Elias Mårtenson @loke@functional.cafe

Playing around with Wolfram Alpha has taught me that there are some really nice alternative interpretations of units.

The temperature outside is 2.647×10^-5 kiloelectronvolts per Boltzmann constant.

@freemo

I think all of the above comes down to Windows completely ignoring anything that is not Windows. If a USB has a non-Windows filesystem on it, it doesn't exist.

This is perfectly in line with other similar kinds of behaviour, such as the Windows installer blatantly wiping the bootloader if a machine happens to have Linux already installed on a different partition.

Or how the old Skype for Business sent invite emails with a link to "connect via web" that just offers you a .EXE download file.

I wonder if they're doing this stuff on principle. "We can't acknowledge the existence of alternatives".

In Microsoft's case, I think we can attribute things to malice rather than stupidity.

Who is saying Windows is easy to use?

So I needed to install Windows on a computer, so I downloaded the Windows media creation tool and booted into a Windows system to use it.

I insert the USB drive and the tools tells me it can't find it.

OK, the drive was previous used as a Linux installation media, and perhaps this tool is so stupid that it refuses to see it unless there is a Windows filesystem on it.

I start the partition management tool in Windows to reformat it. I find the USB drive in the list (ha! So it was there, you stupid Windows media creation tool).

But wait. It tells me it has only one small partition, and the rest is free space. The only option I have is to create a new partition in that free space.

I want to delete all the partitions you stupid thing. All options to do this is greyed out.

OK, fine. So perhaps I need to use a third-party tool. So I try both google and duckduckgo to search for "partition manager windows".

Go ahead, try it. Type that into your search engine and then try to find which tool to use among the blogspam and fishy products whose front page advertise a free edition, and in true 90's fashion advertise the word "free". I'm not downloading any of those, thank you very much.

So I boot into Linux, start gparted and a few seconds later I have a freshly formatted USB drive.

A post from developer memes about TD Ameritrade reminded me of my experience with them. I've never seen a less professional organisation.

So, a few years ago they were establishing in Singapore, and given how bad the trading sites have been here (in particular, the one offered by my bank, DBS) I was looking forward to swithing to something better.

The first step was: Creating an account. Here's what I had to go through to get this done:

• Create an account on their web site
• Fill in a lot of personal information (this is OK)
• Send in copies of my ID
• Send in copies of my house rental bills (I think, it's been a while)
• Go to the MAS (Monetary Authority of Singapore) site to fill in a quiz showing that I understand options (I have no interest in trading options)
• Get a certificate from MAS and upload it to the TD site
• Even more documents needed to be sent in
• Get errors from the site, leading me to have to contact them to create my account manually

The above process took several weeks. Not what you'd expect from a professional broker.

OK, fine, so I have an account created. What did the experience look like after that?

• Log in to the site, but not being able to do anything. I spent a long time clicking around in the web interface, and there is stuff there, but actually access to your trading portfolios wasn't possible.
• Contact support, and having them telling me that the web trading screens actually don't work and I need to download a dedicated application
• Discover that the dedicated application is Windows-only
• Fine, I install a VM and run their application. It's ugly and has a million features I don't care about (options trading) while making the simple stuff like, you know, looking at the financials of a company pretty obscure.

This is when I realised that they only supported trading on the US markets.

What the actual eff?

They establish in Singapore, and don't even support trading on the Singapore exchange? What about other major Asian and pacific markets like Hong Kong, Tokyo or Austalia? Nope. US only. And it's not like they made that clear on their web site.

https://social.cybre.town/@DeveloperMemes/107143653402105219

Proper spelling

Mastodon, why is it so hard to find the place to click if you want to expand a thread from a post which has nothing but a picture?

I just started a full reinstall of my Qubes laptop. Installing 4.1 RC1.

I did take a full backup of my old system, but I have to admit that wiping the old system still felt painful, as I know what I have to go through to get a new system up and running nicely.

So I was reading a discussion somewhere (perhaps here) where someone was explaining that "web 2.0" was the "social web". Then it struck me that a lot of people don't even remember when this term was introduced, so to them this sounds like a very likely explanation.

The Web 2.0 term was introduced to differentiate the old page based browsing where everything was links and form submissions, to the dynamic web pages based on XMLHTTPRequest, allowing developers to write actual applications on the web. This is referred to as SPA (single page application) these days.

Social media didn't have anything to do with it, and it existed before the introduction of web 2.0. Of course after SPA's became a thing, social media sites started doing it as well, but it wasn't dependent on it. Early social media sites definitely didn't have any SPA functionality.

And just to make sure no one thinks this is just something relating to car leasing. A VW Golf Hybrid costs 150000 SGD here. That around 95756 EUR.

I have decided I don't want to drive a petrol car anymore. Stopping at a petrol station is one of my least favourite activities.

However... I was looking for a reasonably cheap electric car to lease, and the best deal I have found was the Hyundai Ioniq. Now... Cars here are not cheap and I won't blame anyone for thinking this is a joke. The best deal I could find was 2300 SGD per month. That's about 1468 EUR.

If you didn't think NFT's had gone too far already. Look at this absolute insanity: https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/06/fantasy-equity-nft-game-wants-you-to-spend-real-money-buying-fake-shares-of-real-startups/

When I was a kid, I read (or did I watch?) Alice in Wonderland. Now, the Swedish name for it is Alice i underlandet. Now, "under" can mean both wonder and under in Swedish, so until I was an adult and I came across the book in English, I thought it was called that because she enters the worlds through a hole in in the ground. That she literally went to the "world under the ground".

Reading the story without the promise of the wonders actually changes way the book read s quite a bit.

@bkhl @jackbaty I belive the movie is the third take. I also think that it was the last chance they had,before running out of time. There is a documentary made about the making of this film. I think it's available on youtube.