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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2023

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  • Mine was a first generation one and as it was dying the first articles popped up about how bad they and the following generation were failing. Didn’t bother with warranty… wasn’t fond of gambling with the failure rates. Irony was that I named the drive Deathstar when I got it (I have the long standing tradition naming my drives after space ships).

    Gonna remember that for the next drive failure. Isn’t condensation a problem with that trick?






  • Yeah, I got a racing bike from a local brand that was mainly known for cheap supermarket bikes. However, they did sell small series of high quality bikes directly out of the factory as well. My racing bike is one of those. It was a lucky, heavily discounted grab at their outlet shop sitting there for ages due to the horrendous colour combination of Telekom magenta and sperm white (great theft deterrent 😋).

    In the almost 30 years I own this bike now, every bike shop I went to scoffed at the brand and refused to work on it. The only exception was a bike shop at my university town specialising in buying scrap bikes and building new Frankenbikes out of them for the students.

    He took one look at my bike when I brought it in, smiled, immediately identified it as a factory bike. He complimented the quality and ease of maintenance, congratulated my purchase (on a 15 year old bike lol) and said he’s looking forward to working on it. Save to say he had a loyal customer for the whole time I was living there.



  • You can still get them but prices are pretty outrageous compared to before. As a result of that a lot of the smaller companies have died and a lot of the small independent neighbourhood vaping shops have closed.

    I have just checked my bulk order from before the tax… I paid 30€ for 1l 50:50 base. Today you pay 35€ for 100ml of the same (same shop of course).

    Edit: the irony of the whole thing is that it’s now more economic to use high nicotine ready made liquids and to not use sub ohm coils to reduce liquid throughput… Great work lawmakers!


  • Yeah, sadly those have become the norm since they started the ridiculous vaping tax here in Germany. It started at 16ct/ml for everything that goes into a liquid independent of nicotine content (base, flavour concentrate, everything…) and its supposed to go up to 32ct/ml in 2026. This has greatly harmed the mod scene while strengthening the pod market. This was done for ‘health reasons’ making vaping less appealing for the youth, but everyone suspects the tobacco lobby influenced how the tax was set up, to profit their disposable businesses…






  • I have been searching for the source, but can’t find it anymore between all the WiFi troubleshooting sites. It wasn’t really brand stuff they mentioned but cheapo TV clones they checked for security risks, similar to those Trojan horse Android TV boxes.

    But wouldn’t be the first time that the industry takes inspiration from something like that and either implements it silently to get the juicy telemetry (yes, using that to enable smart features would be dumb) or sells it as a ‘feature’.