Eggs now in different baskets.

Well, I am here and have been for a while. I mean in the physical space I inhabit. And on Mastodon albeit on a different instance.

I have been known to practice the use of dry humour and irony. Making sharp contrasts and pointing out uncomfortable similarities can appear in my discussions with others.

Pro-European, left of centre in a society that is still intrinsically opposed to both.

debian Linux based digital life.

Languages: Fluent : English, Dutch, Norwegian Basic : German On Bucket List : Croatian
Avatar: Somewhere in Norway taken on a cycletour
Header: Sunrise on the other side of the tracks.

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Last Notes

2026-05-15 13:45:52 UTC

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My 2003 Corolla has a closed source engine management system.
But to hack it you would need to connect a device to the car via an OBD-II cable.
So there is no real risk of any potential software vulnerabilities ever being exploited.
More modern cars have electronics controlling everything and the separate systems, brakes, engine management, infotainment systems etc can be linked together.
With unintended consequences as with the 2015 Jeep Cherokee hack mentioned in the article.

2026-05-15 13:22:11 UTC

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Definitely do not want a modern car, irrespective of driveline because of data collection issues.
I'm using a PinePhone as I do not like the data collection issues, walled gardens and other issues such as data sovereignty associated with Apple or Google's offerings so why on earth would I want a car with CarPlay or Android Auto in it?
Or the car manufacturers own version of such things?
Or closed source engine and brake management systems? Or always on internet access?

2026-05-07 05:32:57 UTC

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There was a TSB a short walk from my childhood home. In an odd looking office building across the road from the Coop with the Post Office and newsagents just round the corner.
The TSB used to have a cash machine which was the only one within walking distance.
In those days we had all the most important services within a short walk.
After the Lloyds merger that branch got shut down and the odd looking office building became an even odder looking private home.

2026-04-24 05:51:00 UTC

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The only one that sprung to my mind was John Smith.
But I could not remember exactly why I have that feeling about him.
Maybe in the old days of Heath, Wilson and Callaghan but my memories of these leaders may have been affected by the collective trauma that was the Thatcher era.

2026-04-23 21:28:05 UTC

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I am looking back at the last 60 years of UK politics and really, when was there a PM that exhibited moral authority?

2026-04-20 06:37:39 UTC

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Each time that machine broke a whole integrated production line ground to a standstill causing all sorts of other more minor issues.
Once the workers had cleared up the mess they would then be standing around for a couple of hours.
So, when it was time for the management and unions to start "negotiating" about pay rises the management could then say "This factory is running at a loss, with constant interruptions in production, so we cannot offer a good pay rise this year."

2026-04-20 06:32:31 UTC

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As an example, I had an interesting student summer placement at a jam factory run by one of the big UK supermarket groups.
The factory was of course badly managed. There was one machine that had a design defect. The maintenance engineers had worked out how to fix the problem once and for all.
Management were not interested as it was costly capital investment. They preferred to have regular downtime to fix said machine to spending a fraction more to stop the problem recurring.

2026-04-20 06:27:49 UTC

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"The problem reflects the UK's low-wage economy, where workers are seen as a cost & not invested in."
It has been like this as long as I can remember.
Also blaming said workers for industrial disputes.
I remember reading a comment by a Japanese economist which opined that the UK labour relations situation in the 1970s was a product of bad management rather than "bolshie" trade unionists.
Workers were mostly reacting to being treated as a bothersome cost rather than a resource.

2026-04-16 16:34:50 UTC

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Prohibition in the US was great for organised crime.
As I wrote a couple of days ago with regard to the EU Chat Control proposals also relevant here with regard to age verification.
https://mastodon.social/@the_wub/116396091947830686
#note1rrx…39dl

2026-04-13 06:56:54 UTC

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This will not just be children in the future either. As adults try to avoid identifying themselves to look at adult content or don't want their chat content scanned by client side scanning and so on.
The internet crims are already looking at things like Chat Control 2.0 and rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of getting punters to download their malware riddled offerings marketed as "encrypted chat programs that your government cannot read".
#chatcontrol

2026-04-12 18:37:07 UTC

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I now fully understand the appeal of #caturday and #owlsintowels .

