+1 on this. Hiker+Trail-Runner here. So I sometimes encounter cows on high mountain passes where taking a detour can mean hours of delay. But after getting kicked like that once, I am very careful around herds, esp. when they have young ones / horns (as they often do grassing on mountains) / bulls in the mix.

Now I’m left wondering what the children of a water system look like.

In no particular order:

• Finally do those after-class reading + tutoring sessions for kids in my daughter’s school.
• Sign up for shifts on the “Good-Night-Bus” in my local town that looks after homeless people during night-time.
• Play hand-pan, guitar & other random instruments at local relaxation spots to add to the overall atmosphere of “the good life”
• regularly offer my handymen skills to my neighborhood via local web-platform and also contribute to “Repair-Cafés” as a helping hand
• Find a local community-garden project to help out at so that the city stays 0.1% greener than without me
• Offer my yet-currently-relevant professional skills (Frontend / WebPerf / CDNs / DevOps) to a NGO that couldn’t usually afford my wages (again: preferably something relevant to my region to feel a sense of impact)
• Keep maintaining my OpenSource repositories and publish new ideas ASAP to prevent Software Patents

Magnolia.

Yes! No.1 reason: microphone quality! I have to attend many calls every day and no Bluetooth headset (BT v.4 > 5.3, SPS, AAC, LDAC) has even come close to the simple quality of a ~25,-€ wired headset.

Long-term custom ROM user here.

Regarding security: as always, it depends on your threat model. If you fear a government actor getting access to your phone, a locked bootloader won’t slow them down.

Regarding privacy: I’ve had both VPN logs and external Wireshark running against traffic going in&out of my custom ROM phones & sometimes I still do it for fun. If you know what you’re getting into (e.g. LoS still using some Google services) then a Custom ROM usually holds far fewer surprises than some questionable OEM ROM (and which is terrifyingly scarce regarding changelogs while still having OTA update power).

tl;dr: stick with well-known ROMs & you get … not the best of both worlds … but a “good enough” of both worlds.

I’m glad to hear it’s not an issue in your experience / industry.

German here: I have yet to witness these “European-style” vacations mentioned in the post title.

Most workplaces seem to frown at people taking >2 consecutive weeks of vacation, esp. if they don’t have kids and do it in main travel season / during school holidays. Handing in ~3 weeks of holidays often at least needs some kind of explanation to the team-lead, e.g. “I have school kids who have their summer holidays and we need to keep them busy until school starts again.”

I have yet to see a single company going easy on someone saying “I’ll be off all of August KTHXBYE”.