Author: Przemek

Today, we’ll be learning some Polish! Specifically, I’ll tell you some popular phrases we use for pseudoscience and woo. Thanks to the power of speech synthesis, I even included pronunciation audio for you. Enjoy.

Altmed

Short for “alternative medicine” (treatments not supported by scientific evidence, such as homeopathy or acupuncture).

Antyszczepionkowiec (plural: antyszczepionkowcy)

An anti-vaxxer (a person who opposes vaccination).

Foliarz (plural: foliarze)

A tinfoil hatter (a person who believes in all sorts of conspiracy theories). They are associated with wearing tinfoil hats, which are supposed to protect against microwaves, mind control waves, or other stuff like this.

Płaskoziemiec (plural: płaskoziemcy)

A Flat Earther (a person who believes the Earth is flat). Seriously, I can’t believe there are still people who believe this in 21st century. To add insult to injury, the Flat Earth Society Twitter account has a “verified” badge. I’m not kidding. See for yourselves.

Proepidemik (plural: proepidemicy)

Pro-disease (a more pejorative term for anti-vaxxers).

Ziębita (plural: ziębici)

A supporter of Jerzy Zięba, one of the most notorious snake oil salesmen in Poland. He’s famous for his “Hidden Therapies” books, selling molecular water filtration systems for $750 (basically some incredibly overpriced water woo), breast expansion through hypnosis, and, quite recently, his advice to stop a heart attack by stimulating an area between your upper lip and your nose with a pointy item such as a toothpick.

Unsurprisingly, he’s not a doctor – he graduated from the AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków, Poland and has a master’s degree in mechanics.

If you’ve been following me on Facebook, you probably know that I went to Ciechocinek for two weeks on Monday, as a part of my occupational therapy workshop. I’m in the Independent Life Center “Sajgon”. I managed to get a decent room – there’s a balcony and a bathroom, and it’s not a bathroom for ants like in Krynica Morska (that’s a story for another time, though). There’s also Wi-Fi, but it’s unusable in my room due to the weak signal strength, so I need to rely on my mobile data and create a hotspot with my phone. We also have access to a few computers.

Our daily schedule is as follows:

• 9 AM: breakfast
• 9:40 AM: 30 minutes of exercise
• 10:45 AM: horseback riding (doesn’t apply to me because I’m kind of a big guy)
• 1 PM: dinner
• 1:45 PM: salt water pool (Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays only)
• 4 PM: physiatry (doesn’t apply to me because I don’t have physical problems)
• 6 PM: supper

The exercise we receive is a bit exhausting, but it’s not too bad. The salt water pool is cool, though – salt water has better buoyancy than fresh water, and I think you’d have to really try in order to drown there

Overall, it’s great here, but I don’t think I’d go here again. Why? Two reasons:

1. I prefer trips where I can do whatever I want,
2. 12 days is too long.

On a side note, my hay fever seems to be back, but I bought Allegra at a local pharmacy, so maybe I won’t sneeze myself to death.

For about one and a half year, I’ve been an owner of an LG G5 smartphone. It has since gained two successors – LF G6 and G7 ThinQ. I thought I might share some information and my experience with you. Here goes:

• The front glass is quite thin and pressing on it a bit harder creates characteristic ripples on the screen.
• LG G5 suffers from screen retention. It doesn’t make the phone harder to use, but it’s a bit annoying. Watch this video to see the problem (notice how the status bar and navigation buttons are faintly visible). Fortunately, one workaround is to install Night Screen and set the brightness to about 80%.
• Battery life could be better. When I use the phone a bit more intensely, I sometimes need to recharge it during the day.
• It can heat up quite a bit.
• The GPS module is not perfect and it takes about a minute or two to pinpoint my location.
• It seems LG G5 won’t be getting an update to Android Oreo in Poland – at least not anytime soon.
• LG G5’s camera is very good, but not as good as the ones in current Samsung flagships. The wide-angle camera is a great feature, although it takes a bit less detailed pictures compared to the main camera. I wish there was a manual mode for videos, which was introduced in LG G6 and G7 ThinQ.
• The system works nicely. It stutters a little when you rapidly press the back button, though
• 32 GB of built-in storage might be not enough for some people. Fortunately, LG G5 supports MicroSD cards up to 2 TB.
• The fingerprint scanner is accurate, but it’s not perfect. Rarely, it fails to recognize my fingerprint five times in a row, which means I need to enter a password to unlock the phone instead. It could be faster, too, as it takes about half a second or even a full second to unlock the phone.

Is LG G5 worth buying in 2018? Possibly, but its successor (LG G6) has noticeably dropped in price since its release and in Poland, you can get a brand new LG G6 for less than $400. It’s up to you to decide.

The Internet is useful, but its huge flaw is that all it takes to find pornographic websites is a simple Google search. This is especially concerning if you have children. Fortunately, there’s a simple and free way to prevent access to Internet porn – changing the DNS server to one that blocks inappropriate websites. One such server is OpenDNS FamilyShield, which blocks lots of known and not-so-known websites, although other DNS servers exist. IP addresses of this particular server are 208.67.222.123 and 208.67.220.123. It’s best to set up the new DNS server on your router to protect all computers in your household. I’m not putting instructions on how to do this here because the process varies between operating systems and devices, but it’s easy to find necessary information on the Internet.

Welcome to the English version of This Is Internet! This version comes with English Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts, with an English Discord server and possibly a YouTube channel coming soon. Huge thanks to creators of the Loco Translate WordPress plugin that made it possible to make this blog bilingual! Alright, I ran out of things to say, so see you soon!