Dries007

As a Belgian I still dislike this new branding.

Normal sunglasses it sees trough, but if you somehow block it, you can't enable some features anymore (pilot assist).

That was different in the early sw versions, where blocking it would simply do nothing, so I had a 3D printed thing to block the camera.

The emissions tests only test to the level that the car was first registered (or produced) doesn't it?

My experience with my Volvo EX30 has been the complete opposite. Although the false positives have gone down with software updates, it's still wrong so often I turn it off every time it bothers me. Due to some other regulation, this setting is unfortunately not remembered. That means every time I get in the car, I have to spend time going trough the settings to disable it, often while already driving. Seems like a great idea.

The biggest false positives involve singing or talking being mis-interpreted for yawning. Which then triggers a notification and a noise telling me "maybe it's time for a beak", which makes me look at the screen in the center console, which then triggers a second notification telling me to "please look at the road".

Great system over all. 10/10 no notes.

Communal bins mean everyone pays for everyone's garbage and/or lack of sorting.

Here the rate per kg is different depending on which bin it is, so you're "rewarded" for sorting properly.

My local garbage org has a site where you can download an ical for your location or put in an address and get it for the entire year.

So nice, until it's the third week of January and I remember that I need to manually import a new year :P

GDPR could have been great, if it was actually enforced in the way it was intended. Cookie banners and dark patterns are not actually allowed, but without enforcement, it's basically meaningless.

IMO the biggest issue is that the member states are individually required to set up agencies to police this. This makes perfect sense for local companies, but is meaningless against large entities that operate across the entire EU.

Almost all EU credit cards are automatic debit at the end of the month, i.e. carrying over balance is not even possible. You will simply be over-drafted on the linked debit account and charged a fee + steep interest if you spend more then you have. Typically until the overdraft is resolved, no further debit card payments can be made.

The only reasons to use a CC in EU are:

- online payments where CC is the only accepted form of payment

- delay payments until after receiving wage

- hotels, car rentals, and other places that lock an amount on your card

- extra insurance provided by some more premium cards (VISA Gold etc)

Ever since 3-D Secure (2FA for CC transactions, beyond the CCV code), you have been liable for any transaction that was validated by it. Your bank may still do a chargeback as a courtesy, but that's not guaranteed.

Except that personalized cards have been a thing since I've had a card in 2014...

The linked size is also quite common in Belgium.

A bit off topic, but changing your name when getting married is so strange to me. It is not at all common where I live (Belgium), in fact I don't think I personally know a single person who did.

This is a fun playlist of a conversion of a manual machine to CNC:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDlWKv7KIIr9rlCwZ9K43...

After having some persistent issues with my previous pi-hole setup, running as an add-on on my Home Assistant rPi 5, I moved to AdGuard Home on dedicated hardware.

I run it on a rPi Zero 2W (15$), with the Waveshare Ethernet / USB HUB BOX (16$). Together with a power brick (5$) and a meh µSD card, it's very affordable. I did add a small heatsink on the CPU and left the lid off the box to improve the temperature situation (it's in a small room that easily gets warm).

Software wise I've opted for DietPi, which works great for this kind of "dedicated device" pi setup. Current up-time is 135 days, with the last reboot being likely due to a power/breaker issue. It's truly become a set and forget thing now. It also runs Tailscale (not as exit node due to USB 2.0 limited bandwidth for Ethernet) and a dynamic DNS refresh script on a timer. It still has some headroom, but I prefer to keep it rock solid and do more fancy stuff on my Home Assistant pi, which gets rebooted/updated more frequently.

I do have the option to set my DNS settings in my router (ISP provided routers don't have that option here typically), so all of my devices follow.

In combination with µBlock Origin and SponsorBlock in my browser, I almost cry every time I see the "raw" internet on other people's devices. The only remaining source of ads is if I watch YT via my TV, so if someone has ideas to make that stop, I'm all ears. (I used to pay for the discontinued Premium Basic, but I refuse to pay double for a bunch of crap "features" I don't want/need.)

It takes out so much frustration too. No more nitpicking about style/... in merge requests, the pre-commit hook will fix it and CI will catch it if you don't.

The more of this you can automate, the more you get to spend on "real work".

For me it's only ever an issue if I stop renewing a domain, which triggers issues somewhere next renewal and now nginx doesn't reload.

Other than that, I've never had to babysit certbot. It's just a systemd timer job.

The writeup page is also definitely worth taking a look at: https://mitxela.com/projects/fluid-pendant

In Belgium, starting in 2026 B2B invoices must be registered electronically & use a structured format. Any ideas about potential integrations?

https://finance.belgium.be/en/enterprises/vat/e-invoicing/ma...

CCS is great in Europe. You can plug in your normal 3 phase 400V EVSE and charge at 22kW at home, and twice a year when you need it, you can uncover the little extra flap for 350kW DC charging for on route to your holiday.

USB-C suffers from unclear naming problems sure, but in my experience most of the problems are actually caused by shady marketing pages. If they just clearly marked cables and ports with their capabilities, using the same physical connector would only be a benefit.

The same thing existed for micro USB before but Apple could not agree to that or a new standard, so the EU said "USB-C". The law provides for upgrades and mandates compliance with the spec, including PD. If the spec upgrades, the law does so automatically.

This is a good thing.

