Intrigued by the World Tension Index (you can enable it in the settings under the Experimental tab) which currently reads Mild/24°:
> The world is simmering gently, marked by active regional conflicts, deadly protests, and a severe flood, yet tempered by budding Gaza ceasefire talks and cooperative diplomatic meetings.
> While trade disputes and political probes contribute to tension, no large-scale escalations or catastrophic events push the situation beyond the usual range of global unrest.
I wonder how this is calculated and what would push the meter from normal over elevated to serious/extreme.
Was looking for an iOS app to always see my age in days on the lock screen. Didn‘t find one, so I first created a shortcut which would change my lock screen background image each night and overlay the number of days on it.
This didn’t feel integrated enough and could fail if the phone was off, so I started looking into Swift and created my first app [1] with added features like contact import and notifications for other people‘s ages in days.
It‘s still very much a work in progress but the core functionality of the lock screen widget is something I use almost every day to quickly get the current number and use it for notes etc. I just like having an incrementing unique-to-me number to reference stuff.
nice job , I think I can do something like that on with my linux desktop. Great idea , it can give a sense of how many days how many hours I have lived on this earth and maybe even by a average time , show how much time is left (yes it won't be predictable , but I also don't want to procastinate thinking there is a tomorrow , I think I like steve jobs quote in the manner that he said live your life as if its the last hour or something like that.
While the text mentions the autobahn having been of little strategic importance, there is a paper[1] which states that it “was effective in boosting popular support, helping to entrench the Nazi dictatorship”.
From the abstract:
”[…] Nazi propaganda used the Autobahn as a powerful symbol of successful economic policy, putting an effective end to austerity – so that many Germans credited the Nazi regime for the economic recovery. In line with this interpretation, we show that support for the Nazis increased even more where highway construction coincided with greater radio availability – a major source of propaganda. The effect of highways was also significantly stronger in politically unstable states of the Weimar Republic. Our results suggest that infrastructure spending can raise support for autocracy when voters are led to associate it with visible economic progress and an end to political instability.“
The article covers that - "Secondly, it would be a political showpiece".
The article's use of "strategic" is in the context of "the autobahn was of low strategic importance for much of WWII". When coupled with "The reichsautobahn gained real military relevance only in 1945 as WWII closed in on Germany itself", it's clear that the text meant strategic from a military stand point.
Once the war started (and especially once they invaded the USSR), I highly doubt the autobahn was anywhere in the top 10 (or top 100...) reasons why Germany kept fighting.
That’s a really basic sales technique much older than the 1975 study. I wonder if it went under a different name or this was a case of studying and then publishing something that was already well-known outside of academia.
I also played with this idea of a Memex [1] a few times already, but I always struggle with the actual usefulness of the data. Most of the time, the greatest fun for me is setting up the systems and seeing it all come together in a single database, but I tend to fall behind as soon as it is manual work to keep something updated.
For location, I found that the easiest and most privacy-friendly way of doing this without wrecking the battery of my main phone was to get a cheap used Android phone with dual GPS (a Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G) on which I have PhoneTrack [2] installed and then pipe the GPS points to a PostGIS database on my local network [3] when I am home.
thanks for the tip. my battery is definitely getting crushed so i might need to mirror that local logging for ios. But yes, the usefulness of it all will be the big question.
I tracked a work log in a "did" list for work and that was useful because you often need regular reporting (standups, perf reviews).
No one needs any location updates on how often I've been to the gym.
Exactly. In my case, I noticed that having an extra device also helped me to not obsess about tracking. I started taking it with me only when I knew that I would be going an interesting route or on a trip to a place I haven’t been before.
Seeing a map with many different paths is way more fun than seeing the same paths just thicker. Interestingly, this also made me take more detours and explore my city and surrounding areas more even if it was a „boring“ route.
[1] https://nobite.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Nobite_Kleidun...