neor

I have used Pop OS for years and for me it was the most smooth desktop environment I've ever used.

They have been working on a custom Desktop Environment which sadly still isn't very stable yet. Promising development, but putting me off of using Pop for a while.

For my work device I've disabled Liquid glass completely. The accessibility options to reduce transparency and increase contrast improve the readability of the system a lot.

Booting a 15 year old Mac a while ago had me surprised how clean the interface actually is. The Dock/Desktop look a lot better in the old versions, and the age is mostly showing in apps like Finder which do look a bit dated.

I really hope someone at Apple is going to make the call to drastically reduce the Liquid Glass design and start complying with their own UX guidelines again.

Ease of use, and a bit of customer protection.

Living in the Netherlands iDeal is perfect for online shopping, but once the money is gone there is no way to get it back.

With Visa/Mastercard there is a level of protection available which leaves the door open to get your money back if you are being scammed.

I believe Wero is going to implement this as well, so time will tell but I think any move to break the duopoly of Visa/Mastercard is good for consumers.

I agree, the Liquid Glass isn’t working out for Mac OS.

Few days ago I booted a very old device running High Sierra and the UI and old Dock look so clean.

That desktop was peak for me, and the age starts showing a bit in Finder, but it's still more usable than today's versions.

Nice additions, but haven't really missed them a lot.

Most of the time if I want the first or last element I don't care about the array itself so array_shift and array_pop work just fine.

Depends on what you're using it for. Windows 11 is the only main stream competition, but for work I've used Pop OS for a few years and was amazed by how stable and usable it is for work.

Back to Mac OS now due to a change of workplace, and while I'm absolutely blown away by the M3 performance and battery life the OS is something I'm still struggling with a bit.

Saying that military action is not off the table to take Greenland is literally insane.

Greenland has always been an ally, if for safety reasons the US needs more military presence on the island they could have just asked for it and it would most likely have been approved.

There is zero reason to use force, but if the US would take such steps I wouldn't be surprised if Europe starts replacing the dollar as reserve currency. This could trigger other nations like China to follow. This move would hurt the US economy way worse than the current trade war does.

Never had issues with Kobo devices and Calibre. Is there any advantage to converting books to KEPUB format?

I've had a new Toyota Corolla over the weekend, and the beeps were driving me nuts.

The car reads signs, and beeps everytime it detects a change in speed limit. If you go over the speed limit, even if its 1 km/h the car starts beeping as well.

I never drive really fast, when the car says I'm driving 1 KM over the limit my GPS speed usually is 5 below. This makes the signals extra annoying.

They should have used beeps when you're 10 or more over the speed limit or something like that so you don't get spammed with notifications all the time. The system being as it is, I'm 100% sure I will get it removed by a tuning shop.

DE razors have a level of aggressiveness. A Muhle R41 for example is a fantastic razor, but known to be hugely aggressive.

A R89 is much less agressieve and will be more comfortable to shave with if you have sensitive skin or are prone to nicks and cuts.

Lots of people talk about how to achieve the greatest smoothness, don’t go for that if you regularly have razor burn. Just go with the grain and that’s it, no across or against the grain.

The Spring Drive movement is amazing, very accurate, very high quality and that smooth sweeping seconds hand is mesmerizing. Availability is good, and the price is a lot better than the high-end Swiss brands.

Rolex these days is a joke, even the authorized dealers will rip you off shamelessly. They will either refuse to sell you a watch they have in store, or they will force you to buy 30 grand in extra jewelry just to get the Rolex you want.

Cheating is when teams are running illegal cars for example, strong rumors existed around the Schumacher championships with Benetton that they were illegally using Traction Control to boost performance.

More recently Ferrari finding a way to circumvent the FIA provided fuel flow sensor allowing them to push more fuel into the engine than allowed.

That's cheating, and no huge problems like that existed last year. Sure there were the usual things. Aerodynamic parts flexing, not proved to be illegal as it passed all FIA mandated tests. It leads to a new Technical Directive in which the FIA reminds teams that aerodynamic parts shouldn't flex and that the FIA is improving the tests. No punishments, no points deduction and no rumors or whatever existed.

The final race isn't cheating, if a referee makes a mistake in a football match you can't accuse one of the teams of cheating. Even Mercedes commented within hours after the race that Red Bull and Max Verstappen did nothing wrong; they did what every team and driver would do. Win the race given the chance they had.

