard, he tries to fight off. Some fascinating cat politics going on.

I have actually gotten shipping notifications from Amazon when I placed the order on eBay.

Several times I have purchased an item on email only to have it arrive from Amazon. The sellers were using both sites and there was no way to tell from the eBay listings. Big sad.

This instance might help you: https://lemmy.world/c/keeptrack (Someone else doing similar.)

If it’s their original thought, or I’m including their comment on the thing they shared, then I include the username.

If they’ve just reposted an image with no extra commentary, I only share the image and not where I found it. Since “where I found it” is not the original source, no attribution is necessary imho.

Prequel to Wall-E.

So I’m an American expat living in Australia. Australia has had the option to file directly to ATO, electronically, longer than I’ve been here. (Google suggests since 1999? So, more than 20 years.) It’s an easy process if you have a straightforward tax return.

It never ceases to amaze me how far behind the rest of the world USA is in some things that just seem like really obvious solutions. Like… Why wouldn’t the IRS want to get tax returns filed directly from the tax payers, skipping the middleman? At least for simple returns. More simplicity, less confusion all around if they get everyone onto the same system. Less paper to wade through, by significantly reducing paper returns. Etc.

It just seems like such a no-brainer. But I guess that’s why it doesn’t work in the USA. >.<

It’s not a huge change, and day-to-day the differences will be smaller things like words that are used differently. You get used to that without even realizing it. I remember feeling very pleased the first time I naturally used the word “jumper” the way Aussies do (meaning “sweater” or “sweatshirt”).

Aussies are generally friendly toward Americans, and thanks to Hollywood they tend to feel like they know a little bit about the USA which makes them interested. (When we visit my family in the US, my Aussie husband says he feels like he is in a movie. 😆)

I have never had any problem with people here not accepting me at face value despite being a foreigner and my accent giving me away. If anything, it’s a talking point when getting to know a person I haven’t met before. They’ll often ask because they are curious, but they aren’t hostile. If anything, they tend to be intrigued that I chose to live in their country instead of my country of birth.

There are systemic differences that may or may not be difficult to get your head around. For example, I didn’t find the health care system very strange, because I was young enough when I moved here that I hadn’t really gotten my head around how it worked in the US. But when my parents come here, they won’t consider going to a doctor if they need one because insurance, even when I tell them it’s a flat fee and give them the amount the local practice charges. It’s just not the system they know.

As noted by others, Australia has its own issues with racism. You won’t escape that by coming here, though it is different. Here it’s rooted in historical treatment of Aboriginals as sub-human, and “white Australia” policies from the early 20th century. Basically white people have a superiority complex wherever you go in the world of former European colonies.

I’m not sure whether any of that actually answers your question… Please feel free to ask more if need be.

There is a resentment of international students who get partway through a course and then cry poor. Our university (and probably others) held a big campaign during COVID lockdowns to donate money, clothing, groceries to international students who couldn’t work and couldn’t get back home…

Understandable. I wasn’t aware of international students struggling when I was at uni (doubtless there were some, I just didn’t see them). COVID lockdowns and border closures were an extreme situation, and I would think there were probably some students who would have been fine normally but didn’t have the extra resources to deal with that large a curveball.

Generally, I think the rules around student visas are reasonable. You’re here to earn a degree, and that needs to be your focus… Not holding down a full-time job to put a roof over your head. Studying abroad is a luxury. (Of course, universities like international students because $$$…)

Happy to answer questions!

In Australia, the big difference between domestic and international students is that domestic students costs are subsidized by the government via a federal interest-free student loan scheme, whereas international students must pay each semester up front. That cost varies depending on what you’re studying. (Every university should have info on their website about international student fees.)

The other limiting thing is that on a student visa, you aren’t allowed to work more than 20hr/week during the semester. So you either need to arrive with a very healthy bank account or put a lot aside during summer and winter break, in order to cover cost of living in addition to tuition. I was only able to do it because my parents were covering my tuition and accommodation.

(A possible point of interest: my bachelor’s degree as a full fee paying international student in Australia ended up being cheaper than my sister’s degree from a private college in the USA. Go figure!)