Overspark

When I was a kid 320x200 was the best you could do on a (Commodore 64) monitor. With 16 colours! Which was a lot, because PC’s at that time could only output 4 colours at once on that resolution (CGA). We’ve certainly come a long way since then.

Arch in the front, Debian in the back(end). I run Arch on my laptop and Debian on my homeserver. I’ve ran Debian on laptops before and if stable is getting older hardware support can be a struggle, much better on a rolling distro like Arch. And having all the newest toys on your desktop is very very nice. While on my homeserver I mostly want stability, everything else runs in (podman) containers anyway.

Cachy is a distro I would consider, because it’ll theoretically give you slightly better battery life due to the optimised compiles, although I’m not sure you’ll ever really notice. Manjaro has a reputation of breaking far more often than Arch does, so that one’s a no for me.

The price of electricity in a country usually has nothing to do with whether power lines are run above or below the ground. Very often a large part of your electricity price is determined by taxes and subsidies for example. And in my country (the Netherlands) the suppliers of electricity are different companies than the ones responsible for the power network too. Like Sweden we haven’t had residential power lines running above ground for half a century or so, it’s pretty uncommon in (Western?) Europe.

Yeah they would, as multiple countries with a better standard of living than the US have already been doing it for quite a while.

I might get downvoted for this, but Breaking Bad. I made it into the second season, constantly annoyed at how massively unrealistic and terrible these people were to each other. People kept telling me it would get better later on and that I should stick with it, but after that failed to materialise I just gave up.

Matte coatings interfere with more than just contrast, they often look a little more blurry as well in my experience. But yeah, the “massively oversimplified” was there for a reason 😆.

Like Eheran said, they definitely exist: https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/best/bright-room

The massively oversimplified explanation is that more reflective coatings give a better image quality as long as you don’t have reflections. Matte coatings dull the colours of the image a bit and make it a bit less sharp.

Yes, those go to the “unsubscribe” folder, so I read them less often than my normal mail.

Can’t have a little weather stop us from cycling.

Regardless of which e-mail service you end up using, I find that an incredible simple rule to filter all e-mail with the word “unsubscribe” in it’s body to another folder saves your sanity. It’s still a folder you should go through a few times a week to read all the newsletters and shit you’re subscribed to, and sometimes the occasional false positive, but your inbox will mostly contain e-mail you actually want to read. I have another rule that filters mail from specific senders that I want to read immediately to my Inbox before it hits the unsubscribe rule, but those exceptions are uncommon enough (I only have 7 after years of doing this) to not take much work.

Astounding mental gymnastics. Not that it really matters in this case, although it does demonstrate a willingness to run away from facts that are staring him in the face. It sounds like he’ll never admit he could have feelings for you too, whether that’s true or not.

Nothing, I just never browse All. Being subscribed to the right communities is enough.

It’s not a particularly realistic show, even for the spy thriller genre, but it has hilarious characters and very amusing hijinks. Would definitely recommend.

Thing is, every time a fascist party rises to power in the EU they fuck it up spectacularly and lose the next elections. So far Meloni in Italy is the only exception, the rest have been quite pathetic.

Agreed, hence the “very often” and not “always”. You are always trusting the VPN provider to not fuck you over, and there probably are a few who don’t.

Your post suggests you’re operating under the assumption that advertising itself is a valid activity. The example about a new small business seems totally legit.

But in reality most advertising money is spent by companies like Coca Cola, that we all already know. And they know that too, which means they know for a fact that continuing to spend money on advertising pays off.

This can only be true if advertising isn’t about awareness of your brand, but about directly influencing buying decision. In other words, it’s brainwashing.

A small business should get known through word of mouth, through endorsements in pillow-related media and communities (in this example). If their product is a good one and they get the right people talking about it, no advertising is needed to succeed as a business. Only line-must-go-up companies that are not content with what they can achieve with an honest way of doing business need advertising to sell even more crap.

IMHO it is entirely valid to reject all forms of advertising, and most of it should be outlawed. As a species we’re wasting a colossal amount of effort and energy on something that shouldn’t even be a thing.

5. It means you’re letting a different company (VPN provider instead of ISP) see everything you do. In countries with sane privacy laws (i.e. not the US) this is very often a net negative for your privacy, as your ISP will be bound by your country’s privacy laws and most VPN providers are foreign (and often based in the US).

Good blog. You touch on this point in the blog but IMHO it should be one of your main talking points.

Yeah this. Python was already popular with the early adopters, and it’s a fairly easy language to learn and use. After that it became a network effect thing: all the best tools were already written in Python so people continued to do so.

Why not switch to LibreOffice?