Mercedes dominating isn't because Newey lost his touch. The Red Bull cars have been in the top three for all those seasons.

The thing is, especially early on in the V6T Hybrid era the Mercedes engine was miles ahead of everyone else. There was simply no other engine capable of winning championships.

The first few years Mercedes was running the engines downtuned to lose some performance, because they felt the gap so huge that it would make the sport look bad if they were running a second a lap faster than the second team on the grid. With such a gap the FIA would also surely intervene fast. Artificially keeping the gap smaller, and only turning up the engine when needed gave Mercedes easy wins, while keeping the FIA away from intervention.

The fights became closer when the other manufacturers started getting more performance out of their engines.

Last year Red Bull won because the FIA changed some aerodynamic rules. Everyone expected that the changed rules would favor Mercedes and Aston Martin who were running low rake. It turns out the expectations were false, the new rules impacted Mercedes and Aston Martin hugely and the teams running a high-rake setup didn't lose all that much performance. This gave Red Bull a edge which lasted until around Silverstone, when Mercedes brought upgrades to fix the performance of their car.

The championship lead built by Red Bull was just enough to win the title in the end with some controversy in the final two races. There never were rumors of cheating anywhere.

Correct, switch it off and the plane can fly fine.

Thing is though the pilots of the second MAX crash took all the right steps. Just too slow.

There was like 10 seconds to turn off mcas, after that a crash was inevitable.

They are doing a great job. 180 turnaround from the company that wanted their products to look clean above usable.

Only downside to me is that in such relatively expensive hardware they should have doubled all storage options. Starting at 512GB for the entry spec and 1TB for the high end spec is rather low.

Reading this, I'm happy it was different for me.

After smoking for years I became a weekend smoker; in weekends I'd go out and after some beers the urge to smoke because so much stronger. It took me a few years to give up smoking in weekends, what helped me the most is all my friends trying to give up smoking so no cigarettes were around anymore when we'd go to a bar.

Eventually most of my friends started smoking again, but I stayed off of them. Now I've not smoked for at least 7 years; and I never feel like there is a lightswitch in my mind. Even after some beers the smell of cigarettes disgust me.

Chopping and cutting is a skill you need to get the hang of. I'm nowhere near a pro level of doing this, but I've become quite fast at it.

It sounds a bit dorky, but it really helps to look up on YouTube how a pro cuts an onion for example. You'll realise that most people are cutting them wrong, and that the "correct" way speeds up the cutting process massively.

I tend to agree with you.

The current V6 Turbo engines with advanced Energy Recovery Systems were introduced with two major ideas in mind; 1. It would make Formula 1 engines relevant for road cars. 2. It would attract new manufacturers to the sport.

1. Failed miserably; there is 0 road relevance for F1 engines. 2. Failed miserably; only Honda entered the sport and they are pulling the plug now. Juicy detail; they extended their IndyCar contract and IndyCar is switching to V6 Turbo Hybrid engines in a few years.... So the "carbon free tech" reason they gave to pull out of F1 isn't entirely true.

What F1 should do is one of two things;

1. Find a way to become road relevant again. I'd say the only way to do this is to skip Electric as Formula E is doing this already and go for hydrogen fuel.

2. Screw road relevance, and focus on entertainment. This means abandoning the insanely complex/expensive engines and go for simple, powerful, and most of all cheap engines.

Part of the agreement is that Ferrari engineers are helping the FIA to police the other engines.

The engineers on the payroll at the FIA don't have the time/resources/knowledge to judge the legality of these insanely complex powertrains.

All manufacturers were forced earlier this year to provide detailed info about their Energy Recovery Systems, rumors are that Ferrari suspects the Mercedes ERS to make use of loopholes so Ferrari lends their engineers to the FIA to research the data provided on all engines.

Close some of those loopholes with a Technical Directive (Basically a clarification of the rules, which takes immediate effect) and you can slow down your opponents with immediately.

The FIA has made a rule now that any new/innovative finding on a car gets banned the next season.

So if a team develops something, they can run it for one year after which it's banned from the sport.

All of this is to cut cost for the smaller teams; take the DAS system of Mercedes (Double Axis Steering). If the FIA doesn't ban it all teams need to be running it next year, or they fall behind. However its a complex system and the small teams (Haas, Williams, Alfa Romeo for example) might not have the money to research and build it.

Siri indeed never learns.

