Today is the sad last day of Iceland’s only vegan grocery store, Vegan Búðin.
When we first came here in 2018 we made sure to visit and spent a silly amount of money on chocolates and various other snacks we ate for our trip. Amazingly, even a few snacks made it home with us. Every trip since has included a stop here as well, so today’s final trip for my family is a sad trip.
Bless Vegan Búðin.
I had incorrectly assumed that software updates in Kia vehicles would be just as awful as they’ve historically been in most other major vehicle manufacturers.
With my move to Iceland, I’ve purchased a couple of electric cars, one being a Kia Soul EV. This was the first car we purchased due to availability and I just so happened to find one with all of the features I wanted.
When I drove it I was somewhat disappointed that the head unit software looked about ten years older than the Soul EV I had previously rented here during one of my trips to sort out immigration paperwork and details about my move. The dated look of the infotainment software had me reaching to switch to Apple CarPlay mode 100% of the time.
In the spirit of the ol’ “turns out” style articles – Kia offers free software updates that are labeled as being “navigation” updates but actually update the entire infotainment stack. There’s even a mac app, so you don’t have to mess around with a Windows VM:
My car immediately feels more modern and while the update took absolutely forever to flash onto a USB drive and then the car, the car was actually still drivable throughout the update process.
Post MY22 Kia EVs all support incremental OTA updates so the pains of this USB-driven process are probably lessened but in reality the USB process is probably still faster (even though it took ages still).
Sometimes my attention issues cause me to procrastinate when I hit a roadblock. So far I’ve found the most use of AI chat bots in helping tell me what to do next when I’m feeling overwhelmed by my own anxiety, stress, and overall attention deficit.
Thank you robots for helping me be a slightly more normal human.
Útlendingastofnun, the Icelandic immigration offices sent me a sms 30 minutes before they closed that I could come pick up my residency card. Luckily I work right around the corner.
I can finally travel throughout Europe and the U.S. again freely 🙌 for the next year and 5 months 😂 until I have to do this all over again.
The wild thing about people in the U.S. going crazy about Tesla’s connector vs CCS is that in Europe it’s all CCS. Our Model Y in Iceland has a standard CCS connector and it works fine. It’s like bikeshedding over USB-C power delivery vs using a proprietary power connector. The open standard works fine but the new open standard will also be nice for the U.S. What people should instead be focusing on is how Tesla was ever allowed to maintain a private charging network given the enormous amount of taxpayer funded bailouts/loans/credits/deductions they’ve received.
I’m not a huge fan of being away from Iceland right now. My tiny family is having a rough time and I just found a giant cockroach strutting across the floor of my hotel room in Novi Sad so now I’m sitting here unable to sleep, looking at a photo dump with all of the lights and the tv playing HGTV.
Palms are sweaty, knees weak, Microcenter ready.
(For context, there’s a computer store named Microcenter off of a road called “14 Mile Rd” in Michigan not far from where I used to live.)
I dislike Siri so much at this point with these homepod minis that I won’t even ask her easy math questions that I’m too lazy to do simply because my day is usually hard enough already and I don’t need a poorly written assistant making it harder.
It’s weird to see this making the rounds 5 years later because my first response was the same – “ok now do healthcare & higher education in the US”.
In more troubles with my move to Iceland: my residence and work permits are valid until 2025 but they never sent me an updated ID card after my renewal in January.
This will make getting back into the country a real blast 😩