Good point with the barrel, truth is probably somewhere between the barrel and a can. After all, there’s also pönttö, both vessan- and linnun-, which again are on the smaller side. I kinda love how much nuance and double meanings there are in especially the spoken language.

True meaning can only be grasped with enough exposure.

Didn’t we also have some Vickers six-tonners at the start? Next to useless by then but probably could penetrate at least a BT-5.

Edit: now that I think of it, a canister probably fits quite well between the sizes of can and barrel. But to me it would then be a closed container, which a pönttö doesn’t necessarily have to be.

They’re an interesting thing to say the least. Finland had a lot of wood gas generators in use during WWII as what limited petrol we had went towards the war effort. Other substitute fuels were used a lot as well, e.g. pine turpentine which we had a lot of as it’s a side product of refining wood into pulp.

It’s a relatively efficient system, and burns quite cleanly in the engine (as soot and other contaminants are filtered out by the generator). Though they’re quite dangerous, since wood gas is mainly pure carbon monoxide. The amounts they produce are so high that leaks or topping up the generator can cause carbon monoxide poisoning even when outside. In Finnish we actually call the generator häkäpönttö, which in English would be a carbon monoxide can (häkä colloquial Finnish for carbon monoxide, pönttö a colloquial Finnish word meaning a can, container, carton or someone dumb in a usually non-derogatory way – closest equivalent in English would be dummy).

Yes, performance fees were, and still are a thing. That’s why there are separate streaming services for playing background music in e.g. restaurants and malls, which have licences that cover that use case. You can’t just use e.g. Spotify even if you pay the appropriate fees separately, at least where I’m from (Finland). Same goes for playing TV and radio in the background – if it’s specifically as background noise or e.g. TV at a bar you typically need separate licencing on top of the one used by the channel itself for distribution. Might be different in the US for example, but copyright laws tend to be quite similar across countries (unfortunately).

The smooth jazz in malls part is likely a lot due to the (historically) overwhelming market share of the company Muzak. They were the pioneer of background music in commercial environments and got a strong enough presence in the market that their name ended up a generic one. AFAIK they’re still a large player in the business.

Mall music basically ended up as its own genre due to Muzak and how big it became, and started influencing other media as well. As an example, the style was referred to in the soundtrack of the first Sims game in the buy mode, where it brought with it the feeling of rampant consumerism and buzz of purchasing new stuff. At least according to this video essay on the subject, which in my mind makes its point quite convincingly. (the relevant part from 11:46 onwards re-watched the video and the relevant part actually starts at approx the 5 minute mark, but the video is altogether quite interesting)

At least in Finland the 30 minutes is meant to be 30 minutes sitting down and eating your food. If your place of work has a shared cafeteria people are meant to eat lunch in, getting from your desk to the cafeteria and back, and queueing for your food aren’t meant to be part of the lunch break. Only the part you actually spend eating and thus properly on a break.

It’s a bit of a spirit of the law thing, though the law is quite exact on the matter. Good luck trying to find an employer outside desk jobs who actually abide by it, though, as factory jobs are scheduled around 20 or 30 minute breaks and if you’re not back at your line by then, production halts. Luckily that fact is typically compensated in the pay.

I’d assume other European countries with 30 minute lunch have a similar clause.

Ed. It’s the standard text editor.

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

Yep, at those percentages there’s likely an amount larger of piss in every breath you take indoors. Always remember, it’s the amount that kills (or tastes like piss)

TBH, a dissertation as a suicide note sounds kinda like a power move.

It really sticks to your ribs.

Serves me right for assuming Germans had a similarly judgemental attitude to people who have ruined their finances. Thanks for the correction.

Finns often have a very puritan attitude to debt (you should fear it like the devil), and in the common discussion it’s often attributed to the ethics of the Lutheran church. That’s at least partially the reason we still don’t have a real personal bankruptcy option. Somewhat surprising to me that a country that shares that value system could be that forgiving to people – I’m a bit envious even 😅

Around here Klarna and other similar companies have long been seen as exploiting the fact that debt is really difficult to get through proper sources, and there’s a matching draconian bunch of collections agencies to support that business model. We’ve mainly been trying to tackle this by regulating the process of giving out loans, instead of giving people the necessary way out and thus giving the corporations an incentive to self-regulate.

If bad credit is actually no longer possible to collect on, it ceases to be good business. Hats off to Germany for having a proper route out of predatory loans.

That certainly contributes as well. I find myself especially annoyed by AI-created soundtracks – they usually sound like a mix of someone passing out in a drumset while someone else is hammering random keys on a keyboard. Similar to the early deep dream AI pictures, but for music.

I’ll try to find some and link, but I’m not sure if there are good ones.

Edit: couldn’t find one with quick googling. Guess I’ll have to write one when I have time.

Klarna 'bout to find out their business model doesn’t work as well in the US compared to the Nordic countries and EU, as

1. People are already up to their neck in debt, putting Klarna to the back of the queue in case there’s a default
2. Personal bankruptcy is a thing

Especially the Northern Europe personal bankruptcy is really not a thing, fuck up your finances and you’re never going to see a penny you make (above what you strictly need to live) until everything has been paid back. Debt that is actively being collected also never expires.

There’s a good reason Klarna’s been able to thrive in this environment – getting debt from banks is quite difficult and you have added security from the draconian collections process.

In the US a company ignores credit scores at their own peril. The bankruptcy process is one of the few things that works better in the US than in e.g. my home country Finland.

