[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSB_Class_MF [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSB_Class_MF#IR4_%22InterRegio...

> The name of the website itself is a wordplay on Altavista.

Though, the creator mentions on his own page, that he is a German citizen (due to his grandfather), even though he speaks no German and have never lived there[1]; which could mean that pun is intentional. Not that it is really all that important (like not at all), but I can't help but wonder now...

[1] https://www.ericexperiment.com/about-me

My list of requirements isn't long: 1) should make/receive phone calls, 2) should make/receive text messages, 3) have physical buttons and 4) preferably use 4G and be able to create hotspots (the last requirement, I have deviated on occasionally, like with my current phone). A requirement 0, if you will, is that it needs to do these things at high quality. But in one way or another, they suffer wildly in either hardware or software, or both. Often to the point, where I wonder if the creators themselves use them.

The two Nokias unfortunately have quite a few ad programs (like Facebook of all things), that just clutter up its menu (but which I can thankfully just ignore), its T9 dictionary is weak (though this will be a recurring theme, they are all bad at doing T9 dictionary typing), and its text message storage is severely limited. The Punkt. MP02 had high quality hardware, but again its T9 typing was frustrating, and eventually mine just bricked. The Mudita Pure was probably the worst one, though: it only supported characters A-Z, despite being developed in Poland, which is frustrating when living in a country, that regularly uses characters beyond that. The Doro 7030 had bad buttons, that often wouldn't properly click, leading to missed characters while typing, and it had an annoying behaviour, where sometimes it would just miss calls, and its T9 typing was abysmal.

I still have all the phones (except the Mudita Pure, which I sold to someone in Greece, even though I explicitly warned them it would not work at all with Greek letters, which they later confirmed, as it was just showing squares), and I am generally sad, that it feels like a bit of an electronic waste.

And why not a dumbed down smartphone, then? My requirement 3 isn't debatable, I loath touch screens; they are - for me at least - the bane of modern existence. I cannot avoid them entirely, but I can lower my own exposure. For example, when I bought an induction stove top, I made sure to get one with knobs.

Maybe when I feel ready again, I will try my hand at another[0]...

[0] https://dumbwireless.com/collections/phones

[0] https://www.retailnews.dk/article/view/1178986/6000_kunder_o... (Danish)

I am pretty confident that aircraft manufacturers themselves cannot require these things, only regulators can. The FAA in particular used to lean heavily on budget constraints for airlines (who would also push back against expensive upgrades); but I am sure the same applies to EASA and other regulators as well.

Conversely, a lot of the writings of the Antiquity are preserved, in large part due to Middle Eastern scholars. The Dark Ages aren't a myth, but rather what is meant by "dark" is misunderstood.

> Asia observed the highest heatwave-related mortality, accounting for 47.97% (85,611 deaths) of the global excess death, followed by Europe (37.23%, 66,443 deaths), the Americas (13.15%, 23,467deaths), Africa (1.61%, 2,881 deaths), and Oceania (0.05%, 83 deaths).

That of course muddles the picture by combining both American continents, though further down it quotes 9,666 for "Northern America" in table 1; though the Europe number also includes all of Russia. Those numbers are from 2023. Additionally, Europe has more than twice the population of North America. Without doing the maths, the gap claim sound about right; however, that doesn't necessarily mean it's due to a lack of air conditioning in Europe.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266667582...

While the Xantia itself wasn't any particular standout in Citroën's history, its Activa variant felt like the Citroën engineers had finally broken through the Peugeot penny-pinchers. At least one last time. Citroën used to be about pushing unconventional engineering (like front-wheel drive (Traction-Avant), unibody (ditto), hydro-pneumatic suspension (DS), self-adjusting headlights (SM), active self-adjusting steering (CX), anti-roll (Activa)); the Metropolis - by contrast - just seems like a styling exercise with some conventional (though uncommon at the time) engineering.

Citroën used to push the frontiers of car manufacturing, but haven't done that since the 1990s.

Disclaimer: I own two classic Citroëns, so I'm likely a bit biased.

[0] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1011/FoundsCS/usingml.html

This is one of those issues I keep mulling about; it seems train operators (and airliners for that matter) tend to avoid being technically specific about operation problems, and just say "problems" and - if they are kind - where the problem is. And I cannot decide whether this is the wrong or right approach: how much information is too much? The argument is that travellers don't care why the train cannot move or why it is delayed, they just want to know when the next train is.

The problem - however - is that train operators come off looking like idiots, when they really aren't. As an example, the S-trains around Copenhagen have recently switched to a CBTC signal system, which has increased punctuality to 97% (below 3 minutes, cancelled trains counted). At cold temperatures, railway points (or switches, if you will) might become inoperable, as their mechanism freeze (of course, there are systems to prevent this, but can occur anyway). This happened this November on the S-train lines, but the announcement was "signal failure"; which meant the train operator (DSB) (and the railway owner (Banedanmark)) kind of looked a bit stupid, since the whole point of CBTC was to eliminate signal failures entirely (in fact, if you're being pedantic, since CBTC has _no_ signals, there technically cannot be any signal failures), and had promised as much.

But - then again - travellers really just wanted to know what the next train was, but I still think train operators are doing themselves a disservice by being oblique about the actual problem. Particularly when a problem lasts for several days, "technical problems" just makes people think their engineers are incompetent, when in reality they have no idea about the severity of the problem (because it is not communicated).

I may of course be biased here, since I have a high interest in how trains operate, but friends of mine - whose interest is far lessen compared to mine - are also frustrated by these opaque messages; and I think the reason is a strong sense of lack of control - since (assuming one made it to the station on time) up until this point, the passenger have done everything right, and yet the system failed, and now they are not privy as to why.