There’s one thing that would certainly stop me from cycling in Australia, and it’s the helmet laws. We don’t have those here and I’m used to decide if I wear a helmet or not. Sometimes I like to live dangerously and have the wind in my hair at 20 km/h.
If my country had laws like this I would not cycle.
In the end though, it’s not making much of a difference aside from nostalgic value. There’s a minimal maintenance to it too. My parents still have the cassettes and the Betamax VCR stored somewhere. Physical photo albums also have to be stored. We don’t want to get rid of them but they’re kind of useless now. It’s around 200 GBs of files to be kept.
It’s also a bit cringe to see yourself being a stupid kid on video. Or read what you wrote in a journal on a floppy disk in the mid 90ies. I went to watch a few minutes because we mentioned it but it’s not something any of my family members return to regularly. It’s just stuff that now sits there. Nice and nostalgic to watch every few years or decade, but not healthy to keep returning to it.
Lots. I was born in the 80ies and my parents took lots of pictures when I was a baby. My sister was born a few years later, and there was also lots of pictures. We have albums full of pictures that I ended up scanning and digitizing. My father was also somewhat of an enthusiast for video cameras and he bought a BetaCam by the end of the 80ies, and a few other ones until the beginning of the 2000s.
So I have videos of my childhood from my first years of school to being a teenager. He was filming at Christmas, at birthdays, and sometimes at random events. He often just set the camera in a corner and filmed for the length of a Beta tape.
I digitized all of the Beta cassettes into mp4s during the pandemic and now I offer USB drives to people of the family that don’t have any videos of when my grandparents were alive.
Plus, my maternal grandfather also filmed some gatherings and events. So I also have digitized videos of them in the 60ies and 70ies.
Ironically most of us never liked to be taken in photos, or filmed, but I’m kind of glad we still have them. If I compare to my friends, apparently, I have a “treasure trove” of videos and pictures.
Is it bad that in all this I see the slim possibility of a world weaning itself from oil? Maybe more and more nations will be pushed to a rapid investment in renewables and gain energetic independence from oil producing countries. It might even have a positive impact on the environment.
Most of the world will probably continue to be dependent on oil, and just pay the price in blood, but one can dream.
Also, it’s an interesting time of you like geopolitics, changing alliances and failing empires.
I’ve always been cynical so times are not especially bad. I was kind of expecting this. Times are just bad because it’s hurting the wallets of the middle class at the pump, but I’ve always been poor and frugal so to me this is just normal. I have no car with an insatiable appetite for gasoline that comes from the suffering of other humans or animals. I have no house to lose. No land. No condo. No retirement plan. Let it crash and burn.
Maybe a glimpse of hope, renew and progress can grow out of the ashes. But probably not. I’ll just be there to watch along, satisfy my curiosity, and feel smug if I’m right.
She is trying to get medical assistance in dying, which is possible here under certain conditions, but just not for people in her case. She’s a Catholic so, well… she’s praying.
Yeah. My grandmother is in that situation. She is a grandmother to me but she’s a great great grandmother for some of my family.
She moved in a nursing home more than a decade ago expecting to be there for a few years but she’s now 98, losing eyesight, hearing and mobility, and hopes it will end at some point. When she caught covid we thought she might have got what she wanted, but no.
It’s reverse for me. I don’t have a car so I bring a backpack pretty much anywhere I go. And in that backpack, there’s also a reusable bag.
If stores want me to leave my backpack at the entrance, I turn around and go shopping where they don’t automatically consider you a thief for having a backpack.
SSH in first place. No explanation needed.
But also MATE and Pulseaudio (yes). I really like paprefs, pasystray, and how easy it is to send audio over the network. To the point where I reinstall Pulseaudio instead of Pipewire, because Pipewire requires long command lines for what was easily done in a few clicks with Pulseaudio.
I dread the day where I will be forced to “progress” to Pipewire and lose that easy feature.