aahaha corona phase flashbacks =D Everyone knew it was bubbles, right?
Okay cool. Within Brussels it's sorta fine indeed, I guess I'm biased by the commuter view ;) Within the city it's definitely getting better the last few years.
The main policy issue is for sure the cars for pay... Some politicians wanted to abolish it since years, but it only grows year after year. Recently they made it only tax-friendly for electric cars, saying the system must stay because it helps transition to electric cars faster (I think that transition would happen very fast anyhow and I think transitioning to (e-)bicycles is better). Understandably, people who currently have such a "free" car from work don't want to give it up (and that's a lot of voters), as they also use it to go on holiday with the family and such.
A main infrastructure issue is the tunnel (you probably travelled in it) running north to south. So many different trains in Belgium get squozen in the same little piece Brussels North - Central - Brussels South, the tunnel is very saturated, and messy with highspeed, intercity, local and S trains all going there. It just needs 1 little incident and plenty of trains all over the country get delayed.
It's a long long battle. I'm guessing you never visited Brussels? It's hard to compare a capital of a small country, and de facto of the EU, with a mid sized city in a huge country.
The survey you're reading about was done with the residents of Brussels. Way more than many other cities: Brussels is a real commuter city. Hundreds of thousands of people commute into the city. We're talking 350.000 or more. Few people living in Brussels commute out of it.
From those commuting people, 17 % cycle, 15 % use public transport (rush hour trains are full AF), about 65 % uses the car.
Reason? Cars are used in Belgium as a replacement (addition) for paying employees (it is called "salariswagen") and they often get a "free tanking" card on top and it is completely legal (even expected/encouraged) that these cars are used by the employee both for coming to work and for wherever they wanna go privately on holidays or weekends. It is very gently taxed, while paying employees actual money in Belgium is taxed among the heaviest in the world. There are estimates of there being 700.000 cars like this (it's estimate because it intertwines with actual "company cars": people who need the company car for their actual job and not just to drive to work). A lot of those commute to Brussels everyday, from Antwerp, Ghent, Liège, ... and from the hundreds of small cities towns in between and around.
The roads around Brussels (and Antwerp, and Ghent, and ...) are really really jammed. On an average day, there are 160 km of traffic jam in rush hour. When there is shitty weather (cyclists turn to cars and public transport), it can go up to 400 - 500km all jammed up. For reference: if you measure very broadly, the country is east-west only 280km and north-south only 220km (while in reality one should ignore the south for this, it is very sparsely populated).
Whatever you do, do not take the way public transport is run in Belgium/Brussels as a prime example. It might be better than your average mid sized US city, but for European standards: public transport in Belgium is very insufficient, unreliable, too expensive and by far not the most popular mode of transport (and for good reasons). Truth be told: among this situation, the Brussels company (MIVB-STIB) is the best public transport company in Belgium, but compared to public transport in big cities in the Netherlands, Germany, ... it still sucks pretty bad.
There's way worse songs this could be happening with...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k85mRPqvMbE&t=3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w&t=28
Lava chicken is quite groovy actually, tasty. You're in luck.
You can buy a used office computer from businesses that are upgrading (downgrading) to win11 for less than 50 bucks. They tend to be relatively low power, relatively quiet, lots of PCI slots and USB ports so there are many upgrade options, yet low entry price for a decent computer. If you plan on using as a jellyfin server: either mind the chip now for transcoding capabilities (there's lists out there) or know that if you want that, you'll have to put in a GPU at some point if the onboard can't transcode well.
I have a mix of external and internal SSD's. Some are running way not as fast as they theoretically could, but it all works well enough for me. You can start with what you have, storage is still expensive.
I've been denied with luggage by a tram driver once. Moving a 2 person mattress was not allowed on the tram...
For brushing in Asia, please upgrade your Oral-B account to the Oral-B premium account for just 5 € / month!
Exactly this, but it will be sold the other way around, you'll get a gift or a discount if you log+link data
An over engineered toothbrush is a dental product just as much as a very cheap one and there are for sure greedy people interested in trying to get people to log their brushing data on a corporate cloud and later link together their insurance and their dental habits at some point and there are for sure people willing to pay for detailed brushing data. It's just the very beginning of it all still. Give it 20 years, your insurance company or dentist will ask you how come you're not logging your brushing.
It can be more. It can really be like hitting a wall in some cities, suddenly you're on the shitside, the change is very sudden and very dramatic, lot more than from a field to a forest.
Exactly!
Still in disbelief how they wreck it even in the simplest things.
Remember how clicking the audio system tray icon would open... The common audio settings and nothing else, idem dito for the network icon. For some incomprehensible reason they jammed those system tray icons menus all together a few years ago, you need more clicks, it's less intuitive and less efficient. For what reason? No one knows.
Remember how right clicking an icon would open a quite extensive context menu? Gone. Now it's a few BS options I never need. For example "open with...": gone. Now in the freaking context menu you have to click "more options" for another, full context menu to appear.
Incredible BS tiny changes with a big negative user experience impact I truly cannot grasp why they'd do it. Only reason everyone sticks around is (bad) habits, vendor lockin and obligations for certain software by school or work who insist on keeping Microsoft because they themselves are also vendor locked in or just very very scared of change.
Most countries will be raising taxes on fuel even more and in general it will become less available fast: gas stations, mechanics who know how to fix the ICE old timers etc. it will become a hobby thing (like old timers today already). Certain niches will keep ICE way longer (heavy construction vehicles etc) but it will suddenly become quite rare in 20 or 30 years to see a regular old ICE driven by a regular person doing regular things like commuting or so.
ok, it worked... the problem was appearantly that is was using xrdp to remotely login to a desktop session, and then for some reason the filepicker crashes: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/file-chooser-does-not-open-for-flatpak-applications-f40-sway/126351/4
I did not use the bandaid workaround, but instead gained access to the device directly instead of remote desktopping and then the file or folderpicker worked just fine...
Thanks, this is great help indeed. I rarely use flatpak, not very familiar with it. It turns out the home folder was already allowed for Nicotine+, the issue appears to be that Nicotine+ is not allowed to "call" the opening of the dialog box to select the folder to use as shared...


