Garrett LeSage @garrett@mastodon.xyz

REMINDER FOR U.S. FRIENDS: The day after President's Day, don't forget to take your president down, clean it, and toss it into your neighborhood compost dump.

#thinkglobally #actlocally

Someone on Twitter mentioned that in some regions of Germany, a common idiom for whenever there's mist in the forest is "The foxes are making coffee", and thought the image was evocative enough for an illustration.

Well, I took the bait! 🦊☕

#MastoArt #CreativeToot #Lineart

Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture - Vox - Pocket
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/living-in-switzerland-ruined-me-for-america-and-its-lousy-work-culture

"I am surprised," the alien said, "that you ventured out into the hostile vacuum of space before you had fully explored your own planet."
"What do you mean?"
"The ocean depths!"
"We had a look at who live there. They're scary."
#MicroFiction #TootFic #SmallStories

@GDPR_HallOfShame Visiting Europe a few weeks ago, I observed how the GDPR compliance was implemented on various sites.

I can only recall a single site doing it right: Allowing me to accept or not. Clicking on deny closed the popup and let me keep using the site.

A lot of sites allowed me to configure with whom to share my personal information, but most of the time everything was preselected.

They break the rules in their GDBR-specific popup. Not doing anything would have been better.

I was thinking that the existence of Macklemore implies the existence of a Macklemost, but another possibility is an infinite sequence of entities whose levels of Mackling asymptotically approach but never reach a theoretical upper limit

My writeup on supporting advanced Bluetooth codecs and thus improving wireless audio quality significantly on #Linux: https://eischmann.wordpress.com/2019/02/11/better-bluetooth-sound-quality-on-linux/

so what's mastodon's opinion on how a baguette would walk

“Critics of the big tech companies are often told, ‘If you don’t like the company, don’t use its products.’ I did this experiment to find out if that is possible, and I found out that it’s not—with the exception of Apple. These companies are unavoidable because they control internet infrastructure, online commerce, and information flows. Many of them specialize in tracking you around the web, whether you use their products or not”

https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-the-big-five-tech-giants-from-my-life-it-was-hel-1831304194

USER AGENT: Hey website, please don't track me

WEBSITE: Aha, you are one of the 0.5% of users who request not to be tracked. This is an excellent way to track you

WebKit release notes for Safari Technology Preview 75: https://webkit.org/blog/8594/release-notes-for-safari-technology-preview-75/

"Removed support for the expired Do Not Track standard to prevent potential use as a fingerprinting variable." Endlessly ironic that the thing that was supposed to prevent tracking has become just another vector for tracking 🤦‍♂️

TIL there exists an "iPad Pro" with up to a terabyte of storage. Apparently Apple doesn't want people to have any reason to have a laptop unless they're a developer, thus completing their segregation the computing population into "users", whose entire computing experience is controlled by one company, and "developers" who are enslaved to that company, at least if they want to reach those users.

No thanks.

@garrett I'll add a couple of reasons more:

- Many trains have groups of four seats around a table. Great to travel with a group. Bring out some board game or a deck of cards along!
- In Europe a ticket for a long distance train usually includes riding the local commuter trains in the origin and destination areas. Sometimes this covers other local transport (tram, bus, metro) as well.
- Sleeper cars in some overnight routes.

...and probably I'm still missing some

@aperezdc Additional things I love about train travel versus flying:

- being able to get up and walk around whenever you want
- no seatbelts needed
- ability to change seats (as long as the train isn't full)
- restaurant section
- no security checks
- can just show up and hop on
- free WiFi (often) and cell signal as backup (intermittent, though)
- actual leg room for tall people
- miss a train? hop on the next (sometimes for no extra cost)
- regional tickets

There are many good reasons to travel by train even when we are pretty much in the “jet age”. On top of comfy seats, onboard WiFi, being able to see the landscapes, and the convenience of not having to spend time going to and from the airport, it is the most efficient way of moving people around: the balances between energetic cost per passenger, speed, amount of passengers per journey, and convenience are unrivaled.

Train travel helps save the planet 🌎🤗🚅

For those of us who can't come to #FOSDEM this year there are live stream from each room.

Here's a list and it can be sorted by track as well: https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/streaming/