The European Central Bank is giving people the chance to vote on the design of future banknotes.

You can find more info and an overview of the designs on this page.

And you can vote directly on the survey here.

I'm quite touched that they picked birds for half of the designs. One design even has the migratory path, footprints and sonogram for each species, which I think is pretty cool. Not trying to sway anyone to vote for a particular design, just happy birds are getting some *more recognition :)

I sold off my last ICE car almost a decade ago, moved to the EU, and I've subsisted on public transportation ever since. Never thought I'd even consider buying another one.

However, the last year or so, I've been anticipating needing to buy a car, at least temporarily (the next 2-4 years or so), and I was just starting to semi-seriously window-shop EVs over here (in Germany), when the whole Iran thing started.

Now, I'm not sure, but I'm starting to think that it might be a good idea to buy a cheap used petrol or diesel car, use it, then re-sell it in a couple of years after I'm done with it (assuming it's still worth anything at that point).

I'm targeting a purchase somewhere around 3-6 months from now, and in the 3,000-6,000 Euro price range. I'd happily go higher for an EV, but not the literally 4x higher (15,000-20,000 Euros minimum) that I'd need to shell out for even a barely feasible new EV. I might or might not be eligible for a decent ~5k Euro govt subsidy on a new EV -- but my 15-20k estimate is assuming I get the 5k discount, which I might not qualify for anything at all.

My thinking is that decent used ICE vehicles are about to become very cheap and easy to find, while good used EVs are going to become vanishingly rare, and new ones are well beyond my target price range. And yeah, gas/diesel prices are nuts right now, and I know they're not coming down any time soon. Even if the war magically ends tomorrow, it'll be a gradual, months-long decline in prices to--let's face it--a couple years before we see pre-war prices again, if ever.

Very roughly speaking, my use-case is going to be infrequent, intermittent, high-intensity usage. Like, the car may be parked for one month, then I'll add 3000-4000 km to it the next month, then parked again for a month or two, etc. So even before, I was anticipating some difficulties with charging the EV during the long-distance high-usage periods. Now, even with the fuel price hike, I'm thinking it's a better deal for me to go with a dino car.

Thoughts?

Hi!

I've decided to move some of my selfhosted things from on-prem (at home ;)) to the cloud, and at the same time I'd like to try and run this in EU, or at least europe. I'd like to get started fairly quickly as this was prompted by one of my home servers halfway dying on me.

The features I'm most interested in are approximately:

• Virtual machines.
• Storage. Cheap long term for backups (similar to S3 Glacier).
• Managed DB, most likely postgresql.
• Serverless jobs (similar to AWS lambda).
• IaaS (I've got a bit of experience with terraform, but it doesn't have to be that).
• Builtin monitoring.
• Git hosting, it's likely that I'll just go with github/gitlab here, but if there's a nice alternative I'm up for it.
• Automated sending of email. I'm using AWS SES atm, and I'm very happy with it.

Some other things:

• I intend to run a combination of services written by others, e.g. nextcloud and software I've written myself.
• I'll most likely be running linux only, but I prefer to select my own flavour where it makes sense.
• I much prefer managing permissions and users in gcp than in aws as I find aws way too complicated for my needs while gcp mostly just makes sense.
• I'd prefer a platform that's being developed and improving over time with big potential for the future.
• This is a hobby project, and some of these requirements may seem a bit contradictory or non-optimal, but that's ok.
• I have some experience running kubernetes (self-hosted), and I'm not a huge fan of the complexity and yaml files, at the same time OpenStack is getting kinda old, and I don't know if I think it's a platform for the future. But from what I see most of the options seems to be built on top of one of those.
• Cheaper is of course better, I don't have a company-sized budget, this is all coming out of my "hobby pocket".
• I live in Sweden, so datacenters geographically close is a plus.

Right now I'm looking at European alternatives to Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Scaleway is looking the most promising, but I'm really skimming the top when it comes to info atm.

Hope that makes sense =) I'm interested in all kinds of feedback.