2026-04-12 16:00:57 UTC

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Not to mention funeral homes.
Then there are venture capital funded care homes and companies providing support for the now disabled car drivers/passengers in their homes and modified cars for those with life changing injuries.
All these services being paid for by taxpayers thus increasing profit for the private companies involved by moving money that the government raises from its citizens into the pockets of speculators in the private sector.

2026-02-27 14:11:23 UTC

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It was a good presentation from the Forbrukerrådet.
Norway is part of the European Economic Area and has access through this organisation to the EU Single Market. Most of the EU directives are implemented into Norwegian law (eventually).
The presentation, interview with Cory Doctorow and the panel discussion touched on what Norway can do as a small nation but also within the framework of the current data protection regulatory system that the EU provides.

2026-02-27 13:48:48 UTC

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Link to the English language version of the report is to be found on this page:
https://www.forbrukerradet.no/news-in-english/digital-products-and-services-are-getting-worse-but-the-trend-can-be-reversed/

2026-02-21 00:26:46 UTC

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And CONSISTENT bloody scrollbars in terms of both function and appearance!
The browser sorts out the scrollbars on the basis of the preferences set by the user in the OS GUI.

2026-02-15 21:03:30 UTC

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@npub10nd…urdx
Vivaldi browser, highlight the "strange" text, right click and select "Translate selected text".
Works for me when I miss the nuances in a German sentence and need some help.

2026-02-07 14:12:55 UTC

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I grew up in the 60s and 70s. I remember the smell of unburnt diesel spewing out of exhaust pipes of heavily laden lorries and buses climbing up mountain passes in the hilly bits of Europe.
<fx fake Yorkshire accent> "Smell o chips! Smell o chips! You were lucky! We used t dream o t smell o chips. And ye try t tell the young people of today that...they won't believe ye!"

2026-02-07 11:37:06 UTC

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I understand that the generators are running on bio-diesel.
It is more efficient and hence better for the environment to run diesel cars on this bio-diesel rather than converting the energy in the bio-diesel into electricity to charge an EV.
It saves transporting diesel to the charging station, transporting the generators to the charging station and keeping the generators running which will involve people going to the charging station (in EVs?)

2026-02-04 20:34:57 UTC

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More recently another UK scandal related to legal identity and nationality in the form of the "Windrush scandal".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal

2026-02-04 20:31:37 UTC

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We had a poll tax in the UK at the end of 1980s/early 1990s. Implicit in the law was that it would force people to remove themselves from the electoral roll in order to avoid paying the tax.
The only good that came out of it was that the opposition to the tax forced the resignation of Prime Minister Thatcher - an odious pro-Pinochet, neo-liberal, monetarist, Reaganite.
So maybe this tale gives some hope for you folks in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_tax_(Great_Britain)

2026-02-04 19:25:50 UTC

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So is the "legal name" in this case the name that the person has used to register themselves as voter?

2026-02-04 18:59:31 UTC

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"SAVE Act would require birth cert or passport that matches voters legal name. "
So where and how is a person's "legal name" recorded?
In the UK there is the concept of "known as" which means that you can end up being called something other than is on your passport.
You can change the name on your passport without changing your legal name by deed poll to match it.
Not advisable as I found out trying to help a relative but I believe even now it is still possible.

2026-02-04 16:27:40 UTC

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I have no idea how this is managed in the US though.
Is your legal identity registered at federal or state level?
Or not at all?

2026-02-04 16:24:53 UTC

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Before Brexit happened if there had been an "EU passport" I would have applied for it immediately.
Identity is a pain in the neck. In the UK you can choose the name that appears on your passport.
In the Netherlands and Norway people are all registered in the People Registers. So you get the name that you are officially registered with when you apply for a passport.
The UK has a perculiar way of dealing with legal identity and has no central register for all people.

2026-02-04 14:51:19 UTC

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I have had a collection of experiences, related to the different way that the UK and most other European countries treat identity.
Some countries base your permission to stay on your birth certificate and others on the passport you present.
In my case the names on the two are not the same.
The UK demands that if you have two passports then the names on both must be identical.
But UK passports do not support accented characters found in other European alphabets.

2026-02-04 08:08:23 UTC

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That also means the end to witness protection schemes.
How do you deal with an asylum seeker without papers? There is no birth certificate or passport to be found particularly in countries where civil society and the system of keeping of public records has broken down.

