I have cleared my own check engine lights for long enough that I usually don’t worry when I see it come on, unless it is flashing.

With a cheap Bluetooth OBD reader and your phone in a mount, in addition to clearing codes you can do fun things like add gauges and graphs of values you are curious about.

Something as serious as a misfire can also cause the check engine light to flash.

Why yes, I did once lose a whole-ass cylinder in a 4-cylinder, manual transmission car. While a couple hours from home! It broke a freaking exhaust valve while we were just cruising along, and the light started flashing immediately with a code for cylinder X misfire.

Funny enough, other than the loss of power it drove alright while in motion, including on the highway. It would immediately stall if left to idle at a stop light, though. I think I ended up using the hand brake to hold still while keeping my foot on the gas to keep the revs up. Fun.

I totally see it, and I am totally here for it.

Remember that M365 stuff works in a browser too!

I am not going to argue that some people – both creative and technical – don’t have a need for the native apps. If your line of work standardized on a Microsoft product, fair enough.

If you are not one of those people though (and you have a choice, of course) Teams & Outlook work great as webpages, and they have web versions of the rest of the office suite which I assume work fine for occasional work. I’ll usually just try LibreOffice with the file anyway and it works fine.

Yeah, and I think it’s a symptom of a cultural problem where people think prosperity means essentially not having to do anything. The ideal is to sit on your ass and consume, while never having to create.

But when you don’t do anything for yourself and have AI or hired help do it so that you can go back to scrolling the dopamine treadmill, you eventually don’t know how to do it even if you wanted to. Losing knowledge, skills, and attention span means getting more stupid, kinda by definition.

This negative feedback loop is a form of conditioning, and it is not in our best interests. It is in the interests of advertisers, psychological manipulators, tech barons, and others who are generally the worst.

In my case, the more I have consciously decided to take care of my own shit – in various aspects of life – the better I have felt. It’s not the one secret to a fulfilling life, but it’s an important one. And yes damn it, I sometimes use dashes.

That post is like some precision engineered engagement bait. There are multiple axes of conflict that ensnare people in the mood to argue or share their opinions.

MY man!

First, I appreciate that your comment is even longer than mine AND came with the multimedia.

I totally get what you mean about it being an occasion to listen to music with the old equipment. I had at least one portable CD player with no anti-skip. So not only can I feel some of that experience just through nostalgia, but then I start thinking about nerdy little kid me getting a player with anti-skip. It had a clear window on the lid, so I could see how the disc spun at 2x speed for while when starting a song or causing skips. I started to understand how it was filling a buffer and must have had a bit of extra RAM in there. And now middle aged me monitors and controls engine RPM all the time in my automatic car, lol.

On listening to MP3s, I see no issue there, but I have always been more of a videophile and less of an audiophile. However, I have also transitioned away from locally stored music, to just streaming from my Jellyfin server. Thanks to that practically eliminating audio size concerns, I just use FLACs of everything.

As high tech as that sounds, the server capacity also helps me discover music in the old-fashioned & natural way rather than algorithmically. When I realize I am missing some song I want, I will add as much of that band’s entire discography as I have available. Then it’s just a question of whether I listen to albums or random songs. Any songs that noticeably stroke my neurons the right way gets added to my single playlist of bangers, for when I don’t want random or albums.

Finally, a manual transmission midsize sedan can still be had in a few non-BMW forms. I have actually been researching current fun-transmission new cars even though I don’t plan to buy anything any time soon. Most of them will be performance oriented models that recommend premium, but most seem to be able to run regular these days with just reduced max hp. So just going off memory for now:

Civic Si - This might be your best bet. High fuel economy, great 6-speed, well equipped, well priced. I think it’s in the Car & Driver top 10, with a 10/10 score, alongside the Type R which is like $20K more.

Mazda3 hatchback - ok it’s not a sedan, but for some reason you can get a specific premium trim level of the hatchback with a really good 6-speed. It’s also a FWD 2.5L that recommends regular unleaded.

Elantra N: 6-speed manual and 8-speed DCT available. Seems like an extremely fun performance bargain. Lots of tech and adjustability, including fancy LSD.

WRX: 6-speed AND full time AWD. I had one long ago and loved it. It isn’t regarded as being quite as aggressive and refined as the Si and the N these days I think, but it’s definitely a great all around vehicle and you aren’t stuck with FWD if that matters to you.

Even living in the US (but being on Lemmy and therefore knowing computers and hating advertising) getting stuck watching cable TV at a relative’s house can be a real “boring dystopia” experience.

It can be genuinely disturbing when you realize the majority of the ads you’ve seen were for ONLY medication and gambling.

I feel at home in this photo. My beard has turned 1% more gray this blessed night.

The key differences I have come from the fact that I am drawn to the “chief engineer turned goose farmer” future even more than the “greybeard recluse inventor” one. I

get to use a Debian machine at work all day anyway, plus of course the home PC runs it. With KDE there is nothing that feels old about it unless I check when the kernel was released.

