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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • My old FR 110 is still working. Since then:

    • Vivoactive HR - 2 years in, the casing broke at one of the points where the wristband is attached. Material fatigue. Out of warranty.
    • Vivoactive 3 - 2 years in, altimeter went haywire. Also, battery life decreased to one day. Just out of warranty.
    • Fenix 6 - 1.5 years in, GPS got really bad. As in, drift of over 200m from route. Within warranty, so I contacted them and they sent me a replacement watch. That one is still working, and I hope it will for a long time.

    By now, I developed a certain expectation of the life of Garmin watches. I divided their price with expected lifetime, and compared that with similar data for Coros. Coros is simply better value for money.


  • I just saw DC Rainmaker’s video on this, and I’m not impressed. In any case, I’ve bern using my Garmin watch mainly for running, and I’ve been more interested in spot data than history on Connect. Still, I’m on my last Garmin watch. The hardware itself seems to last for only 18-24 months before problems start piling up, so I decided that my next watch will be Coros. I’m under no illusions that the hardware would be more reliable, but it costs half of what I’ve paid for my Garmin.


  • Last time I travelled to the US, I brought my old phone. It had plenty of text messages, a few photos of family and nature, and nothing else. They didn’t check it, but I guessed it would pass the “not a burner” vibe. Now I’m wondering, though, how people would react to me having no social media presence (other than Reddit at that time, which I accessed via browser). Not that I’m planning to travel to the US ever again, but I wonder whether there’s a market for perfectly inoffensive fake social media accounts.


  • There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

    • Isaac Asimov, 1980

    There were people warning against the glorification of ignorance in the US nearly half a century ago. It’s nothing new; it just reached critical mass (also thanks to social media where ignorant people can self-organise).




  • I used Classic Shell to make it look as much as WinXP Classic as possible, so I’m happy with how it looks. As for vulnerabilities, knock on wood, so far I didn’t have any issues (but I do run Bitdefender). I use it for gaming (GOG, newest game being older than my PC), photo editing (Gimp with Google Nik Collection), browsing, and office work. Nothing too demanding. But to be honest, I would have switched to Mint a long time ago if I found a Linux alternative for Smart Switch (my phone backup utility) and Garmin Connect for my watch. Those two are the only two pieces of software that keep me with Windows, and at this point I’m actually thinking of a cheap mini PC just for those two as a direct pass-through to my NAS backup.




  • I agree overall, but VAT is not all that difficult to evade, at least in the service industry. Paying handymen in cash is common in many countries, and that’s a means to evade VAT. Hell, even using them to buy the building or landscaping materials for you (being a registered business they purchase for prices without VAT) saves you on most of the tax. Then there’s service barter. I did it only once, a long time ago, but it can serve as an example: I did family portraits (photography) for my physio, in exchange for a number of physio sessions. If we charged each other, it would have cost each of us, say, 250 Euros, but we’d only see 200 each, and the state would get 100. So, savings of 50 for each of us.