Tanguy Ortolo

So, today is Black Friday, and today, environmental and zero-waste organizations are promoting Green Friday, suggesting that people abstain from buying stuff, and to create and repair things instead.

Well, believe it or not, while I am in favour of reducing consumption and waste, and because of that, I am buying stuff on Black Friday, and doing so in order to repair things, namely, my bicycle.

I am an intensive bicyclist, commuting almost exclusively by bike every day, and guess what? A bicycle needs to be maintained, and for that, requires spare parts. As a bicyclist, I do not believe at all in zero waste, which is just an unrealistic goal, perfectly impossible to achieve. With the six thousands kilometres I ride every year, I am buying an average of two tires, one cassette, one or two chains and eight brake pads every year, and proudly dumping exactly the same, used ones.

So, for Black Friday, bike resellers are offering actual discount on spare parts, and, for the planet's greater good, I am buying some. This is not additional purchase, just stuff I need to maintain my environment-friendly attitude.

Dear manufacturers of kitchen scales, could you please stop considering your clients as idiots, and start developing useful features?

Read more Scale manufacturers…

As I have just moved to a new home, I had to declare my new address to all my providers, including banks and administrations which require a proof of address, which can be a phone, DSL or electricity bill.

Well, this is just stupid, as, by definition, one will only have a bill after at least a month. Until then, that means the bank will keep a false address, and that the mail they send may not be delivered to the customer.

Read more Proof of address: use common sense!

This is a reply to Josselin Mouette's blog article About choice, since his blog does not seem to accept comments¹.

Please note that this is not meant to be systemd-bashing, just a criticism base one a counter-example refutation of Josselin's implication that there is no use case better covered by SysV init: this is false, as there is at least one. And yes, there are probably many cases better covered by systemd, I am making no claims about that.

Read more Re: About choice

Since systemd is now the default init system under Debian Jessie, it got installed to my system and I had a chance to test it. The result is disappointing: it does not work well with cryptsetup, so I am switching back to SysV init and RC.

Read more Trying systemd [ OK ] Switching back to SysV [ OK ]