Yup, that went well for Van Moof owners in the Netherlands. Also hipster bikes, the latest model turned out to be of dubious quality and was built using all custom parts. They had fun times getting their ridiculously overpriced bikes repaired after the company went belly up.

Well, that takes ‘required reading’ to a whole new dystopian level. I’m sorry you had to go through that, that’s terrible and I just cannot see any other outcome than forging a severe resentment against reading. Hopefully you’ll one day find the motivation again, but I certainly wouldn’t blame you if you never want to read anything again after going through that.

I read so much in my youth, I could read cover to cover in one go thanks to the power of hyperfocus. Reading was fun and synergised greatly with my ADD-fueled daydreaming.

Unfortunately though high school came along and had to fuck up my intrinsic motivation by force feeding the boomer drivel that ‘everybody should have read in their lives’, and having to write book reports where you’d have to analyse those books to death. Assignments could vary from analysing all the different narrative arcs in the story to the relationship between each main character in the story and even more obscure stuff that I don’t even (want to) remember.

Anyway, this meant reading the ‘classic’ Dutch writers like Reve, Mullisch, Wolkers etc and then analysing a story you didn’t even care about. Fun fact: those writers seem to have an extremely limited repertoire: do you want to read about addiction, WWII, or sex? Ok ok, you had ‘het Gouden Ei’ by Krabbé, on which the movie ‘the Vanishing’ was based. Guess that was a breath of less stale air.

But in the end it sucked the enjoyment I felt when reading from my very soul and replaced it with the feeling that reading books is a chore. At times a slight shimmer of that old spark returns, but never for long. Depending on how often I feel like reading, getting through a book usually takes me months to years these days and rarely captures me like in the past. I’ll never forgive the sadistic bastards who came up with this part of our educational system.

Anyway, sorry for dumping this on you, turned out to be more of a rant than I initially intended. If anybody knows how to convince my brain to consider reading to be fun again, I welcome any insights.

They took ‘woensdag gehaktdag’ (Wednesday Minced Meat day) a bit too literal. ☹️

Get the robber out, lock the door, call the cops.

For us it was ‘hit the silent alarm as soon as it is safe to do so’ instead of calling the cops ourselves. Hitting the alarm would trigger a whole chain of events, which included alerting the cops, region manager and an emotional support team and sending out a notification to our intranet that your office would not be reachable for the rest of that day and the day after. It would also immediately notify the correct police departments, which was another reason why we were instructed to not call the alarm number.

Our robber wrapped a plastic bag around his arm so probably didn’t have a firearm, but you simply do not take that risk. Although my colleague had to tell that nitwit that he walked into a branch office that didn’t handle money and had nothing on premises, which was clearly advertised at the door. It did have an ATM, but, as was also made very clear on the outside, we didn’t have access to that. Never seen somebody so confused, fortunately he 180’d out of there. We were lucky that it was probably just somebody who acted on an impulse, another office a few streets down had a real armed robbery, where one of my colleagues got a gun put to her head. Took her years to get her live back on track.

I’ve got a waterproof timer which I set when I need to shower within a set timeframe. Seeing a countdown helps keeping a sense of urgency and helps me with not getting lost in thought.When I’m not on a limit I’ll put it in clock mode so I can let my thoughts wander, while still having some sense of elapsed time.

That’s just part of the problem unfortunately. The other part is overprescription, don’t expect or demand to have antibiotics prescribed for every cold. And if you do get them prescribed: finish the course, instead of stopping when you think things are better and leaving a colony of (somewhat) resistant bugs alive, which now stand a much better chance of gaining dominance.

Your hand might have slipped.

Could be Bupropion or Atomoxetine. I’ve been on the former, but it didn’t do a lot for my ADHD. It did give me a wonderful few weeks filled with panic attacks and having my mind convinced that every little ache I felt must be because I was dying of something. Of course everybody responds differently, so don’t let that deter you if it is prescribed, but for me I never want to touch that stuff again.

Option 1 doesn’t even exists for me. The feeling of accomplishment only comes after option 2. ☹️

I work with Linux on a daily basis, both as a server OS and a desktop OS. Unpopular observation perhaps, but I’ve yet to find a distro which provides a more stable desktop experience than Windows 11 does for me. I do enough Linux troubleshooting during the day, after work I just want something that works.

Isn’t dendrite formation and the shorts they can cause a much bigger concern when dealing with old batteries that are being charged 24/7? Asking a genuine question here, so please don’t shoot me if I’m wrong. 🙂 I’d love to hear more about the most common failure modes and causes for li-po/ion batteries.

I feel like I’m reading a conversation between Walter White and Walter Bishop here.

Snoop has wares, if you have coin.

Depends, in my country ionization detectors have been banned over 20 years ago, you’ll mostly find optical / photoelectric detectors here.

Also U.S.: Don’t worry, all will be forgiven if you are able to get our space program off the ground! 📎

So you can absorb all that sweet sweet kinetic energy being released yourself of course. Energy gud right? And as you already paid for that energy at the Fast Charger, it seems only fair that they give it back to you when you crash.

Also, the shape has horrible aerodynamics. If it had a combustion engine, they couldn’t sell it in large parts of the world due to fuel efficiency.

I doubt it will get a type approval in Europe anyway, seems absolutely no consideration for pedestrian safety has been given. If this thing is as stiff and solid as Musk said it was it is also going to fail miserably during crash testing. Having been in a car crash this weekend I can testify how crumple zones save lives. Good thing the whole “but it’s a light truck” loophole they used in the US isn’t going to fly here.

To each their own, after having had the ‘pleasure’ of maintaining a fleet of Macs I’m personally quite happy with Windows these days. I’m never touching anything running MacOS ever again, that bullshit OS almost made me want to practice my frisbee skills on more than one occasion. Stability issues galore, that stupid single menubar that changes depending on which window has focus, crap like ‘sudo rm somefile’ failing with a ‘not enough disk space remaining to remove file’ error message when the disk is full, and many many other issues that were such a pita to solve. MacOS feels like having to work with one hand tied behind your back and a hammer in the other. Never again.