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).

That’s because the elites don’t want you to think for yourself, and instead are designing tools that will tell you what to think.

I’m one of those complaining about the UI. Used the TabMixPlus extension to adjust the UI to my liking. FF killed it. So, I started customizing the UI CSS. Every few versions, Mozilla changed the browser enough to invalidate my changes. After a while, I got tired of thiz and switched to Vivaldi, which is Chromium based.

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 work in IT, run Mint on my travel laptop, and yet at home use the desktop I got 10 years ago, still with Win 8.1. And I use my current desktop quite extensively. There’s still a lot of perfectly fine hardware with outdated OS floating around, and I’d argue that a significant portion of it is used by people experienced enough that they know what they are doing. Much of that will shift towards Linux. Not most of it, I’ll grant you that, but more than people expect.

I’m personally not sure how it works. But when we were upgrading our bathroom, the tile shop added the VAT to the quoted sale price. I then asked a friend of mine who is VAT-registeted to buy it for us, and he got it from the same warehouse for the non-VAT price.

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.

I have been downvoting every post I came across that has a link to Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. If those links are banned, I’ll have fewer downvotes to hand out. It ain’t much, but it’s honest work.

I quit Facebook because it stopped showing updates from my friends and groups I subscribed to. I couldn’t care less about Zuck’s political leanings as long as his product had any use for me.

It is also a pain in the arse for a normal user. When I search for a local plumber, instead of typing my query into the address bar, I need to go to maps.google.com first, and search there. These days, half of my searches are for businesses (the other half for spelling or correct usage of a difficult word), and all those searches now need to be made directly on the map page.

Heh, the same here, but with the usual green screen. A few years later, I took out my old PC to replay my favourite - F-19 Stealth Fighter. Found, however, that my MS-DOS 5.25" floppy, which needed to be loaded in Drive A, didn’t work. Here was my setup.

Man, that Gateway brings back memories… I’ve had ine just like that, including speakers, and I used to play the shit out of Heroes of Might and Magic II and Sim City 2000 on it. I still have the HDD. I think I’ll spin up a Win98 instance in VMWare and copy over my saved games there when the kids are asleep

The key phrase is “multi-party democracy”. I guess I should have also added “parliamentary” into that phrase. Political systems with a single winner are far more prone to electoral manipulation than systems where a coalition government is the norm.

I wouldn’t see it too tragic. Those who would support AfD already do, and the rest won’t change the mind because of an article written in a lunatic’s name. If he threw considerable amount of money at AfD, I’d get a bit concerned, but in a functional multi-party democracy, especially one with a nazi past, a nazi party would never be invited into a government unless it won an outright majority.

Military attack -> Kinetic military action

Torture -> Enhanced interrogation