In Spring 2012 I bought my Lenovo ThinkPad X220 Tablet. It was during the second semester of my Bachelor's course. I've used it for studying since then, wrote my Bachelor thesis, my Master thesis and now my dissertation on it. It has served me well for over eight years now, and I have no intentions of replacing it yet. During those years I carried it around in my backpack, and it has seen quite some wear. Still I find it remarkable that there are just minor issues with it.

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Python doesn't have variables. It sounds mind-boggling, as one seems to use them all along. But really, that is not how it works with Python. This will really confuse people with a background in C or C++. If we do int n in C++, and write n = 1, n += 1 or the like, the address &n will never change. The value changes.

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Bei ALDI gibt es wegen der Mehrwertsteuersenkung aktuell 3 % auf alles. Mediamarkt hatte manchmal auch so Aktionen, bei denen es 19 % Rabatt unter dem Motto »Mediamarkt schenkt die Mehrwertsteuer« gibt. Interessant ist ja eigentlich, dass bei den Rabatten die Preise sogar noch weiter gesenkt werden als nötig.

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On my Windows PC I have multiple audio devices. There is a 2.1 speaker system attached via USB and an analog headphone jack on the front. When I am not alone, I attach the headphones and want it to be used. Otherweise I remove the headphones and want to use the speakers. For some reason Windows has the super obnoxious limitation that audio sinks cannot be changed after the application has launched. There is a settings menu where I can apparently set the source and sink for separately for every application. But it does not seem to have any effect when the application is already running!

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For the past years I have only used WhatsApp and Telegram for messaging. Surely also Discord, Skype, Team Speak and Zoom for certain discussion groups, but not genereal messaging. Most people use WhatsApp, and few use Telegram and insist that it is the better messenger. I still do not like Telegram for its home-grown cryptography, trusted-server design and opt-in end-to-end-encryption. A relative had a security incident on Telegram, apparently somebody was reading all the chats and searched for login credentials that were sent to somebody else. In the end the person ditched Telegram as they did not feel secure on it any more.

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Es gibt immer wieder Situationen, bei denen man seine Identität im Internet nachweisen muss. Dafür braucht man also irgendwie ein Ausweisdokument, was auch digital funktioniert. In Deutschland haben wir dafür den elektronischen Personalausweis (ePA), der irgendwelche Zertifikate enthält. Mit einem geeigneten Lesegerät kann man damit seine ganze Identität oder nur sein Alter gegenüber einem Dienst verifizieren.

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Mein Vertrag bei der Universität läuft in etwas mehr als drei Monaten aus. Damit man seinen Anspruch auf ALG-1 nicht verliert, muss man sich mindestens drei Monate vorher als arbeitssuchend melden. Das ist die Vorstufe von arbeitslos. Dazu muss man sich aber erstmal online einen Account erstellen. Das ging auch ziemlich einfach, für die arbeitssuchend-Meldung brauche ich den sogar nicht nicht zu bestätigen. Heute kam der Brief mit dem Code an. Also erstmal zur Anmeldeseite:

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In the past years I have done a bit of programming teaching. Mostly at the university, where I have tutored in-person classes for C and LaTeX. On the side I have also taught people C and recently Python. In order to learn programming, one has to be able to experiment, therefore one needs to have a shared environment that allows to execute code. I want to introduce a few options that I have found.

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Launching GTA 5 on my PC takes a lot of step. So step 1 is to start the Epic Games Launcher:

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I recently noticed by accident that the default standard deviation implementations in R and NumPy (Python) do not give the same results. In R we have this:

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