I've had to disable "Hey Siri" because my daughters name is pronounced vaguely similar to Siri. Worst thing is, Siri transcribes what it hears, and it transcribes my daughters name. So it doesn't hear wrong; it just activates on a different name than Siri.

I've tried telling Siri to shut up; but it never learns not to activate when I call out my daughters name.

I believe every car manufacturer has a disclaimer that the autopilot can only be used as an assist. That the driver needs to keep his eyes on the road, and ready to intervene at any given time.

Were not at the self-driving level of kicking back the seat and watching netflix on your phone yet.

I doubt we will ever get there; there will always be edge cases which are difficult for a computer to grasp. Faded lane marking, some non-self-driving car doing something totally unexpected, extreme weather conditions limiting visibility for the camera's etc.

I have the same problem with Bose. I love the headphones but I always need to put on music.

Just using them to reduce noise and focus isn't possible because it makes me nauseous.

There is a much bigger risk than sink rates.

The houses have been built on wooden piles, and with the recent drought in the Netherlands the ground water level fell. If the top of the wooden piles were exposed to air, they start rotting.

A few years from now we might see a lot of old homes needing new piles or new foundations.

I fully agree, there is a steady decline in usability and its a bloody shame because for years the usability is what set Apple apart from the others.

A few things which hugely annoy me;

- Saving a photo from iMessage.... the option has disappeared. I get a popup to airdrop the file, interact with some apps and a huge copy button. In fact, I can scroll down in this menu but there is not a single visual indicator that I can scroll. No scroll bar, no icon... nothing. I've had to read somewhere online that I could scroll there, and I work in IT. How is this usable for people who don't work in IT.

- After updates I'm frequently asked to provide my Apple ID password, and yet iOS doesn't allow me to interact with Password Managers at this moment. I've got a 36 random character password, and it is a pain in the ass to enter this.

- 3D touch has been removed in newer iPhones. Fine, but why cripple older phones which still have the hardware to use 3D touch... Now it takes me an extra action to re-arrange my icons.

Thank you for your replies and giving a look into how 1Password handles security.

I've been looking to switch for a while now, as the UI of 1Password looks superior to LastPass and my wife needs a strong UI because else she won't understand her password manager :).

Few questions though; - Will you add support for the newer 2FA options anytime soon? I'd love to use a recent Yubikey when providing the second factor; the FIDO2 keys and NFC on iPhone. - Is there any roadmap on when the newer 1Password X becomes the default plugin for use in browsers? As a Linux user I believe my options to use 1Password are somewhat limited.

Shortfalls are about the same, but I do wonder if the problem is as big as well.

I'm not sure about the US, but in the Netherlands the pensions are a hot topic in politics.

The pension funds have to maintain a minimum amount of money, and need to take action if they risk getting below the minimum.

Some/most funds are no longer indexing yearly based on inflation, and some funds are talking about reducing payouts to the retired. They are actively protecting their wealth to ensure the younger generation still has access to a pension when they retire.

On a grander scale there are talks about a completely new pension system; the big funds where the current generation of workers pay the pensions of the retired is fragile with the general aging of the population. The amount of working persons per retired person is shifting, so they are talking about restructuring in a way where every working person saves money for their own pension.

So when the article states that it is an invisible problem... not entirely true for the Netherlands.

I switched recently and I love it. Clean interface, and some good tweaks on top of Ubuntu.

Main reason for switching was better docker support/performance. Don’t really miss anything.

Some say Pop is the best for HiDPI screens, but personally I’ve disabled the entire HiDPI Daemon, with a triple monitor setup it was really buggy and slow so I decided to just take the shortcut and change the resolution of my laptop screen to make it readable.

I found a wallet once. It has a bankcard in it, so I called the bank, telling them I had found the wallet of one of their customers and asking them if they could help me return in to the owner.

They weren't allowed to give contact details of the owner to me, but they were allowed to forward my contact details to the owner of the wallet.

Through this route we eventually got the wallet back to its owner. Took half a day to get everything in order, but man were they happy to get the wallet back.

For the Veyron I know they developed special tires with Michelin to be able to handle the extreme high speeds.

Such development might help "normal" tires improve in durability.

I can imagine this is something that happens in a lot of area's. Pushing every part to the extremes might help make them more reliable under normal usage.

Ultra high speeds also require efficient aerodynamics, which in turn helps reduce drag/fuel usage.