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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • Every country in the EU has some system for direct debit payments.

    Italy has Bancomat, Germany has EC/Giro, France has Carte Bleue, Belgium has Bancontact/Mister Cash (still have not figured out whether they’re supposed to be different or just different names in Flanders and Wallonia), and so on and so forth.

    Does the Netherlands not have such a system?

    It used to be that people would use these within their own country, but there would be Maestro for payments around Europe.

    MasterCard decided to discontinue Maestro for MasterCard Prepaid which has higher fees.

    The Germans whined about it a little and said that Europe should have come up with its own payment systems, but nothing came of it.

    By now we are also supposed to have SEPA Instant, that should offer Europe-wide bank transfers. I still have not quite understood why a debit card system can’t leverage that directly.










  • Time and convenience and… local shops were and are largely very disappointing for many types of purchases.

    My first online buy (in 2003, at the age of 17) was a decent wired optical gaming mouse, a Logitech M510, in 2003. The first optical mouse I ever used that wouldn’t skip.

    The selection at local computer stores was lacking to say the least, and they also could not give much good advice anyway.










  • Last time I had a PC with an optical drive, I used the built-in features of Dolphin, and using a different software for metadata. If you use KDE, it’s hard to find a good reason to do otherwise. It will usually get metadata from CDDB, but on the other hand for metadata It’s really hard to beat Picard or Beets.

    Beets will also scrape the lyrics and add them to the metadata, beside acousticbrainz goodness, multiple genres from Last.fm, and more. Picard will do most of this as well.