Every country in the EU has some system for direct debit payments.

Italy has Bancomat, Germany has EC/Giro, France has Carte Bleue, Belgium has Bancontact/Mister Cash (still have not figured out whether they’re supposed to be different or just different names in Flanders and Wallonia), and so on and so forth.

Does the Netherlands not have such a system?

It used to be that people would use these within their own country, but there would be Maestro for payments around Europe.

MasterCard decided to discontinue Maestro for MasterCard Prepaid which has higher fees.

The Germans whined about it a little and said that Europe should have come up with its own payment systems, but nothing came of it.

By now we are also supposed to have SEPA Instant, that should offer Europe-wide bank transfers. I still have not quite understood why a debit card system can’t leverage that directly.

Give Piquadro a look. They are originally from near Bologna (Italy) though they’ve gotten so big I can’t imagine that they still produce everything there.

Wallets: https://www.piquadro.com/en-de/collections/wallets

And card holders: https://www.piquadro.com/en-de/collections/card-holders

Plenty of options with some style variations.

My last wallet was one of their “blue line” card holders in orange leather. The leather that was great and aged great for 10 years. I replaced it after 10 years of abuse because the pockets were getting a little stretched and the cards were occasionally falling.

Bought another one from them, more wallet-like this time. Let’s see if this one beats the 10 years mark. I still have the well-loved old one around if you want pictures.

mp4 is not really a video format. Depending on how recent they are they’ll play a broader or narrower range of MP4 files, depending on codec selection.

Time and convenience and… local shops were and are largely very disappointing for many types of purchases.

My first online buy (in 2003, at the age of 17) was a decent wired optical gaming mouse, a Logitech M510, in 2003. The first optical mouse I ever used that wouldn’t skip.

The selection at local computer stores was lacking to say the least, and they also could not give much good advice anyway.

I swear to you, my first thought was “an Apple peeler? Why would Apple make peelers? Do they have Bluetooth or Wi-Fi?”

Was using CUDA a problem?

Does someone want to convince me that the whole AI industry is training their models on windows machines?

But by that standard, Windows isn’t ready either…