edent

Because I can put it next to my bed at night and have it cool me. Not all of us travel with a punkah-wallah.

What's banal to you is exotic to me.

I've seen tourists in London marvel at the most commonplace thing - and I think that's delightful.

In the UK I've never seen a train open its doors directly to the tracks. We also have lots of warning not to cross the tracks except by bridge or tunnel.

How do you handle seat reservation refunds? That was our most annoying experience with the Interrail app - a booking fee on top of the reservation, but little support when those trains were delayed or cancelled.

Yes. The app makes it really easy to do that. In our last trip we did it a few times.

But, as you get older, there's a certain joy in making plans in advance.

No, I just imagined the trip…

Yes, very much still a thing. We saw Interrail travellers of all ages. Lots of students going on a big adventure - but a decent number of more experienced travellers seeing the sights.

The passes were about €500 each for first class. Each reservation was €3-€15. The overnight ferry was about €100 each.

There's no such thing as a "legal name" in the UK. For example, Boris Johnson's first name isnt actually Boris - that's just what he goes by.

I had thought to use homographs. Sadly, all the models I tried were able to decode something like:

"ﾌㄖ乇ㄚ ᗪㄖ乇丂几'ㄒ 丂卄卂尺乇 千ㄖㄖᗪ"

However, I have noticed that voice assistants have a hard time understanding homonyms. Saying "bow" (as in to bow one's head) is often stored as "bow" (as in a bow and arrow). I wonder if there's a sufficiently complex sentence which is intelligible to humans but not to machines?

If you shut down, I want to still be able to run the software.

OK, if you're running something with a cloud component, I might not get all the functionality. But if you decide that you don't want be in the app business any more, I still want to use what I paid for.

OSM does have a pictures layer.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Panoramax

I use https://mapcomplete.org/ to add images of artworks to OSM objects.

OP here.

Fuck off.

Yours etc,

They both have received significant opprobrium. But she's the one funding a massive hate campaign.

I'm in IT right now having travelled through FR, DE, NO, PL and half a dozen more countries. When selecting the EN option on a website it is almost 100% of the time with a GB flag. The spelling is mostly en-GB as well.

The Applicant Support Programme makes it significantly cheaper (if they qualify).

See https://newgtldprogram.icann.org/en/application-rounds/round...

And https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dotmeow/meow-next-round...

Android used to have an "office hours" setting which would prevent specific email accounts from notifying you outside of your specified times.

I had my work GMail set to notify only between 0800 (so I could check for a "don't come in" message) and 1700 Mon-Fri. Of course, it didn't account for holidays / sick leave etc, but it was good at prevent me from panic checking every ping.

I wish that was a feature on modern Gmail. Or, indeed, WhatsApp and Signal. You can manually mute, but there's no way to silence specific notifications at specific times.

Regardless, employees shouldn't be expecting employees to be on-call without compensation. But users also need ways to manage this themselves.

You can use the JSON-LD for your movie reviews even if you're not a big site. I use it on my site for reviews (books, games, movies) and it seems to show up in most search engines with the star rating etc.

I'm not sure. On GitHub I see plenty of bug reports which say "this is broken" with references to other repos. Those backlins are useful when someone does figure out the fix.

That said, I'm very much in favour of people and projects moving away from GitHub.

A project’s issues and pull requests are only useful for that project.

I don't think that's always true. A bug in library A might be referenced in project B with a fix in fork C.

Yes, a hyperlink works to show you where to find info. But it doesn't alert you when a PR on C is merged by A meaning that B is now unblocked.

Because it is useful for most people to see that they're receiving a call from their bank, insurance company, hospital, whoever.

The hospital's call staff might not be in the same building as the doctor - so showing a familiar number is useful.

In an ideal world you would be able to trust that number but, as per the above, that isn't always the case.

The mechanism is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN

But it is slow to roll out.

I used to work at two (UK) telcos. There's a historic reason and a modern reason.

The historic reason was, just like the Internet, the international phone network was built on gentlemen agreements by engineers who largely trusted each other.

A big national telco is unlikely to attack its peers, so there was little need for safety measures. As smaller telcos came in to the mix via deregulation, that understanding changed - but it was hard to retroactively fit controls.

The more modern reason is outsourced call centres. You want outbound calls from your Philippines based staff to show as if they were calling from a local number. When large and reputable entities were doing this it was fine. Just like showing a different reply-to address on an email.

If you were designing a modern network, it wouldn't be like this. But international telephony is over a hundred years old and has a huge amount of legacy technology and legal agreements.

This one. No separate charger, just plug the USB-C cable in to the toothbrush.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B0F8BD3922

This one - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/08/i-bought-a-16-smartwatch-ju...

No need for a magnetic dongle. I literally shove a USB-C cable in there, charge for a couple of hours, then get a week+ of use. Does step count, notifactions, calls, etc.

There's more to the world than Apple and Android watches.

I've basically stopped buying any portable electronics unless they take USB-C.

Currently travelling with a laptop, watch, toothbrush, eReader, camera, bug-bite treater, and phone - all charging from the same power brick.

I'm guaranteed of getting a replacement cable / charger wherever I am in the world if I need it.

The only slight snag is some cheaper itema refuse to use PD and insist on plain 5V/2A - buy most decent travel chargers have NON-PD ports.

Amusingly, most of the buses I've taken recently also have USB-C ports on them for ad hoc charging. Perhaps one day EVs will use USB-PD-Max rather than CCS :-)

Ok, so what? Whether it is the server, the ISP, the CDN, or whatever - if I can't utilise the speed, what's the point?

The author (who I understand to be incredibly handsome) has a family, multiple devices, servers, VR headset, and too many smarthome gadgets.

Even when I was on 500Mbps, I never noticed a slowdown while things were accessing the net simultaneously.

The author (me) does play games. I'm on PC, Oculus, and console. The console downloads are limited by the upstream. The VR games are limited by WiFi. I've never noticed the PC games getting close to the max download speed I have.

But, to go to your edit. Is there a significant difference between waiting 90 minutes and 45 minutes? Either way, you set the download going, grab some food, have a bath, whatever, right?

The author (me) is English, living in England.

In my experience, the Sony servers can barely saturate a 500Mbps pipe.