Google Maps falsely marked a bunch of highways in Germany closed and caused traffic jams by routing people to smaller roads, and they refuse to say why it happened.
https://www.techspot.com/news/108134-german-roads-thrown-chaos-after-google-maps-mislabels.html
The idea of a federated social network, but at any time your server can shut down and the protocol doesn’t offer any way to migrate your whole account, including old posts in context… it’s not surprising that we remain a niche system.
I know you can export your posts, but you can’t import your posts on a new server, let alone keep replies linked.
I know it got some bad press by association recently, but Signal is still genuinely a better idea for texting than actual texting, Google Chat, or Zuckerberg's Whatsapp.
Two interesting developments recently are that the iPhone version finally adopted the modern photo picker, so you don't have to give the app access to all your photos, a feature I'd been long waiting for. Another is that for Windows desktop users they've disabled Recall from snooping your messages.
This is fantastic. A podcaster I’ve listened to for years about the airline industry (Dots, Lines, and Destinations) put up billboards criticizing Avelo for facilitating illegal deportations with their jets.
The airline threatened to sue, and the billboard company caved instantly, but Seth is countersuing in Nevada court. I hope it’s resolved quickly and the billboards go back up.
His thread on it is at https://bsky.app/profile/wandrme.paxex.aero/post/3lm5xib2kt22t
European egg prices update: there’s about half a dozen egg sellers in the big market nestled up against the fort in Niš, Serbia. They offer five or so sizes of eggs, and are 12 to 20 dinars per egg as they increase in size.
Per dozen in USD, that’d be $1.38 to $2.30.
Any time there is a failure in aerospace there will shortly after be some kind of euphemism. One of my least favorite new ones is "an observation".
Tory Bruno used it after a Vulcan SRB nozzle fell off: “We did have an observation on SRB number one, and so we will be off looking into that”
NGIS started it during a solid test in 2019: "we observed the exit cone and maybe a portion of it doing something a little strange that we need to go further look into"
Now ISRO is doing it:
I was looking at where the train went after Zaječar, and one option is Prahovo, a town on a bluff above the Danube.
I really appreciate their dedication to not having any square grid in their streets. As far as I can tell they aren't any older than any other town in the area, so it's just some local decision to not bother with the idea of rectilinear blocks.
The Serbian wikipedia page on them informs us that the river nearby is full of sunken German ships full of bombs, a hazard to navigation.
Serbia looks and feels a lot like the Midwest, but with some taller hills and lizards instead of snakes. A collection of animals I saw at the site.
It’s hard to see scale from the video, but European hornets are *huge*. I had no idea they were so large.
I sat on the only bench under a tree and immediately had two different species of crab spider crawling around on me. Fortunate to not be particularly arachnophobic.
There was also an entire wall full of chirping bird nests hidden in tiny gaps.
Yesterday I visited the UNESCO site “Gamzigrad-Romuliana, Palace of Galerius”. It is near the settlement of Gamzigrad in Serbia, near the border with Bulgaria. Felix Romuliana is an imperial Roman palace, they only figured out its name in 1984.
It was built on the site of a previous fort around 300, and only went about 150 years before being plundered by the Huns.
The towers and walls seem to have been reconstructed from debris in modern times, as far as I could tell from the info at the site.
“NYU is deeply sorry that the audience was subjected to these remarks” is an insane thing for a university to say. Just shut down the university if you can only allow speech that is condoned by the government.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/15/nyu-withholds-diploma-israel-gaza-speech
You might say it’s a place to park your ‘har’. A wheely good spot. You have to be carfull. Cry havoc and let slip the Dodge of war. A place for a lesson in Civics. There’s a guy selling beef at the end of a spot, he’s a parking meater.
If you have to pay property tax on an empty office, but don’t have to pay property taxes on a farm, then obviously you should put about a dozen snails in the office and call it a farm.
Solid tax avoidance from the Brits.
One of the strangest aspects of taking the train in Serbia is that there’s usually a guy in the station wandering around with a war hammer.
Probably the deputy station agent, and probably ceremonial role play as a “wheeltapper”, but I guess good to know that if the station is attacked by a knight in shining armor that we’ll have at least one line of defense.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_hammer
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeltapper
A couple succulents growing in a block of limestone that looked to have been ancient fossilized coral reef, full of porous organic shapes.
And a key in the scene to give a sense of scale.
A brief Serbian lesson:
hrskavi: crispy
hrvatski: Croatian
EU Space Surveillance and Tracking chips in with "2025-05-10 06:47 UTC ±533 min"
https://www.eusst.eu/newsroom/eu-sst-monitors-reentry-object-cosmos-482/#EUSpace
In addition to the TUDAT and CSpOC forecasts at the link above, the ESA Space Debris Office is also making reentry projections: https://blogs.esa.int/rocketscience/2025/05/07/reentry-prediction-soviet-era-venera-venus-lander-cosmos-482-descent-craft/
Current TUDAT projection is 10 May, 7:34 UTC ± 14.6 hr, ESA says 10 May, 07:12 UTC ± 13.67 hours. Pretty good overlap.
It's still much more than a single orbit, so it can rule out some areas but it's still covering a lot of the surface.
Nasa asked industry "hey do you want to pay to fly our rover to the moon, and also pay to operate it" and the answer was unsurprisingly "not really" so they've cancelled that solicitation and are back to trying to come up with some other idea for the largely complete VIPER rover.
My new favorite pedestrian desire path, which includes a short rail bridge on an active line. I walked past it, thought it was funny, then turned around to take the photo and use it.
Within a minute one other person was going in the same direction, and one person in the opposite. A freight train had come through a few minutes earlier.
A last-minute #caturday in Serbia. None of the cats will let me pet them, which is similar to how things went in most of Bulgaria. It speaks poorly of how they are treated by strangers.