My car isn’t THAT old but it’s on its way. I drive an almost 15 year old mazda3, which we have owned for all of those years. I just did my biggest-yet DIY maintenance/repair when I had to replace some disintegrated-yet-seized brake hoses in addition to pads and rotors and flushing the fluid. In my driveway, no garage. I got a bunch of new wrenches and vise grips!

The mazda is an automatic since we originally bought it for my wife. But it was right after the company debuted the Skyactiv stuff. Among other things like great fuel efficiency, that means the transmission locks up the torque converter as often as possible. And it has manual shift mode. So when you’re in gear holding some mid-range RPM, you do still feel that direct powertrain connection between engine and wheels.

Part of me is casually keeping tabs on the “fun” new car models out there that still offer a manual transmission or DCT. But another part of me is constantly noting to self how I already have a nearly perfect old familiar car that is fun and practical for the whole family. It has low mileage for the age and a good maintenance history. And it is $FREE versus $30,000+.

Aside from the car difference, I have cast off a bunch of little devices and accessories thanks to my conscious efforts to be less connected and more about experiencing life at my natural pace. I no longer wear a watch, ever, even though I definitely have the chunky leather wallet. Also no glowing visible clocks in the bedroom or family room. And no big stereo because 95% of my music listening is via headphones at work or working outside in my yard.

Even if we assume your opinion/conclusion is true, the fault for that lies with the government and society at large, or maybe just capitalism in general. It is not an individual issue when so many people live in areas that have been designed (often for corrupt/malicious reasons) around individual vehicle use.

I’d say that for individuals the risk is real and we should all try to be prepared for emergencies the best we can. Access to a vehicle is a prerequisite for having an income for many folks though. Other options don’t exist, and non-ownership vehicle options are typically more expensive (taxi/uber/lyft) or drag another person into the arrangement.

However, if someone went to a phone store with a stock graphene on display and anything else next to it, which one do you think they’ll choose?

Given the past couple years I’d like to think the fraction to choose graphene would be multiple times what it would have been 5-10 years ago. But not close to a majority.

“How do we have our safety, and how do we balance privacy?”

Spoken like a true sales/con artist. I can almost hear the brand guidelines poking through… Always mention safety before privacy, always treat safety as a given and privacy as the buffer zone in which to find compromise.

The compromise is how far each town chooses to go above security tier 0: emergencies with immediate threat to life or property.

• tier 0 is defined as covering 100% of law enforcement requests of all agencies with jurisdiction in the covered area.

I love this poster.

Unfortunately I think it was just as relevant well before the AI craze of the past few years. Plenty of shitty humans were happy to create psychologically manipulative algorithms that care only about engagement.

Yeah it’s less like something new and more like “Thank you, ancient me, for deciding it was always a good policy to go heavy on the RAM.”

Even if generated images originally could be traced to the training data, I think that maybe just maybe the shady gigacorps would have some incentive to remove or obfuscate the copyright & IP violation paper trail from their trillion-dollar toys.

Oooh excuse me, b- but did your apt just brush up against my pacman?

Oh no, I will be sure to keep an eye out for these scary vandals invading my peaceful town over these next few days!

I mean, you never know when a passionate young person needs a “thumbs up” to brighten their day and boost their confidence.

And in case any of them want to step to me, I can threaten them with all the old power tools I have in my house that they could learn to use.

Today is the first day for our school district. It’s weird to start on a Thursday, but at least the kids get a quick first weekend.

I took note of this story because now is exactly the time of year I would expect to see these stories. There have been months of summer vacation in which some number of these perv glasses will make their way into the hands of minors. So we get a spike early in the school year.

I keep thinking we need an overhaul where volunteering to be a public servant at a high enough level also means volunteering to surrender all your assets and be barred from owning anything significant for life. You get a stipend that you can spend on food, hobbies, travel, and entertainment, but that’s it. You get housing and transportation paid for (or maybe you can own your residence and car) but no businesses, no stocks, etc. I guess you get a pension or salary for life or something.

People have demonstrated that they generally cannot be trusted to balance governmental power with conflicts of interest. Sure some people can, but ordinary voters picking from candidates filtered for “actively seeks power” have a crappy track record. Here’s hoping politicians like Mamdani can teach the voters a re things and start to turn that around.

I think it’s fairly easy to imagine what that would be like, given the limited examples you can see with a VR headset with pass-through. It could be pretty sweet for people to have the option of a digital overlay on reality that’s under their own control.

What’s missing are the extremely powerful but also extremely miniaturized and efficient hardware (imagine just constant inside-out tracking of some kind with the storage to remember the 3D layout of basically everywhere you go, but also with 12-24 hour battery life and not generating a noticeable amount of heat with a tiny surface area), and the open technologies and/or lack of enshittification. Who is going to sell such a device but won’t stuff it with ads, surveillance, and paywalls?

The closest we’ve seen is Apple’s headset that was still just a high end VR headset with passthrough and was thousands of dollars while still being locked down.