I live in Germany.

I looked it up. Neat concept, but it is availiable within US only. There is nothing similar availiable at my country - at least, not that I know of.

Did you follow the tutorial I posted? If so, the English-translated part may not have the right terminology. I followed the instructions on the linked website: https://www.404media.co/paypal-personalized-shopping-opt-out/. I suppose, this is appliccable worldwide.

To me, it is. I don’t have a credit card - I never got one offered by my bank (…which makes one think…). Back in the “early days” (early 2000s - mostly on Ebay) it was quite common to recieve the bank information of the seller after purchase. Then I had to wire the money to the sellers’ account. There was no online banking. It could take up to a week to wire the money. After the seller recieved the payment, the ordered item got sent with postal service. When Paypal was introduced, it was a game changer: the seller recieved the money instantly, and could send the purchased item right away.

How do you do online shopping then? Most websites offer Paypal as a payment method, among credit cards. Or do you pay with a credit card?

• Einloggen
• Herunterscrollen und unten auf der Seite den Link „Datenschutz“ anklicken
• dann bei Datenschutz festlegen den Link „Datenschutzeinstellungen“ anklicken
• dann das Feld „Interessenbasierte Werbung“ anklicken
• auf jeden der beiden Einträge klicken und den Schalter jeweils auf „aus“ schalten

. Translated from the above:

• Log in
• Scroll down and click on the “Privacy” link at the bottom of the page
• then click on the “Privacy settings” link under Data & Privacy
• then click on the “Interest-based advertising” (Personalized shopping) field
• click on each of the two entries and set the switch to “off” in each case

I think that manufacturers of tech products test their products only with a few standard configurations - but in reality there are too many possible combinations of different configurations:

Take a bluetooth mouse for example. Generally, it connects to a computer and it works. Now imagine that you have a different configuration - a logicboard in your laptop that has not been tested by the manucacturer of the mouse or an obscure model of the bluetooth reciever, that also hasn’t been tested to work with that mouse. Your mouse works well in the beginning, but disconnects at random times. You can’t pinpoint the issue, and when you are looking for help online, nobody seems to have the same problems with that mouse.

In this case, said mouse sucks, because it doesn’t function reliably. A different person with a different configuration of their computer (different logicboard, different model of the bluetooth unit) might have no problems at all with the same mouse.

This happens with your returned packages (article is in German, half of it is translated below):

Amazon shreds its returns 08.06.2018June 8, 2018

The “Destroy” shipping method is bringing Amazon into disrepute - is the online retailer really destroying tons of functioning products? The German government is already talking about a “huge scandal” Germany, Pforzheim: Symbolic image of Amazon logistics center The “Destroy shipping method” can also be booked with the logistics service provider

Tons of returns and products in mint condition, including fridges, cell phones, mattresses and furniture, are said to have been destroyed by online retailer Amazon. This was reported by the ZDF magazine Frontal 21 and Wirtschaftswoche. Both media outlets refer to internal product lists, photos and statements from employees. According to these, goods of all kinds are disposed of “on a large scale” in the mail order company’s German logistics warehouses.

Amazon not only destroys unusable products, but also functional and sometimes new items, according to statements from employees. One employee reported that she destroyed goods worth tens of thousands of euros every day.

Clip from 2022, German. Signature quote: “It is not only an occasional [Euro]Palette of Items, it is whole truckloads - in all fulfilment centers, almost day by day.”

Pizza Hut over Dominos.

In my area Dominos is more common, but they are really bad. All of them. We had them delivered on several occasions (over the time of a couple of years) and at least twice the food wasn’t cooked properly. It was warm but the inside was still raw. When complaining, all you recieve is a voucher so you are bound to them as a customer.

Also, in order to cut preparing times short (a fast order and delivery is advertised) they prepare their pizzas in advance: at our local shop they have a prepared pizzas with the tomato sauce already applied to. They literally have a stack of them handy (at least 30 of these stacked up). They just need to put the toppings onto it, depending on the pizza that will be ordered.

When ordered, you recieve the pizza rather quickly, as promised, but the tomato sauce is more stale than their competitors’ pizza, because the sauce was not freshly applied when the pizza was made). Also, they skimp on the toppings. With a little luck your pizza arrives warm and done (read: not raw on the inside).

Dominos pizza is not worth the money - more precisely, it is a waste of ingredients! I refuse to pay for anything from Dominos - my friends know that and therefore I get invited sometimes when they decide on Dominos. This way, at least I don’t waste my money on them.

Pizza Hut on the other hand is always top notch. There are not many of them where I live, but when there is an occasion to have a pizza at them it’s always worth the money. As far as I know they don’t do deliveries - they are more a restaurant than a fast food place here.

I was living with two other roommates and we were moving into another city to live there together as well. Me and one roommate were planning ahead and got moving boxes, slowly sorting out stuff that can be thrown out, and started packing things way ahead of the moving date.

