vr46

Intriguing stuff here from a geek perspective, as I have an X2 and am only plagued by a lack of gears. I would expect e-shifters to have been made reliable by the time the 3 series came out, I didn't realize they were that bad, especially as I would love to see them everywhere. Having to adjust my son's bike shows how tough shifting gears can be, and the cable is constantly stretching. Plus, the whole getup freezes in winter.

ML doesn't work on a lot of cameras - yet. It's quite far behind the last generation of SLRs and stays away from the flagship models.

Canon, and yes you do, the camera is not recognized without the drivers installed. Actually, it barely works even with the drivers installed. There is a free version that I have had working in the past, to glorious success, with the Canon 1DX, but the current 5Div does nothing, and I don't want to pay to find out that it still doesn't work.

There's half a camera's worth of features in these things that people won't use, but they still pay for them.

It may have been a customs and taxation issue here, but manufacturers are constantly adding costs of their own onto software before often reversing track.

Examples: Leica (for Fotos) charged a princely sum for various trifles before removing these fees.

Naim: charged £35 for the control app - which I paid - before going free, and now the app is the only way to control whole swathes of their increasingly-execrable hardware.

These two companies’ kit is expensive, luxury, premium, however you want to refer to it, and so they probably felt comfortable wringing their customers a little more. Probably understandable in the case of Leica owners who will pay £250 for a viewfinder dioptre correction lens (puts hand up again) but less so for hifi owners.

It is not that audiophiles haven’t been shown to spent inordinate sums on the dumbest, snakiest, oiliest tat this side of an Oxford Street souvenir shop, but it has to be material and palpable.

I didn't mean gag as joke, it was a direct reference to the article, but I see that people might be confused.

Agreed - This article is wrong at the beginning, Chatham House Rules are not a gag, they allow everyone to talk FREELY. I have been to many classes and forums under this rule, not least at Chatham House in St James Square, and it means that the speakers can speak freely, name names, without hedging or fudging or perambulating around the shrubbery. You can report whatever you like, but not who said it. I have heard so many truths in these discussions that were 15 years before their time - the behaviour of Mohammed Al-Fayed, for example - which carry much more weight when you hear them from an eyewitness, even if they do not wish to be named.

Had never heard of it before meeting German spouse. Now I can’t get away from it, they’ve all gone next door to watch it.

You pulled three words completely out of context and misrepresented them. But to be clear, and put another way, (ad) filtering is too important to be left to an extension alone, especially as browsers can no longer be relied upon, and creating layers of filtering like defence in depth is better to avoid single points of failure.

Ad-blocking, etc, are too important to me personally to delegate to just an extension, hence I use NextDNS, but naturally it can’t manipulate the DOM to tidy up the page.

Luckily I have long-preferred Firefox but I recognize that it’s not for everyone, or hardly anyone for that matter.

Maybe a local pi-hole would do the job properly.

Huh, thanks will check it out - it is like Strava but without the Lycra?

Nice

Yes, South seems to be South of the Ganges, where nothing happens and nobody goes.

For my part, I find the city tiny as I can cycle to the other side in less than forty minutes, which I love, it’s so fast to get around. I’ve been to a few non-tech meetups but they are short and fleeting and quite insubstantial. Still, here we are, send me an email/dm if you want to connect for a cup of tea somewhere equally inconvenient in the Mitte, like one of those Treffpunkts!

Dang, how did I not hear about this? I’m in a local Discord tech group and this hasn’t been mentioned at all!

Thanks for the intel, definitely one for next year!

Thanks for those, hadn’t found them, but I’ll get in touch to see if things are still running. Great tips.

Good tip on CCC too from previous poster, they’re not far from me, they’re near to stuff I know in Altona, I will grab a mask and head to an Open Chaos night. I passed my B1 earlier this year so my German sucks less than it used to but is still terrible.

This year has honestly speaking been terrible, but all I can try to do is either go back home or find some people to talk to here. You gotta work with what you’ve got.

I’m in the middle of Hamburg but ironically in a completely dead spot with nothing going on nearby and surrounded by light industrial parks. I wouldn’t mind improving my guitar skills and finding a jam, even a ukulele jam, but Google searches went nowhere. I don’t have a job, and it’s not looking good either, plus I’m focusing on launching something in the UK, but doesn’t help with severe loneliness here. Thanks for the pointers, will do some more searching for these things.

Thanks for the tipp - I’ve been trying to volunteer at the refugee centre ON MY ROAD for months but my application is going nowhere. I’m not super old, just entered my sixth decade, but bogged down in parenting instead of socializing.

EDIT: Super Tipp, danke. Habe gleich zwei Treffpunkte in der Nähe gefunden und werde diese im neuen Jahr besuchen.

