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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Digital, unless I really want the book and it is only analog.

    The analog form factor of books is IMHO much nicer, and I understand everyone who doesn’t like digital books.

    Stil, for me going digital beats analog:

    • Having books always in my pocket, I never wonder what to do if I have to wait somewhere
    • Going for work/leisure travel, always fully stocked with interesting reading material
    • Learning from books and making notes? Digital makes it far easier
    • I mostly read English books for learning and in my country one has to pay a heavy surcharge for English books

    I also have to say, Amazon really earned all the critic it gets, but their Kindle apps and physical devices are awesome. It is easy to buy DRM free books and read/sync them with Amazon kindle infrastructure (send to device etc.).









  • Seriously, I have no idea how one could brush teeth in 2 minutes. I brush gently, use the simple swipe away from the gum technique and just work systematic chewing surfaces, inner surfaces, outer surfaces. Each part gets 2-3 swipes. I had a professional dental cleaner teach this technique to me, and she also told me that she couldn’t finish within 3 minutes. (Do not misunderstand me; I would happily get away with 2 minutes.) BTW flossing is another interesting topic, AFAIK there is no study which can show that flossing helps your teeth/gum. (I floss daily, but I just cannot understand why there is no study which supports this practice.)






  • X-COM (from the 90’s, not the remake):

    I totally sucked at playing X-COM and died a lot, until I learned about real world squad tactics.

    In X-COM, the members of your team can get scared/lose it, and behave in random ways like throwing away their weapons/fleeing the fight or just going berserk and shooting around.

    So, after I improved my game with my newly acquainted knowledge of real world squad tactics, I had a terror mission. Terror missions are missions, where the aliens attack and which are harder than the other missions.

    I managed to survive the load out from the helicopter and kill nearly every alien on first contact, thanks to very careful and orchestrated movement of my squad.

    There was one alien left, I tried to shoot it several times from a distance, and of course (this being X-COM after all), all of my shoots missed…

    … THE ALIEN STRESSED OUT AND BERSERKED…

    I didn’t even know that it was possible. After weeks of loosing and frustration, this one moment is the most satisfying moment of my entire gaming history (more than 30 years now).

    Haven’t found any modern game, where this would be even possible!

    Mandatory link to OpenXcom


  • I would not self host a password manager, simply because I don’t want running something like that on a 24/7 online server.

    Still, if I needed to run a password manager on a server, I would rather self host it than use a hosted service from someone else.

    In my opinion, running such a service commercially is a much harder problem than self hosting it and has a much bigger attack surface.

    This is IMHO what many people do not understand about hosting as a service vs. self hosting: The full time DevOps/Admins etc. people who work at the hosting service are hopefully better than me at hosting stuff. At the same time the problem they have to solve is so much harder than self hosting, that even if they are 10x as good as me, running my own little service with a firewall, rate limiting and monitoring should at least not be less secure.


  • To the best of my knowledge, how a body processes caffeine is highly individual.

    My body seems extremely bad at processing caffeine, and I’ll sleep worse and get other bad side effects after a few days of drinking two cups of coffee before 2 PM.

    Other people drink coffee until the late afternoon and don’t report such problems.

    In summary: I would recommend anyone who experiences sleep problems or the feeling of being stressed to avoid caffeine for 2-3 weeks to rule it out as a source of problems. OTOH if your sleep is okay and you don’t sleep bad, consume as much caffeine as you are happy about.

    One more word about the research concerning caffeine: Usually the research is done with young (< 30 years), healthy (they sort out people with illnesses problems) people. AFAIK everything they say about caffeine is technically true, but unless you are young and healthy, the research doesn’t tell you anything about how caffeine will impact your life/body/health.