keraf

There are plenty of friends of that one famous financier roaming the old continent, who probably won't ever see a courtroom or prison cell in their lifetime, despite a lot of incriminating evidence.

The same governments pushing for this type of regulation are also the ones that fail to condemn high profile individuals involved in the crimes that these regulation are supposed to help fight. Makes you really wonder if it's about protecting the children.

And with more and more content being distributed digitally, and even Sony announcing that physical disks won't be a thing from 2028 [0], the days of media ownership are gone. The only way to "own" content is it being DRM free (rare) or piracy. And ironically, DRMs justify the existence of piracy.

[0] https://blog.playstation.com/2026/07/01/physical-disc-produc...

It's possible to do it in 2 ;-)

Looking at the source, it seems to be using OpenSeadragon[0].

[0] https://openseadragon.github.io/

And a bunch of other countries like Switzerland, Tanzania, Belgium, India, Greece, Hong Kong, etc. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Day#Dates_around_th...

Sadly accessibility often lands at the bottom of priorities because developers mostly don't care. Yet, it's relatively straight forward to implement in most modern systems if you start building it with that in mind. Similarly, adding i18n to an application as an afterthought requires more effort than if you would have done it from the start.

Accessibility doesn't only mean easing access to your application to people with disabilities. Accessibility makes it also easier for people with temporary or situational impairment to use your software. A simple example that comes to mind is single finger zooming on map applications, where you tap once and then hold-swipe up/down to zoom in/out, which makes it easy to be used with one hand. I know it's difficult to relate to people with permanent disabilities, but we can definitely relate to situational ones where we wish something was easier to use with one hand because the other was busy. Now imagine if it's the only way you can ever use it :-)

Ultimately, it leaves out no one and benefits everyone.

Looks really smooth! Would love to see that write up, or even the source if you would be willing to share it.

Used to have my VPS' with OVH a few years back but noticed the performance was significantly worse than similarly priced Hetzner ones. Not sure if that changed.

Regarding alternative VPS providers, Infomaniak in Switzerland have decent prices on their Lite range [0]. I'll stick with Hetzner but if I move some day, I might try them out.

[0] https://www.infomaniak.com/en/hosting/vps-lite

Over a decade ago, I already saw a music festival using Bluetooth tracking to monitor crowd movements [0]. There's an assumption that people just leave their Bluetooth on out of convenience.

[0] https://actu.epfl.ch/news/using-bluetooth-to-track-crowds-at...

When I set up my iPhone and it asked who's iPhone it is, I thought it would be funny to put in Kim Jong Un. Now it shows up as "Kim Jong Un's iPhone" when I enable my hotspot. Or even better, it says it out loud when I connect to some Bluetooth speakers.

Got the UniFi Doorbell from Ubiquiti and I'm really happy with it. It's hooked up to my Dream Machine, records video on disk and I access it via Tailscale. Not paying any subscription and it doesn't live in a cloud.

That's a lovely idea! I wanted to build something similar for safaris but the lack of network in remote areas makes it a bit tricky to use online image recognition models. I never went down the rabbit hole to use offline ones.

When my parents built a new house, they wanted to get smart home features and got quoted 12k CHF (pretty much same as USD) for a crappy proprietary system.

I asked them for 1/4th of that amount to buy hardware and do it myself. My philosophy when designing it, is that everything that is "smart" should have a non-smart backup. You can trigger the lights via an app or the tablet, but the switch on the wall also works. The garage can be opened remotely and automatically when the car approaches, but there's a physical radio remote that still does the job independently of the smart home system. You can set the blinds exactly at the level you want from the app, but the remote is always around if you need it. And so on.

The idea was that if the system goes down, everything should still work. But it also made me realise that the convenience of having both options is what my parents love the most. They mostly interact with things using the non-smart controls, but love to know that they can monitor and interact with these same things from anywhere.

I bought a Fairphone 3+ years ago and, as much as I want to support this company, it was a huge disappointment. I switched to an iPhone after using it for less than three years, which is less than the life span I was hoping to use it for.

Within a year, the USB port wore out. Contacted the support as the phone was under warranty and was given two options: Order the replacement part online and get reimbursed for it. Or send the entire phone back, but it would get wiped clean.

