While 50 is north enough and the absolute majority of Canadians live south of it, “Northern Canada” generally refers to the three territories (as opposed to the ten provinces), that start at 60 (mostly, there are some islands south of that).

As it should be… Navigators could determine latitudes pretty accurately by using astronomy. It was the longitude that was a big problem (maybe that’s part of the reason Japan is placed in the middle of the Pacific).

I’m pretty sure I’m in my fourth pair now.

Playing 4D chess /s

Interestingly, that is not the case. Month names can differ in different languages. I discovered the hard way that Ukrainian has completely different names for months when I had to connect to a Linux machine in Kyiv with Ukrainian locale (I can read Cyrillic, but the abbreviated month names meant nothing to me). The name for August is “serpen” by the way, and it is similar in some other Slavic languages. Also Arabic has its own month names based on Akkadian, August is “ab” but an Arabized version of the word August is also commonly used and understood. Finally, in Mandarin and presumably other Chinese languages, Gregorian months are only referred to by their number, so we are in “bayue” (lit. eight(th) month).

The start of the calendar has to be arbitrary, there’s no way around that as it’s not feasible to measure the time since the beginning of the universe with good enough accuracy.

As others commented, the Julian Day is a time measure that is actually used in astronomy, and Unix time is a time stamp standard (not really a calendar, although it could be if we got used to it) that is mostly a way to store time points, not really to consume them before converting to a more readable form.

But as a scientist who is wholly irreligious, I’m not overly bothered by using the Gregorian calendar, even though it has Christian (and a lot of pre-Christian) elements. Its annoyances (different numbers of days in each month, weeks not aligning with years, leap years etc.) are due to the fact that we decided to measure time in these arbitrary units. At least it’s universal in the modern era (often in conjunction with another calendar), and everywhere you go people understand what “August 5, 2024” means (although August might have to be translated to the target language, since the names of the months are not universal).

That’s more than you can say about non-time units of measurement (I’m looking at you, imperial and US customary units!!)

You can’t successfully use a home email server.

Mostly true (server can be home but using the ISP network directly probably won’t work)

You can’t successfully use an email server on a (cloud) VPS.

Bullshit

You can’t successfully use an email server on a bare metal machine in your own datacenter.

Bullshit

As such, it is my distinct displeasure to declare the death of SMTP. The protocol is no longer usable. And as we can see, this devolution occurred organically.

Bullshit

Borg

Also note that if it’s just for personal use, you don’t have to have a domain for HTTPS. You can self sign, or create your own certificate authority, you just need to clients to trust it. But domains can be cheap or even free, so it’s better to get one so you don’t have to specially configure your devices.

Borg for backup. I’m really surprised it’s not more widely known. It’s an incredible piece of software.

Also, not really lesser known software, but a lesser known feature of file systems including the ones we use in FOSS operating systems: extended file attributes - useful to add metadata to files without modifying them.

+1 for Whisper. Also, I use Piper for the reverse (text-to-speech).

Not sure it satisfies your requirements but I’m quite happy with Baïkal.

Borg is great.

Abrechnung is really good and actively developed and improving. The UI is already pretty satisfactory, and there’s also an API which is needed if for example you want to bulk-import a spreadsheet, for now you have to code it a bit.

Came here to say just that. The WebDAV synchronization target is great.

Joplin as well, syching my 3 devices with the WebDAV option. I checked a few other options about a year ago and Joplin seemed the best.

A mid-late 24th century Starfleet runabout?

Piper is my choice. Very easy to use from the command line, fairly good sounding voices. Prior to that, for years (decades?) I used espeak-ng, had a very robotic voice but articulated almost everything very clearly, and I got used to it so didn’t actually mind.

I’m very happy with self-hosted Vaultwarden.

Baikal is lean and great. I use it and sync to my Thunderbird (using the TbSync extension) and Android phone (using DAVx⁵).