gsa

I really hope cash transactions become a little more normalised in India.

The UPI experience is built for a single audience in mind. It has changed the way people transact in India but at the same time it's been an absolute nightmare for a tourist to play along. The only route for a tourist to use UPI is via third party apps, which charge a markup for loading money (3%). But let's say you accept that as a part of travelling - the limitation of tourist wallets is that they can't be utilised for P2P payments - exactly what UPI is most used for across the country.

Alternative, since no one accepts cash anymore, is that I have to carry thick wads of cash so I can hand out exact change. That still gets you the stink eye because most vendors don't like to deal with cash anymore.

In my experience (my partner has a Framework), changing a port is not something easily done without putting the Framework bottom side up. In practice you need to stop whatever you are doing to first sleep the laptop, turn it over, change the port and then get back to what you were doing before. Repeat the process if you want to get the ports back in the original order.

I have been looking to buy a new laptop personally. Framework has a compelling argument. But with only 4 ports on the Framework, I'd likely be switching the ports often. In addition to using USB-C, I often need a USB-A for an external mouse but other times a HDMI port to connect to a display while presenting.

I don't think it's fair to compare Thinkpad X1 Carbon with Framework. The T14 range is a much better comparison. While Lenovo took a few steps back a few years ago the last couple of generations seem to be much better in regard to being repairable. The T14 Gen 5 [0] gets a 9/10 score on ifixit. Parts are easily available globally, while Framework is still somewhat limited in this regard geographically.

That said, it's great we have a choice! If it were not for Framework, I don't think Lenovo would have made an effort to make the Thinkpads repairable again.

- [0] https://www.ifixit.com/Device/Lenovo_ThinkPad_T14_Gen_5

Looks like the needle has moved, but reading the blog it's a recent development and only available in the beta version of the Android app.

Signal does some things well, but lacks far behind other apps in UX. It doesn't do cloud backups either, which keeps me from recommending it to less technical folks.

DigiUsher | https://www.digiusher.com | Senior Backend Engineer | Remote (overlap with West Europe) | Full-time

DigiUsher is a multi-cloud data and AI cost governance platform. We work with AWS, Azure, GCP, and leading system integrators to help enterprises build sustainable, efficient, and profitable cloud solutions.

We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join our core team. You'll play a key role in shaping product architecture, building scalable data integrations, and driving technical strategy as we grow. Ideal candidates are product-minded, detail-oriented, and proficient in Python with experience handling large-scale data.

Tech stack: Python (FastAPI, Celery, Polars, NumPy), PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, GitHub Actions

You will:

- Architect/build new data integrations and features

- Enhance existing integrations for performance and reliability

- Engage directly with enterprises to understand challenges

- Own responsibilities across the full product lifecycle in a fast-growing startup

Interview process: Screening call → take-home assignment (work relevant) → review → CEO/leadership chat → offer. Typically 2–3 weeks.

More info/apply here: https://wellfound.com/l/2Bywrm or reach out to me at gagan@digiusher.com

I'm the co-founder and CTO and will be personally handling recruitment.

Circle to Search is not available for all devices. My Fairphone 4 doesn't have it and there are plenty of other devices where it's not allowed by Google yet.

That's a very different flow with a much higher friction compared to simply long pressing the home button in any app.

Like with all things Google, this feature wasn't available in Gemini (or only available on some devices) last I checked. With Gemini going to replace Google Assistant in the future, this is yet another useful feature that Google will be taking away from Android.

I wanted a small form factor for my homebrew NAS and Jonsbo N3 is the case I ended up with a couple of years ago. I couldn't find anything smaller that would let me have at least 6 disks. The Asus ITX motherboard I bought second hand had only 4 SATA ports and I bought a m.2 sata adapter to get an additional 4 ports.

Unihertz devices fill a gap but are subpar phones in terms of hardware. They also don't get any software updates the minute after they are launched.

Google is pretty frustrating. I switch between my desktop and laptop frequently and sometimes browsers as well. The reauth dialog pops up two weeks for every login - usually just when I'm about to hop on a meeting.

Electronic interop, in my experience talking to my GP (not US), is tricky not because of technical challenges but very strict privacy implications.

I use a Zigbee plug to toggle the power off and on, and the bios is configured to boot when power is restored.

Google: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/26/google-pr...

> there's an annoying step of having to register your card in advance on an app before it actually works.

Did this change recently? I travelled a little over a year ago and my Wise card worked right after I landed at the Singapore airport.

Same here, I eat spicy food all the time but these are on another level. I will eventually finish a bowl, but my lips and throat were always sensitive for a few hours afterwards. Using a half or a third of the sauce sachet is more than enough for me. I stopped buying them because as much as I enjoy spicy food this flavour was just pure extreme self-torture.

An even nicer thing about the Albert Heijn self checkout is that I can use my own phone from start to finish. Connect to store wifi, scan items using their app (using the phone camera), pay with my phone (contactless payments) on the self checkout and use my phone to scan an exit barcode at the turnstile. My visits to the store usually last only a few minutes and I don't mind popping in multiple times a week.

Airbnb has a "dedicated workspace" filter which is actually worse than not having the feature. Most of the listings I have come across are properties that have nothing more than a dining table, often a round one and paired with really awful chairs. Airbnb could _make_ it work properly, but it doesn't seem to be their focus.

Polarsteps | Multiple positions | Amsterdam, The Netherlands | Full-time (or 4 days/week) | Hybrid | VISA (with relocation package) | https://careers.polarsteps.com/

We're an Amsterdam-based team of 50 (and counting) with 20+ nationalities amongst us – a varied, skilled bunch of "Citizens of The World" with hundreds of thousands of kilometers under our travel belts. We also have something important in common (other than our very well-worn passports): We want to change the way people travel.

And that's exactly what we're doing, with _the_ travel app to plan, track, and relive your journeys in a smart and beautiful way. Our product is at the core of everything that we do, and we always put our users first, so you will always have all the space you need to build things in the best possible way - there's a reason why we have a 4.8 star user rating on both Play Store and App Store ;)

We have over 8 million users and with our user base doubling roughly every 12 months we are looking to expand our engineering team to be ready for what's coming. More specifically:

- Senior Backend Engineer: https://careers.polarsteps.com/vacancies/senior-backend-engi...

- Senior DevOps Engineer: https://careers.polarsteps.com/vacancies/senior-devops-engin...

You can apply there or if you have any questions about the position or company, you can reach me at gagan@polarsteps.com

> People are leaving in droves

I stopped posting to Twitter some time last year but most of the people I follow on Twitter/X are still active and haven't moved. It is still the biggest platform compared to any of the alternatives (Mastodon/Bluesky) and despite the downward spiral it will be with us for a long time (just like Facebook).

If I had to guess, it's phrased like this since it's blocking their third-party cookie banner.

The Netherlands has plenty of them. Tweakers.net is a price tracker for electronics and such (eg: computer parts, phones, laptops etc) and usually it's easier to find a shop cheaper than Amazon. I have some go to stores for my needs because their content is organised way better than Amazon. I also find some alternatives better than Amazon because they have free next day shipping, something that's not free on Amazon.

Some things that qualify for essential SEO in my book:

- (Basic) meta tags

- Alt attributes

- Mobile friendly content (always required for a blog)

- Loading speed, optimised images etc.

- No JS rendered content

Chasing Google ranks is an abysmal practice, but a basic level of SEO goes a long way in making content discoverable and accessible. As for the rest of the practices of the SEO industry, I believe in the saying "if you provide good content, you don't need to SEO".

This is pretty cool but I'd like to see a well-formatted recipe, not a transcript. I prefer the markdown format for recipes so I worked on something like this earlier this year [0]. It fetches Youtube subs (with no audio processing like the video itself like this project) and returns a markdown with ingredients and steps.

[0] https://github.com/gaganpreet/summarise-youtube-recipes

After what.cd died, I used Google Play Music for a long time before Google discontinued the product. I stumbled around a bunch of streaming music services and have been disappointed ever since. Streaming services have a terrible UX. Some artists are completely missing from the services. I often find one of my favourite artists has released a new album, but I end up finding this from third party sources. Scrolling through the library is incredibly slow because of infinite scroll and no concept of a local library. Lyrics don't always work and if they do it's always presented in a big font with no way to change it. I could go on and on.

I'm now transitioning to my own curated music library and I'm currently running Navidrome on my home NAS. It has a Subsonic API that I use with Strawberry, a player which is reminiscent of Amarok - my favourite music player ever. New releases are tracked by Muspy. I subscribe to a bunch of blogs and subreddits to discover new music. Works well for me but I imagine it's not for everyone.

This is now fairly common where I live (Amsterdam) and since COVID I notice it a lot more. Many restaurants have a reservation fee of €10 or €20, sometimes even more. It's flexible enough that you can reschedule till 8 or 12 hours before the reservation and it's deducted as part of the bill. If you are a no show, you forfeit the deposit. Definitely creates a barrier for scalpers because they would have to buy seats and swallow the loss if they can't sell it but if the restaurant is popular enough, then it can still work in the scalper's favour.

To play the devil's advocate, this is likely an artifact of how they store the images. Embedded EXIF does not make for an efficient filesize and separating EXIF from image data means they can have different image sizes with a single source of EXIF data.

AFAIK, Google doesn't hand out Android certification for e-ink devices and without the certification a manufacturer can't bundle Google Services on the device.