I had some data that wasn't backed up and didn't want to loose, and because I couldn't charge it, I decided to go for the first option. It's supposed to be easily reparable, why go through the hassle of sending it back? Well the problem was that the part was unavailable on their store for months. I even looked at third party stores, that specific part couldn't be found anywhere in Europe. After three months of having a "repairable" paperweight on my desk, the part was finally available and I could change it (replacing it took seconds and I've done it while sitting at a café, gotta give credit to Fairphone for that).

Meanwhile, I see my friends with their iPhones getting them repaired within a few days or even the same day! Battery change, charging port replacement, screen change, etc. All could be easily and quickly done by a local repair shop.

In the end I realised it's not about how easy it is to repair your phone, it's about the availability of spare parts. iPhones, especially a few years ago, make it difficult to be repaired. Yet, they are the easiest to get repaired. Fairphone's spare parts are specific to their phones, and even specific to some models. Using generic parts or having some compatible across models would create more need for them = more parts available.

Eric's answer is just don't buy it if you're not happy with the warranty [0].

I'm still willing to take the risk because Pebble smartwatches are the only ones I like and wear. I managed to give my OG Steel another life by replacing the battery. Unfortunately that seems to be harder with the Round 2 as there won't be any screws. I'm still a bit split on whether to change my Time 2 pre-order for a Round 2.

[0] https://bsky.app/profile/ericmigi.com/post/3maubss6mqc25

There was a number of games that allowed similar things in these days. My favourite was San Andreas Multiplayer. All you needed was a copy of GTA: San Andreas and download the client, the server was community scripted. This gave birth to a number of unique servers: racing, deathmatch, role play, etc.

Multi Theft Auto (another GTA multiplayer mod, still alive today) allowed for similar things. And so did the source games (Counter Strike, HL2: DM, Day of Defeat, etc.).

Apart from all the awesome annoucements, what really makes me happy is how quickly this went from internet drama to both parties moving towards doing whats best for the community.

Props to Core and Rebble for making Pebble what it is today and casting a bright future for theses watches. Been happily wearing my Pebble Steel for the past month after replacing its battery, looking forward to the PT2!

Also daily driving Bazzite on my gaming laptop, everything is supported out of the box (iGPU / dGPU switcher, fan control, LED keyboard, low/high screen refresh), there's barely any maintenance needed and it runs really smooth. The other day I connected my G27 (wheel, pedals and gear shifter) to play BeamNG, it just worked, no drivers, crapware or configuration needed.

I also use the same machine for dev work and everything works amazingly well.

Subpar tooling outside of Windows (I'm looking at you C# Dev Kit)

JetBrains Rider is excellent and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. It has a few Windows only features but nothing important for me, it's the best IDE for C#/.NET you can get on non-Windows platforms imo. And it's free for non commercial use.

Reminds me of my time in Zanzibar, where the internet was censored and some VPN providers (like Proton) weren't working. The authorities then imposed a complete ban of VPNs without permit, with threats of harsh punishment (2000 USD fine or 12m in prison). Exceptions could be made by filling a form justifying the use of the VPN and details about it (for example IP address) but reviews are slow and obscure.

The context with this article is different but the similarities are with how lawmakers misunderstand VPNs. They are an essential tool for workers and there are many other ways to circumvent censorship without VPNs anyway. The irony of this ban is that Zanzibar also wants to attract digital nomads, and the most important tool for them is an unrestricted and reliable internet connection.

My parents are both 70+ and I put them on Linux (Ubuntu and Mint) a decade ago, best decision ever. All the frustration from Windows went away overnight. They are simple computer users - browsing (email, search, booking), opening PDFs, offloading photos from a camera and watching them, editing word documents and spreadsheets, everything just works with no friction. I'm so happy they never got to experience Windows 11.

A few months ago, I switched my aunt (70+ as well) to Linux Mint after repeated issues with Windows 10 and now 11. The last straw was the printer stopped working one day out of the blue. Tired to re-install it for over an hour, impossible! When I installed Mint and looked to add the printer, it was already there and ready to work. And for the user experience, I just sat her in front of the computer and asker her to do various tasks that she would normally do on Windows without any explanation, and she just did them intuitively. She even sent me a message a few days ago to thank me for installing Linux on her machine!

Microsoft keep shooting themselves in the foot with Windows, it's like they don't even care about consumer operating systems anymore. Most popular Linux distros are stable and easy to use, for an average computer user it's perfect. I also daily drive Linux (Bazzite, based on Fedora Silverblue) and it does everything I need - coding, browsing, games, it's all there. I'm never going back to Windows.

