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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 27th, 2023

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  • I get your drift and there are definitely routes where that will always be the case. You can’t run trains from central or eastern Europe to Portugal competitively with airplanes, never. Same goes for islands like Malta, Corsica etc. But an important part of the equation is still also how heavily travelled a route is, and somewhat if that is year round the case or mainly (short) seasonal demand. Airplanes are more like busses, it’s easy to shift them around to meet a seasonal demand. But trains move a lot more people at once. A TGV can transport up to 550-600 people at once, 2 trains coupled that’s more than 1000 people at once. The ICE4 gets to above 800 people at once. Most main aircraft types are 250-300 people capacity. The flight itself is fast, but the entire travel often is not, because the train brings you to a city center while many airports are 20 or more km outside the cities and because of regulations (the airports are way stricter controlled) causing long waiting times. And the main reason of all, even if the airplane is faster and always will be: the climate impact. Tho railway is for sure not zero impact, airplanes according to most stuff I’ve read is still way way worse impact so making trains more attractive on year-round very often travelled medium distance routes still pays off. It should, for example, not be okay that the airplane is faster and cheaper between Amsterdam and Berlin. Yeah, it’s a bit more than 600 km, but it is a very often travelled route, year round, the geography and population density in between is very fit for high speed, the amount of stops in between could be very manageable (4 or 5), while it connects 2 very big population centers. But because of lack of investment on such a main route, it currently takes 6 hours by train. By airplane including check-in, security, being there early, etc it’s like 3,5 hours. It’s a really fine example of where train could become a lot more competitive with strategic investments with in the end a lower climate impact and lower dependency on imported fossil fuels (large electric planes are still a pipedream for now). Speed isn’t everything, it’s on many routes also just the lack of coordination between different national railways’ schedules making it a headache by train currently.


  • Yes true but the range of how far train can be preferable above plane can be expanded if network better run on a European level and some big strategic investments (not that different from what France did in the 80’s and 90’s) on quite a few very often travelled routes. Amsterdam-Berlin is an easy example, but there are many like that. Currently on many routes the plane>train is like ~300 km, while on many that could become 600-700km with either high speed tracks or more sleeper train options or better connections. On some big routes the train>plane is up to 700-800 km already.






  • You can buy a used office computer from businesses that are upgrading (downgrading) to win11 for less than 50 bucks. They tend to be relatively low power, relatively quiet, lots of PCI slots and USB ports so there are many upgrade options, yet low entry price for a decent computer. If you plan on using as a jellyfin server: either mind the chip now for transcoding capabilities (there’s lists out there) or know that if you want that, you’ll have to put in a GPU at some point if the onboard can’t transcode well.

    I have a mix of external and internal SSD’s. Some are running way not as fast as they theoretically could, but it all works well enough for me. You can start with what you have, storage is still expensive.



  • Skyscrapers =/= big city. Basel is a very well known city in western Europe (France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands…). Known for it’s beautiful old town, trams, many museums. It’s the cultural capital of Switzerland. Also with people who never went there. As for “not big”, it’s just not the case, it spreads out into Lörrach, Rheinfelden, Saint-Louis, lots and lots of people from FR and DE work in Basel, go visit it regularly etc. The commuter attraction reaches easily into Freiburg and Mulhouse, with thousands going there daily to earn a way higher Swiss paycheck. The wider urban area goes towards 900.000 people! Compared to polish cities too it’s not that small. It’s only the old town and the river area that gives that vibe (stayed out of the wars, nothing was destroyed…). Really the lack of skyscrapers is a very unreliable way to judge how “big” a city is! Basel by the way houses the tallest buildings of Switzerland! Roche towers. High rise is just very uncommon in Switzerland, but they get high density living with regular apartment buildings. I really don’t understand where your “Basel is a small provincial town” impression is rooted.


  • Depending where you’re from this might be a perception issue. Cities in Europe are generally smallish on modern city world scale. 200.000-500.000 inhabitants, with just a few larger city exceptions per country. There’s just a LOT of those medium-large cities and they are often all rather near to each other. How a “city” is defined can differ a lot, many urban areas consisting of many entangled and interdependent cities are technically still all their own (historic) “city”. Look at the Ruhr area for example, the Randstad, Flemish Diamond, …











  • SSD’s as far as I know mainly degrade from writing, not so much from reading or idling. If you fill an SSD, delete all files, write again, delete, etc, that is when they can wear out fast. If you’re just stacking on top slowly filling it and occassionally reading from it, it should theoretically last for many years. I don’t buy brands i’ve never heard about before and I read many customer reviews. Slightly higher price for way better reviews wins. Reviews like “it’s too slow” are not very relevant to me. Reviews like “I used it twice, got very hot and smelled like fire, broke, lost all my data”: those are the important ones. I never buy latest generation tech, I buy older generations. They’re cheaper, but more importantly they have more review information available about what you can expect from it slightly longer term.

    I avoid buying anything from aliexpress, amazon, … out of principle, don’t want to support those foreign (Europe) giants. Any other webshop might get my order if they seem okay to me.