JustTesting

i have a venta lw45. same principle, but instead of a wick, it has these rotating disks that the water sticks to (with a little soap in the water). Works incredibly well, still uses next to no energy (<8W) and the disks are super easy to clean. It's a beast, goes through 9 liters of water in a bit over a day. All the parts are easily accessible for maintenance and there's replacement parts if anything ever were to break (though i havent needed those yet).

the disks are especially nice when you have hard water, the calcium can be a pain to remove from a wick, but you can put the venta plastic disks (and lower housing, if you can fit it) in the dishwasher to get them good as new. And calcium does not stick to them weld, so a quick rinse under a strong showerhead is usually enough to clean the disks. Definitely one of the best appliance purchases i ever made.

It's also the plot of Forego Quest (a short novelette included in the book Dragons Banker). the hero is not just the chosen one, he's THE chosen one, as in, the chosen one of every prophecy and myth. His body is covered in different birthmarks from hundreds of prophecies, he stumbles on unique magic weapons to defaet a dark lord at every coner (they sell for a nice profit), every inn he enters, the maid is suddenly super pretty and starts going on about actually being a princess in distress or some such. And he's having none of it.

i quite enjoyed that one, and as a novelette it's short enough to not overstay its welcome.

The main book was ok, had some nice ideas but nothing too spectacular. It's about some magic kingdom intoducing bank notes instead of gold and a dragon hiring a banker to convert its hoard of gold into this new currency without being noticed or crashing the market.

Looking through hugo/nebula nominations.

friends

i used to use goodreads but since it's owned by Amazon, i don't trust it an switched to thestorygraph.com which has really nice recommendations. of course it recommends based on my usual tastes but often also has some books i would never have checked otherwise, which i quite appreciate.

Fair enough. As I said, compared to some other european countries it's still relatively bad here. Though 52 hours vs 45 is a whole extra day of work. And while I don't care about the religious stuff, and there is some convenience lost with (most) shops not being open on Sunday, having a specific day that is generally off for everyone so you can spend time with family/friends is kind of nice. And I think one important thing is that most of these things aren't negotiable by a contract, otherwise they'd be meaningless imo, at least in the sense of preventing low paid workers from being exploited.

There's also lots more rules I didn't mention, like acceptable hours you can work before you must take a break, number of hours you can work in a row (with breaks) before you need to get a half day off etc. A lot of it is focussed on giving workers an opportunity to regenerate properly.

tbh, for european standards, that still sounds pretty bad.

for examle here: 45 hour work week, sunday labor is generally banned, with 6 sundays/year being the limit and having to be paid 50% extra for that work, plus being required to compensate for that day by taking an extra day off the following week. Overtime 2 hour/day, 170 hours/year, 25% extra pay or compensate by taking off same amount of time. Of course there's also exceptions, same as everywhere.

and this is still relatively bad compared to e.g. france with its 35 hour work week.

Kobo.com DRM is also very easy to bypass and turn into epub using knock

Viel Diskussionen um das Thema im Moment in der Politik. Natürlich schön, nach dem das Armeebudget erhöht wurde, ohne dass die Armee überhaupt weiss, was mit dem Geld machen.

Hoffentlich wie in den letzten paar Malen wird das an der Urne abgelehnt, weil Leute erstaunlicherweise keine Freude haben, wenn Sozialbeiträge gestrichen werden.

https://www.republik.ch/2025/02/03/die-verborgenen-milliarden-der-schweiz ist auch ein guter Artikel zu dem Thema

Für Navi funktioniert das super. Das einzige, für das ich noch keine gute Alternative gefunden hab (wie im Artikel erwähnt), ist Restaurants in der nähe zu finden, mit Bewertungen, Fotos, Öffnungszeiten. Vor allem beim reisen. In OSM/OrganicMaps findet man da vieles nicht, und wenn dann nur Name/Adresse.

Falls da wer ne gute Alternative kennt wär das super.

It's not economical to grow. It has very specific requirements in terms of wet soil and not too much sun, it has pretty low yields in terms of weight/area, compared to other crops. and since it isn't grown commercially, you also dont have optimized farming techniques and breeds etc.

and since it's quite common in the wild, well, if the price is too high, you'd just go and collect some yourself. Wild garlic products in supermarkets are already too expensive for me and i'd rather spend half an hour filling a bag with 2kg than buying 50g for 5 bucks.

It's not just the use itself, but also how irresponsibly it is produced. Exposing pregnant workers to high levels, dumping it in community water supplies, on farmland etc.

Also the EU did ban them last september (effective in 2026) for essentially all of the uses you outlined, most of which I dont think are such a big deal and just minor inconveniences. It's not like the 60s were terrible in terms of living conditions.

We also used to use asbestos for a lot of the uses you outlined and we got rid of that without too much inconvenience, but you could have made similar arguments about it back then.

And any reduction is a good thing, it's not an all or nothing thing. DDT was banned, but can and is still used where there's no better alternative. And just categorically saying any alternative must be just as bad is just a non-sequitur, there's no reason that should be true. Cookware is a good example, cast iron works just as well, is not as bad, the only downside compared to teflon is weight. But it's not like sending us back to the stone age or anything...

The newest generation of xps i shit anyways, good riddance.

i was really happy with my 2019ish xps. But the 2024 one is hot garbage. not just that it arrived with the keyboard not working and Dell taking 3 months to replace it. There's a total of 2 usb-c ports on it. That's all the connectors, yes. No, no headphone jack either. And one of those two is taken up with charging, so i'm left with one port if i dont use a dockingstation.

the whole function bar is touch now. you need to hit it 3 times for it to react, who needs Esc anyways. Unless you want to type in the number row, then the function row will pick up random key presses sometimes.

Copilot key no one asked for. Power button is just an unlabelled piece of plastic that looks like filler, not a button. Keyboard sucks in general, too little space between keys, you're bound to mistype.

linux support is ok, though webcam doesn't work in firefox, hibernate doesn't work, every few weeks it'll just freeze. But otherwise acceptable.

definitely my last dell, i really hate it.

[Edit] Oh and I forgot the best part, when the dell repairman finally repaired it after 3 months, he said "oh a new XPS? Yeah, those suck, every customer hates them especially for software development"

Also useful in this regard, python comes with a sìmple file server built in, python -m http.server --directory /dir/ would serve /dir/ on port 8000.