I really like this design due to how compact it is. Italy has an almost identical historical design*, but the earth is not offset so LN can be swapped.
Both plugs and sockets are very compact, which is a far cry from the emerging standard which is the shuko/europlug which takes twice the space. Almost all new houses are equipped with shuko sockets.
But the sockets here do not have the additional prong to avoid swapping the neutral, so they're effectively just a waste of space.
* at least, we have two sizes for it, a smaller one rated for 8A, and the newer for 16A which we commonly have today.
Perhaps it is harsh, but element is being founded to improve the client, and I find several other open source clients to behave better than the official one.
I call this honest criticism. My hope is to push matrix as an open protocol, to push matrix as a slack replacement and I genuinely wish the greatest success to the element foundation.
I currently cannot say "element is awesome". Matrix as a protocol and ecosystem is awesome, but the client... I can't say that.
You can. People have suggested the Element foundation to publish "red blue green yellow" versions of element with just a different app id for this.
I wouldn't be against it (the _clear_ distinction between accounts is important!), but element is already a memory hog. You really don't want multiple instances running.
I totally get it, but I still disagree. Getting more users on the network should be a #1 priority. You don't want to keep another 10 chat programs, just because matrix is "not" a plain chat app. If the element foundation doesn't do this, who will?
As a tech user, I still don't find the element UI great. It's clunky, quite slow and generally not intuitive, and wastes a lot of screen real-estate.
I'm using slack and discord and I find both to be _significantly_ better for group work.
But actively trying matrix on mobile, I still found the simplified FluffyChat UI much more usable on mobile anyway.
Element is this sort of annoying middle ground which is not great for either.
The third point is also important, because matrix is one of the few systems where you can have a private network for your work. You know, just like slack (again, the "group" they're apparently targeting?). Great feature. But if you, like me, would like to use matrix for both work and other communications, you're stuck.
So in the end you run two clients. Element for work, fluffychat for everything else? And maybe shildychat for your other private group (I wish this was a joke).
For the average user the element UI is just confusing. This is the #1 complaint I got from all non-techies. They expect to just see a contact list, with each contact being a simple chat without the typing bar. Most of the other interactions are also too complex (like sending an image).
You'd think this is a small complaint, but I've listed this as first as it's the biggest barrier to conversion. Ask the _same_ user to try FluffyChat, and no objections will be raised besides the expected "why another chat app".
I'm not a fan of the Element UI myself, although I "get it" as it's targeting to something more group-oriented like slack. The problem is that Element is currently neither oriented to plain users, nor it's great to technical ones.
If everything else had to stay the same, they should optimize for plain users on mobile and offer a better, more advanced desktop client instead.
3) add support for multiple accounts and identities (too many requests to list on the issue tracker), since federation is great, but it's not always wanted.
Disclaimer: I managed to convince a group of technical users to switch over to matrix. We stay for the principle, but not really for the experience so far. FluffyChat is the best client we tried on mobile. On desktop, I'm glad weechat-matrix and gomuks exist, because all the other clients "reek" to us. And even if you like the modern chat UIs, they're really not bug-free either.
Overall many clients and some severs to choose from, but I did prefer irc just for the simple-no-BS-clients alone (the protocol has nothing to do with it).
I started to work as a staff member of a local research center mostly doing foundational research (genetics, life sciences), publicly founded so no conflict of interests. At some point, the founding body (the local administration) decided that general research wasn't cool anymore, and was thought to be a waste of money. They should only found "targeted research", an idea which sounds good in theory, but in practice is a sure way to destroy research at it's core. The first result is that any researcher that wasn't working on something mandated from above had either to shift (destroying his work) or leave. New positions would only be open to work on targeted projects.
The net result was a massive loss of bright researchers, massive churn and the death of pretty much any promising research endeavor (it's hard to do great research on a 2 years contract already, but doing so without infrastructure...).
The administration also started to push aggressively for this idea that we should try to apply for patents in anything that seems even vaguely applicable, and in order to keep the financing going the center had to sign a contract that "guarantees an increased in throughput of 2% every year", where the throughput is measured in pubblications. Again, this requires no explanation for whoever has worked in research, but for the others: it's impossible: it just promotes lower and lower-quality of output in order to meet the criteria, until it will bust.
This also gives an idea how the center and the local administration fail to understand how research work on a basic principle.
The local group has started to apply aggressively for more and more EU grants (which are the only one that can provide vaguely sustainable research), which in turn resulted in staff doing less research and much more grant writing. We now have staff whose purpose is doing just that.
Academia has a lot of problems, but founding seems to be one of the major ones. Without stable founding this is what you get: aggressive push to make money, and not to make great research.
I generally never comment on this to my coworkers because I want to be polite and keep good relationships (I've had very hard responses to very polite requests just to open the windows in the past, so I simply stopped commenting).
I'm doing this here because I'm seeing this often, and I want to be honest: no, it doesn't really do much, unless we're talking about ~50cm face-to-face conversations maybe (something that would make me back-off quite sharply, gum or not).
Keep in mind the smell after 10 minutes of open-air ventilation is still not a smell I would consider acceptable. For consideration, a very nasty and strong office fart would be in the same line of stench for my nose at that point. Except a fart doesn't tend to cling on for so long.