After many years of absence, I am trying to get back into soulseek using Nicotine+.
Installed it through Flatpak on a debian based system. Application seems to work fine... except: clicking the "Add" button on the Shares pane of the settings menu does nothing. No dialog opens, no error message is shown, just nothing. Is it a known bug with an easy fix?
EDIT / SOLVED: appearantly when one logs into a remote desktop session, the file picker sometimes crashes. For anyone encountering same issues: login directly instead of remotely, or use suggested solve: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/file-chooser-does-not-open-for-flatpak-applications-f40-sway/126351/4
It's not out of the ordinary for EU as a whole either.
I'm also guessing it's actually lower, almost all larger German cities are all very livable without car with fine public transport, but a lot of city people do own an old VW-van or similar for holidays, which is often not used much in regular daily life.
Public torrents suck for music these days. Little available and a lot that is there is FLAC only, no mp3-320
Definitely impossible for most tracks. Possible for some, but at high costs. Germans have been upgrading some lines for decades now... The best (worst) example being the north-south towards Basel. For high speed the paths need to be further apart from eachother, there need to be better barriers between tracks and what's around them, the curves indeed need to be wider, the 'tilt' in the track in curves might need to be adjusted too... All of which leads to necessity of many new bridges and tunnels where this upgrading is impossible due to surroundings. It costs many millions of € per km and many decades to accomplish. The French on the other hand mainly went for "build new lines", it was clearly the better approach to get shit done fast (tho skipping many possible stops altogether on the new lines).
Not necessarily. The divisions in middle east today have roots to end of WW1 and collapse of Ottoman empire and decline of British empire. There would still be a shit load of oil in middle east. There would still be limited amount of water... It could be very different, which countries ally, what kind of regimes etc, but not necessarily more peaceful region as a whole.


Does anyone here know a self hostable service (or a demo of someone else hosting it) which can split common .cbr filetype to a .cbz or other filetype to split the panels?
So for example the 1 image I put with this post, would be 8 seperate images (pages).
That would ideally somehow make the comic books readable on a (somewhat old) black and white travel-Kobo...


