Veracrypt e.g. has had this for a long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability

I'm considering using a second phone for increased security. As you say, only put banking apps on them, leave it at home.

The larger population is getting pushed towards banking on the phone, and on top of that, many people don't own a PC/Laptop anymore.

In Western Europe this is also quite pronounced.

In Białystok, Poland, solar noon is at 11:39. In Vigo, Spain, it's at 13:46, .

Being in favor of all-year DST (more sun in the evening is just nice), nice to see that those lucky Spaniards already have it and then some.

Whatever the preference for the permanent time, abandoning the switching should be advocated by the software industry. I've yet to work at a company where there are no bugs related to switching the clock. Those bugs have ranged from harmless to pretty severe.

That sounds like an unnecessary EU standardization. Having the same timezone in Poland and Spain possibly made sense 30 years ago, but now that all communication goes through computers of one kind or another, time conversion is seamless.

For those companies that have offices in both countries, and for which the synchronicity matters, it is not that difficult to just have special office hours.

> [The same timezone in Poland and Spain] sounds like an unnecessary EU standardization.

Well, if you look up the histories of the time zones in the respective countries ("Time in Poland" and "Time in Spain" on Wikipedia, I have no reason to doubt their accuracy) you'll see that both settled on CET, with or without daylight savings, long before the EU was even an idea.

Started the Visual Basic dev env, added a button to the form, MsgBox "Hello World", and it worked.

So simple, so easy. Those were the days.

You can still have that experience with VB.NET, C#, Delphi, FreePascal, Gambas, Xojo and C++ Builder.

Instead folks go with Electron crap.

TCL/Tk too, albeit being far less intuitive than Lazarus+FreePascal. Altough it has far less code, so it's a draw on difficulty. The average Joe would just spend time measuring the sizes of the frames and that's it.

In a sense yeah, but as far as I remember it never had a good UI designer.

Well, MessageBox() in the Win32 API is just a simple C function call: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/...

I wrote a blog about this many years ago: https://latedev.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/simple-windows-dial...

It’s everything leading up to the MessageBox() call that VB makes trivial.

It looks like the difference between the Boston Dynamics robots 2016 vs 2021

The Spot dog (which inspired the Black Mirror "Metalhead" episode) in 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf7IEVTDjng

Atlas doing backflips in 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FByY3tSx2Ak

So 5 years of progress within a year.

spot dog is hydraulically powered junk, unitree is motor driven from day one. Boston Dynamics was forced to switch to a motor driven architecture after it is proven by unitree.

Boston Dynamics is the follower here.

I look after one at a University that gets used for teaching & outreach & there's definitely no hydraulics on the thing.

They moved to motors from their older high speed hydraulics. I don't know if it was after unitree or not.

why is hydraulics junk?

Perhaps because of the potentially slower actuation speed, but you also generally get a lot more power from hydraulics so im not sure one can claim it is junk. Far less acrobatic, but also far more sumo wrestler.

Less fit for impressive youtube videos. I'm sure they have other boring utilities for the technology.

The good thing is, with AI scraping everything today, it will be incorporated into the AI - so your content will continue to exist in the weights.

In that way, your thoughts will live on ...

My favorite: near the Bering strait you can see the distortion of the map - obviously ships go in straight lines on a sphere but in a curve on the map.

As you say, in moderation. That also applies to red meat, considering the adverse effects listed on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_meat

The compression is nice, you can fit very long (low-entropy ;-) messages in there - this one is 9k characters:

https://textarea.my/#7cGBAAAAAMMgzfmTHORVAQAAAAAAAADAuwE=

Very nice, the introduction to recursion in university (which was around that time of the year) was drawing a fractal Christmas tree