The American tipping madness had already arrived in Europe: A week ago I was in a self service restaurant. The cashier told me to push the Green button of I wanted to give a tip.

What for? I tipped myself for carrying the trays without spilling anything…

Since Thalia tried to squeeze small bookstores out of business and other unfair behaviour I’m boycotting them. See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalia_Bücher To be fair, there are probably not many alternatives to audio books.

The important part:

This week, Bill White, the US ambassador to Belgium, criticized the country for its approach to Jewish ritual circumcision and accused the country of antisemitism.

White slammed Belgium’s handling of a case in Antwerp, where three Jewish men who perform ritual circumcision – known as “mohels” – are under judicial investigation after they allegedly carried out procedures without doctors present. In a long post on X, White demanded that Frank Vandenbroucke, Belgium’s health minister, intervene in the case.

You lost me at electron…

“Personal data doesn’t get piped to the state in the United States,” he said, referencing concerns that the Beijing government has laws requiring firms to hand over data for Chinese surveillance and espionage purposes.

So, have we forgotten about Edward Snowden’s discoveries?

Please don’t mix AI with LLMs. LLMs are surely overhyped and I guess they will never reach the quality they promise. AI on the other hand is used in many aspects, successfully. For many years protein folding was extremely difficult. Google threw AI at it, now it can be regarded as a solved problem.

Well, geographically the UK is still in Europe. The downside is that tariffs apply, but this is something that could be changed…

Not a classic soda, but refreshing anyways: Bionade

Unfortunately nowadays the quick chargers at the supermarkets are occupied most of the time, at least in my area. As I try to go shopping only once per week, this is to much of a risk for me. 5 minutes at the gas station is just easier 🙁

This! The next public charger is a 15 minute walk away, I would have to pick up the car once it has finished charging, and they are costing an arm and a leg. So it’s more comfortable and cheaper to drive a combustion car, even though I like the silence and torque of an electric car.

I doubt this is a majority speaking. A few people may be petrol heads and love the roaring sound of a v engine (or an underpowered r4 with a loud exhaust). Most Germans drive standard cars, where the manufacturer is trying to make the engine as writer and smooth as possible. Their real fear is that their electric car won’t take them the 1500km to their holiday destination, without any stops, with a caravan in tow, which they will do once per year.

Just run an exe from github, who does who knows what. Trust me bro…

Which were rather underwhelming according to done sources.

As an engineer, thinking of designing the metal connectors needed for this, this gives me nightmares.

You’re not too far off: there are water kettles and rice cookers (Xiaomi) and vacuum cleaners with app support (and definitely not collecting telemetry…)

There is GSconnect, it’s the gnome version of KDE Connect. Haven’t tried it, though.

Logitech M650 it had very quiet buttons and a freewheeling scroll wheel. Wheel click is not quite as quiet, and the thumb buttons are noisy. Another downside is that after roughly a year the plastics have worn down, moving and sometimes the buttons are clicking due to getting stuck.

I think this is the smartphonification of the desktop. Android and iOS hide most settings, it works out of the box, while the user has no idea what’s happening in the background. To be honest: at least the reliability of the software has drastically improved. Nowadays the network just works, so no need to know the details. I remember the days of Win95 and BNC network, where it always took an hour and several tries until the network was up.

So I synchronize file system <-> cryptomator <-> file system <-> cloud.

And I need additional disk space for the encrypted files.

I didn’t check all these providers, but from my experience most use proprietary software, which is a no for me, especially when it comes to client side encryption.