Yeah but there are too many brands out there to choose from; as a consumer our only power is to speak with our wallets.

Corporations don’t get to pick and choose which actions from them result in lower sales; all of their actions are judged, and by all potential customers.

Maybe not as bad as the others…

I’ve been a NOFX fan for about 25 years; still am.

Their whole Vegas shooting country music joke was really hard to wake up to & read as a fan. Also the ripple effect that had on the other bands playing with them; the shows getting canceled; it was all a huge shitshow.

Having said that, I’m sure NOFX themselves have done more fucked up things than that joke, but the timing and lack of sensitivity was really a gut punch (not just to the fans, but the people of Vegas and the victim’s families).

Yeah I feel the same.

So at least on an iPhone (I think Android does this too if I recall from when I had my Pixel 3XL) the payment uses a one-time use card number if you use Apple Pay; I didn’t have to sign up for an account, and the Taco Bell app only has my email & first name (pretty sure you can give a fake email too as it asks you to enter name/email each time if you have no account), and that’s it. The friggin’ Taco Bell app has less of my data than most apps actually.

I actually installed it as a joke (my wife hates Taco Bell), and ended up liking the ordering process, go figure… it’s fun for a once in a blue moon fast food order.

I eat Taco Bell occasionally and I do like their system. Order on the app, use Apple Pay/Google Pay to actually pay for it in advance; roll up to the drive thru and give your name; drive forward and get food.

It’s the most frictionless fast food experience I ever had ever had.

Sometimes the operator is in another state! There was an article I read a while ago about… maybe it was Carl’s Jr.? but they were saying that the drive thru operators were in call centers in states with a lower labor cost.

Not exactly uplifting, but “yay capitalism” I guess.

Nothing about this story makes sense; you’ve asked a great question. Isn’t CarPlay/Android auto usually manufacturer agnostic when it comes to the features included? Wasn’t that the whole point of it?

Chamberlain Group’s myQ Connected Garage service

Ahh yes, myQ; the service that is randomly up and down when you need it the most.

I had a Chamberlain myQ garage door opener and I hated it. I hated everything about it. It was slow, unreliable, the button doesn’t use a simple open/close contact for triggering the door (so you can’t easily DIY a solution with a relay board); and it just didn’t work half the time because “the cloud!”

$129 for 3 years? For what? For < 10 API requests per day? That’s insane.

Don’t most modern cars (the type that have CarPlay in them) also have programmable garage door buttons on the rear-view mirror?

Right on man, thanks for the additional context/info. Much appreciated!

For most of us, there is no difference though; you get what you get.

I live in a nice neighborhood but I won’t ever get fiber… we have underground utilities and this area is served by coaxial cable. There’s no way in hell they are digging up miles of streets to lay fiber; you get what you get.

My ISP latency is like 16-20ms but when sim racing it just depends on where the race server is (and where my competitors are). As someone on the US west coast, if I’m matched with folks in EU and some others in AUS/NZ, the server will likely be in EU and my ping will be > 200. My Aussie competitors will be dealing with 300-400.

It’s not impossible to share a track at those latencies, but for close racing or a competitive shooter… errrr that just doesn’t work.

The fact that I’m always at around 200ms for EU servers might be improved if we could run a single strand of fiber from my house to the EU sever (37ms!) but there would still be switching delays, etc. so yeah the speed of light is the limit, but to your point, there’s a lot of other stuff that adds overhead.

I repurposed an old gaming PC as a Proxmox server, stuck HA on a VM and have never looked back. Backups are easier, it’s blazing fast, I can have 90 days of history if I feel to, upgrades/reboots take seconds instead of minutes.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my Pis and use them for my 3D printers and such, but Home Assistant is a lot for a Pi to manage well at times.

Having said that… I too am curious about the performance bump here especially considering the SD card write speed increase and the PCI-E (SSD) capability. I’m sure it’ll still kill SD cards every 6 months with HA running on it though.

Just installed it based on your comment, and am giving it a shot. Seems nice thus far!

Unless I’m mistaken, don’t HomeKit compatible devices need to be local-first too? I remember reading that if I switch my Ecobee thermostat to HomeKit (via HomeAssistant’s bridge), it will use local control instead. It’s on my todo list but I just haven’t done it yet.

I think this thread about Ecobee and HomeKit was where I started…

Blender is really amazing. The last 3 years have been really good to the project. I forced myself to learn/use Blender 2.79 as an alternative to Maxon’s Cinema4D which I had been a long time user of. It was… tough, but after dozens of hours of tutorials it got easier, then fun, then powerful. Then the 2.8-3.x updates started to roll out! I love Blender now.

It has an amazing real time renderer in Eevee, the Cycles renderer is quite amazing too; Geometry Nodes can do some crazy stuff, but the UI; man has the UI gotten so much better.

If you’ve tried Blender in the past but felt it was awkward, give it another shot.

I’ve used it on and off over the years; ever since 2004/2005 or so.

Firebug was amazing for web development back in the days when it was just IE, Firefox & Safari.

I recently built a couple of sites (for a sim racing community) and one of my users mentioned a Firefox bug. I fixed the issue but then realized I need to be more aware of Gecko specific rendering issues. I decided to use Firefox for a week on my iPhone (yes I know, still technically Safari) and my desktop, and I forgot how much I like it.

I also don’t love the choices Chrome has been making recently.

Firefox’s market share is so low lately when compared to Safari and Chrome that it honestly feels like the battle is already lost.

I share this perspective. I’m often told that I’m smart, but I’m really just normal I guess.

The more people I meet, the more I realize there’s a bunch of knowledge out there I have zero clue about and I realize it’s not about being smart or dumb; we just all have different strengths.

I watched this a while ago and it was pretty eye opening for me. https://youtube.com/watch?v=KW64FiB0ITg

It seems like many of the “users” in this virtual world are kids. This makes sense to me as they are just “playing with dad’s VR thing while he’s at work” or something like that, they ain’t switching accounts or anything. There are a few adults in there, but yeah… watch the video; it’s rough.

Agreed, this can be so zen.

Watching YouTube videos of people making things in machine shops. It switches my brain off and just lets me focus on the work happening on screen. It’s so rewarding to see the process and the finished product.

See:

• Abom79
• Clickspring
• Cutting Edge Engineering Australia
• Make it Extreme
• bigstackD Casting

I’m not here to argue & you’ve got some good points. I am defending no one; this isn’t a situation where I’m in the “hail corporate” camp.

The minute Plex started taking money back in 2012, anyone who thought Plex was still creating this product+service out of the goodness of their hearts has been missing the point. The writing has been on the wall for 10+ years.

I understand what you’re saying here, but I want to let you know that it just sounds like “sour grapes”.

It sounds like this provider is allowing something that could put Plex in legal hot water; why would they allow this and potentially jeopardize everything for all Plex users?