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Comment Re:I am not of sinji's opinion. (Score 2) 304

I hate it because I have a dangerous intersection at the end pf my street. Great visibility one way, terrible the other way. But that’s the way I”m going 99% of the time. City won’t fix the light that warned of approaching traffic. So when I go, I need to go right then, not in a half second or so in case someone comes flying over the hill. There’s a button to turn it off, but you have to use it at every start. I could go the other way, but then that’s a half-mile detour through another neighborhood to turn around, so it’s defeating the purpose. In traffic, I don’t care either way, and I don’t know enough about the engineering to talk about wear effects, but as a practical matter it is very annoying in a pure ICE vehicle. Niche case, I know, but there are some good reasons to dislike them.

Comment Re: The cloud strikes again (Score 1) 26

Though itâ(TM)s not always correct. I got a garage door remote that, yeah, works without their cloud stuff, but you canâ(TM)t modify several parameters like open/close detection delay with the open source side. Not that itâ(TM)s a big deal; you can sign up for their account using a throwaway email address and never use it again.

Comment Re:meross has a serverless solution (Score 1) 126

And for slightly more money you can get one that can control up to three garage doors and includes two magnetic sensors to detect open/closed state. They have their own app for the tech-scared but you don’t need to use it; it’s fine with HomeKit, and Home Assistant can control HomeKit devices.

Comment Re:Anything for money (Score 2) 108

BYD, at least, have a reasonable footprint in Mexico (taken several Uber rides there in BYD’s).And unless you’re already in the western US, Mexico City is as close as LA or closer - and that’s one of the farther-south places in the country. The one driver I asked about his was very happy with the car, and it certainly seemed nice enough. Not a luxury car, but comfortable and spacious.

Comment Re:Will it make ICEs irrelevant (Score 2) 180

I don't drive 600 miles without stopping. I could, however, completely understand not refueling in that time.

I expect to stop after about an hour or two on the road to use the toilet. After that, about every 4 hours until I'm there. I don't know if you've done much driving in the US, but the vast majority of our highways don't have service plazas such as are common in most of Europe. You actually have to exit the highway and find a gas station (or, if EV, charger). The only Tesla Supercharger in my area is in a place that makes sense from the company's perspective (fringes of an outlet mall parking lot, ready access to high-power lines), and yes, we all have GPS now, but it's decidedly not a minor detour to get to. From getting into the exit lane from the highway to being at the charger is a solid five minutes' drive each way, during which time you will pass two large truck stops that have all the amenities that long-haul truckers need (showers, e.g.) as well as a large selection of snacks and drinks, which the Supercharger doesn't - you'll have to walk to the outlet mall's food court. And once you're at the charger, it's outside and uncovered. Enjoy baking your car in the sun or soaking yourself if it's raining.

Anyway, the whole point from my perspective about insane range isn't how often I use it fully. I don't use up the 600-mile range of my wife's car (what we use for trips) fully, but 600 miles at ~80 mph with air conditioning or heating on probably corresponds to an 800-mile theoretical max range (at most-efficient speed, no climate control used). It's that I can count on 3/4 of that without worrying about it. And since you're going to protect your battery by keeping it between 10-80% most of the time, you're already limiting yourself to 70% of total capacity for typical driving.

I agree that charging that was as fast as fueling an ICE car would go a long way to mitigating that issue, but I still don't want every single bathroom stop to be 15-20 minutes (exit highway, drive to station, fuel/charge, drive to highway, get back on) when they could be ~5 minutes at a rest stop that just has bathrooms, not gasoline. Nor, once I've settled in for some serious miles, do I want to be forced to stop every 2.5-3 hours.

Comment Re:TCL who? (Score 1) 48

Buy now, before they can afford to throw a cellular connection in there. I have a TCL TV. It’s technically smart, but it has no network connection (my guest WLAN is password-protected), so it’s just a display for my TiVO and my AppleTV. Picture is good. Sound has a strange bug that causes it to go quiet or even silent every once in a while, but a reboot fixes that. I could get a dumb commercial display for 4-5x the cost, but I don’t need commercial durability, just the dumb part.

Comment Re:Welcome to the future (Score 2) 144

Tomato is an amazing piece of software. Even going back to the original, it was just so well designed as a UI. I don't use consumer stuff anymore; I've got an SMB router and AP's. But man, did that thing unlock so many possibilities of the hardware that the factory software just wouldn't do...

I've got a Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 and probably 2-3 Asus models sitting in closets gathering dust that have it on board.

Comment Re:Courageous? (Score 1) 86

Adapters are cheap. Buy several. I’ve got a fat stack of cables that are USB-C on both ends with captive adapters for USB-A on the power end and micro and Lightning on the device end. $12 each and if you use the USB-C plug on the power end, you get 65W power delivery. They’re great and I just buy a bunch. When I lose some, I lose some. I give them out as impromptu gifts.

Comment Re:Yeah! Apple commitment to the environment. (Score 1) 171

At the power consumption levels we are talking about, a sleeping computer is barely more than a sleeping TV. If there’s a power button on the remote, something is watching for that signal. Back in the 80s, when TVs still had physical power switches, many cable boxes had a switched outlet on the back for the TV. “Power” turned that relay on or off, but the cable box was drawing power all the time to watch for the remote. My current TV has a strange software bug that occasionally drops out all the bass from the audio; rebooting it fixes this, but it’s not fast. Thirty seconds minimum. So it’s maintaining some kind of state while it’s “off” (usually responsive in 3-5 seconds).

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