It’s weird though. Pencils were never a good way to transport tape. It was also investigated that only certain Japanese pencils fit as these are bigger. In my memory we always used a BIC ballpoint pen which fits perfectly.

I agree with your point. However that’s not what the article is about. It’s about the social and aesthetically engaging aspects that come with physical media compared to the utilitarian services where music is presented like “tap water”, and the sense of indifference that’s created through abundance, hurting the artists financially.

That authors’ view is explained in the article.

Unlike a burned CD from a friend, there’s no social contract that compels me to sit with something new, and take the time to better understand it. There’s very little on Spotify that will compel me to dive into the catalogue of a new-to-me artist, then seek them out when they go on tour.

I know it’s a rather random rant but if we want to highlight a EU company, can we at least ensure that the website supports English? I know everyone loves their native language but people are striving to be more unified in Europe and English is the working language of the EU.

This is just a proposal to unify company rights. It makes it easier for everyone to set up companies without the hassle of having to deal with the individual rules for companies in every independent country. That is a plus for everyone, even if your company is small. In fact, it makes expanding business activities abroad more reachable to small businesses as it does away with a lot of expensive and specific legal requirements.

Usable addition, and the fact that it is only in-browser is actually a merit in some cases. Firefox gets a lot of hate but is way more privacy centric out of the box compared to Chrome. AI is only opt-in and you can literally customize the entire browser using about:config. Mozilla also maintains the only real competing web engine (not considering Apple’s locked in ecosystem) and they are the reason browsers are open source these days.

The free option is limited to a certain amount of GB. Mozilla can upsell an unlimited version in the future. Likely the reason they don’t do that right from the start, is that their VPN network is completely new and it’s hard to judge the network capacity needed.

Confirmed by Spotify that it was a bug and has now been solved. It only applied to Basic users. Basic is the slightly cheaper version of Premium which doesn’t include audio books.

Unclear if these are real deaths though, possiby this number includes wounded as well. Totals for the Ukraine war are around half a million deaths and 2 million injured until now. So around 350 deaths/1400 injuries per day

Whether current is flowing into an appliance or into the grid depends on which of the two has the highest voltage at any given time. Current is the result of a voltage difference in a closed loop.

These batteries have a built-in inverter. The inverter can produce an output voltage. The electricity grid uses AC which means the voltage is not constant but rather always changing in a sine pattern. To control the current, the inverter can follow the sine pattern and increase amplitude to control an outgoing current, or decrease it to control an incoming current.

By the way, in many cases you don’t want to power the grid. So these batteries usually work together with a sensor placed at your electricity meter. That way they can induce just the right amount of current to power your home appliances without sending something back to the grid.

The law is there solely to ensure the customer always has the option to buy the product without a charger, in order to fight waste. It doesn’t restrict manufacturers from offering the product including charger as well.

For consumers it doesn’t matter. Capitalism is capitalism. If the price of the laptop + charger is not attractive, consumers can buy a competing product. Arguably buying an Apple on a budget is a controversial choice anyway, as the ecosystem costs (software, cloud services, accessories) are generally higher compared to other OS, which have an open hardware architecture, less licensing costs and more competititon.

The only choice so far is Birdychat, which is business related. I’m afraid Signal would be hard to integrate due to its encrypted nature (and the fact that it’s not European). I hope Threema will follow.

To be honest offline Office 2016 is a solid product and the desktop software is still more snappy and capable than the online counterparts. If you don’t need collaboration and online integration there’s little reason to go subscription based. I can understand that small companies make that decision. After all it is just a tool and not a goal in itself.

So basically the same every Android phone does. Google has done this kind of tracking since 2007

Exactly this, there’s a huge market for energy storage, where cost, power and cycle life matter way more than size and weight. And Na-ion can be produced in countries that do not have access to lithium mines, making transport less of an issue and countries more self-sustaining.

Weird reaction there though, how many phone suppliers with an open bootloader and documented architecture are there really? If Fairphone doesn’t live up to their standards, I’m sure they can cooperate as a team instead of clinging to a big tech US monopolist that can make their lives hard at any moment.

Png is the right choice as it is lossless. Jpg works well for photos but it’s not designed for abstract depictions such as the lines, panes and texts in applications and web sites. Meaning artifacts become noticeable with smaller jpg file sizes.

Article says 47 Wh/kg. Thats around a third of LFP cells. But the power density is way higher. Meaning it can do enormous peak currents.

For grid energy storage, energy density is not the most important factor, but the power density is a great plus. It means these cells can rapidly charge or discharge in the grid, offering flexibility to buffer in any way that is required. And the cycle life is also way higher.

This, the Shuffle function should play every song exactly once, just in a random order. This is what cd players have been supporting since the late '80s.

It is a very simple algorithm but Spotify turned it into something complex that barely works. By default, in large playlists, it will heavily prioritize some songs while others are almost never heard. People have complained about this for years and there is an option in the settings for it now, although I am not yet sure if that setting really disables all of the “smart” algorithms Spotify has associated with shuffle.

That is sort of true. Electric bikes are allowed because they provide assistance only when humans are riding (pedal assist), never autonomously. The initial idea was to help elderly people cycle. The category has been abused over the years in such a way that we now have bikes that compete with motorized vehicles and unsafe import that is easy to tweak, pushing bikes way beyond their legally intended limits.