Very nice, just FYI for home assistant fans: WoL is also supported in there :)

> There is no "formula" for success in the creator economy - the winners are largely random.

I think that strongly depends on what you call "the creator economy". For example, on YT it's really mostly skill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip2trao6dYw

Not that I believe its easy, nor do I think AI will be super good at it, at least not before everything else also enshittifies into the habsburg-AI-powered dead internet.

Yes and no.

No on the distribution network (aka up to the transformer in the street usually, but for sure not on the xxx kV lines) because there the lines are balanced.

In your house, you do, because the voltage between 2 phases is 400V, but the voltage between 1 phase and N is 230V. So you have "low" voltage for "normal" appliances, but high-voltage (and thus high-power) available for high power applications. For example: EV charging, induction cooking, home heating / AC etc.

For an EV usually the N wouldn't be needed, if you always charged at a balanced power on all phases. But from my experience, the full 3 phase power is only used when the battery is empty. At some point the charger switches back to single phase to better modulate the current I guess.

Sidenote:

On a 3x230V net, you don't have an N, but that means you also don't have a non-power conducting wire either! Meaning: double pole switches and breakers are required to prevent shocks. This is why these are generally required in Belgium btw.

See also Y vs Δ distrubution nets: https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/alternating-curren...

3 Phase is (normally, in Europe) 3x400V+N. Single phase is 230V.

AC chargers here (Belgium) are usually 11kW or 22kW capable (at least nominally). This is 16 or 32A. A normal household socket ciruict is 20A here, so this is not very abnormal wiring wise. Most homes are actually hooked up to three phase power, but just have a single phase meter, so an upgrade is usually affordable.

If you want to offer 11kW or 22kW single phase, you'd need 47A or 95A service, with massive cables etc. Hence why most single phase chargers are 7.4kW limited here (32A). Also: Almost no cars would even take that in on 1 phase as far as I know.

Higher amperage is what costs more in terms of losses and cables, so less amps is good.

3x230V also exists, but at least here, is being phased out.

Notes from Belgium:

- A full time working week is 38h by law. If you do work 40h, you get that time (so 12 days/year) back to compensate. There are talks about a 34h workweek, but that seems unlikely in the near future IMO. We tend to have 30m lunch breaks, not the 2h long siesta like in the south.

- You are required to take your holidays. Your employer can get in serious trouble if you don't, so "leaving vacations days unused" almost doesn't exist. Some systems allow you to transfer your extra legal holidays to next year, but the base 20 you basically have to take every year.

- We also have 10 public holidays. If you have to work on those, you get to recoup the day. Same goes for work on Sunday for most people, if Sunday work is even allowed in your sector.

- Sick days are normally not something you have to worry about as an employee, provided you have a doters note (which costs you 4€ for the visit). Although most places are starting to relax the note requirement for short (1-3 day) things. For short sick leave, you'll get 100% of your wage from your employer. Once it becomes a long term thing, you fall back on the health care system, which usually covers 70% of your wage. Some employers contribute the other 30%.

- Health care wise: We pay contributions via our wages into a "mutuality" based system. There are a few choices (1 government run, the rest are non profits) that offer different benefits, but the base coverage is mostly the same. Enrollment in this system is mandatory. More and more employers offer supplementary healthcare that can have benefits like full reimbursement of brand medicine instead of only the cost of generics, getting private rooms during hospitalizations for free, additional dental coverage, a new pair of glasses every year, ...

Note that this is all assuming you are an employee, not self-employed. There are also some legal differences between blue- and white-collar workers, but are slowly being removed over time.

> but as far as I'm aware, somebody with no credit history is basically indistinguishable from somebody with "good" history.

As it should be. Why would you want to allow someone to be judged for _not_ having been in debt in the past?

You can always ask for references if they rented before, that might help somewhat.

Exactly why I run my DNS on an old pi just for that and some minor watchdog stuff.

I would say: stick to straight command sequences with variables, avoid if/for/while/functions etc. Subshells and pipes only for trivial things.

Setting something like a 30 char limit will inevitably lead to code-golfing to fit a mess into the 30 char limit.

But that becomes harder to automatically check, that's why you should still have good peer reviews based on written standards somewhere.

We've been experimenting with Dagger here, as part of the alternative to writing glscpc actually, but I'm not convinced it's ready to replace Gitlab CI.

Dagger has one very big downside IMO: It does not have native integration with Gitlab, so you end up having to use Docker-in-Docker and just running dagger as a job in your pipeline.

This causes a number of issues:

It clumps all your previously separated steps into a single step in the Gitlab pipeline. That doesn't matter too much for console output (although it does when your different steps should run on different runners), but is very annoying if you use Gitlab CI's built in parsing of junit/coverage/... files, since you now have extra layers of context to dig trough when tests fail etc. Plus not all of these allow for multiple input files, so now you have to add extra merging steps.

If your job already uses Docker-in-Docker for something, you have to be careful not to end up with Docker-in-Docker-in-Docker situations, or container name conflicts if you just pass through the DOCKER_HOST variable.

The one thing that would make this worth it is being able to run the pipelines locally to debug, but I've just written quick-and-dirty scripts to do that every time I've needed it. For example, running the test job in our pipeline on every Python version: https://gitlab.com/Qteal/oss/gitlabci-shellcheck-precommit/-...