2026-02-01 11:50:13 UTC

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There is a long running debate about private day care provision here in Norway.
There are strict rules about how much private owners can take out of the business as a private day care is supposed to be non-profit.
It has lead to a few cases in recent years where private day care owners went a bit too far with creative accounting sometimes taking out quite large sums out of their business.
Which was against the rules.

2026-01-18 16:27:40 UTC

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Oh it is so simple to explain!
Most sheep are quite skittish so you can only pat them once before they run away.
DDR rams on the other hand are two-stroke sheep.

2025-12-16 10:23:57 UTC

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In the US people live in their campers, vans and cars. Often fighting a constant battle of being moved on by the authorities.
I just found this page of "useful" information about living in your car from, of all things, a car insurance company in the US.
An example of "meeting people where they are" perhaps?
https://www.autoinsurance.org/is-it-illegal-to-live-in-your-car/
#homeless

2025-12-04 18:23:34 UTC

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I remember years ago when I still lived in the UK reading in a newspaper article that compared the "return on investment" of training tax fraud investigators vs benefit fraud investigators.
The sums saved for the exchequer by each tax fraud investigator were ten times the amount that a benefits fraud investigator would bring in.
For some reason the government of the day was much more interested in training benefit fraud investigators.

2025-12-01 18:55:58 UTC

OK I have struggled with GNOME like elements in file chooser dialogues in XFCE for some time now and am considering a non-GTK desktop.
In XFCE, MATE and LXDE I can configure the title bar buttons in windows such that the close button is on the left and the minimise/maximise are on the right. See the attached image.
This is similar to the RISC OS layout and stops me accidentally closing windows.
Is this layout possible with the KDE/LXQt/Trinity desktops?
#kde #lxqt #trinity #RISCOS #linux
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/645/796/692/876/297/original/b2eb4172208882c3.png

2025-11-30 09:10:11 UTC

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Oh most important of all, keep a log book.
Unless you have a particularly good memory you will forget where you planted which crop when you come to plant the next spring.
If you are doing organic gardening then crop rotation is important so a log book makes it easy to work out where this years seeds have to be sown.
We include information as to the seed varieties planted, when they were sown/harvested and if there were any crops that did badly or well.
#gardening #organic

2025-11-29 19:10:54 UTC

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There is one simple thing that took us a while to work out.
We tend to plant enough potatoes to keep us self-sufficient for around nine months of the year.
With such a lot of the same crop it makes the harvest easier if you plant seed potatoes over a period of weeks. A bed at a time.
This avoids the problem of having a garden full of potato beds that all need to be harvested and processed for storage at the same time.
#growyourown #gardening

2025-11-26 07:08:06 UTC

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If you feel you have to replace your Windows 10 PC for Christmas as it cannot run Windows 11 try to find a Repair Cafe to help you install Linux.
It can save you money and stop you putting more money in the hands of the corporations. It will also save a perfectly usable computer from being sent to the tip.
My remaining elderly parent, soon to turn 87 has been using Linux for over ten years now.
Linux might work for you too.
https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/How_to_Find_your_Local_Repair_Caf%C3%A9_%F0%9F%8C%8E
#linux #repaircafe

2025-10-13 07:27:37 UTC

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Ik was op een veerboot in Croatia eerder in het jaar. Ik ging richting mijn auto en opeens was er iemand de achter mij begint te roepen en dan mijn schouder aanraken.
Op dat moment ik had zeker hetzelfde gezichtsuitdrukking als de jonge vrouw in de foto.
Maar het was een jonge dame die heeft achter mij heeft geroepen en mijn schouder aangeraakt. Zij wilde mijn autosleutels die waren net uit mijn broekzak gevallen aan mij teruggeven.

2025-09-05 07:02:04 UTC

I find that carrots exude and overwhelming carrot scent as I dig them out of the ground. Maybe the smell comes from scrunching the carrot tops rather than the carrots themselves.
I wash most of the soil off and the smell recedes.
When I cut them before putting them into a cooking pot full of water the smell briefly returns but never as intense as when i am harvesting them.
#carrots #gardening #selfsufficient
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/150/390/493/688/523/original/5ee2e9a22e0e9053.jpg

2025-06-24 06:23:29 UTC

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What struck me about Trump winning the recent presidential election in the US was that the US electorate is even more misogynistic than it is racist.
The US electorate chose Obama twice as president but subsequently has on two occasions rejected extremely well qualified female candidates for the same job.