I miss the pubs in the UK, but they’re nothing without your mates. In Germany, I have no way of making friends or meeting people, it’s a real struggle. Too broke to go out to Meetups, and at my age it’s hard anyway.

I agree, I would be rather be in a pub with all my mates and cracking on with the evening than worrying about the beer, but plenty of people are hung up on their own comforts and tastes.

That said, currently in Germany where several of my favourite bars have only three taps of similar beer all of which I can’t stand, and rather than drink spirits at the same flow rate (if it’s in my hand it’s likely going down at the same ml/minute) and bringing my evening and next day to a halt, I’ll have to cut the bar time short.

It pays to diversify the palate but it takes years to get used to some booze in the first place, I figured that’s why all the simple, uncomplicated stuff sells.

There is that, but nothing can really temper unrealistic expectations. You can enjoy stout for what it is on its own merits, though. And plenty of stouts beat Guinness in blind testing (or is it tasting?) such as London Black. Not that one will find that in a Sam Smith's pub.

Met my wife in there, but the refurb ruined it a bit for me. Much prefer the Mitre at the bottom on Hatton Garden, have had to be carried out of there on occasion, but I know what you mean about Sam Smith's Zoider.

All they seem to offer the world has been revenge since the 1980s.

Many a birthday have I begun by sitting alone at the bar, in a cubby hole, at The Princess Louise, reading for pleasure and necking G&Ts, in a gradually-improving mood until the evening, when friends begin to show and we find a bigger - never better - spot in the pub.

And no visitors to the city have ever felt disappointed in an English pub if taken to the Louise, John Snow, Cittie of York, or a few of the other unmodified Sam Smith’s pubs in town. I even like most of their beers.

But they are a bit weird and stories of the boss are pretty legendary, and this confirms it in glorious detail.

Yes, I finally decided not to renew my über-cheap JetBrains subscription in January and shift to VSCode + Copilot with Claude, then tested Cursor and dropped Copilot. Cursor is still a bit frustrating and gets trapped in circular reasoning a lot, but its features are good, like creating files.

I picked it up from an anarchist stand at a comic convention in the late 1980s, where else! I don’t know where it is right now, and I’m not sure it’s a cherished treasure, more an amusing memento of my youth! Although I will be most annoyed if I can’t find it!

Tintin has been satirized for years already, so we have an idea of what might be yet to come!

My favourite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Tintin:_Brea...

Others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tintin_parodies_and_pa...

I put on the Purple Rain album once that had been remixed into Atmos and it detracted from the sound of the band - The Revolution - it just didn’t sound like them and it didn’t sound good either. I saw them live not too long ago so I know what they want to sound like.

If Atmos was like Q Sound and an intrinsic part of the artists’ recording and mixing process, that would be one thing, but sticking it on afterwards, especially when the core guy is dead, is just fucking things up.

It’s the musical equivalent of the woman who tried to restore the Ecce Homo painting.

For decades, everyone has been obsessed with trying to remaster and restore music and extract as much as possible from the original recording, resulting in outstanding work (I like The Beatles’ Love, btw) and I guess we’ve run out of projects for remastering engineers if retrofitting Dolby Atmos is all they’ve got.

Of course, but tapes are niche too, right? I'm kinda optimistic, because the influence of people who care is outsize, they're always being asked what equipment is good by their friends, so maybe more people will start to care.

One problem is finding music that is recorded well-enough to enjoy in better quality. I was listening through my Mojo 2 earlier, and enjoying the last Radiohead album from 2016, it was fabulous in every aspect. But then, on the other hand, put on Arlo Parks Collapsed in Sunbeams, which sounded terrible in comparison. You can't really tell on streaming!

It turns out that streamed music isn’t an artefact in neither format nor artistic integrity. The underlying tracks found in streaming are subject to change, and they may also be different to those on the original album. But my 1987 CD will always be 1987 songs.

My kid gets this, he hears it, and to my surprise he’s playing all my records. And some he’s bought himself. He doesn’t mind turning a record over, or walking to the stereo, or listening to a side in full. He’s making his own memories and his own associations, it turns out that it’s more powerful for him with something he holds in his hands.

The sequencing and timing between tracks turns out to be crucial too. Too many songs on streaming are split or stutter when they’re supposed to segue smoothly into one another, or the single version appears as an album track and sounds weird, or there’s a different delay between two songs everyone. It breaks the rhythm, even the one you can’t hear.

Absolutely, but the data is not the map, and there are so many average uses of the original data. Organic Maps is so much better than the OSM mobile site, for example, both visually and in providing the appropriate language for the user. And you can contribute useful data back to OSM, so it’s certainly my favourite map application even while I wouldn’t use the original site.

Just easy to see on the map, I guess - look for the binoculars!