That also means we can still use the expansion cards for the Framework in any other device that also has a USB-C port. Need an SD card reader or a 2.5Gb LAN adapter? Not a problem, I’ll just grab one from my laptop.

Por qué no los dos?

Nah, the SWAT would have to arrest themselves.

My daily driver is a pure EV, but while I was on holiday a few months ago I was driving a Yaris Hybrid as a rental (which to my understanding is basically a Prius drivetrain in a Yaris body).

Fuck me it was terrible. Every time I applied even mild acceleration it sounded like the valves were going to eject out of the engine, meanwhile it had about as much get up and go as a sedated elephant. 0-60 in four to six business days. On ramps were an interesting experience.

The only saving grace was that we only used about a third of a tank of gas during our week long trip.

I’ll stick with pure electric thanks. No complicated drivetrain with multiple systems to go wrong, no compromised performance, enough range to get me everywhere I need to go, and good enough charging infrastructure (at least in my country) to make longer journeys trivial.

Regarding battery degradation - I’ve owned my EV for 4.5 years now, and its battery is still at 93% of its original capacity. That equates to maybe 10 miles of range lost, from an original range of around 230 miles. At that rate, it’ll still be giving usable range in 10, 15 years from now. It’s even warrantied to keep over 75% of its original capacity for 8 years / 100,000 miles - if it fails to achieve this (likely due to some defect), it’s replaced for free.

And when it does eventually need replacing, it can be recycled into something like a home storage battery - where the power demand is not as high, but still more than enough to power everything in your home for days. Meanwhile, the car can be upgraded to a brand new battery, which will likely last even longer.

Edit: In fact, I tell a lie - I did have to replace a battery on my EV recently. The 12v lead-acid battery, that ICE cars also rely on.

You might have seen a quest, where if you stream a specific game to your friends you get a free in-game item, but these are not advertisements.

…

Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers

I have no interest in streaming “quested” games, and whatever deal Discord has done with the developer to encourage users to engage with such games (and by extension the game’s microtransaction economy), and regardless of what they call it, is by definition an advertisement. If you can’t see that, then you are an ad campaign exec’s wet dream. Either that, or a troll.

Discord enshittification is well under way, just this week I have started seeing ads in the client just above the voice channel status in the bottom left. Cancelled my Nitro immediately, no point if they are going to shove ads in my face anyway.

Currently looking at alternatives, Revolt looks promising, and can be self hosted.

I don’t have enough superlatives for it. I’m > 300 hours in between three characters, and I’m still finding new stuff to do. Even at full price, worth every penny. Also an amazing co-op experience - played through the whole campaign with a friend, we both agreed it’s probably one of the best games we’ve ever played, period.

It’s also the first game of this genre that I’ve played, off the back of this I also picked up BG1 & 2, and Neverwinter Nights, which I’m excited to try out to see what I missed out on back in the day.

To clarify, I used to do more miles (which is why I bought the car in the first place) but in the last year I’ve moved to working from home full-time. Still need the car for occasional errands and long trips, but obviously tyre wear is now not much of a problem.

However, given the massive amount of torque you can apply from standstill, if you drive like a hoon at all times then yes you can absolutely tear through them.

I own a Model 3 which I took delivery of back in 2020. As a car it’s actually been fine - no major issues, aside from a fault with the AC which was sorted under warranty. It’s been cheap to run, cheap to service (basically just tyres and other consumables like wiper blades), build quality seems perfectly fine and overall it’s generally pleasant to drive.

The charging network is also fantastic and by far the most reliable one, at least here in the UK. It’s now opening up to other makes of vehicles and I regularly see non-Teslas charging there.

Would I buy another one? With their current lineup, probably not. Nothing to do with Elon, douche nozzle though he certainly is. I mean, people still buy VWs (also great cars, used to own one too) and look who founded that company.

No, my issue is with the stupid cost cutting measures with removing critical physical controls from their latest cars. Moving the gear selector to the screen is absurd but at least you are (or should be) stationary when you are swiping the screen to change direction. Removing the indicator stalk however and replacing with buttons on a movable surface seems downright dangerous, especially in EU & UK where there are roundabouts everywhere and you need to be able to indicate while at half lock.

My Tesla is old enough to still have physical controls for all of those things and unless that changes I will not be getting another. I also just don’t do enough miles these days to justify a new car, I’ll just run this one into the ground.

I can’t speak from experience as I don’t own any Amazon devices, but I have read reports that it seems to work fine with the FireTV variant of Android.

The dev has only tested it against Chromecast with Google TV, with that said I’m using it on a Shield TV and a Shield Pro and it runs fine on both.

Google is already doing this with their default Android TV launcher. I tolerated their home screen ‘recommendations’ for a while as they occasionally highlighted something interesting to watch, but one day I switched on the TV and was greeted with a huge advert banner for a fucking watch on the home screen.

