I learned this term from Terry Pratchett a few years ago as the disc in discworld rotates and the four cardinal directions are rimward, hubward, turnwise and widdershins. Instead of north south east west.

Edit: though I never knew it was a real word!

This is a big part of why I love them so much. Hardly a week goes by that I don't think of the "boots theory of socio-economic unfairness" from Men at Arms!

To your list, I've also switched out:

• Gmail for mailbox.org
• Google calendar for calengoo
• Drive for koofr
• Netflix for Mubi
• Google docs for onlyoffice
• Edit: and chrome for Vivaldi

No complaints so far, they don't all have exactly the same functions as the products I replaced, but they very much do the job and I'm happy overall.

Koofr and mailbox also respond rapidly to tech help requests 👍

Definitely not looking back having switched to Qobuz for streaming music. The quality is higher and the pay-per-stream beats most competitors as far as I can make out.

People lament the loss of podcasts but I never liked Spotify for podcasts, preferring to just get an RSS feed and use the podcast app of my choice.

Also a shout out to Le Chat, which is super fast and entirely adequate for everything I used to use ChatGPT for. ChatGPT grabs all the headlines with Deepseek and Gemini close behind but nobody outside my circle seems to have heard of Le Chat.

Wrong place wrong time during a controlled demolition

My favourite series of all time is Brideshead Revisited (UK, 1981). A beautiful and melancholic look at British high society between the wars, following the recollections of one Charles Ryder as he remembers his youth, college years and early adulthood. Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews give star performances as the two leads, while John Gielgud and Lawrence Olivier steal the show as their respective fathers.

Also I've been quite partial to the range of crime dramas from N. European countries. Ones I can remember offhand include:

• The Killing (Sweden), award winning crime drama, multiple remakes
• The Bridge (Denmark and Sweden), possibly the apotheosis of the Nordic crime drama subgenre
• Endeavour (UK) a prequel to Inspector Morse
• Jack Taylor (Ireland) gritty police procedural from the West of Ireland
• Corp & Anam (Ireland) Irish language crime drama, great cast
• Wallander (Sweden, UK remake) long running series, also remade a few times
• Poirot (UK) charming and eccentric series based on the Agatha Christie stories
• There are many others but that's what I came up with on the fly

Also Father Ted is something the Irish are still very proud of. 3 misfit priests are exiled to an island off the west coast where they get up to all kind of ridiculous high-jinks. The show lampoons Irish culture and society in the 1990s, and absolutely eviscerates the Irish Catholic Church.

And there is of course a wealth of excellent stuff out of the UK: comedies and dramas, sketch shows and miniseries.

https://media0.giphy.com/media/3oEdv7Ob55JGHS3Ces/giphy.gif?cid=6c09b95204rgexk6a1y2dhg1l5innb0vmlzppjthv2al36vs&ep=v1_internal_gif_by_id&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g

Sounds like something you'd say before engaging in some good ol' fashioned extortion...

Bill Phillips seems like a pretty cool guy, certainly fits the mad scientist archetype!

I actually haven't read Making Money but I will now :)

Urly (Italy) and urlr (France)

From here: https://www.goeuropean.org/, haven't actually used either myself but maybe you can report back some time if you go ahead with one or both?

I checked out nextcloud and koofr when switching from Google drive and settled on koofr. In terms of the criteria you outlined above:

• Decent desktop client + network drive which appears like a USB key in your file system, super usable
• Very good android app
• No document editing but you can open everything from the network drive using the editing software on your device and it syncs to the cloud
• Nice price (45 euro for 200GB, which is all I need)
• Downside: no integrated document suite for editing in the browser but the workaround with the network drive is very straightforward (one click to enable in the desktop client)

I don't need a massive amount of cloud storage, in the terabytes, say, so I've found koofr ideal for my purposes. Another bonus for me is it's a Slovene company so must be GDPR compliant.

🇮🇪 Sally Rooney

🇦🇱 Ismail Kadere

🇩🇪 Hermann Hesse

🇮🇹 Elena Ferrante

I replaced google drive with koofr. Very happy so far! Still unsure what I'm doing about Google wallet/Google pay...

How are Heliboard and Here Wego?

I remember seeing this as well. I'm much more of a Brian Blessed than a Stephen Fry, unfortunately for my pain threshold...

And the Darwin Award goes to...

Yep would've switched to koofr ages ago but I've been happy with the Google drive experience until I wasn't...

Koofr is great, very user friendly!

Oof, yeah, France really pulled out the big guns in the second half. They have one hand on the trophy now.

That reverse pass was really one for the highlight reel

Gutted he went off...

Yes

Yep I got Borrowbox but the selection was quite limited and popular books are often unavailable and must be reserved.

I'm given to believe that Libby is better but unfortunately my library only has Borrowbox for now. Not a bad service by any means, just some in-built limitations 🤷