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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • Meh. I have a cabin in the countryside 130 km away from my apartment and I can cycle the whole way, or take a coach with a foldable bike and pedal the 30 km left.

    It’s actually in the region where I grew up so I have to get there frequently to see my family. It’s a hassle sometimes but it’s only because my government can’t adequately fund and maintain a decent transit network.

    I also bike to national parks nearby, and sometimes haul my inflatable kayak with a bike trailer.

    People overestimate distances and think the country side justifies a car but it’s usually just excuses. I did move in a big city eventually but I lived in small towns and cities for a decade before that. I still hated cars and didn’t have one.

    For example, my mother lives on a rural road outside a village of less than 2000 people. And she works in the next town that is 7 km away. Meanwhile I live in a city and work in the same city but I have to bike 9 km to get to work.

    So sometimes distances are shorter in smaller cities and towns but people still insist they need a car. People will give any excuse to use their car. It’s like cocain.

    Also, here Uber is only available in major cities where it’s competing with public transit anyway. AFAIK you can’t take an Uber to a small town or a rural road.

    EDIT: Also, most people DO live in a city anyway. And they still have excuses to use a car.

    Today, some 56% of the world’s population – 4.4 billion inhabitants – live in cities.




  • AFAIK Kodi can use pulseaudio and probably pipewire. I use Kodi too on those computers and I just leave it to use the default PA device that I’ve set. I switch the default devices with pasystray.

    What’s usually breaking for me is paprefs. Every so often after an upgrade, the options are greyed out and I can’t share or access my devices over the network.

    I never tried to setup simultaneous output before because I just switch from device one to another, but I just enabled it in paprefs and it’s working too.


  • I work in a call center where we are all speaking English as a second language. At one point we had a pharmaceutical company as a client. They had employees in different countries but the American employees whined that we didn’t speak English correctly or made bad comments about my coworkers. Eventually we lost the contract and they went with an all American call center for their American employees, because apparently they didn’t like our English.



  • pedz@lemmy.catomemes@lemmy.worldLife Pro Tip!
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    26 days ago

    We (Canadians) actually have two layouts to type French characters. The modern Canadian multilingual layout, and the traditional “French (Canada)” layout. As an older French speaking Canadian, I prefer the traditional layout but both work. You can even type English words with these.





  • pedz@lemmy.catoComic Strips@lemmy.worldIt's raining
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    1 month ago

    For some people there’s a point where riding in the rain turns from sucking to being fun. For me it’s when it’s pouring down and water is sloshing around in my shoes. I meet other drenched cyclists and we just smile at each other. We can’t get any wetter, might as well enjoy it.

    I don’t enjoy going cycling when it’s raining, but I get used to it and sometimes end up liking it. Same with the cold.



  • Let’s now wait until they learn about shrimps and hermaphroditism in animals.

    Northern shrimp, also commonly known as northern prawn, are a sequential hermaphrodite. This is a term used for animals that start their life as one sex and change to the other later in life. In the case of northern shrimp, they are born as males and become females at around four or five years of age.

    In a group of anemonefish, a strict dominance hierarchy exists. The largest and most aggressive female is found at the top. Anemonefish are protandrous sequential hermaphrodites, meaning they develop into males first, and when they mature, they become females. If the female anemonefish is removed from the group, such as by death, one of the largest and most dominant males becomes a female.



  • Audio over the network is a feature of pulseaudio/pipewire from a module aptly named “module-simple-protocol”, and as simple as it is to make it work on Linux (when it works), it’s unfortunately not as easy on other platforms. Technically speaking, it’s possible to do that on Android with an app called “Simple Protocol Player” but it’s apparently very glitchy and you’re going to need some patience for the setup. It’s from someone that wanted to stream audio from an HTPC with Ubuntu to an Android phone, but the author states that it’s pretty buggy. Here’s the link to their blog: https://kaytat.com/blog/?page_id=301

    So the short answer is unfortunately “no”, unless you want to practice your patience on a project.



  • When it works (!), it’s one of the reasons I brag to my tech friends about Linux, and why I switched to Linux many many years ago. In fact, it was when Esound was a thing. But once in a while it stops working after an upgrade or a dist-upgrade, and I have to spend time trying to fix it.

    I like to joke around with tech minded friends that Windows keeps breaking with every updates, but then I have to spend an hour finding out why my sinks disappeared after an upgrade, and I’m forced to realize that… sigh… these things happen with Linux too.


  • Mainly because of bluetooth headphones with multiple computers. That way they are paired to only one computer and I can use them with other computers at the same time. Just right click on paprefs system tray icon, change the sink and the audio is sent somewhere else. I know it’s now possible to have bluetooth headphones that have multiple connections but it wasn’t the case a few years ago and I still find it much more useful this way.

    But it’s also useful when I have my laptop near my main computer and want to use its much better speakers instead of the crappy ones on the laptop. Right click, select another sink, and that’s it.

    It’s just nice to have the option to send the audio from one computer to another. It’s a shame that it’s apparently a niche thing.