We’ve built an entire winter village, we’ve received our Homepod Mini, we’ve transferred our characters to another Realm and we’ve even seen Donald Trump, beat that!

Our Winter Village

Since it was impossible to log in World of Warcraft this week-end, mostly because of the impossibly long queues, we decided to cozy up and build our Lego Winter Village while watching Christmas movies. It was amazing and I only wish that there were more buildings available or that they would re-release the holiday train (which I’d buy in a blink).

Apple Homepod Mini

We bought it to replace our Bose Mini speaker. I had no expectations and I was already resolved not to use Siri because I thought that I would feel silly talking alone in my apartment.

First, setting it up was as easy as usual: detected and recognized by all my Apple devices out of the box. The sound quality is amazing, it fills perfectly my living-room without exaggerating the bass like Bose usually does.

What I use the most is Siri. Yes, I know what I said earlier, but operating my music player without having to use anything else than my voice is incredibly useful. I can navigate through my music, set up a timer, check the time or the weather and even add songs to my playlists without having to get up.

Realm Transfer

Draenor is the most populated WoW server in the world. How does that translate in terms of gameplay: horrible lag, impossible queues and a constant feeling that you’re about to be disconnected. What do you get in return? Full cities and people everywhere, very active chats the feeling to be part of a huge community. Is it worth all the negative points? Certainly not!

We’re now less than a week from our winter holidays and I can’t picture myself waiting 2 hours in a queue only to be disconnected after an hour and returned at the back of the queue.

And the problems aren’t only related to the launch of Shadowlands, we’ve been experiencing laggy zones for months, which makes relaxing activities like fishing nerve-wrecking.

When Blizzard announced the free transfers to lower population realms, we moved our guild and all our characters to Stormscale. The cities are still filled with people, the prices at the auction house are decent and the experience is entirely lag-free, even fighting mobs or summoning our mounts feel smoother.

As the transfers were complete, I had to change the names of a few characters, since they were already used on the destination server. My Blood Elf Paladin is now named “Dumar” and I love it, it has a nice crusader ring to it.

We’ve seen Donald Trump

We were building our Lego village while watching Christmas movies, among which: Home Alone 2. As Kevin is alone in New York, he ends up at the Plaza hotel where he asks his way to no one else than Donald Trump.

Donald, you’re everywhere lately!

Languages in Belgium are a real pain in the ass! We have 3 official languages: Dutch, French and German. It generates a ton of problems and even xenophobia. These problems have consequences on our everyday life, and even on our access to technology.

If you live in Belgium and your OS is in English, most search engines and websites will assume that you’re a Dutch speaking person. Because, you know, French speaking Belgians don’t speak English (am I a joke to you?).

This is already ridiculous, but it gets worse… When the Homepod was released a few years ago, Apple wouldn’t sell it in Belgium. While it can recognize Dutch (the one that’s spoken in the Netherlands), it can’t make sense out of the Dutch that’s spoken by Belgians because it is more of a dialect than the real thing. Since those people have a very fragile sensibility when it comes to their language, Apple decided not to sell its voice operated device in the entire country.

But wait, it gets even worse… While the official Apple website doesn’t sell the new Homepod Mini, you can purchase it on the websites of other shops… Only if you set these webshops to French!

So, if you’re a Belgian who uses an OS in English, it is assumed that you’re a Dutch speaking person. But if you want to use a voice operated device that recognizes English, you have to buy it in French. Wtf?!