How I asked EVERY countrys embassy for flags [119 packages]

Here’s one of the best YouTube videos I’ve seen in a very long time.  In fact, I love is so much, I’ve decided to take in effort beyond just sharing it.  Watch it first, and then I’ll share a list of reasons why I love it.

So, here we go with my own personal reasons of why I love it.  In no particular order, as always.

  1. It’s not about COVID-19/Coronavirus.
  2. It’s positive, nice and kind.
  3. It’s funny.  Not like stupid funny, or stand-up funny.  But it still is.
  4. It has substance.  It’s not a video for the sake of video.  It’s a video about a rather long and complex project, which took a lot of effort.
  5. It bridges the real world and technology, and shows how one helps the other.
  6. It’s very personal, yet very global.
  7. It demonstrates one of my strong believes, that even simply asking for something, even from total strangers, has merit.  Not everyone will respond.  Not everyone will respond in the way you want them to.  But overall you’ll get more than you thought you would.
  8. Cyprus made it high up the recognition list.
  9. Political neutrality.   A lot of the countries mentioned in this video, have a long, complex, and often violent relationship with each other.  Yet, that doesn’t matter for this particular project.
  10. Free stuff.  Who doesn’t like free stuff.
  11. Production of the video.  It’s not over the top professional production, yet it’s not an amateur talking head, filmed on the mobile phone in the car.
  12. Maps.  I love maps, and especially checking them off on the global map.  Bonus points for more than one color for checked out colors.
  13. Flags.  Even though I don’t collect or study flags, I love flags and their designs.
  14. It’s work and family friendly.  Easily shareable with everyone I know.
  15. Bonus point: it just makes me feel good about the world.

Ranking The Startup Ecosystems of 1,000 Cities and 100 Countries

CrunchBase links to the StartupBlink’s “Ranking The Startup Ecosystems of 1,000 Cities and 100 Countries“.

The top 3 countries are USA, UK, and Canada. Cyprus takes 68th places out of a 100, climbing 6 places from the 74th place it was at in 2017.

The top 3 cities are San Francisco, New York, and London. Three Cyprus cities made it into the ranking:

  • Nicosia takes place 239, dropping 23 places from 216 in 2017.
  • Paphos takes place 531, climbing 329 places from 860 in 2017.
  • Limassol takes place 613, climbing 234 places from 847 in 2017.

I can find ways to justify Nicosia being so much higher than Paphos and Limassol. But Limassol being below Paphos looks strange to me.

Goodbye Waze, hello Google Maps

I am a big fan of social apps, especially those that address a particular problem, usually outside of the generic social networks. Unfortunately, many of these apps suffer from the same set of problems – insufficient user base to make them useful, competition from larger apps with overlapping functionality, and feature stagnation.

If I find the application useful, I try to ignore these problems for as long as I can. But, unfortunately, at some point even the best of us give up.

Last year I gave up Swarm and Foursquare. This time around, I am giving up Waze in favor of Google Maps.

Waze is like a social network for drivers. There are plenty of maps and navigation apps, but Waze went further. The app had the functionality to assist with mapping the roads, reporting police and road hazards, and some basic social and gaming functionality, where you could communicate and compete with other drivers. (The competition wasn’t speed based, but rewarded drivers who contributed the most.)

Waze never was a big hit, at least not here in Cyprus. But it was big enough to be acquired by Google back in 2013 for over one billion dollars.

Waze wasn’t shut down after the acquisition and the deal kind of made since, as Google would get real-time human contributions to compliment its automated ways of Google Maps.

But it didn’t solve the problems of Waze at all, if not made them even worse. More and more people started using Google Maps. The development of Waze slowed down to a crawl. And even the most vital features for such an app were never added.

As far as I was concerned, I could even live without the large user base. But there is one particular feature that kept annoying me until now, which was never added. There is no way to drop a pin on the map. Yes, that’s right, Waze is a map and navigation app without a pin. Instead, you can either search for places to go, or enter a street address to go to.

