Buy European

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7310628

It’s from Karachi, so doesn’t officially count, but still.

I am heavily using Cloudflare for many of my web services. Now I’m looking for a European alternative. I’m not just talking about a CDN, but also all the security focused features. Any ideas?

Hey, is there any exhaustive guide to EU-based email providers that breaks down not only which ones have free tier, but also which ones allow multiple accounts and verification by email only? To my horror, I've found out days after switching my multiple email accounts from Gmail to another email provider that the latter explicitly forbid multiple accounts, unlike Gmail, something which was buried in fine print.

If your company allows you to use your end of the year bonus to do an e-bike lease, then I'd highly advise it.

You get to use the value of your end of the year bonus in advance by already having the e-bike. On top of this you won't pay any personal income tax, which will be the highest tax that you pay because this is the top bracket of your year income.

On top of this you don't pay the 13,07% social contribution as employee.

Now the good part. You also get to use the 25% to 32,4% employer social contribution on top of the gross wage.

This turns a 1500 euros bonus into a near 4500 euros bonus.

On top of this you get paid every day to bike to work. I get 10 euros per day. Which ends up being more than the end of year bonus I otherwise would get on my bank account. Better yet, the government takes 1,5 year to pay back the taxes that you paid too much, with the biking compensation you get paid the amount of money monthly. Removing a rent free loan to the government from existence.

There are amazing European E-bikes. Your budget can be up to 12000 euros.

I took the R&M Multicharger2 gt rohloff. Brilliant quality. I'd recommend everyone in this position to do the same.

It's more tax friendly than having a company car. It's just so cheap. I'm saving 6000 euros a year thanks to this.

Only downside: you will be locked down at your employer for 3 years unless you find another employer that is willing to continue the lease.

I inadvertently bought one of their pens when I was in Waterstones recently. Cute and really nice to write with (erasable gel ink apparently - I've not tried erasing it yet).

They do refills too, which seems quite unusual, but greener.

Thought I'd give them a mention here!

Virtual meetings and video conferences from Germany with real data protection. It IS designed for professionals and comopanies. But videoconferences for up to five people, and maximum 30 minutes long are free.

From a post here I realized Bitwarden (the password manager) is an US company. I also noticed when I login into bitwarden, I login into the bitwarden.com domain.

There now seems to be a bitwarden.eu domain too. Did anybody try to migrate their account from the .com (US) to .eu (EU) region?

Is the process really so weird? Do you really have to create a separate .eu account then migrate your passwords by exporting/importing from account to account manually? And then closing your .com account? This also suppsedly involves cancelling your subscription in the US region and rebuying it in the EU one.

I am aware I can use keepass or vaultwarden and self host rather than paying to the US, I just don't trust the resiliency of my own homelab as I am abroad a lot and can't afford for my passwords to be unavailable. So I'm doing this as a half measure

https://bitwarden.com/help/server-geographies/

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EDIT: I created a .eu account with the same mail as my .com account, exported an encrypted json from my .com account where I have premium, imported into the new .eu account without a subscription, then wrote to support using https://bitwarden.com/contact/ (sent to billing department) to transfer my subscription. They replied very quickly with an automated e-mail to which I needed to respond "YES MIGRATE MY SUBSCRIPTION - [bunchofnumbers]" and they moved my subscription.

It took like 30 minutes from my initial e-mail to complete the whole process.

cross-posted from: https://europe.pub/post/32096

Went to a drink store (Getränke Markt) in Aachen, Germany today. To my surprise I saw that all local soda brands were almost sold out(Fritz, Afri, Sinalco) and Coca Cola was almost not touched. I was very pleasantly impressed by this. Seems like more people are joining with the small consumer choices to buy from EU rather than US. Do more people notice this elsewhere?

Originally posted on Reddit

All the supermarkets seems to sell the same brands and I have no idea if any of them are mostly processed in Europe or elsewhere in the world.

Do you have recommendations? I like the ones with a fruity taste more.

This one is my current favorite:

Click to view

They claim on the package that they care about sustainability, better working conditions and social engagement.

Edit: looks like there's another Pop Cola brand in the Philippines owned by the actual Coca Cola, lol. The one I got is actually produced in the EU, by Merlin's Beverages, headquartered at Piatra Neamț, Romania.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27150675

The US, grappling with an egg shortage, is reaching out to Lithuania for egg exports after Finland declined. The situation has prompted ridicule online.

The short Story is, that they only mark the country of the company who sells the products and not the country of origin. So for wxamble, their own peanuts are marked with a star as they are based in EU as a company, but their peanuts can come from the US. Same gores with "California raisins" and other products what recieve the EU mark simply because the company who owns the brand are based in EU.

EDIT: local bookstores have it now. They just hadn't gotten it yet when I was looking for it

I am looking to buy Careless People from within EU. No local bookstores seem to have it (yet) but I would like to get it before it (maybe) gets pulled back. Any suggestions besides Amazon?

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/34810765

This is a Firefox fork from a Spanish group.

Pros

• privacy focused
• default search is their own Searx instance
• default integrated Oblivious http (toggle off)
• uses Next.dns (cannot be changed though, and I can't find documentation of the implementation)

Cons

• updates can be irregular
• they seem a bit opaque as to funding
• no about:config, if it's not in the settings you ain't getting it.
• may use Google Safebrowsing directly (instead of the Firefox version), it's very hard to tell
• the website is fucking garbage, stock photos/images on a lot of it, many links go to the same place

Other

• originally goes back to 2007, however it was sold in 2019 to the Astian Foundation. Then became a Firefox fork
• https://astian.org/
• Github for releases https://github.com/goastian/midori-android (also available from their site)

Seems to be a middle ground between Firefox and Ironfox on Android. I use it occasionally when it is up to date just to spread my browsing around. Obtanium reminded me today that there was an update.

🇮🇹 🇮🇹 🇮🇹 Vive l'Italie ! 🇮🇹 🇮🇹 🇮🇹

I have no affiliation with the service but I've been running Filen.io these past 2 years ever since switching away from my own Nextcloud instance. It's E2EE and been running really smoothly. Also cheap and sometimes they offer lifetime packages when their algorithm decides that they can do so (which I think is a good thing in order to not have it unsustainable for them).

My only complaint is that the Android app doesn't work half of the time, meaning you'd have to close it and re-open it 2-3 times to get it working. Otherwise it'll get stuck on the main loading screen. Seems to be a network issue with the app that's been posted on Github, but that hasn't been solved for a long time now.. Not a dealbreaker for me though.