systemtest

I use money.

It was a lot of micro-USB and some Lightning. CAT5E and lower. HDMI 1.4 and lower. All still useable cables for many people. It went to my local hackerspace.

Simplification of my digital self. Removed most of my online accounts. Removed all my VPS's. Removed most apps from my phone except core ones. Cancelled a lot of online subscriptions.

In the real world finally moved everything to USB-C. Gave all my old cables away. I have two chargers in my home and a handful of C to C cables. Everything connects to everything now.

Home is now downgraded to a dumb home. Lights work on physical toggles. No hubs or sensors anywhere. Heat and AC is with a dumb panel on the wall.

It feels freeing.

I don’t do FXP anymore :)

I have been thinking about it but it is tricky from a legal standpoint. What I'm trying to arrange next time I visit is to have a secondary line installed at my parents place that is in my name. So that when I pull heavy traffic from that line it doesn't impact them and I can't get them in trouble for posting a message that isn't government approved.

I'm a big VPN user since I am the citizen of one country and the resident of another. Even for government services I have to use a VPN. I tried to access the bureau of statistics of my home country through my foreign residential IP and got 404s on all pages. Enabled VPN and everything magically started working. For watching the election result video stream I also had to VPN but at least that one gave me a clear message. For doing taxes in my home country I then have to disable VPN since all VPN access is blocked but it's OK to use a foreign residential IP.

I would easily pay €30 a month for a VPN in my home country that uses a residential IP and isn't noticeable. I am aware that those exist, but 99% of them are shady.

Even worse is the Reddit approach, where leaving your VPN on will get your account shadow banned permanently. But you are not notified of that, so if you are wondering why nobody is replying to your comments, check in a private session if you can visit your profile page.

I am getting a paywall so I will skip this article.

We have plenty of beheadings in Europe but not on a Flixbus.

Do people on Grayhound busses clip their toenails in sight of everyone? Is there open drug use? Do people bring bluetooth speakers and party in the back?

In that case, yes, Flixbus is similar to Grayhound.

I remember 20 years ago where you could just impromptu hop onto a train to Paris, party for the weekend and come back Sunday evening.

I just checked online with the Dutch Railways:

- Train that leaves in one hour (18:00), arrives at 21:40 just in time to party. 148 euro! - Train that leaves 21:00, arrives at 10:35 the next morning. You'll miss the party plus you can't even book the train online for some reason. Multiple transfers and you need to sleep on a bench in Brussels between 00:15 and 07:30

Then for the train back:

- Train that leaves at 17:50, arrives at 22:30, decent times, 185 euro! - Train that leaves at 20:50, arrives at 08:20 the next morning, right in time for work. Can't book it online. This time your are sleeping on a bench at Antwerpen between 00:25 and 05:50

If you are with four people, just drive the five hours to Paris instead. Have one person be sober. So much better than the train. I'm sure the fuel and tire wear are less than the €1332 in train tickets you would have with the four of you.

If you do this too many times, you end up with a train that never stops and rides along the world until the world is habitable again.

Population density of 4 versus 240 people per square kilometer. NRW has 528 ppsk. Ontario has 15 ppsk.

Not surprising that Germany has a better train network.

I have been to places in Germany where it was a 45 minute drive to the nearest train station. I'm not talking about somewhere in the Black Forest but an actual village where people live. It's great for cities but for villages I typically take the car.

Amsterdam to Berlin is probably cheaper and faster by airplane. Even a car is sometimes faster if you count for delays.

It really should be a three hour train ride but due to incompetence it takes over six hours.

From what I can see online, two-thirds of Germans use a car to commute to work.

Last time I had to go somewhere in Germany I used a Flixbus instead of their "high-speed" trains. The fact that I was willingly subjecting myself to a Flixbus, not because of price but because of reliability, really tells you something about the state of trains in Germany.

For Americans: Flixbus a cheap bus service which is often used by people who are not really bothered by social norms.

At least you were able to make a seat reservation. In The Netherlands I frequently had to stand in first class while paying €600+ a month for the subscription. Ended up buying a car, that way I had a guaranteed seat with climate control.

You gave me flashbacks to my Samsung washing machine that needed a factory reset after changing my SSID. Which also reset the service life of filters and liquids and such which was somewhat of a hassle. Such a dumb design not being able to change the wireless network.

I installed an AppleTV recently, so I don't have much experience. But the first thing I saw after the initial setup was one/third of the display advertising a TV-show on a subscription service I had to purchase. Would that count as an ad?

A bit of a shame. I had a Nokia 6090 with 8 watt of transmit power on 900Mhz. Combined with a 33 centimeter antenna that phone had reception in nearly all of the European continent. And with a 70Ah 12v battery you had a battery life of weeks. Even with the phone consuming up to 25 watts during calls.

My fancy new 5G smartphone doesn’t work in rural parts of the country. We are going backwards.

Love how a €7.5k 20 kilogram server is placed on a €5 particleboard table. I have owned several LACKs but would never put anything valuable on it. IKEA rates them at 25 kilogram maximum load.

Sounds like a great excuse to not have to partake in office BS.

Yes, and I am afraid that gaming PCs will move from the fully modular repairable computers we have today to small little boxes where you can only upgrade the SSD.

Xbox One Kinect, Xbox One non-Kinect, Xbox One S with disc drive, Xbox One S All-Digital Edition, Xbox One X

And then you have the various drive options, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, game bundles, day one edition. We are talking about dozens of variants.

Seeing the latest Valve Steam Machine made me disappointed. No replaceable GPU, soldered memory, no socketed CPU. I really hope Valve isn't going to lead the way for unrepairable gaming PCs.

The Coca Cola poster on the impoverished wall is eerie. Reminds me of developing countries where to this day I see the same, run down shanty towns with Coca Cola signs all over.

> Why do Cleveland Clinic executives need to be paid $30 million/year?

So they can hire bodyguards?

> If you're not rich, you're gonna spend a lot of time on the phone, arguing with bureaucrats and getting treated like shit

Sounds a lot like the Spanish healthcare system.

I don't think US doctors will want to work for German pay.