Cyprus is the country where street addresses are seldom used for navigation. Most of the cities grew out of small villages that overlapped with time. Which means, there is no preset design for the cities, like in the USA with the street-avenue grid. And most of the villages had the streets named after the same people, which, in the city causes lots of confusion with several streets in different parts, named the same. Heck, we even have streets with the same name crossing each other.

Try telling Waze that you are going to your friends house. You know where it is on the map, but you don’t know the exact address. (Yes, you might know the street name, but not the number.) And you’ll know what I mean.

On top of that, with fewer and fewer users contributing to the app, the data gets obsolete. There are places that have closed years ago. There are places that have moved to a different address. And there are plenty of new places that Waze knows nothing about.

And since you’ve got me complaining, here’s another feature that I miss, which is also missing or inadequately implemented in all the other apps I’ve tried – custom repeatable routes with multiple stop points.

Google Maps has a very basic “Commute to” feature, where you can just set your work and home, and then quickly navigate to either one or the other. Waze and many other apps have the same. But that only takes you so far.

Here are two scenarios which are a pain in pretty much every navigation app:

  1. More than two commute entries. Yes, work and home are common destination points for most of the user base. But what about school? Many of us are not 18 anymore and need to drive the kids to or from school. Sometimes, even more often than we navigate to home or work. People might have more than two jobs. Or they might have other destinations that they visit on a daily basis. It might a doctor’s office, or an older relative for a quick check. Why not expand the short list of “Commute to” entries to more than 2. Make it 3 or 5, and that covers most frequent routes for most people.
  2. More than two points in a route. Sure, home to work, and work to home, makes sense. But for over a year I had to commute to work, while picking up two colleagues on the way in, and dropping them home on the way back. Even dropping off the kids to school on the way to work is a common scenario among the parents I know. Why can’t we just connect the dots? Create a new route from one place to another, add a couple of stops in between, and save it in the shortlist for quick access. This will even help with the navigation part as well. The app won’t have to insist on re-routing me on every turn, when I briefly drive in the direction opposite to my office to pick up a colleague.

So for the last couple of month, I haven’t used Waze for my navigation needs. I tried a whole lot of other apps, and after a brief try outs, I decided to use Google Maps for now. It’s far from perfect, but it sucks less than others.

And just after I’ve made my mind, I came across the news that Google Maps will get the speed limits and radar locations feature. A feature inspired by Waze.

Oh, well. That’s good to know. But that just confirms my decision of letting Waze go and using Google Maps. At least for now. We’ll see what the future brings. Hopefully Google won’t kill the Goolge Maps app, like it did so many others.

Goodbye Waze and thanks for all the good times. I’ve enjoyed our time together, but now it’s time to drive forward. Hello Google Maps. Please learn from the mistakes of Waze. You’ve paid the money already.

Cyprus Tax Calculator

Cyprus Tax Calculator is probably the best implementation of the tax calculator that I’ve seen around. It’s dead simple to use, and allows all kinds of calculations – monthly or annually, with or without 13th salary, and reporting overalls, income tax, social insurance deductions, as well as providing tax breakdowns.

Very handy tool for anyone in the job market. ;)

Living conditions in Europe – material deprivation and economic strain

Share of population living in households that have difficulty or great difficulty in making ends meet, 2016 (%)

Eurostat published the results of the survey studying the living conditions across European Union. The numbers are a couple of years outdated, but I don’t think things have changed dramatically during this time.

Cross-country comparisons (see Figure 5) reveal that in 2016 more than half of the population in Croatia (51.4 %) and Cyprus (59.8 %) reported having difficulty or great difficulty in making ends meet, while this share rose to more than three fifths of the population in Bulgaria (61.7 %) and to more than three quarters of the population in Greece (76.8 %); more than half the populations of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (55.5 %; 2015 data) and Serbia (63.9 %) also faced difficulty or great difficulty in making ends meet.
On the other hand, less than 1 in 10 persons in Sweden (7.6 %), Germany (6.9 %) and Finland (also 6.9 %) reported facing difficulty or great difficulty in making ends meet; this was also the case in Norway (5.4 %).

Found via In-Cyprus.com.