Notices by Miguel Arroz (arroz@mastodon.social), page 2

@lonvarscsak Portugal.

@lonvarscsak There are many other reasons including my family of course. Inertia is a bitch but I’m starting to feel a big repulsive feeling towards Vancouver. I feel the city has been taken over my imbeciles and the few cool people that are still around are either suffering through it or moving somewhere else.

@lonvarscsak Initially, where I am now, a relatively peaceful suburb of Lisbon. Kinda boring and nothing really happens but it’s 15 minutes from Lisbon so not too bad. After that, not sure. I have the dream of living in the south, in a small village, but that’s not very compatible with my anti-car stance. Lisbon is already too noisy and chaotic. We’ll see.

Just a few years ago it would be extremely rare to see a Mac driving something like this. Today, it’s way more frequent. Imagine if Apple launched a cheap, low end Mac or even single board computer targeting embedded/hobby applications… https://hackers.town/@LambdaCalculus/112360077959647223

@goatsarah The other day I asked for transit directions between Lisbon and somewhere near Mont-Saint-Michel and holy shit no wonder people fly everywhere and rent cars locally. Even inside France it kinda sucks, since they built the TGV as a star centred in Paris, so you always need to go through Paris if you’re travelling between two different places. The only viable option to leave Portugal by train was Vigo which turns into buses as soon as it reaches Vigo. Lisbon-Madrid is badly needed…

@TimWardCam @goatsarah Spain and Portugal use the Iberian gauge (not sure what the historical reasons are). However, the AVE (Spanish high speed network) was built using the standard gauge so the trains can continue to France without interruptions. The Portuguese high speed network will be built using the same standard gauge but of course we have been debating it for several decades instead of building it, per fine Portuguese tradition.

@goatsarah I’m not sure if PS and PSD will form any sort of coalition. The history on that isn’t great. I’m not sure how long the next government will last but my guess is, not much. I’m still hoping the emigration ridings will repeat the result of last election, causing a tie in MPs and (hopefully) more votes for PS, forcing the president to invite the left-wing “majority” to power.

@goatsarah Every election so far people have been saying it’s their high water mark and then they triple or quadruple their voting. I’m not optimistic. 1.1M people voting for these fuckers… I’m still in disbelief. And some of the regions I love the most and the worst. The world is really turning to shit.

@goatsarah How do they know if you watched on iPlayer? Does the inspector ask for the browsing history? Or contact your ISP? That seems bonkers.

Retro computing Mac people challenge: I’m looking for a game but I forgot its name. This would be from the age of beige PowerPC Macs.

Game was slightly inspired on Tron. It had a 3D board divided in squares, with bumps, floating on a black background. Players controlled spheres that would roll and leave a track (each square would be lit with the players color as they rolled over). The goal was forcing other players out of the board by bumping them or forcing them to roll over a track. 1/3

@goatsarah I just watched Fool Me Once (Netflix) to kill the jet lag and liked it. I tend to like British dark crime shows, though.

@goatsarah Capitalism does to products what it does to everything else: the wealth gap, here visible in quality and price tag.

The midrange products are kinda gone or turned to shit. We now have a lot of shitty cheap stuff (getting less cheap by the day in many cases) and very high end quality stuff, unaffordable by most.

On top of that, all the crap technology now allows like subscriptions to be able to use the hardware we paid for are not prevalent.

@goatsarah Regarding cars, if I was on the market for one, I would look into the Hyundai Kona (or Kauai or whatever it’s called in Portugal to avoid the c word). It’s a bit SUVy so you probably won’t like it, and I’m not sure about the enshittification factor. However it seems to be the car that usually gets higher ratings on range per kW second only to the fascist EVs (and I’m almost sure the battery has active cooling).

@pmdj @danyowdee Yeah. I’m currently in Portugal and trying to get anywhere with Siri is simply not going to happen. Driving directions are reliable, though.

Another “designed in California” thing: the look around feature uses cameras with lenses picked for wide roads, like the ones they have in California. They aren’t wide enough for narrow Lisbon and other historical neighborhoods in Europe. Google uses wide angle lenses and it’s so much better.

@retrotechtive I think someone (@mac84tv maybe?) had a video about that. It may be an accelerator board or a video dual-screen thing for using an external monitor together with the internal one.

@retrotechtive @mac84tv Ah here’s the dual screen thing, it was Adrian’s and not mac84: https://youtu.be/slY_F1MxGlk?feature=shared

Yeah if you don’t see a cable it might just be an accelerator. But it’s definitely some goodie. 😊 Probably jacked in right in the CPU socket.

Whoever invents a gluten free cracker that doesn’t fall apart in one thousand pieces just by looking at it will become filthy rich.

And if you’re about to suggest Schär… these were Schär.

@goatsarah I have two Linux and one FreeBSD. Since Sonoma they randomly hang after running for a few days. After this latest update (14.1.1) I had a hard time trying to even boot them up. UTM couldn’t start the VMs at all, didn’t get to the phase where it shows fhe big UTM logo in the window just before handing the console to the guest OS.

@goatsarah I’ve been having lots of stability issues with VMs running on a M1 mini. Not sure if it’s a UTM or an OS problem but never happened on Ventura.

@goatsarah Sonoma is by far the worst release in years, maybe ever, since the initial version of OS X. It keeps getting generally worse, not better, but this year was a huge leap backwards.