Posts

CloudNeo Environmental Impact

Last year I tried Cloudneo shoes. I paid a monthly fee to use shoes that were made from beans that were processed into ’environmentally friendly recyclable shoes’. In reality this is a con. According to an RTS article the shoes are made from natural products, that are treated in a manner that is dangerous for humans and nature. The shoes themselves, at the time the article was written, are still not recycled.

Of Glossy Mags and Social Media

Many years ago I liked to get mags. I would look at the choice of mags every time I was in a magazine shop. I would even buy some every so often. Eventually I stopped I stopped, not because my desire to get mags was gone, but because the return on investment imploded. You would buy a mag, flick through it, read a few articles, and in the process realise that more than half of the mag wa filled with adverts.

Apple and Meta Fight About Privacy And the EU Weighs In

A few days ago we saw that talks between Apple and Meta had amounted to nothing. There was talk about including Meta’s AI efforts into Apple Intelligence, unti Apple said “Forget it” or somethign to that effect. I skimmed the headlines but don’t remember the details. This is significant. The reason for this is simple. The EU is being criticised by Apple for the Digital Markets Act and Apple is trying to give the EU a bad name by saying “We won’t make Apple Intelligence available in the EU because we’re not clear about the DMA.

The Swiss End of FM Broadcasting

Within the next year FM broadcasting will come to an end in Switzerland in 2024 and people with old cars are sad. So are people who want to hold on to FM for nostalgic reasons. For hobbyists it’s a shame too, because then all FM radio equipment will become obsolete as we will no longer have content available, for people to listen to. We Have Already Shifted Having said this, it has already been replaced by Internet radio in people’s homes, and DAB+ in cars, and by people who switched to digital.

The Americanisation of Swiss Weather Forecasting

A few days ago they announced a “cocktail météorologique explosif” but the result I saw from my vantage point was some medium rain, and plenty of rain and thunder. The thunder was constant for quite a while. When I saw the weather warnings my fear was that we would end up with hail. I have seen the damage that hail can do to nature. It shreds trees, destroys veluxes and more.

CoffeeB Compost

For several weeks I have been using CoffeeB capsules to prepare coffee in an environmentally more friendly manner. In the process I used an old ice cream box made from cardboard to store the punctured balls of seaweed coffee. It doesn’t smell at all, so you can keep it in your kitchen without hesitation. As the capsules decompose they dry up and the surface becames like paper or a wasp’s nest.

The A1 Hallucination

I just spent over an hour driving between Morges and Nyon because someone crashed his car, and everyone else is rushing home, or away because the holidays are beginning. I bring this up because the friends of Global Warming want to expand the A1 between Nyon and Geneva, to allow for fluid traffic. The traffic jam I encountered is between Morges and Nyon so to expand between Geneva and Nyon would do nothing to alleviate this problem.

Leaving Netflix Soon

For the last week, or less, I have been choosing what to watch, not based on what’s new, or recommended, but on what is leaving Netflix soon. With netflix it is very easy to think “I don’t know what to watch” and “I don’t want to watch anything that is being recommended. By noticing the films that are “Leaving Soon” the challenge of choosing what to watch is simplified. If you have to choose what’s vanishing within a few weeks then the choice is smaller.

Watching the Weather Again

For five years it was sunny almost every day in Switzerland. It was sunny so often that the water tables declined and village fountains dried up, as did fields. Clouds of dust could be seen rising when tractors worked the fields. It’s because of this excellent weather, for years in a row, that I stopped looking at weather apps. Now, weather is interesting again. Two or three weeks ago Geneva flooded.

The Fallacy of Please Like and Subscribe

Over the years I have subscribed to hundreds of podcasts, YouTube channels, people on Instagram TikTok and more. I then stopped subscribing, and sometimes like, but never when I’m asked to by the content creators. The short reason for not liking and subscribing now is that if I subscribe I usually grow tired with the content and stop watching, so my subscription is an illusion. The reason I don’t “like” plenty of videos is simply that the videos are not worth a like.