khannie

I was gifted a 4K bluray player for Christmas. Whopper!

I immediately bought my favourite movie of all time - Aliens. I only got around to watching it recently and HOLY COW the detail. I grew up watching it on a VHS that I recorded off the TV.

I'm looking for some recommendations for things to visually blow me away. I was thinking of Interstellar, but I did watch that recently enough.

All suggestions welcome and thank you!

edit: Some absolute bangers of recommendations here, many of which I wouldn't have considered. Thanks folks!

Some things may go without saying, but Belgium's food agency issued a public health warning as the festive season wrapped up: don't eat your Christmas tree.

The unusual message came after the city of Ghent, an environmentalist stronghold in the country's northern Flanders region, raised eyebrows by posting tips for recycling the conifers on the dinner table.

Pointing with enthusiasm to examples from Scandinavia, the town website suggested needles could be stripped, blanched and dried - for use in making flavoured butter, for instance.

Asked what they thought of the idea, the reply from Belgium's federal agency for food chain security, AFSCA, was a resounding "No".

"Christmas trees are not destined to enter the food chain," it said in a statement.

Coming up to Christmas I generally make some small donations. Some of these I ask for as Christmas gifts because I'm old and basically have very basic wants and needs so I'm hard to buy for.

Curious to hear if / what others do.

I've expanded my annual list to include:

• Wikipedia
• Lemmy.world (my home instance)
• Mozilla (I'm not happy with how they spend their money necessarily but I'm very thankful to have Firefox)
• Signal messenger
• A few Ukrainian things (u24.gov.ua is the official site if this is your thing but there's a great lady on Reddit I give to occasionally too)
• The guardian (I read so many articles from there linked on here that I feel like I should and I really appreciate the lack of paywall and easy cookie rejection but never use the site logged in)

95 drones were diverted using spoofing tactics that manipulate the satellite coordinates guiding the drones and missiles through Ukrainian airspace.

LOL

Me: Ireland - Approximately 2 minutes until poll in hand is the longest.

I've been seeing long lines for the US elections even for early voting. Seems completely unnecessary.

They just crossed the line. Very tight race in the end.

Live tracker here.

Mine have built a decent number of very small scratches and they're getting annoying so I'd like to get rid if at all possible.

I've seen various things suggested including:

• lens scratch repair kit (reviews don't look great on amazon)
• baking soda paste
• non-abrasive toothpaste
• furniture polish (temporarily fills in the scratch from what I can tell)

I'm reluctant to try any of them without some first hand accounts. No lens coating on these so no worries there.

Thank you in advance!

edit: I just want to say thanks very much to everyone. I ended up getting my prescription emailed to me and buying a new pair for €17 (about $19 USD) delivered on a site that one helpful poster linked. Looks like they will take about 3 weeks to get here so I'll put up with the scratchy ones until they get here.

When they do arrive I will take some pictures and test the various methods I found online then post up what works and what wrecks the lenses.

The sale of disposable vapes is set to be banned under proposals going to Cabinet.

The Minister for Health is expected to get Government approval to draft these laws which will ban the sale, manufacture or import of single-use or disposable vapes in Ireland.

Stephen Donnelly plans to introduce this ban on environmental and public health grounds.