In my part of the world, old tram and train tracks usually become bike paths. And its pretty much the only way that we get new bike paths in the countryside.

We can expropriate and build 4 lane highways in the middle of corn fields but we simply have no space left for bike paths, so we take disused rail lines.

I can name at least 4 long distance bike paths here that have replaced rail lines, and there are others planned.

For example, this line closed in 1956 and is now a bike path: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_and_Southern_Counties_Railway

Or this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parc_Linéaire_Le_P'tit_Train_du_Nord

They make very nice bike paths but it’s also a reminder that I could be in a tram to travel those 80 km instead of pedaling them.

Lost, confused, disturbed, unsettled, baffled and eve a bit turned on.

This could describe every decon scene in ENT.

I grew up with DOS and used Windows 1 (barely, DOS was better), 3.1, 95, 98, etc… But curiosity made me try a bunch of OS in the beginning of the 2000s, like BeOS, QNX, and Linux (Kheops, Mandrake, SuSE). I dual booted for many years, keeping Linux as my main OS but having to boot Windows for games. I preferred Linux but I was pretty much OS agnostic for a while. I even worked as level 1 tech support for many years, helping people with Windows and Office products.

But then came Windows 8, 10, and now 11, + Office 365 + OneDrive. It’s very difficult to stand any of those new versions, with the ads, the constant peddling for Microsoft products, the “forced” login with a Microsoft account, the updates whenever they feel like it if you don’t pay enough for Windows, if the updates are not breaking something. A few years ago I was helping a friend and discovered a version of Windows 7 where you can’t even change the wallpaper.

TBF, I knew it was coming. Anyone in IT knew for years that Microsoft planned of having everything subscription based. To me, every new versions of Windows or Office, or Teams, is now more intolerable than the previous one.

Anyway, at some point I stopped gaming/dual booting and pretty much kept exclusively on Linux. My workplace used Windows, and I use Linux at home. I’ve been using Debian for 15 years now and despite minor issues with sound recently, since pipewire, every time I use Windows, I’m reminded of how much worse it could be.

Recently I quit my job as a level 1 tech. I can’t help people with Microsoft products anymore. Having calls from people telling me they cannot delete files from their OneDrive when it tells them it’s full, then discover it’s a bug and users with their drives full cannot delete anything, is just disconcerting. Before all that, I could at least see/understand the reason why things were working like they did; I could help and explain it to the users. Now, I’m as frustrated as they are when I use Microsoft products.

I think they are more akin to living rooms on wheels.

I’ll believe it when I’ll be in one of the trains. This has been promised for years, along with other major rail overhauls, that have never materialized. This time it seems like it may have a chance of being constructed, but so far it’s also just money dumped into consulting firms. And for multiple years still, without anything being physically constructed.

I’m unfortunately a Via Rail user. I’d like to get excited for this project but the proposed route is not going to help me with my current needs along the corridor. I’ll still need to use Via Rail trains, they’ll still be late and I’ll still miss my connections. They’ll still promise to take bikes in a few years without actually taking bikes. They’ll still charge $75 for a last minute 60 km trip, in economy. They’ll still only have a few trains a day.

When the federal announced Alto/high speed rail, it apparently forgot about the high frequency proposal from Via. So I guess things will continue to be shitty on that side.

I’d really really like to get excited for any type of new transit, but rail projects and services in Canada are so abysmal, that I prefer to have very very low expectations. If it eventually gets built, I’ll happily be wrong.

They know it’s not feasible in Canada our cities are not dense enough.

This is false. The corridor has a density comparable to other countries with high speed networks.

The Quebec City–Windsor Corridor is the most densely populated and heavily industrialized region of Canada. As its name suggests, the 1,150 km-long region extends from Quebec City in the northeast to Windsor, Ontario in the southwest. With more than 18 million people, it contains about half of the country’s population and seven of Canada’s 12 largest metropolitan areas, 3 of which are in the top 4. Its relative importance to Canada’s economic and political infrastructure renders it akin to the Northeast megalopolis in the United States.

FFS, Sweden has a rail network with trains going at 200 km/h and is currently building sections where trains can go up to 250 km/h, but somehow it’s impossible in Canada because we’re not dense enough?! Somehow we can expropriate people in a few months and build entire expressway sections, all over the country, sometimes in complete fields, with bridges, but linking a few cities with trains is impossible?! This is just car dependency propaganda.

EDIT: This fucking country was founded on railways. The west wouldn’t be as populated as it is without these. Today we’re talking about establishing a high speed line over a fraction of that distance, linking multiple major cities with millions of people, and we don’t have the density? What a fucking joke.

Conservatives in Canada with Stephen Harper tried that in 2015.

https://canadatalksisraelpalestine.ca/2015/05/05/ok-mr-harper-i-give-up-i-will-stop-singling-out-israel-for-special-criticism/

Ugh, they had to shoehorn AI somewhere. Anyway, it’s a logical and good initiativebut it’s probably not gonna go far enough.

Also, unsurprisingly, I was very much expecting to see OVH mentioned at some point. TBF OVH is probably better suited for this than Bell or Telus.

