I thought that was a corporate logo, marketing banner or something like that. Nope. It's actually a flag!

People walking between the bus stop (outside the picture) and the building (on the right) don’t like taking the long route around this huge green circle. It was pretty obvious that this would happen sooner or later.

When I ask Copilot something, the response usually starts with “Great question!”, followed by emojis and encouraging words that gently pet my fragile ego. Pretty much anything seems to pass for a “good question”, so if my questions are able to surpass that exceedingly low standard, I no longer feel very confident about their quality.

Am I the only one feeling this way? Anyone else noticing how excessive encouragement can have the opposite effect?

Crossposted from https://sopuli.xyz/post/25634723

I wonder how native English speakers do it, but here’s how I approach this problem.

My trick involves using a consistent spelling system for encoding a random letter sequence into a sound which I can memorize. When writing, you just pull those auditory memories, decode the sounds back to the original alphabet salad, and you’re done! Needlessly complicated, but that’s a common theme in English anyway, so it should fit right in.

To make this method work, you need a consistent spelling system, so you could make one up or modify one previously invented for another language. Basically anything more consistent than English should do, so it’s a pretty low bar to clear.

Here are some example words to test this idea with:

• carburetor
• carburettor
• carburetter

Pronounce those letter sequences using that alternate spelling system. It won’t sound like English, but it’s consistent and that’s all we care about at this stage. The end of each word could sound like this:

• [retor]
• [retːor]
• [reter]

In my system, each letter corresponds to a specific sound like e=[e], a=[ɑ] etc. I’ve been thinking of including the Italian c=[tʃ], but you could use other languages too. Feel free to mix and match, as long as you make it consistent.

The idea is that it’s easier to memorize sounds rather than whimsical letter sequences. Once you have those funny sounds in your head, it’s easy to use that same consistent spelling system to convert the sound back to letters.

Once you know that trick, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to spell common words like “island”, “salmon”, “subtle”, or “wednesday. For example “cache” could be stored as [tʃatʃe] in my head. Still haven’t settled on a good way to store the letter c, so I’m open to suggestions.

I wonder how native English speakers do it, but here’s how I approach this problem.

My trick involves using a consistent spelling system for encoding a random letter sequence into a sound which I can memorize. When writing, you just pull those auditory memories, decode the sounds back to the original alphabet salad, and you’re done! Needlessly complicated, but that’s a common theme in English anyway, so it should fit right in.

To make this method work, you need a consistent spelling system, so you could make one up or modify one previously invented for another language. Basically anything more consistent than English should do, so it’s a pretty low bar to clear.

Here are some example words to test this idea with:

• carburetor
• carburettor
• carburetter

Pronounce those letter sequences using that alternate spelling system. It won’t sound like English, but it’s consistent and that’s all we care about at this stage. The end of each word could sound like this:

• [retor]
• [retːor]
• [reter]

In my system, each letter corresponds to a specific sound like e=[e], a=[ɑ] etc. I’ve been thinking of including the Italian c=[tʃ], but you could use other languages too. Feel free to mix and match, as long as you make it consistent.

The idea is that it’s easier to memorize sounds rather than whimsical letter sequences. Once you have those funny sounds in your head, it’s easy to use that same consistent spelling system to convert the sound back to letters.

Once you know that trick, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to spell common words like “island”, “salmon”, “subtle”, or “wednesday. For example “cache” could be stored as [tʃatʃe] in my head. Still haven’t settled on a good way to store the letter c, so I’m open to suggestions.

This is big news for the Skellefteå factory. They were still ramping up production.

Have you noticed that many quotes attributed to famous people are actually incorrect? When someone sends me one of these fancy quotes of profound wisdom, it looks really suspicious to me if:

1. It’s a picture (as in, not text in a technical sense)
2. It’s attributed to someone famous
3. There’s a picture of that person
4. There’s no source

When I start looking into it, I usually end up reading a quote investigator article that says the original line was written a few hundred of years ago, got mutated many times along the way, and eventually was coupled with the name of someone like Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein or whatever.

BTW I put that picture together using Imgflip’s meme generator. Seemed appropriate.

Most of the time, I read the “subscribed” feed, sorted by scaled. Maybe once a week or once a month I check what’s in the “all” feed, sorted by top of the week or something like that.

My opinion is, that this is the better way to see the stuff I care about, and it allows me to ignore all the stuff I don’t care about. I’ve seen many people say that you should read the “all” feed, but I just don’t seem much value in that. There are a few people who agree with me, but we appear to be a minority here, hence the unpopular part of this opinion.

These are the hottest things I’ve ever tasted, and here’s my journey to spicy chips.

A few months ago, I decided to try some spicy potato chips. They were interesting, and next weekend I tried something hotter. They were actually really good, so I kept on trying hotter and hotter things every week, until I ran out of options at the local supermarket.

Yesterday, I visited my local Turkish supermarket, which sells all sorts of weird things I’ve never seen before. They even had a bunch of potato chips from obscure brands that are probably normal in Turkey and Middle-East.

Among those, I found these… non-potato chip thingies. Nevertheless, they’re, by far, the hottest thing I’ve ever tried. At first, I just took a tiny little crumb. It burned so hard, but after a while I was ok. Then I took another crumb, it was really hot etc. After about an hour, my mouth was strangely getting adapted to chili, so I could take small bites too. It just escalated from there, and less than 24 hours later the bag was empty.

What a weird experience! I never thought you could get adapted to chili. I thought it would be equally hot all the time, but that’s not at all how it works.

Being allergic to ads, I can’t watch YT on the default app. Google isn’t one of my favorite companies, so getting premium isn’t on my wishlist either.

When at home, I use a computer with Firefox and uBlock origin, but now I’m traveling light , so I left my laptop at home. Previously, it was possible to use my iPad to block YT ads, but that stopped working about two months ago. There are ways to watch those videos anyway, but I thought it would be fun to see if I can avoid YT instead.

Currently, I’m traveling with a tablet and several video apps, such as Nebula, Odysee and even Loops. My local TV channels have made some video apps, and nextDNS can block those ads without any issues, so now is the time to explore those as well.

Got any thoughts, questions, comments, or random stuff?

Edit: Turns out, my nextDNS was blocking .*.jnn-pa.googleapis.com, and that causes videos to stop after precisely 60 s. If you allow the jnn-pa.googleapis.com, the videos can once again play normally. That didn’t used to be a problem. Maybe nextDNS didn’t block it before, maybe YT didn’t route any critical traffic through there or something. Who knows. Either way, if your videos stop after 1 minute, make sure jnn-pa.googleapis.com is not blocked in your DNS settings.

https://carnewschina.com/2025/01/08/yadea-released-first-electric-scooters-with-sodium-ion-battery-pack-in-china/

Seems like sodium ions batteries have left the lab and are already in production.

For a long time, Brave was the best way to do it, but then Orion started supporting Firefox plugins. Safari had some extensions that also worked for a while. Ad blocking worked perfectly, I had many options, and YT was great again.

Recently, all of that changed when YT or Apple implemented something that makes video playback stop after 1 minute. At the moment, I just have to use a proper computer for watching YT, since mobile devices don’t have functioning ad blocking any more.

Has anyone else noticed something similar? Is is just my devices, or do other people have the same issues?