The other roommate couldn’t be bothered by all of this. The day we were moving he started packing his things. We had rented a moving truck for that day and were able to move my and the prepared roommates’ stuff to the new appartment first. Then we drove back to help lazy roommate. If all had been planned accordingly we wouldn’t have had to drive back to pick up a second batch of household items - only for returning the moving truck, and then to travel back to the new place by train.

Unfortunately he had not anticipated that he would have needed moving boxes and it was way too late to organize some. We were moving all of his stuff with garbage bags. They are not sufficient to move things at all.

Moving lazy roommates’ stuff turned out to last several more hours than anticipated. We almost exceeded the deadline for returning the moving truck to the rental place, which would have resulted in having to be charged for another day.

0/10 for moving with garbage bags instead of moving boxes.

You might be lucky: there is a gui availiable for yt-dlp on GitHub. I just looked it up. The descripition reads:

Graphical interface for the command line tool yt-dlp, which allows users to download videos from various websites, including YouTube. It is designed to be more user-friendly and accessible for those who are not comfortable using the command line.

Link: https://github.com/dsymbol/yt-dlp-gui

Edit/addition:

There are online services availiable (for instance https://yt5s.com/en173) that basically do the same as Cobalt.tools. I assume that they don’t put any emphasis on privacy tho.

Yes, this would be an option (that I did not think of). But I assume that it would be easier to download the same file in another file format, as there will be probably an improvement regarding the video resolution (480p versus 1080p or higher).

Warning, I might be wrong:

yt-dlp seems to be operated with command lines, whereas cobalt is a user interface in an opened browser tab. You paste the link of the desired video or audio source into a search bar and you can toggle different settings (bitrate, file format, video output size etc.). The desired file will be appearing as a download into your download folder.

The funny thing is that said .flv files could be played with VLC without any issue at the time I acquired them. I downloaded a bunch of cartoon episodes in this file format back in 2010 (?) when once-click-hosters like Megavideo were a big thing then. I was able to play them with the then current version of VLC without any problems.

Since then there were several updates with VLC and some time along the way it suddenly didn’t work that good anymore. I might add that this file format is not very common today (it was, when Adobe Flash was still around), so today there might be no incentive to maintain any old codecs for these type of files any longer.

When it gets worse with dwindling playback compatibility I probably have to acquire these files with a more recent file format (e.g. .mp4) in the future.

I discovered that VLC isn’t so good at playing .flv files. This are video files that are saved in the Adobe Flash Video container format. I have some episodes from cartoon series which I downloaded years ago. Sometimes there are no playback issues with VLC, but sometimes the audio track is delayed. For this reason I have installed IINA, but I like VLC’s user interface better.

Not discovered in the past year, but in the year before that:

Blender (program for 3D modelling, animation and rendering)

cobalt.tools(web-app for downloading video or audio content from youtube and other websites)

VLC (media player that plays almost everything)

All of this applies to many niche communities. In Germany, especially the older forums that are around since the internet became widly popular show such behavior. Take HiFi- forums for example: If your plugs are not made with gold, you are doing it wrong. Also, if you want to spend money for a hobby, don’t bother to start if you are not willing to spend at least an unreasonable ridiculous ammount of Euros.

These enthusiast also complain about a lack of new members. It’s the nobody wants to work anymore sentiment, but with niche hobby communities.

German dubs are actually top notch compared to other countries

This is true for movie productions. They are dubbed well, even to a point where jokes and plays on words are translated as well. On the other hand, cartoons are not. They lack of something that makes them unwatchable when dubbed - I think it’s because some of the play on words and jokes are missing, also the dubbed voices differ extremely from the original. Such thing can make a character appear and be percieved very different, compared to the original. If cartoonn are availiable in original language (English), I’ll prefer that.

Yesterday I watched an interesting video about this topic: Why Germany dubbs movies, but other countries don’t
Warum Deutschland Filme synchronisiert und andere Länder nicht The video comes with insights from a voice actor, who dubbs the voice of Leonardo di Caprio.

Sadly, in this world you accomplish nothing for being nice and considerate. If you want to leave an impact (anything - a new invention, a new product, a new idea, anything with impact to contemporary culture) you have to bully yourself to the top, including stealing ideas and screwing people over, as well as to exploit people. All “great” people who accomplished something did that: Gates (Microsoft), Jobs (Apple), Musk (Tesla, Twitter), Bezos (Amazon), Thiel (PayPal, Palantir), Zuckerberg (Meta), Huffman (Reddit), as well as many politicans. It’s a personality treat.

Here is a video that explains the issue, albeit it focuses on designers:

Back in the early 2000s I bought my first own car. It had a radio with cassatte. I had a mixtape that I carried around, with a walkman (albeit not the original one from Sony). When I drove the car home - stil with temporary number plates, because I needed to register the car to my name - the song Turn The Page played a few minutes into the drive. I will always associate this song with that particular event.