It’s unfortunately all through private companies and consulting, but at least it’s a small step forward in decoupling from American giants like Microsoft and Amazon.

It’s interesting to see that China is taking this seriously and might ban them, while the US forgets more and more about “car safety”.

If China bans it, most manufacturers will have to follow their rules if they want to sell cars there, including Tesla.

It’s not much in the grand scheme of things but it’s nice to see that at least one major country is considering this.

I had the same experience as OP when I tried Matrix a few years ago. No hate on it but it was not easy and I gave up because I already had a simple IRC setup that’s working for me and my friends.

Some IRC clients are now web based and it’s been enough to keep a few of my friends there instead of Discord. We use The Lounge. It can keep a history, display images, videos, play mp3s, and show previews of most URLs. Like, we can simply copy/paste images into a channel and they are uploaded on the server and displayed in the chat. There’s also push notifications and it’s mobile friendly.

Convos also does something like this. Apparently it can also do video chat but I’ve never got it to work.

I’ve recently been thinking about giving Matrix another try but I’m pretty sure my friends are going to stay on “modern” IRC anyway.

Email and IRC push notifications through The Lounge. The rest is disabled. Even amber alerts, because my government uses them for everything. It’s “illegal” to disable them here but with a few commands on adb its possible to disable the service and never have to hear that end of the world alarm for an elderly person missing 200 km away from me.

Those responsible for the booing will be found and deported to El Salvador.

Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Raccoons.

The tourists visiting Mount Royal park in Montréal are often charmed by the raccoons. Enough so that they feed them and some even let the raccoons climb on them. The city tries to warn people but they obviously ignore the signs. So now we have gangs of raccoons begging for food near the two most popular view points.

I go camping in provincial parks and the same seems to happen there. It’s obviously also locals doing this but, people feed the raccoons, they come back, they harass you for food, they can carry rabies, and it’s annoying as hell. I watch people hiking and camping in other countries, like the UK, and I’m constantly jealous that they can keep their food and cook near their tents. Doing this here will result in frequent annoying visits from raccoons (if not bigger animals).

Yeah, it’s pretty disappointing. I worked for a consulting firm and it was doing the same thing for clients, and internally.

There is the perception that paying continually for your own specialists is a waste of money and you’d be better off just paying consultants when they are needed. It always ends up costing more money and/or the organization loses all internal knowledge of how their things work and they even have to pay more consultants to sort that out.

I love public transit and it’s the same exact problem. Instead of having our own team of transit specialists, that knows how to plan, and build this, we just pay for consultants at every stage of the project. It ends up costing way more, and we repeat the same thing for the next multi billion project a few years later. So every new project is a huge undertaking costing millions in consulting, and that’s why we don’t continually develop public transit. We have to start anew every time. It’s so horrible. Yet, that’s apparently how we “save” money.

There’s just no chances of that. I don’t know about other provinces but in Québec the provincial governments have always had a strong bias towards Microsoft. Schools have multi million contracts for Windows and Office 365.

And the government is absolutely not ready to change that. Using FOSS means they need internal specialists instead of just paying consultants, and they really hate that idea.

I can’t recall the exact context but a few years ago, the provincial government “recognized its need for FOSS” and had it codified somewhere. But every time schools and organizations have a choice to make, they just say it would be unrealistic to even try to make any change, and automatically give the millions to Microsoft, Apple, or Google.

I don’t want to gatekeep and you do what works for you.

I can only hope that you are kind enough to stop torturing this poor Debian with WSL, and can find it a proper home.

Or have you considered getting therapy for this?

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“Cats can see in the dark because the structure of their eyes, and specifically their retinas, permits them ‘better’ vision than humans when light levels are low,” Plummer said. “Cats have a higher percentage and concentration of rod photoreceptors than humans, which means they have better sensitivity to light, and can see more in low levels of illumination than we can.”

It’s also worth saying that as much as I don’t have an antivirus on Linux, and that I’m generally not too worried about malware and viruses, I have backups, follow the 3-2-1 rules, and my OS can be scarified if there is ever a problem.

But I must admit that being infected is not always detectable and taking extra care probably wouldn’t hurt.

I thought solar over surface parking could be good in certain conditions, and maybe it can, in small installations. But there has been research done on this subject and it’s not entirely clear. Large photovoltaic farms often increases heat island effect.

Source: The Photovoltaic Heat Island Effect: Larger solar power plants increase local temperatures

There is a cooling effect provided by the panels, because of the shade, but it’s not that much. Putting them inside giant parking lots and over roads could ends up making things warmer around those areas.

Anyway, the point is not that we will require more or cleaner energy for those cars, the point is that they still create pollution, space, and lethal issues.

Car dependency should be reduced. Some highways and elevated expressways should be changed into urban boulevards or even simply demolished. Power usage should be stabilized. Consumption should be reduced. Habits should be changed.

It’s unreasonable to expect everybody on the planet and in cities to have a 2 tons giant cube of metal wasting energy to move itself and the little bag of meat inside everywhere they go. Alternatives to car dependency have to be provided.

I’m sorry but solar panels here and there are not gonna be enough with the current trajectory.