Was walking down the street the other day. Taking my Pfand to the shop to cash it in and go shopping. Broad day light, nice weather day after many ugly weather days so everyone is looking rather happy in general.
I pass by a local soccer club, lots of youths coming and going by bicycle, it must have been like 5 or 6 in the evening and it seems like one group just ended training and another is starting.
A sparkling white tesla drives up to the entrance of the club, while doing so: blocks the cycle path... was wondering why the kids had to be dropped off at the door with this nice weather.
Anyhow: car stops at the old clothes collection container, passenger gets out: it's a fit young woman (driver is a young man), she walks to the trunk of the car, casually takes out bags of trash and puts them next to the "old clothes" container. It's clearly not bags of old clothes, and she's no putting it in the container but next to it. She takes out a broken vacuum cleaner: casually puts it behind the container, between the soccer club and a small parking lot and a park.
I tell her this is not the place for that and ask her if she can load it in to her car again. She acts like she's from another planet and doesn't understand me. She knows perfectly well. See the guilt in her face. She stays silent, rushes back to the car seat. They drive off, I give the middle finger and a "you're a fucking wanker" sign. We meet again like 100 meters further where they have to stop for red traffic light. They try to ignore me and stare ahead, avoiding all eye contact. Not talking to eachother either. I don't start yelling or hitting the car or whatever, because I didn't wanna cause a scene at the youths/soccer club.
These were really very very "decent" and "normal" looking people. Young, wealthy, healthy, white, with a car. How hard is it to drive 4 minutes to the recycling plant at the edge of the city and dump your trash where it belongs for practically free?
"Normal" people who have dumped their trash where it doesn't belong: WHY?


Almost like jellyfin is trying to probe my mood or preferences


Hi, what's your setup?
I often listen to music through youtube on my phone connected to a bluetooth speaker. I use Newpipe, works very well. Then when I want to save a song or an album, there's the option for downloading (in newpipe itself) or on android for example Seal (works really well for downloading entire playlists and unselecting some sponsored video's from the playlist).
The hassle is uploading from the phone to my jellyfin. I've used File Browser, bit limited in options.
Then I thought I could use Syncthing to have some folder from my Android phone upload it automatically to my Jellyfin server (pc running dietpi), but it seems Syncthing is now discontinued on Android?
What I was first looking for was my own hosted yt-dlp with a mobile friendly UI, but that seemed quite difficult to get running.
Is there a way to turn off incremental search? Either Web UI or apps: search seems to send a search instruction to server for every new letter added to the search box. I'ld much rather type a few letters (I usually sort of know what I'm looking for) and then click send or whatever to fetch results only for that. Would improve performance a lot for me


Hi, my laptop got fried because of getting caught in the rain :(
I got a gaming laptop for work a few years ago, because appearantly the CPU AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX was about the best thing to be found for updating some ridiculously complicated excel power query circusses at work, according to the internet back then (i think I found that info on pc master race on reddit before the reddit-api-fall), and finding those CPU's in business laptops was rather difficult at the time. They were right, this CPU handled the queries like a walk in the park.
Is the AMD Ryzen 9 6900H* still a very good CPU for this kind of thing, or should I put in a lot more time investigating again, is there better cost-efficiency available now in other CPU?
Sorry if this is not a right place for this question. I'm usually not really a hardware guy. Just need a CPU that handles this Excel shit as fast as possible, preferably without locking up the entire machine and without being as noisy as an F16 getting ready for lift off. On "regular" work laptops with i5 or i7, these files can take literally over an hour to update.


For example on wikipedia for Switzerland it says the country has an area of 41,285 km². Does this take into account that a lot of that area is actually angled at a steep inclination, thus the actual surface area is in effect larger than what you would expect when looking onto a map in satellite view?


Use UBlock, sponsorblock, firefox, etc. Recently it broke again, some stupid permission to connect youtube to other google services pop-up is permablocking it and I can't be bothered investigating.
Go to FreeTube cause why not. Works rather well for how it works. Especially for listening to albums it is fine, for video it's often too slow.
They found a way to inject bullshit in there too, now? And basically everywhere.
Albums are sometimes uploaded as 1 long video. Those are fun. Often they're uploaded as all songs seperately and then there's a playlist which makes it 'the album'. They used to be okay too.
Not anymore. People started injecting bullshit videos within the playlists. No, Andrew fucking Tates bullshit is not part of this album. Fuuuu. ANDREW I CAN'T STAY FUCKING MOTIVATED BECAUSE SOME ARSEHOLE INJECTED YOUR BULLSHIT VIDEO INTO THE MUSIC PLAYLIST I'LD LIKE TO LISTEN TO WITHOUT YOUR BULLSHIT INTERRUPTIONS!
I need to work on permanently replacing youtube. It no longer serves its purpose (for me of listening to albums) reliably.


