murrayhenson

I assume you're talking about on-street charging? If so... I think you're right. The UK, like Poland (where I live), has a LOT to do in terms of supporting folks that live in a flat. On-street charging really needs to be properly prioritised, properly funded, the paperwork/process streamlined, etc.

Labour ought to be doing all of this already, but I haven't seen it yet and this article: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrddz2407zo ... is a good example of the situation.

In Poland, especially in the cities, parking is always an issue and doubly so around large blocks of flats. I doubt the new coalition government has the backbone to do much about the situation, but while EV adoption is low here, they have the chance to get ahead of the curve and mandate new builds have a meaningful percentage of parking with ~11 kW charging points. Existing builds should be heavily supported but it should also be mandatory to retrofit charging at existing parking spots.

The end of Chapter 12 from Douglas Adams' Life, the Universe, and Everything.

The darkness of the cloud buffeted at the ship. Inside was the silence of history. Their historic mission was to find out if there was anything or anywhere on the other side of the sky, from which the wrecked spaceship could have come, another world maybe, strange and incomprehensible though this thought was to the enclosed minds of those who had lived beneath the sky of Krikkit.

History was gathering itself to deliver another blow.

Still the darkness thrummed at them, the blank enclosing darkness. It seemed closer and closer, thicker and thicker, heavier and heavier. And suddenly it was gone.

They flew out of the cloud.

They saw the staggering jewels of the night in their infinite dust and their minds sang with fear.

For a while they flew on, motionless against the starry sweep of the Galaxy, itself motionless against the infinite sweep of the Universe. And then they turned around.

"It'll have to go," the men of Krikkit said as they headed back for home.

On the way back, they sang a number of tuneful and reflective songs on the subjects of peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life and the obliteration of all other life forms.

I just bought an MBA M1 with 16 GB of RAM. I had to check to make sure that it was actually going into sleep mode because the system seems to instantly turn on and unlock when coming out of sleep mode.

It's also cold most of the time; it takes ages to get up to what feels like "room temperature". I'm besmitten.

I've had something similar happen. I was keeping home-made ginger beer in our refrigerator for some weeks after I'd made several bottles of it. Ginger beer is yeast, water, sugar, ginger juice, and a few other things. I didn't realize that - even at 3-4 degrees Celsius the yeast would continue doing their thing, albeit slowly.

I was sitting at the kitchen table, right next to the fridge, when a 750 ml glass bottle of ginger beer exploded. It took out another bottle along with the tempered glass shelf it had been sitting on.

Not only did it take more than an hour to clean up, the replacement shelf my wife ordered was the wrong one, so she had to order yet another replacement. It took ages to arrive.

I have not yet been allowed to make more home-made ginger beer, which is a shame because it's very tasty and is excellent for making cocktails in the summer.

Seconded for Ubiquiti. I've had a Dream Machine Pro (firewall/router), a couple of their USW-Pro-24/48-PoE switches, and some of their AP's (U6-LR mostly) for a few months now and everything seems to work well.

I went for the Ubiquiti stuff because it seemed like it would be fairly easy to configure and it was... and I don't have a lot of experience with configuring routers/firewalls. Ubiquiti's stuff was also less expensive than some Cisco gear I was looking at, though that may be more because of my location (Poland) than anything else. Also, because I'm in Poland, houses are constructed largely out of brick, concrete, and rebar. So, reasonably powerful AP's were needed and the U6-LR's seem to fit the bill.

My only issue with the Ubiquiti stuff is that everyone admonishes everyone else to not automatically upgrade due to some pretty serious issues from firmware upgrades from Ubiquiti in the past. However, because someone will always have issues with an upgrade, it can be hard to know for sure if the latest firmware is going cause real issues or not.

iCloud photo sharing? Works with people that do and do not have iPhones/Macs. At least I know that non-Apple users can see photos in a shared album; I don't know if they can add photos to a shared photo album as well - I've never tried that.

Several years ago I got tired for Facebook and quit it. My parents, in-laws, and siblings have an Apple shared photo album for "general" content and we occasionally set up albums for the same group of folks when there's a big event/trip/etc.

We occasionally Facetime or use chat via Messages. Email's are in the mix as well.

I feel that it works reasonably well.

Agreed!

My wife and I are building a home at the moment and, when it came time to consider appliances, noise of a given appliance was a factor and something we took into consideration. For example, we chose a very quiet vent hood to go over the hob/stovetop since it's an open plan kitchen/living area. Vent hoods can be very noisy (65+ dB) when running maximum.

However, given that there are tractors in fields nearby, dogs, chickens, and other "sounds of rural life" ... we made sure to put in a LOT of insulation and also went for triple-paned windows. While the house isn't yet complete, we hear almost no outside sounds when we are inside.

When we compare that to our current location - on a side street, but a moderately busy one - with sometimes couriers on loud motorcycles, lorries, police/fire vehicles (sirens), and the occasional person with a car that has an exhaust tuned to be loud ...the difference is really quite remarkable.

Maybe that the quotas are very low, or that there are quotas at all. Mainland Norway definitely doesn't have quotas like this; rather alcohol is simply made to be quite expensive.

When I read this my first thought was something like, "I bet that those who don't drink are making a bit of profit on the side by selling their allowances." However, I'm guessing that for Svalbard's dedicated drinkers ...they're finding a way around the import restrictions.

It would be interesting to hear how folks deal with the restrictions by someone that lives on Svalbard or has spent significant time there.

That's about 49300 miles a year, or about 200 miles a day if you drive five days a week, 50 weeks out of the year. That's a lot of driving. What has pushed you to be driving so much?

You could throw VAT/sales tax in there, too. In Switzerland it's absurdly low (for Europe) at 7.7%.

Without these funds the infrastructure would either be poor or non-existent, making it expensive or unrealistic to move goods and people around within a country like Poland.

When I emigrated to Poland in 2005 (from the US) driving between Krakow and Gdynia at never more than 15% over the speed limit of 90 km/h (the average speed everyone else is travelling at) (but often under 90 km/h due to many lorries on the road, tractors, accidents, people in elderly Fiats, elderly people in Peugeots/Fiats/Polonez/etc) with three 15 minute stops the driving time was about 10.5 to 11 hours. Now it's about 7 to 7.5 hours (two stops, not three, and usually driving right at the speed limit).

The change is because of the introduction of the proper A1 motorway. Two lanes each direction and, most places, rated for 140 km/h.

I should note that the "proper" A1 isn't yet complete. There's no A-class motorway between Krakow and Czestochowa though it's being built and should be complete in a few years.

Maintenance on the thousands of kilometers of motorways (and highways and smaller roads) will undoubtedly be a significant expense in the future. But those roads allow for a staggering quantity of goods (and people) to be moved about quickly, safely, and inexpensively (even accounting for tolls). I doubt that our current government is setting aside money for maintenance for all of that but the potential incompetence of today's government shouldn't be a reason not to do something that will have ripple effects for decades.

My wife (native Polish speaker) and I (native English speaker) both use Wikipedia's left-hand list of articles in other languages to get quick translations of the title/subject of a given article.

Cambridge

"Our fair city!" -Tom Magliozzi