ianleighton

scooters are the worst. So much noise for a tiny vehicle (worse than most cars even) and the old ones smell so so bad.

electrify now!

mostly just a new year’s eve celebration now

+1 for Cargo bikes, but otherwise if your bike infrastructure sorta sucks, the Citroën Ami and counterparts from Fiat etc are pretty common in European cities… easy to park too.

NIO does battery swaps in minutes, in China and Europe. I believe you can also perhaps get different ranges but if not, would be great to swap between a 50kwh pack for normal use and say 100+kwh for your road trip.

Then again battery charging/weight tech is getting pretty good pretty fast.

If you like repairing the vintage Vespa, great project and that sounds fun. That’s worth a lot!

But I will curse at the stink of the exhaust from the crappy old motor when you ride by. Try an e-bike (you can get one built more locally surely), or an e-Vespa (or hell, make that your project to convert the vintage Vespa into a silent sleeper Vespa with crazy performance!). Electric is so, so much more fun.

Worrying about that small amount of “critical minerals” needed for a bike/Vespa is a conspiracy to distract you from the fact that oil is also extracted and has negative externalities, we just live with those already.

My only counter to this is that after, what, two _decades_, Apple _still_ has not added the ability to adjust number boxes with the up/down arrows on the keyboard (like text size for example). A designer would have included this on day 1, it’s such a common UI pattern in design tools.

If anyone on the iWork team is reading this, _please_ get to that Radar.

A sensible approach I saw in the BMW i4 was to keep the defrost buttons around, among relatively few buttons. (I forget if the climate temp controls were physical too though.)

This is a must-watch for everyone here commenting!

6 minutes dense with revelations.

IIRC Vigo, in Galicia (Spain) struck me as a case of a decently dense city that used roundabouts at relatively compact intersections in the city center, along one street at least: https://maps.app.goo.gl/CwZYypxT5SjBr1QE7?g_st=ic

Yes. This bug makes the UX on mac just feel broken and frustrating reminds you every time you do it. Tried to bear it for a year but I use text replacements so heavily that I had to switch off eventually. Firefox: for the love of Jobs, fix it!

Took Lisbon to Donostia-San Sebastián before Renfe canceled it in 2020. Basic hostel-like sleeping experience, but really nice and something that should exist.

Would love to take these more often if there were more (any) west to central Europe connections! (perfect routes for it too, since the flights are long and the infrastructure is less high speed)

A car+sleep train would be amazing to bring back, too.

And yet car+sleeper trains were pretty common until relatively recently! (edit: in Europe)

I got an e-Muli, which is a sorta “short john” but where the front basket folds and handlebars pivot 90° so parking it is a bit more slim, more or less the footprint of a normal bike. It’s amazing — a little heavy so probably not luggable up stairs, but small enough when basket is folded that I prefer it even on errands where I don’t need the cargo space, just cause it’s electric (nice to throw a backpack in the front basket and close it, too. A little pricey since it’s made in Germany, but absolutely worth it: https://muli-cycles.de/en

I think your reverse cycle ac would be an air-to-air heat pump. Air-to-water is more like your heat pump water heater, with the hot water then going through radiators.

that sounds really nice… without “blowing up the spot”, could you give a vague location?

always good to have zoning, either via small separate heat pump or with a retrofit like AirZone (not sure if something similar is available there) which modulates the flow to each duct from the air handler.

source?

Would this satisfy your criteria? Or are you looking for someone explicitly pairing pumped hydro with other renewables?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/18/portugal...

This was probably made possible by the half-dozen pumped storage hydro plants in Portugal. Now they’re putting floating solar on some as well.

I believe I’ve read this was also due to Iberian gauge high speed rail technology not really being existent at the time Spain started building HSR in a hurry for Expo ‘92? in Sevilla, and they’ve continued using standard gauge for it (to the benefit of the link with France).

However the huge investment in HSR (longest network after China, but low utilization), has also come at the cost of the local and regional train network (which still use broad gauge, yes there are gauge changing trains, but the broad gauge network is languishing).

If your goal is just lowering R0, sure… but a lot of countries prefer to lower deaths, which is why they start with the older population / those with health conditions.

but they have the option to download (with the iCloud share link, not shared album).

This is sort of a thing in Portugal. They display all the papers on a board and you can (and people do) read the front pages, and then you can decide if you want to buy one to read the rest.

Temporary in that they are moved 2-4 times a year, but permanent in that they are used throughout the year, just in different locations.

Ironically, traditional yurts very similar to these are used in places that go from -40C to +40C throughout the year (Mongolia, Tuva... though true, when it’s -40C, hopefully you’ve packed up your yurt and moved it down the valley to the winter grazing location that’s a little less harsh...).

Disclaimer: Outlier fan.

The shorts and pants are where Outlier really shines (okay, and button-down shirts), they’re the best value. the ~$100 Ultrafine t-shirt is luxurious as hell but then you’ll want to wear it every day and it’s pretty delicate, being wool. Their pants definitely uphold the “quality comes at a cost” argument.

Also there are luxury brands with questionable quality that will also sell you a t-shirt for $100 that doesn’t have the same thought into materials or build as Outlier, etc.

Let’s also not forget that there are regions/countries where it’s either culturally not always the norm to use street names while giving directions (especially when driving), where in the real world a street name is hard/impossible to find on a sign (try to find and read a small low-contrast stone inlay somewhere up on a building while you drive luckily slowly), or where street names don’t even exist!

When driving in some countries in Europe a GPS will repeat that you should use <really long badly pronounced street names after an old white guy> for multiple steps when in fact the road signs don’t mention the street anywhere and just say “Center”. (Granted sometimes the GPS directions are correct and use signage info.) Or the street name may have changed 5 times, as you keep driving straight on the same road.

The problem, as with all things in maps, isn’t so clear-cut and the fixation on street names is very centric to certain countries.

...granted my partner (who comes from near Liège and studied there) also doesn’t like it because it is pretty grey, but so is most of Belgium. I find the mix of old and postwar architecture quite beautiful and there is lots of cool stuff going on now; it’s like an edgier, more “Brooklyn” alternative to Maastricht.

What I find interesting is that the road signs in the Netherlands say Liège whereas in the few km of Vlaanderen on the way there, they insist on Luik. But this is what makes Belgium, Belgium.

On top of that, Germany is a federal system whereas France has a very centralized government... so I imagine the politics of financing and building HSR lines is very different (and you end up with very different networks, check out the maps on wikipedia)

IMO Portuguese (in Portugal, not Brazil) actually sounds a lot like Russian or Polish at first listen, the accent is very different than other western European romance languages

Tisane probably comes from French, where it is relatively common (at least understood, and a stickler for tea would correct your usage) and perhaps one would use it in English like other French culinary terms like “à la mode”