That hardly masks anything TBH. You smell the same with some hint of mint on top. Most of the smell comes from your lungs, your clothing and your hair. You need to stay outside for a good 10 minutes to make a significant difference in perceived smell. Anything else is mostly wishful thinking...
I'm in IT, but I've worked as electrician and carpenter for some years. IMHO this is not easily comparable as you'd think.
You can easily estimate the time required to perform some physical tasks. It's a bit different if you're working on something you never did before, but again as an electrician or carpenter this rarely happens after the training period. Working more hours generally does result in more work done, although the physical factor makes this work-life balance waaay more obvious to whoever is working.
In IT I'm constantly working on things which are slightly different than before. Time estimation is big common issue in the field. I'll be fully honest and say that working 4 or 8 hours a day makes absolutely no difference in work being done for me, except in very rare cases. Dedication has nothing to do with it (I love what I do). Technically I'm not stopping to work at the 6pm hour mark, my brain keeps thinking about technical issues also during off hours and the weekend.
I don't know about you but I felt physically tired, but satisfied at the end of the day when working as a carpenter. Sense of accomplishment was much more rewarding. When coming home I would enjoy something different. The next day I was recharged.
When working on problem-solving, I don't feel physically tired, but I can still feel exhausted in a way that prevents me doing other things. It's much, much harder to find a good balance. And I'd stress this again: putting more working hours sitting in front screen is not necessarily achieving anything.
Note also that these crazy perks as outlined in the article are not my experience in IT working in several places in EU. Yes, our working hours are more flexible due to the nature of the job, but I've yet to see such entitlement in my career. Maybe I've been unlucky.
YMMV but I've also disabled favicons as well where I can.
For me the reason is that the icon is too small to be useful while browsing. The details are insignificant, so it just ends up being a "color" cue at best.
I actually hate newer versions of FF mobile that show favicons instead of the page title on the new tab page. I often have no clue what the icon of a site looks like before I stumble on that page or I bookmark it. Presenting me the icon without the text is like asking me a guessing game.
It makes sense for software packages, of which you have about 50 icons that you might be familiar with, but with web browsing it's easy to browse through that many websites in a day while searching for stuff, destroying any visual memory you might have.
What do you mean by "BOTH my own sending and the bill sending back to them? When did this happen, and from where?
My last cross-country return was in 2017 for a lens (sold and shipped from amazon) and I had to pay for the shipping myself to amazon.fr from italy. Didn't get a refund for the shipping cost, although the replacement arrived for free. Note that the lens was originally shipped to france. I was substituting for an identical item, which usually gets shipped right away. However, in this case, I had to wait for the return to be processed.
I had the same scenario in 2016, but from germany (shipped to germany, returned to france).
Note that I cannot complain for the service itself. I only had great experiences in return from amazon in general, but your description comes unexpected from me.
Note that when ordering outside the country you still have to pay for the shipping fee of the return yourself _to_ the amazon store of origin you selected, making this a lot less flexible (and slower) than you'd think.
As a frequent traveler across the EU, this bit me both on amazon.de/fr.
I'm not sure if there are exceptions to these rules, but free returns are frequently only free if within the same country and it's not unique to amazon.
Currently for me 4G is the only option to work remotely (the only alternative would be going with a wimax provider, or sat). I don't normally incur in the data size caps, but I will soon in the current situation, even when trying to be conservative.
It also doesn't seem worthwhile to switch at the moment, since other solutions require a 1-2 year contract which I do not need (not to mention, it would also take 2-3 weeks to get a connection with those anyway).
That's the idiocy in general of modern car design.
A bright-blue headlight of a modern car will actually make everything surrounding the headlights darker. A light which is slightly dimmer and more shifted towards red works much better for your peripheral vision. If you drive in rural areas the difference is very apparent.
Not only that, but street lights seem to be doing that as well.
Cross-walks here are now illuminated along the path with a strong shaped light. But the light is so bright that during night they just blind the observer: the pedestrian looks like ghost in a black background. IMHO this is even more dangerous, I frequently cannot see past the crosswalk, so a pedestrian which is passing behind it is risking much more than before. Go figure.
There are a couple of intersections which I pass frequently where the green light is too bright already during day. During the night, as soon as you get the green light you get blinded, which is _awesome_ since the light is guarding a cross-walk in this case as well. By night you cannot see pedestrians when you have the green.
I use some CAD/CAM programs on Wine and they're sensibly faster in both rendering and general usage compared to a windows install (I have a dual boot system).
I can only complain about some minor font rendering issues and the lack of child window rendering [0] which is frequently used in programs like these.
Once child window rendering is fixed, I will actually be considering ditching windows entirely and go wine-only.
I lost my cat in my 20ies, which died of old age. I wasn't living with my parents anymore for years when this happened. I still sometimes weep when I think about it, decades later.
My father got cancer and lived with it for about 7 years before dying. Our relationship wasn't exactly close. When he was in the last weeks, I got so used to the hospitals and health issues that everything seemed so normal to me. I knew exactly what was eventually going to happen though. It only hit me two days before he died, and it was with the brutality of an instantaneous train-wreck.
You could have told me everything, exactly as I wrote it down now, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have made a difference.