One of my team members is based in the US, and he told me after the election: “The media told us all about how bad Trump was. But nobody ever told us how good Kamala was.” I guess voting only for the lesser evil has its limits.

I once went to a proctologist who had a “This too shall pass” plaque on his desk. I decided to trust him, there and then.

Ads. I’ve been online since the age of Gopher. I’ve gone through every kind of ad or a pop-up you can throw at me. Even though I use an adblock, even without it I can subconsciously filter out ads so well that they won’t bother me.

Steam owen. Haven’t reheated my food un the microwave ever since.

The Canon didn’t. That’s where my assumption of a green laser came in. When I aimed the camera directly at the embassy, I got a white screen; when I aimed it a little to the side, I saw a green dot on the screen. This is a bit of a stretch, though. It could have been an optical artifact, with the sun behind me, and me wearing polarized glasses.

This is just pure speculation, but I think the firmware on the camera refuses to take pictures when its GPS detects it to be in a restricted area. That’s how higher-end drones work. At the same spot where I detected my interference, a DJI drone would refuse to take off. Drone no-fly areas are well documented (and advertisef), though, so it was easy to check against those.

Professional: Self-driving trailers are already a thing. They are not legal on public roads, but they work just fine in warehouses and yards. The way it works, a dolly is hooked up to the front of the trailer, and the yard master just instructs it where to go and park, and forgets about it. Thanks to the trailer sensors, the trailer is also able to navigate around fairly heavy yard traffic, which is far more complex than linear traffic on roads. The EU is being lobbied to allow the trailers on the roads. The EU is also being lobbied to increase the max length of a tractor-trailer from 27m to 50m. The new road trains are also using these autonomous engines and steering directly on trailers. We estimate that by 2035, we’ll start seeing a drastic reduction of demand for truck drivers.

Hobby: This is unconfirmed, just an odd thing I started noticing. In some places, in particular around US embassies, modern cameras are blocked from taking photos, and older models are being interfered with through green lasers. I noticed the latter when I tested with the first gen Gopro Hero and a 15 years old Canon. Need to dig out my film camera to see whether it has any impact there.

First who popped into my mind was Friday Jones from Robert A. Heinlein’s Friday.

I used to and still do, but I see it as an investment. In the past, I used to donate to various environmental organizations. Lack of money and disillusionment with the progress in environmental protection stopped this. Nowadays, I have a small monthly direct deposit to the armed forces of Ukraine. Living in Europe, I see this as investing into a peaceful retirement.

Ireland uses a variant of ranked choice voting. In essence, voters get a list of candidates for their voting district, and rank as many of them as they want in order of preference. When votes are counted, the candidate with the lowest votes is eliminated, and votes of those who ranked the candidate first are distributed to their second choice. Rinse and repeat until only as many candidates remain as there are open seats in the constituency.

There is still some inertia, especially in rural areas (“my dad always voted for this candidate, so I’ll vote for his son”), but the system still lends itself to more informed voting. From what I’ve seen in other countries, on average Ireland does a better job at electing more reasonable candidates than the US or EU countries.

"No pain, no gain. "

As someone who’s been running for over 30 years and working ou for 20, if there is pain, there is injury. When there is injury, you take a break and regress. People may say that muscle pain or stiff muscles are a sign of a good workout, not an injury. However, even with those your risk of injury is much higher, and you’ll eventually hurt yourself. “No pain” should be one of the outcomes of smart exercise, not an admonishment for not working hard enough.

If you insist on pronouncing “gif” as “gif” instead of “jif”, you should pronounce “jpeg” as “jfeg”.

As the saying goes, buy the cheapest tool you think you need, and if it breaks, buy the best. I’ve had some Lidl tools for a decade, and I used only a very small portion of them to the extent where they broke. And even among them, if I just wore them down (interchangeable tips for my screwdriver), I just ended buying the same.

Whose Line Is It Anyway?

Tapiooooca!

I wouldn’t change anything, but I would be far less stressed that everything would work out just fine.

Geocities. That’s how I lerned HTML. Used their WYSIWYG editor and then tinkered with the code. Built several pages close to my interest, and even scored some free stuff from marketing early online retailers like CDNow.

Also spent a lot of time browsing other Geocities pages and contacting people with shared interest.

I don’t mind discussing politics or religion, even though I don’t repeat myself in the same discussion and don’t engage with trolls. However, I absolutely never discuss my family, my personal matters and my racist views.

I’ve had exactly the same experience. Let me addd one more: when OneDrive decides to back up open files, they ate regularly deleted both from local and cloud. Those are the files I tend to use the most, and I grew so frustrated that I ended recreating my Documents folder steucture in my Downloads folder, which doesn’t get synced. (IT is useless; when I complained abou that, they told me that One Drive was a third-party application, and they didn’t support those. )

I can’t complain about them. I just rip them off. There may be a law (EU regulation) for bottle manufacturers to tether the caps, but there’s no law againt ripping the caps off.

I used to use Ubuntu up to 12.04. By the time the support ended, the new versions had the Unity desktop, I didn’t like it, so for a while I switched to Crunchbang (may it rest in peace), and now I’m using Mint Cinnamon. Some of my developers are using Ubuntu with Unity. Everyone is free to pick what suits them; I’m not one to judge them.