In my 2 years in Portugal, I saw at least 7 ways to renovate a residence permit - Call SEF and get an appointment at SEF - Auto-renewal online - Get an invitation to IRN by email - Write to IRN, justify urgency, and ask for a slot - Get an IRN slot online via SIGA - Renew online

This is how my A/C energy consumption looks in Portugal. At least in the north, heating took around 3x than cooling, though cooling also is very handy.

Today's German confusion: "erledigen" - The verb "erledigen" means "finish" or "complete". - It sounds like a prefix form of "ledigen", but it does not exist in the current language. - The adjective "ledig" does exist, and means "unmarried", or "free". Apparently, "ledigen"

For a change, some work-related rant. There's a file upload API in Slack that returns OK status, and even gives you a "permanent URL", but you can't use it until you check that the just-completed is really-really ready. How could anybody ship this to production?

The HPV vaccine is indeed a modern miracle - it almost eliminates a class of cancers with zero side effects.

If you need a hosted Apache Airflow, you might consider these folks. (Yes, I have been aware of what "Apache Airflow" is and what "Astronomer" is for quite some years)

German word of the day: "berappeln". This reflexive verb means "recover", e.g., after illness. The phrase "Ich habe mich berappelt" can be translated as "I have pulled myself together."

The long path towards mastering the top 2000 German words - just 64 left. Mastering means correctly recalling 6 times, after increasing periods, in both directions.

AI code review is nice and great, until it makes and carefully justifies a complete falsehood.

It took, apparently, 5 years, but it seems like the electric charging monopoly in Portugal has been defeated. Last year, 20% of all new cars in Portugal were full EVs, and a further 13% were plug-in hybrids, and now charging will catch up.

Withings makes probably the most expensive blood pressure monitor on the market. But, interestingly, there's no 24h monitoring feature - where it would automatically take measurements every 20 mins or so. I wonder if that's some regulatory issue or product management failure?

Two years ago, I had to retake a practical driving test as part of immigration paperwork. That started as a nuisance, but turned out rather useful. It reinforced some habits: driving at the speed limit (and not holding up traffic), or changing lanes to let others merge. It

Of all RFK Jr's dangerously wrong opinions - his attack on HPV vaccines is the worst (and that really is saying something) HPV vaccines like Gardasil PREVENT cancer - so effectively that cervical cancer is on the way to ELIMINATION in places like Scotland, Sweden and Australia.

✍️ New article: Death rates from cardiovascular disease have fallen dramatically — what were the breakthroughs behind this? For much of history, heart disease was a mystery. Middle-aged adults often collapsed without warning, and doctors usually blamed “dropsy”, “apoplexy”, or

People realize these are vaccines for CANCER, right? Like, cancer was going to become a treatable disease because of this funding. Now your cancer will be a death sentence, because of RFK and Trump.

GRPC requests are usually sent in simple pick-first or round-robin fashion. However, there are more advanced algorithms, such as weighted round-robin, that split traffic according to target performance and can achieve perfect balancing. Details at vladimirprus.com/blog/2025-08-0…

Codie Sanchez Probably true when internal drive is lacking or the culture is built on supervision. But it's possible hire folks with high internal drive and build a culture on outcomes. Then work-from-home does wonders for the right people.

It's about time to make a statement about em-dashes. When I first started writing term papers at the university, the tool of choice was LaTeX. Its documentation explained that a dash is for hyphens, an en-dash is for number ranges, and an em-dash is a punctuation symbol. If I

Kubernetes CPU Limits often feel like navigating between Scylla and Charybdis. In this blog post, I'm trying to visually explain the tradeoffs, so that the decision is easy: medium.com/@vladimir.prus…