For running, get thin gloves that keep out the wind chill. Your body will heat itself up, including your hands, so all you look for is decent wind protection. I did some trail running in down to -10C, and thin running gloves were sufficient.

If you want bells and whistles, get gloves with reflective elements. In winter, chances are you’ll spend some time running in the dark.

This is a perfectly valid reason to like Ubuntu, and it mirrors my own reason for preferring Mint: familiarity with an OS UI. In my case, Mint Cinnamon is the closest I could find to the Win98 user interface. Back in the old days I also had Ubuntu, but then they switched to the Unity UI and I changed to Lubuntu. That went to the pits a few years ago, so I moved on to Mint. Just like you, I also have a preference for the UI, and I suspect that very many people choose a distro based on their UI preferences. That’s the beauty of Linux: plenty of options for everyone.

One of my team members is based in the US, and he told me after the election: “The media told us all about how bad Trump was. But nobody ever told us how good Kamala was.” I guess voting only for the lesser evil has its limits.

Didn’t the European commission recently declare that Twitter had become too irrelevant to regulate?

I don’t live in the US, so my views are probably biased by our anti-Trump media hype, so even though I agree with most of your points, I’d leave two open for discussion:

If incels think that women hated them before, just wait, his incel base of voters are going to be enemy number one with women from all walks of life.

I was under the impression that Republicans are not looking for love from women, but their total subjugation. Women don’t need to love them (perhaps they can, only in Stockholm syndrome mode), but they have to obey. I don’t think incels will be disappointed.

For the rest of us, just laugh. We’ve been through 4 years of this idiot before.

I said this twice before, and I was always wrong, so take this with a huge boulder of sand. But I don’t think he’ll last four years (unless they do a Weekend at Bernies), so part of the 4 years will be with that weird cross-dresser, and I have absolutely no idea what to expect from him.

In two days, I’ll hit 4.5 years of daily running. Can confirm. Things get easier when you do them every day (within reason).

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

We have access cards to unlock the office doors; this is tracked. Everyone is required to be in the office for a certain amount of days per month, and a monthly report is always generated. I found when the fewest people are coming (nobody on my floor), and that’s when I come in, given that my entire team are digital nomads, so I’d communicate with them via Slack anyway.

I’m on hybrid, but my entire team is all over the world, so I’m just as alone in the office as at home. The only difference is that in the office I’m bound by the train schedule, so I can’t take out of hours calls. My coworkers and manager keep petitioning HR to let me work from home full time.

Great post! I was thinking about it the other day. I have a Citizen wrist watch from the 60s from my grandfather. It looks like new and functions well (mainly because of its self-winding mechanism). I also have a high-end Garmin watch, which from my personal experience lasts about 2 years, so I decided to start treating modern watches like the junk they are: get the cheapest possible that still has the features I want, because I’d be replacing it in two years’ time anyway.

I also have an old mechanical typewriter. The drum doesn’t move on the A key, so I’m used to hit the space bar whenever I type an “a”. It moves the drum slightly more, which is something I always notice when I read pages typed on other typewriters. And don’t get me started on the font. No computer can recreate the idiosyncrasies of a good typewriter.

Damn, now I got all nostalgic again. If you excuse me, I’ll be in the attic, hammering away on my Consul…

The Canon didn’t. That’s where my assumption of a green laser came in. When I aimed the camera directly at the embassy, I got a white screen; when I aimed it a little to the side, I saw a green dot on the screen. This is a bit of a stretch, though. It could have been an optical artifact, with the sun behind me, and me wearing polarized glasses.

This is just pure speculation, but I think the firmware on the camera refuses to take pictures when its GPS detects it to be in a restricted area. That’s how higher-end drones work. At the same spot where I detected my interference, a DJI drone would refuse to take off. Drone no-fly areas are well documented (and advertisef), though, so it was easy to check against those.

Professional: Self-driving trailers are already a thing. They are not legal on public roads, but they work just fine in warehouses and yards. The way it works, a dolly is hooked up to the front of the trailer, and the yard master just instructs it where to go and park, and forgets about it. Thanks to the trailer sensors, the trailer is also able to navigate around fairly heavy yard traffic, which is far more complex than linear traffic on roads. The EU is being lobbied to allow the trailers on the roads. The EU is also being lobbied to increase the max length of a tractor-trailer from 27m to 50m. The new road trains are also using these autonomous engines and steering directly on trailers. We estimate that by 2035, we’ll start seeing a drastic reduction of demand for truck drivers.

Hobby: This is unconfirmed, just an odd thing I started noticing. In some places, in particular around US embassies, modern cameras are blocked from taking photos, and older models are being interfered with through green lasers. I noticed the latter when I tested with the first gen Gopro Hero and a 15 years old Canon. Need to dig out my film camera to see whether it has any impact there.

First who popped into my mind was Friday Jones from Robert A. Heinlein’s Friday.

Just to be pedantic: we’ve had a hell of a time implementing dynamic resizing of svg’s in Firefox. Works fine with Chromium. We spent far too much development time to keep our 4% of users happy, but eventually we did it. Perhaps newer versions of Firefox changed this, but there are customer-facing oddities the bank’s customers may experience.

I used to and still do, but I see it as an investment. In the past, I used to donate to various environmental organizations. Lack of money and disillusionment with the progress in environmental protection stopped this. Nowadays, I have a small monthly direct deposit to the armed forces of Ukraine. Living in Europe, I see this as investing into a peaceful retirement.

We lost a good developer to AWS, so now we’re poaching him back. He knows our office, so I’m hoping for at least a list of his coworkers who he’d recommend.

Must be a gold rush for companies that use the AWS infrastructure. My company is already trying to poach a few AWS engineers, with a WFH or hybrid contract.

Deciding on the school for my master’s. Had two choices: the no. 1 school in the US at that time, or an up-and-coming pgogram. The top school would have set me back about 200k in debt, but I was virtually guaranteed a job with a starting salary of 150k+, and a career path to the C-suite. The other school would give me a free ride, but it was anyone’s guess where’d I end up. I picked the free ride, and ended with a dead-end job for 40k. That was 20 years ago. Since then, that job gave me the push to leave the US, settle elsewhere, find a wife, start a family, and have an exciting new job with career progression. The choice, when I was deciding, couldn’t have been more clearly defined, and for years I kept thinking what if I picked the top school. Not anymore…

Removing public amenities is just the first step. The next step is to erect fencing around public parks and other spots where people like to enjoy themselves. Source: living in Dublin “the city centre is for working and shopping only” Ireland.