While 50 is north enough and the absolute majority of Canadians live south of it, “Northern Canada” generally refers to the three territories (as opposed to the ten provinces), that start at 60 (mostly, there are some islands south of that).

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As it should be… Navigators could determine latitudes pretty accurately by using astronomy. It was the longitude that was a big problem (maybe that’s part of the reason Japan is placed in the middle of the Pacific).

Some natural cushioning is needed to appreciate the comfort of the floor, I imagine. I’m too boney for that.

I’m pretty sure I’m in my fourth pair now.

Playing 4D chess /s

QWERTY on a cheap Dell keyboard I’ve had for 12 years.

I’m sure some of the alternatives are objectively superior, but with all due respect to enthusiasts, I’m simply not passionate about it and have yet to be convinced that the time and pain spent on getting used to a new layout would actually be worth it in the long run.

Interestingly, that is not the case. Month names can differ in different languages. I discovered the hard way that Ukrainian has completely different names for months when I had to connect to a Linux machine in Kyiv with Ukrainian locale (I can read Cyrillic, but the abbreviated month names meant nothing to me). The name for August is “serpen” by the way, and it is similar in some other Slavic languages. Also Arabic has its own month names based on Akkadian, August is “ab” but an Arabized version of the word August is also commonly used and understood. Finally, in Mandarin and presumably other Chinese languages, Gregorian months are only referred to by their number, so we are in “bayue” (lit. eight(th) month).

The start of the calendar has to be arbitrary, there’s no way around that as it’s not feasible to measure the time since the beginning of the universe with good enough accuracy.

As others commented, the Julian Day is a time measure that is actually used in astronomy, and Unix time is a time stamp standard (not really a calendar, although it could be if we got used to it) that is mostly a way to store time points, not really to consume them before converting to a more readable form.

But as a scientist who is wholly irreligious, I’m not overly bothered by using the Gregorian calendar, even though it has Christian (and a lot of pre-Christian) elements. Its annoyances (different numbers of days in each month, weeks not aligning with years, leap years etc.) are due to the fact that we decided to measure time in these arbitrary units. At least it’s universal in the modern era (often in conjunction with another calendar), and everywhere you go people understand what “August 5, 2024” means (although August might have to be translated to the target language, since the names of the months are not universal).

That’s more than you can say about non-time units of measurement (I’m looking at you, imperial and US customary units!!)

Digital only. Who even has room for physical books.

Have autoplay disabled

Yes, I have a 14h reminder to drink 1L of water, which is my entire daily intake. I have this reminder because without it I may well drink nothing at all and not even realize.

I wonder if the process is open source or we just take their word that it’s privacy preserving. Anyway, privacy is not the only problem with online advertising, so I’m not going to give up adblocking any time soon.

Also note that if it’s just for personal use, you don’t have to have a domain for HTTPS. You can self sign, or create your own certificate authority, you just need to clients to trust it. But domains can be cheap or even free, so it’s better to get one so you don’t have to specially configure your devices.

Don’t overdo it with the cheese 😆

Very nice. I’ve been daily driving KDE for 20 years and only changed the default wallpaper once or twice.

I had the tune to Men of Harlech stuck in my head for almost 20 years, then I randomly watched a video about Wales that used it, and I was able to make the connection from there.

Borg is great.

Abrechnung is really good and actively developed and improving. The UI is already pretty satisfactory, and there’s also an API which is needed if for example you want to bulk-import a spreadsheet, for now you have to code it a bit.

Cretaceous park