Hi, First, is it possible to set the steamdeck to "default" to always keep picking the steamdeck speaker as default audio out also when an HDMI is connected through the USB-C? I have an old monitor (VGA to HDMI to USB-C haha) and would be easiest to still just output audio in the steamdeck speaker by default. It is easy to switch audio outputs in desktopmode, not in gaming mode unfortunately can't switch to steamdeck speaker there, doesn't work.
Second, how do y'all combine music and games? I prefer to play games while listening to youtube full albums (freetube or similar) in background. Doesn't really seem to integrate well in gaming mode either? Tried adding Monophony and Freetube as non-steam games, but not very succesful. What's your suggestion for optimizing the setup?
Sorry for the noob-questions. Pic unrelated, sort of.
is actually a rather nice promise to give someone in the USA: "we'll treat your wounds, you'll receive basic health care services from us"


Society's got priorities wrong.
-
most car travels are 1 person or sometimes 2 person
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the majority of car travels are quite short, less than 40km.
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many car travels are just to get some groceries or drop of a little package or just say "hi" to someone, carrying nothing but themselves.
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cars are fucking expensive, to buy and to maintain
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accidents become way worse with heavier vehicles
Microcar is a valid answer to all of these, while still being sheltered from weather.
How are urban places (i'm in Belgium) with almost permanent super heavy road traffic congestion, bad climate statistics, high polution values, very limited available space left, no self-sustaining energy production and high traffic accident statistics still pooring in billions and billions in subsidies year after year into "regular" big heavy SUV-like vehicles instead of these? It's beyond my comprehension. The only real valid reason i somewhat get is the collective scare of being in a crash and not wanting to be in the smaller vehicle. We could save the climate, we choose not to.
- MICROLINO: 17.990 €
- OPEL ROCKS: 8.699 €
- CITROEN AMI: 7.790 €
- RENAULT TWIZY: 13.000 €
- FIAT TOPOLINO: 9.890 €
A lot of people here casually spend more on a sunday racing bike every few years for fucks sake.
What's stopping us from making smellulators, for games or movies?
Vietnamwar videogame: smell of napalm in the morning.
The sims: baby pooped.
Survival game: that lump of flesh is rotting.
Smell you later


I'm not young. But 25 years after the hype, I am finally getting around to playing half life (1)! Stupidly missed the free action, but paid a few eurocents for it. They're totally worth it! Awesome game, holds up very very well after two and a half decades!


Entschuldigung, wenn dies nicht der richtige Ort für diese Frage ist, aber weiß jemand, warum diese Aufstriche von Lidl verschwunden sind? Die in den Glasdosen. Lidl, bitte bring sie zurück. Ich danke euch.
I just ordered a refurbished steam deck :D
Because of all the great reviews still, long after launch and because i'm very enthousiastic about being able to use it as both a handheld console on the train and as a full blown desktop at home. I've honestly long been waiting for such devices... And wonder why android phones still don't really do that.
Now, regarding the docking station: the official one is quite pricey.
It does not matter at all that the charging of the dock is rated at 60W, which is more than the steam deck needs, right?
Would this thing do the trick? I'l need to connect 1 usb dongle for mouse and keyboard in the usb 2 port, 1 hdmi to screen, 1 usb 3 to external harddisk and then the charging. SD is nice to have, don't really need it. I don't care that the deck will be laying flat on a desk instead of being able to use it standing up as a tiny second screen.
I travelled a bit through Italy recently, by bicycle. Cycling here seems either
- super sporty road cyclist
- poor people on what's left of what used to be a bicycle
Stumble upon Lodi, Lombardy: cyclists everywhere, like dutch style: adults carelessly cycling with 2 kids and lots of luggage on a single normal city bike and without helmets. What's so different about Lodi (or the region) that it's so common here, but not in other Italian small or medium cities? Any Italians with answers? Thanks


Like, I get comments from people telling me it's weird I always try to peel potatoes like I am trying to make the worlds longest 1-piece potato peel. To me it feels way for efficient and fun to continu down a potato in 1 peel, while circling around it, instead of randomly scraping a hundred different pieces of peel off and having to reintroduce the cutter knife to the potato for every piece.