At that point I spent a few hours setting up FLauncher on all my ATV devices.

Same. Coming up to 4 years owning my Model 3 with no major issues and no work needed other than normal serviceable items common to all cars (tyres, wiper blades, cabin filters, etc).

On the flip side, one of my old coworkers who got his Model 3 at the same time as me had a litany of problems from day one. We used to joke that his car had been built by an intern on a Friday night before a major holiday.

I don’t do enough miles these days to justify getting rid of a perfectly good, functional, almost brand new car and buying a new one - I plan to just run it into the ground instead.

I don’t think I’d buy another Tesla in the future, though. Not necessarily because I care what people think of the car I drive, but because Tesla has made some astonishingly stupid decisions with their new/refreshed cars. No physical drive selector? No TURN SIGNAL STALK? Yes, because I love having critical vehicle controls on a movable surface. Come on now.

I use both. Pi-hole running in a docker container on one of my home servers which my gateway is configured to assign as the default DNS for all clients, and uBlock Origin on all my browsers to catch everything else.

Pihole is pretty good at catching ads on platforms that are not suited to browser based blockers (IoT devices, streaming boxes etc) but it isn’t perfect and is best used in conjunction with another solution.

That is exactly what I did with my dumb washing machine (and dishwasher).

Each has a ZigBee energy monitoring smart plug which is connected to a local Home Assistant instance. Spent an hour or two writing automations based on the power draw reported by the plugs and now I get push notifications that report whenever either machine finishes its cycle (including how long it took).

This seems like a brilliant solution to a problem that shouldn’t exist.

Oh yes, 100% - if they were to implement a fuel system, then just mining for fuel manually on the existing planets would be incredibly dull. Building something like a fuel refinery on the other hand would make sense - it would even give a purpose to habitats/planetary bases, which are completely superfluous at the moment. At no point in the game did I need to build one, and if the game didn’t keep reminding me that base building existed I would probably have forgotten all about that feature.

I got Starfield free with my new graphics card and tbh I’m glad that was the case as otherwise I’d have serious buyers remorse. I put a good 50 or so hours into the game, enough to finish the main storyline and most of the factions quests, but at the end of the day it just felt like a hollow experience, and I doubt I’ll be going back to replay it.

The NPCs are shallow and robotic, and once you’ve explored their dialogue tree once you may as well never talk to them again as they’ll never say anything new.

The game worlds look quite visually impressive but aside from the handful of cities and occasional settlements and outposts there is just nothing to do. Who would have guessed simulating a lifeless grey rock would be boring?

The fast travel system is completely broken and ruins the purported objective of the game; to explore. Instead of encouraging the player to do so by landing on planets to find fuel for their ship, the player can just teleport across the galaxy with no consequences.

The only aspect of the game I found to be really fun was the space combat. The ship builder, while quite frustrating at times, was also enjoyable.

Overall, Starfield feels like a game whose ambitions exceed the technical capabilities of the engine it is based on. You can see the janky workarounds that are used to make the game fit the engine from a mile away; cutscenes of a ship taking off rather than an interactive first person view, invisible barriers in the world to prevent you from walking too far without reloading, a cut to black when transiting between interiors and exteriors, and the same dull and lifeless NPC “AI” (I use that term very generously given recent advances) as we saw in older Bethesda titles.

It’s past time that BGS put the rotting hulk that is Gamebryo/Creation Engine/whatever this latest iteration is called out to pasture (at least for new IPs like this) as clearly it is now actively hindering their creative ambitions.

Unlike oil, rare earth minerals can be recycled to a degree. What is today your car battery may end up in 10+ years as someone’s house battery, or a power bank or other low-load energy store. The raw materials can eventually be recovered to an extent as well.

A resource disaster is inevitable either way as nobody wants to give up the convenience that we have become accustomed to. Encouraging affluent economies to adopt EVs is pure damage limitation at this point, our biosphere is already fucked from over a century of waste emissions, the least we can do is try and find solutions that don’t involve burning fossilized plant matter for every car journey.

Doesn’t need to be a “green energy paradise”, just a reasonably well connected first world country.

Take a look at Electricity Maps. Unless you live somewhere isolated or with very poorly developed grid infrastructure (or some central US states, apparently), you should see a non-trivial amount of electricity being generated by non-fossil fuels. For example, at the time of typing this 77% of the electricity I’m using is low-carbon and 50% of it is renewable.

That’s the kicker. EVs don’t have to rely on fossil fuels to operate (but they can make use of them depending on the grid infrastructure). ICE cars on the other hand are burning fuel wherever they go.

Walking or cycling will always be the least polluting means of getting around, but if you really need a car then you could do a lot worse than getting an electric one.