Also, at some point people lost the skill of making short ads on YouTube (or YouTube reduced the price of unskippable ads too much). If your brand or product is so bad you need more than five seconds of advertisement before a YouTube video, you either need to improve your product (so it’s easier to describe) or hire a better copywriter.

Most actual good ads on YouTube have been 5-10 seconds, interesting, informative – and they fulfill the actual part of what the ad is trying to achieve. They get you interested, and get you to click it to find out more. They have a clear message that you can internalize even before realising there’s an ad running.

It’s almost as if advertisers are purposely making bad ads to force people to watch through them without interaction to avoid paying the premium for the user click rate. That or they simply don’t understand the amount of value a good ad director and a good copywriter can generate.

Completely feasible, especially if you have access to a 3d printer. There are even instructions available. With printed parts it shouldn’t even be that expensive.

If you want to build it in a more traditional manner (i.e. out of wood), that’s also possible. Large format cameras have a long history of DIY, loads of early photographers built their kit themselves.

If you want to reduce the costs a bit when getting the camera to a working condition I’d recommend using photographic paper instead of film. It’s also a thing that was historically done quite often. One example that comes to mind was the last market photographer in Finland, Valto Pernu, who shot most of his photos on paper and reverse-processed it. He also used mostly DIY cameras. Fresh in my memory as I just saw an exhibition about him in a museum in Rovaniemi last summer.

Keep them in a well ventilated space, if they rot too quickly it may be due to ethane making them ripen too fast. A mixed fruit bowl is one of the worst possible ways to store fruit.

Apples offgas ethane as an example, making other things around them ripen faster. In a cool, ventilated environment where you replace the ethane with something inert they can last over the winter.

I tend to get 1-2 weeks of shelf life from fruit, though I tend to only buy the stuff that stores well. (apples, bananas, oranges etc.)

Labs around here give a disclaimer when you buy either Delta 3200 or Kodak’s P3200 that developing according to box speed costs extra.

3200 is indeed difficult to shoot in daylight, especially with older bodies that run out of fast enough shutter speeds. That’s why you really should have multiple bodies with you for different lighting conditions, if you’re trying to get the best results. I usually carry three, color or BW ISO 100 for daylight, BW@1600 (typically HP5 or kentmere 400) for well-lit indoors, and BW@12800 (typically Delta3200) for poorly lit indoors and night time street photography. I don’t like shooting with a flash, so I tend to prefer pushing the hell out of fast film even when shooting in a dim environment.

Even then there’s an upper limit to things. Even with the “3200” films you start running into issues when pushing past +5 stops (50k ISO upwards). Metering becomes an issue as well, mine caps at 12800 and isn’t really that usable at the high end. My Canon A-1 can technically meter up to 12800 as well, though I’d advise pushing a stop extra if you choose to do that. It’s had a tendency to underexposea a bit, possibly related to reciprocity.

If you want to see how the 3200 speed alternatives fare when pushes to the extreme, attic darkroom is a good starting point.

I’ve two rolls pending development at ISO 25600, I’ll try to remember adding examples when I’ve mixed a new batch of microphen.

Or, if you do want to do illegal shit over unencrypted forms of communication, use your own encryption layer on top, so you can actually be 100 % sure that there’s real E2EE. This is the way e-mail encryption was meant to work, before someone added TLS to the “standard” and everyone thought it’s OK as they trust the e-mail service provider.

Yep, the issue is that the server stores the messages centrally in plaintext, and most email users nowadays assume that the server always has a copy. That’s why we have PGP and ring-of-trust, and why there used to be a lot of push to use that with especially E-mail. Especially with the preparation to post-quantum era, any communication you actually want to stay secret should be encrypted with (symmetric) keys you exchange in person. That way there’s no log or key exchange that someone can see or store, and thus break in the future.

Unfortunately people in general deemed the centralized solutions “good enough”, and for “more secure” contexts we got the abysmally horrible solutions like Secure Mail. PGP’s problem was, that the trust needed to be established in a distributed manner outside normal communication which the layperson found confusing. It also was problematic in corporate contexts, as proper client-side encryption meant that the company could no longer scan through employee messages.

It’s still the best way to make e-mail safe, though.

I Finland finns det en argument varje år av vilken är det rätta alternativet för semlor – sylt eller mandelmassa.

Svenskspråkiga områden (t.ex. Österbotten) använder mandelmassa, finskspråkiga sylt (typiskt).

Edit: här är en artikel från YLE med en poll. 56,9 % sylt vs 43,1 % mandelmassa.

One of the main historical reasons was the Debian project’s puritan approach to open source, meaning the distro was very picky about what it could easily run on. As an example, most network drivers for Realtek nics weren’t included out of the box as they contained non-free code, there was no direct way to install Nvidia drivers instead of nouveau, a lot of the hardware didn’t work in the installer unless you sideloaded the drivers from a usb stick and so on.

There was a non-free ISO version to get around this, but you needed to know of it to use it, and it wasn’t provided anywhere by default. The download page for it was just a barebone directory listing within the mirror. No link or information was provided for it on the main project page.

Starting from version 12 or 13 (don’t remember exactly) proprietary drivers have been included in the installation images, which removed the biggest pain point (IMO) for novice users. Apart from that Debian has been one of the easier distros to install, and has things like a considerably better experience when updating to the next major release. It’s not really slower to update packages than Ubuntu, as I’d be wary of recommending the non-LTS versions to novice users. They tend to be quite unstable compared to LTS.

Personally I’ve daily driven Debian for close to five years, on all my devices except the work laptop. That one is running Ubuntu 24.04 as the employer requires either that or Fedora for Linux users.