I tend to use floating or fullscreen for general browsing but often you have to type something while frequently referring back to something else - for example when programming I will be looking at the documentation. Or maybe debugging something on the command line while looking at your code to see what’s going on. In those circumstances tilling is perfect.

It helps if you can treat it as a hobby. My partner’s hobby is music, which is a perfectly sensible thing to do in one’s spare time. I always feel a bit weird when people ask me what I do in my own spare time and my answer is basically fixing my shit, then pushing it just hard enough that it breaks again.

To your question, the unfortunate reality is that those of us who care about privacy and software freedom are a small minority. Why overhaul your business model to suit us when they can continue to milk every other consumer out there who frankly doesn’t give a shit?

Phones are, of course, the worst of all for this. People do great work developing FOSS solutions but it is an uphill struggle and I worry that the hill is getting steeper.

They have since announced that it will be capped at 0.1% of a bank’s assets: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/09/business/italy-bank-windfall-tax-change/index.html

Most of my data is backed up to (or just stored on) a VPS in the first instance, and then I backup the VPS to a local NAS daily using rsnapshot (the NAS is just a few old hard drives attached to a Raspberry Pi until I can get something more robust). Very occasionally I’ll back the NAS up to a separate drive. I also occasionally backup my laptop directly to a separate hard drive.

Not a particularly robust solution but it gives me some piece of mind. I would like to build a better NAS that can support RAID as I was never able to get it working with the Pi.

I like my Garmin Vívoactive 3. It has all the basic features (for casual walking/running) and looks okay.

I really like the look of the “hybrid” watches like the Garmin Vívomove or Withings watches. They look great but as far as I know none of them have in-built GPS.

Would be very interested in checking out the BangleJS 2 as well.

There are definitely other win conditions, but it’s still winner-takes-all. So say if an ally is really strong scientifically or culturally it inevitably becomes in your interest to destroy them.

One limitation that games like Civ suffer from is that diplomacy is ultimately pretty shallow because there can only be one winner, so even when you’re building alliances or trading relationships it is generally to gain some temporary benefit until you are in a position to defeat your partner later on (whether militarily, scientifically, etc).

What I would love to see is a multiplayer game like Civ but where each player has independent win conditions (so that a game could have multiple winners, or no winners). The condition could even just be to attain a certain level of happiness or wealth. And if you achieve that then you win even if other nations are bigger or stronger, and conversely if you don’t achieve it you lose even if you are the last nation standing. So decisions to go to war, or focus on technological development, or build alliances or trading relationships, etc, are driven by the wants and needs of your own people and not just a need to dominate others.

I haven’t played ESO but I can tell you the standard of writing in the other ES games is, IMO, very high. Morrowind is my all time favourite, the lore in that game is fantastic.

GnuCash user here. Have been using it for almost two years. I never even tried to get bank sync to work, I don’t think it works in Europe. But the process isn’t entirely manual - it usually just involves uploading bank statements. Many banks (or credit card providers, etc) will let you download statements as QIF or OFX files, which are supported by GnuCash. Those that don’t will usually at least let you download as CSV files which you can also import into GnuCash (and tell it which columns it needs to look at for transaction amounts, etc). GnuCash will then try categorise the transactions for you. The first few times you do it you’ll need to manually categories everything; after that it will get better at guessing where things should go but you’ll still need to review, and fill in the gaps.

I usually set aside 30-45 minutes a week to do this will all my accounts (I have multiple bank accounts, credit cards, brokerage accounts etc). If I do it weekly it rarely takes much longer than half an hour. Though I’ve been quite neglectful recently and probably have about a month of transactions to add which will be a bit of a pain.

This looks promising, thanks!