Yet again another company hit by the consequences of being out of touch with their customers and fuelled by greed. Thankfully good alternatives exist, otherwise it would have sent a signal to the industry that this is OK.

I might be naive but why isn't any package manager (npm, pnpm, bun, yarn, ...) pushing for a permission system, where packages have to define in the package.json what permission they would like to access? À la Deno but scoped to dependencies or like mobile apps do with their manifest.

I know it would take time for packages to adopt this but it could be implemented as parameters when installing a new dependency, like `npm i ping --allow-net`. I wouldn't give a library like chalk access to I/O, processes or network.

It baffles me that a ton of sites that have been translated into multiple languages still set the language based on IP rather than trying to determine it based on the client settings or defaulting to a set language with an easy way to switch it.

Countless times I landed on websites I use relatively frequently in foreign countries to see them in a language I don't understand, having to rely on my browser's translation functionality to find the language switcher. My operating system + browser are set to English, yet I still get served the one in the language I don't understand.

The worst offenders in my opinion are the ones assuming language based on IP for multi-lingual countries like Switzerland. People living in the French or Italian parts almost always get served the German content. It's bad UX.

It's not an assumption, it's commonly done in some parts of the world that don't have proper waste management. What happens after you put trash in a bin and there's nobody to collect it? You have to get rid of it somehow. Out of many options, such as throwing it in the sea, burring it in the ground or simply burning it, the latter is usually done because it's easier and quicker.

Heating isn't really an issue in the part I lived (warm all year round, even in the night) and the smell of burned plastic is quite distinguishable, even at higher altitudes.

A sibling comment mentioned that it can detect smoke, so my guess is waste disposal, aka burning trash in your backyard. Some can produce quite a lot of smoke.

I did a private pilot license in Africa, the biggest "plus" was that I always knew the direction of the wind on the ground by looking at all these fires. There was never a time when I didn't see smoke unless I was flying in very remote areas.

Been a Hetzner customer for years and have considered using them for a new business project of mine. Will reconsider it partly after reading this. At least use a separate provider for backups so I can quickly recover, just in case.

Seeing it happen to a reputable project such as Kiwix [0] definitely damages my perception of Hetzner. I've read numerous complains on Reddit a few months ago but they mostly boiled down to breaching the ToS in obvious ways. Still, not giving a heads up before cancelling a service and no option to recover data is just bad business practice.

[0] (I've deployed Pi's with Kiwix in remote areas in Africa, it's an amazing project)

After a last horrible work experience, I decided to quit working for a while and travel. Haven't sold a lot of things, some are still stored at my parent's place but I managed to live off my saving for almost two years. I could have gone a lot longer but unfortunately some bad investment decisions and a long dream of obtaining a pilot license shortened my runway by a lot.

In the past months, my situation has gotten worse as I needed to tighten my belt due to my saving having almost completely melted. Hard but enriching times, I have now found a job after months of searching. The market in Europe isn't great these days. Back to hustling but without any regrets.

100% agree with OP, it was the experience of a lifetime for me. If I can give some additional advice, plan your finances. Even if you think a large sum will last you years and you're a bit lazy to plan it (as I was), don't be conservative with your forecast, plan large. Personally if I had to do it again, I'd try to keep half or one third aside for unexpected cases.

Having spent a lot of time at a hangar at international airport in Africa and flying there, I can say that there's a thin line between crashes and incidents that could have resulted in a disaster. The former being extremely rare while the latter occurs so frequently it's scary. Between pilot errors, ATC mistakes and bad aircraft/airport maintenance, I've witnessed and heard of many near misses and incidents that have miraculously not turned into something worse. Passengers are completely oblivious what they narrowly escaped.

I often talk about my experience to my peers in Europe. They have similar stories, albeit not happening as frequently. Looking at accident reports on Aviation Safety Network [0] and breakdowns on YouTube such as videos from Mentour Pilot [1], some of the factors that contributed to crashes still occur frequently without resulting in an accident. It's usually a combination of multiple failures that lead to it. My flight instructor used to tell me, every aggravating factor (i.e. lack of sleep, low fuel quantity, complacency, assumptions, etc.) fills a glass which leaves less and less space to luck until it runs over.

[0] https://asn.flightsafety.org/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot