Author Archives: Béranger - Page 10
2020: The Year The World Ended
Friday 13 sounds like the best day for expressing some thoughts regarding the state of the world in the times of the COVID-19 outbreak. (And yes, I know: there is…
Internet Radio, Mon Amour
Listening to dozens of Internet radio streams is my contribution to increasing the carbon footprint. But it's not my fault that everything now is using Internet bandwidth--YouTube videos, Smart TVs,…
24-Hour Shifts: A Planet of Fools
Since I already posted today on an issue involving both logic and common sense, here's another one, in the context of a human tragedy in Romania where it has been…
What divides the Internet is not math
They swear by their PhD in maths or by their experience as a software developer. They invoke PEMDAS or BODMAS as the correct order of operations. Some of them admit…
Choosing the right poison
About one week ago I had exactly 50 types of tea at home. By tea, I don't only understand black-oolong-green-white tea, but also the various plant infusions that are actually…
24 h with Huorong, a week with Comodo 12, a year with Bitdefender 2019 (or not)
While not being that much in the mood for writing, I had to clarify that I put a halt on my CCAV journey. It worked well, but I wanted to…
Living Dangerously: CCAV 2.0 Beta
While I recommended Kaspersky Security Cloud Free to everyone—wife and friends included—as a much better choice than Kaspersky Free Antivirus (for it's much more customizable), I don't use it anymore…
The day the Chinese puzzles took over
I'm really furious when people don't bother to look for the original source of whatever they're posting on the Internet (I feel I have a duty). I'm also angry at…
Should you live with no sense of smell…
...you'd be missing quite a lot. I happen to be a person to whom the olfactory and the tactile senses are crucial—not that I could imagine myself blind or deaf,…
Carracci—what else?
I failed to update the blog with the coffees I've tried since the last post on this topic. I'll only tell you what I settled for: Carracci. Despite the fact…
Nostalgia & Fun With Calculators
Despite having developed a dependency of my ~200 installed Android apps and ~150 installed Windows programs, I still use a hand-held scientific calculator. Most of the time I'm using it…
Until further notice…
...let's consider the contents of the previous posts as outdated. For the time being I have no motivation to correct or update them, nor to add new posts.
Crypto-mining is the new adware, only worse
When Emsisoft posted Is cryptocurrency mining malware the new adware? not long ago, I'm not sure they fully realized how serious this problem is. Of course they knew that At Least…
Learning a language in 200 hours?
German is an impossible language. Right after I got the Zertifikat Deutsch B1, I forgot half of what I've learned. This is in part because all the methods and textbooks…
Guessing the weather forecast
Weather apps: a tricky topic; most people wouldn't understand my obsession with weather apps and widgets. But I had to move the section about weather apps out of my post…
Finding happiness in simple gizmos
Every now and then I read reviews of Bluetooth speakers, and I'm baffled how a same device can have both eulogistic and vilifying reviews. I know that any other kind of…
The coffee saga goes on—Summer Edition
My post on Nespresso-compatible capsules has become unmanageable because of its too many updates. I myself cannot use it as a guide anymore! As I've discovered some more capsules, it's…
Kaspersky is one more time a valid choice
To stop adding comments to old posts, here's a small update as a full-fledged post. Despite my temporary commitment to Panda Internet Security (for its features called Data Shield and…
How I Came to Hate Nova Launcher
This is nothing serious–take it as a grumpy rant on the opposite side of "Nova Launcher may be the best thing that ever happened for Android." Because I also hate…
Going into Nougat and Motorola–rather unexpectedly
Remember my crappy Wiko Robby I wrote about? Well, I broke it–not before it somewhat started to fail itself and by itself, after only 8 months of usage! First, its…