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There’s one thing that would certainly stop me from cycling in Australia, and it’s the helmet laws. We don’t have those here and I’m used to decide if I wear a helmet or not. Sometimes I like to live dangerously and have the wind in my hair at 20 km/h.
If my country had laws like this I would not cycle.
In the end though, it’s not making much of a difference aside from nostalgic value. There’s a minimal maintenance to it too. My parents still have the cassettes and the Betamax VCR stored somewhere. Physical photo albums also have to be stored. We don’t want to get rid of them but they’re kind of useless now. It’s around 200 GBs of files to be kept.
It’s also a bit cringe to see yourself being a stupid kid on video. Or read what you wrote in a journal on a floppy disk in the mid 90ies. I went to watch a few minutes because we mentioned it but it’s not something any of my family members return to regularly. It’s just stuff that now sits there. Nice and nostalgic to watch every few years or decade, but not healthy to keep returning to it.
Lots. I was born in the 80ies and my parents took lots of pictures when I was a baby. My sister was born a few years later, and there was also lots of pictures. We have albums full of pictures that I ended up scanning and digitizing. My father was also somewhat of an enthusiast for video cameras and he bought a BetaCam by the end of the 80ies, and a few other ones until the beginning of the 2000s.
So I have videos of my childhood from my first years of school to being a teenager. He was filming at Christmas, at birthdays, and sometimes at random events. He often just set the camera in a corner and filmed for the length of a Beta tape.
I digitized all of the Beta cassettes into mp4s during the pandemic and now I offer USB drives to people of the family that don’t have any videos of when my grandparents were alive.
Plus, my maternal grandfather also filmed some gatherings and events. So I also have digitized videos of them in the 60ies and 70ies.
Ironically most of us never liked to be taken in photos, or filmed, but I’m kind of glad we still have them. If I compare to my friends, apparently, I have a “treasure trove” of videos and pictures.
They’re no longer gooey here. They were gooey in the 90ies and early 2000 but at some point the recipe changed now they’re grainy and dry.
This is nice but not an option for me. This won’t pass through any chicane of the cycling network and I wouldn’t be able to leave my town. I also wouldn’t have any space to store it when not in use. Plus, I’m usually doing multi day trips that amounts to more km than what an electric bike can do on a single charge in a day, and pulling a camper behind would reduce even more the possible range.
I fantasized a lot about campers like this, thinking I could leave it at my parent’s and tour my native region. But again, chicanes… chicanes everywhere.
I would have to use the roads, with cars, and be very limited in range compared to what I’m used to. So unfortunately, as nice as this seems, it’s not really an option.
EDIT: Here’s an example of a very tight chicane on a remote rail trail.
You can physically live in a car but depending where you live, this might me illegal or difficult to do legally. You don’t have an address and governments usually don’t like that. And it’s also not always possible/legal to park a car somewhere a sleep in it.
Still, motonormativity makes living in a car much easier than just roaming around with a tent. There are exceptions here called “relay villages” where people can legally park and sleep in their car or RV for the night. I love touring on my bike and some rail trails are going through those villages. And obviously you can sleep in a car there, but not pitch a tent for the night if you just have a bike. I’m so jealous of the privilege of people with RVs and cars sometimes.
I’ve said something like that to a therapist once and he did not like it.
The character they brought is named Londo and is from an excellent sci-fi series from the 90ies called Babylon 5.
I have no idea how good plain SSL is but I just use my own IRC server with SSL on top. At least I can control the whole thing.
Is it bad that in all this I see the slim possibility of a world weaning itself from oil? Maybe more and more nations will be pushed to a rapid investment in renewables and gain energetic independence from oil producing countries. It might even have a positive impact on the environment.
Most of the world will probably continue to be dependent on oil, and just pay the price in blood, but one can dream.
Also, it’s an interesting time of you like geopolitics, changing alliances and failing empires.
I’ve always been cynical so times are not especially bad. I was kind of expecting this. Times are just bad because it’s hurting the wallets of the middle class at the pump, but I’ve always been poor and frugal so to me this is just normal. I have no car with an insatiable appetite for gasoline that comes from the suffering of other humans or animals. I have no house to lose. No land. No condo. No retirement plan. Let it crash and burn.
Maybe a glimpse of hope, renew and progress can grow out of the ashes. But probably not. I’ll just be there to watch along, satisfy my curiosity, and feel smug if I’m right.
The biggest issue I’ve had with my Pinebook Pro is getting any external display to work. I have bought multiple dongles and none of them are working. In fact, there are multiple smaller issues all different depending on the OS installed. I settled on Manjaro but wifi stops working after coming back from suspend, and it needs to be rebooted. The speakers are weak too.
And there’s software compatibility. Most of the software have ARM packages in multiple versions, but sometimes it doesn’t exists or can’t work. Like wine.
It’s not very polished and it requires knowing tech and Linux a good deal. It’s functional enough and could be useful for development, but I wouldn’t recommend it as an everyday laptop.
I tried to have it nearby and use it from time to time but I just end up getting back to my x86 laptop.
I know this is a meme community but I was curious about this. It seems some birds do get burned, but not blasted. It varies a lot depending on the installation and it can also be mitigated. Also, the amount of birds dying from this is significantly lower than just the amount of birds hitting windows. For the benefit of other curious people, I’ll try to condense the relevant information from wikipedia and the sources.
In more general terms, a 2016 preliminary study assessed that the annual bird mortality per MW of installed power was similar between U.S. concentrated solar power plants and wind power plants, and higher for fossil fuel power plants.
How it was calculated for fossil fuel
Sovacool estimated avian mortality from fossil fuel power plants across the United States as a result of collision with infrastructure, electrocutions, pollution and contamination, and climate change. In addition, Sovacool estimated climate change-induced avian mortality (in terms of habitat loss and changes in migration) predicted to be the result of fossil fuel power plant operations.
A preliminary assessment of avian mortality at utility-scale solar energy facilities in the United States: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148116301422?via=ihub
Review of Avian Mortality Studies at Concentrating Solar Power Plants: https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1364837
It’s not a privilege. It was standard before those shitty delivery services appeared. You should have higher expectations instead of considering poor service as standard and defend venture capitalists that exploit both the people ordering and the people making the deliveries.
are you saying that the solution for genocide is more genocide?
Israel not existing is not a genocide against Jews.
It’s so weird to give that information to a government. Here if people want to vote for internal party elections, they become party members. You register directly with the party and it is entirely independent from the general elections.
Parties have their own elections, members of that party vote for their leader. Then we have general elections where everyone can chose between those parties.
The government has statistics about the number of members for each party, but not who. Knowing what voter is a member of what party would probably break some privacy laws. A vote is supposed to be anonymous.
“Which party?” Say “Uhh. Independent?”
Why is there a party affiliation at registering?
Yeah. It was a bad attempt at a joke about how the Democrats in the US seem to ever slowly move to the right. Probably to attempt attracting a broader spectrum of voters, but it has the effect of making their policies not so distinguishable from any other right leaning party, just not as radical as the Republicans. And MTG moving from radical to somewhat sensible means she may soon reach a point very close to some Democrats.
SSH in first place. No explanation needed.
But also MATE and Pulseaudio (yes). I really like paprefs, pasystray, and how easy it is to send audio over the network. To the point where I reinstall Pulseaudio instead of Pipewire, because Pipewire requires long command lines for what was easily done in a few clicks with Pulseaudio.
I dread the day where I will be forced to “progress” to Pipewire and lose that easy feature.