In the beginning of the month, I wrote about being a foreigner in the country you’re living in, and the struggles we have to find ingredients to make dishes from our home country. It can be so frustrating! And well… it happened again!

Yesterday, I was making Arroz Doce 🍚, which literally translates to “sweet rice”. It is a Portuguese rice-pudding-like dessert. It asks for arroz carolino, which is a rice only cultivated in Portugal. That would be quite hard to find, so I checked a Dutch recipe and they said I could use dessert rice instead. I tried it, the taste is there, but the consistency is very far away from what I expected. The grains are so much smaller and it’s barely noticeable it is rice. Next time it’ll be better!

Also, fun fact: Portugal has the highest rice consumption in Europe and we cultivate our own rice. You can read more about it if you’re interested.

The Swiss trains app is 👌.

Here’s a picture I took yesterday where you can see the mountains, as well as the lake Eugenisse.

So the train is so delayed that they canceled the last two stations. Now I have to change in Freiburg to another train from DB. And we can only get that train because… it is also delayed. Now I missed my 2 trains in Switzerland and I will have to get 3 instead 🥲 On the way back I actually have a stop in Germany, before changing to Venlo. That scares me.

I’m in an ICE today for a 6 hour trip from the Netherlands to Switzerland. It’s my second trip on a long course train through Germany. It’s also my second time that the train gets delayed in Germany due to a fire. We’re now being diverted and getting a massive delay. Germany… please hold onto your fires.

Albert Heijn, the largest chain of supermarkets in The Netherlands, is notorious for not accepting debit cards that aren’t Maestro or V-Pay. This is due to the Dutch system only using Maestro and V-Pay, instead of Mastercard of Visa. Fortunately, Maestro and V-Pay are going to be deprecated in a few months, and therefore merchants have to start accepting Mastercard and Visa.

Yesterday, I was at Albert Heijn and I had a feeling. I decided to try my Portuguese debit card, which, being Visa, has always been rejected at Albert Heijn. I was pleasantly surprised when it worked. That is some progress.

I use my YubiKey for signing my git commits with my SSH key. I notice that, very frequently, the YubiKey hangs after I touch it. It takes a few seconds until it’s signed. Sometimes unplugging and re-plugging it briefly fixed the problem. Anyone has had this experience? It was much faster when I used GPG through the YubiKey for signing commits.

Haven’t used Windows in quite some time, but I like to keep following the news as it was the OS that accompanied my childhood, most specifically Windows XP and Windows 7. Somehow I managed to skip Windows Vista, apart from some few interactions in someone else’s computer. Then, Windows 8 came and Windows 10 and I ended up moving to macOS for some other reasons and so far, haven’t gone back. I always enjoyed Window UI, at least to some extend.

This article shows UI elements present in Windows 11 that date to older versions of Windows. I expected to see things that dated back to Windows XP. However, I was surprised to see that you can still find UI elements from Windows 3.1 on Windows 11!