I disagree. I absolutely love the fact that I can just turn it off after office hours and throw it in a corner during holidays and weekends. Sure, it’s a bit cumbersome to take two phones with you, but it’s also cumbersome to take the laptop and everything with you all the time. Just put it in the same bag and you’re good. Good to note, my employer provides me with a phone, so I didn’t need to buy a second one. It also means that if I switch jobs, I just return the phone and still have my personal device.

But if it doesn’t work for you, by all means, don’t do it. For me the good outweighs the bad.

To not even consider the consequences of deploying systems that may farm your company data in order to train their models “to better serve you”. Like, what the hell guys?

Oh don’t worry. If you try to deposit it at a bank, they’ll start asking questions right away on how you got the money. Unless you never bring it into the “official” system, the financial surveillance system will find it.

In my experience, charities try to get you on a recurrent donation nowadays instead of taking cash or transfers (although I am in the Netherlands, not Belgium). It’s terribly annoying because they take the “being lazy and forget about it” and weaponise it against you.

One positive on the Dutch coalition talks. We can always say that our southern neighbours take even longer…

On a more serious note, the last three coalition talks in the Netherlands took over 200 days, with one taking 299 days. Sure, not even close to over 500 days in Belgium, but how the hell does this happen?

Nowadays I just roll my Linux installation back to before the updates using the BTRFS integration with the package manager. It works great and I’m never at a point where I can’t use my computer because updates broke it. Heck, even if I bork it myself it’s no biggie.

Ever heard of Jehovah’s witnesses? Or Mormons going on their mission? They aren’t constant here, but they are definitely a thing in the Netherlands.

I had a nice one today. I saved an email for archiving for all to see ( you know, as a .msg) and tried to open it. Windows asked if I would like to open it with Outlook (new). Sure, I thought, only to be greeted by the message “sorry, this function is not supported”.

Why do you do this to me Microsoft?! Why?!

As the owner of a Fairphone, this is indeed my experience. The only non-standard app is the Fairphone app, which is easily ignored or might even be useful.

That looks good! I think I’ll try it out soon, thanks for the tip 🙂

Might be a slightly unpopular opinion, but Volumio (software for a raspberry pi to run it as a headless audio system). It’s good, it’s relatively well maintained and works. But paying 7,50 a month for this software to get multiroom audio, Tidal integration and some other stuff is ridiculously expensive. That’s nearly 90 euro a year and the only thing that is actually an addition server side is syncing settings across devices and the Tidal integration (requires license fees iirc).

And sure, I can’t buy multiroom speakers for that kind of money, but damn, is it expensive.

So why not use something like WhatsApp or Signal instead then? Sounds like a terrible user experience to me. Nobody I know uses iMessage, everybody uses WhatsApp instead, which is platform agnostic.

But I’m European, so the iPhone penetration is lower iirc and they can’t stay in their bubble as much.