jdeibele

Also switched recently to one-pedal driving, which means that the car slows down if you lift off the accelerator pedal. You almost never need to use the brake pedal. It's not the same feeling as driving a stick, where you're using all 4 limbs, but it makes me feel connected in a similar way.

I would be interested in the statistics on rear-end collisions with one-pedal driving as opposed to normal cars, because the car doesn't coast while somebody is looking at their phone. It just feels different.

The bigger benefit is that some charging stations will stop charging once your battery is "full", wait a bit, then start charging an idle rate. The app can notify you about this or you can be texted or both since the station knows who you are.

All EVs have a charging curve and typically the last 80% or 90% to full goes much more slowly than starting from 0% or 20%. In one case, ChargePoint decided that my Bolt EUV was charging too slowly and started charging me the idle rate without notifying me. Since the idle rate was $.25/minute, I ended up getting charged $1.50 or something like that. I didn't think the idle rate was unfair but I was literally waiting in a coffee shop for the car to get as charged as much as possible.

We hadn't said anything about flood insurance. So it seemed like either the disclosure scared the other buyer or they found riskfactor.com or something like that.

Beautiful house, beautiful view. Also a quarter mile below a earthen dam 250 feet high and a few feet above a creek that was raging in 1996, several years before this house was built.

I seem to remember there not being any fees the first time I signed up, which was over two years ago but they were there 18 months ago. I’m assuming they didn’t charge them at the start to make the price more attractive.

We were going to buy a house overlooking a creek but were told that an offer had just been accepted. A few days later, we got a call that for some strange reason the sale had fallen through. My wife and I started researching and ran across https://floodfactor.com. It said that there was a 97% chance of a foot or more of water in the house in the next 15 years, incurring more than $100,000 of damage.

I wasn't familiar with floodfactor.com but they were linked from realtor.com I'm a little cynical about that - hey, yes, your house flooded but you should have checked that link and it's not your realtor's fault - but it's a sign that their information should be taken seriously.

Now they do wildfire and "heat" risks as well as flooding. They might introduce something like water supply risk and other things.

It's not clear how a damaged casting could even be repaired.

In an ideal world, cars would be driving themselves and not crashing into one another, of course.

I guess there was a $300 provision for charitable deductions enacted in 2020 that they are trying to make permanent and larger. Web site wasn't working for me but Google's cache did: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WdabFa...

Setting a known location (like home) means that you can charge at 12A because you can tell the car there's nothing else on the circuit. Otherwise, it will charge at 8A to avoid overloading the circuit.

The Bolt charges about 3.5 miles per hour on 110V, which is 35 miles of range or more overnight, which is fine for this situation.

Somebody in the neighborhood has a PHEV Subaru. They park on the wrong side of the street (can be ticketed for this in Portland) so they can run their charging cable out a window and plug it into the car. It is almost certainly another 110V.

The local utility offers $25 off if you let them control your smart thermostat during the winter and summer (not spring or fall) seasons. You have to participate in at least half of the events to qualify.

The typical recommendation for EV batteries is to charge them to 80% unless you need more. There are times where energy prices have gone negative because utilities have too much electricity from solar or wind power.

It doesn't seem impossible to do some combination of "let us fill you to 100% if we have too much energy" or "please go plug in your EV" along with time-of-day rates. 240V can draw up to 32A for the Bolts, other cars up to 50A (on a dedicated 60A circuit) and is easily multiples of 110V, which might not be worth really worrying about it.

There are solar panels on this house and there'll be ones on the next one, too.

I say "had been" because 189 lines of garbage entries are in iCloud Keychain and I can't get them out. They look like this:

Title,URL,Username,Password,Notes,OTPAuth www.amazon.com (MEoEEPgAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEwFAYIKoZIhvcNAwcECJeL6XzO81KJBCA02+DHVDASQ5Y3hOVrhGjCxV9Mv9qSEOc7uod7iKS3Rw==),https://www.amazon.com/,MEoEEPgAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEwFAYIKoZI...,, (repeat for various sites 188 times)

I've tried deleting them multiple times but they always come back. I've filed Feedback with Apple but no acknowledgement of the problem. There's no hint as to whether the problem is with one of my devices or with iCloud.

I've switched over to BitWarden entirely. At some point, I guess I try deleting the keychain and starting over but I really am concerned about using something that allows an error like this.

In the event of a major power line being damaged, there would still be power for some amount of time coming from the substations.

Somebody I talked with last night was vehement about how irresponsible moving to EVs is, that the grid simply isn't up to it in her opinion. It's hard to get new power lines approved but distributing energy storage seems like it would help.

After that, experienced EV drivers tell me that using all that torque eats tires. One said he had to replace the factory tires after 20,000 miles, even with rotating them twice.

What makes this a hard sell for manufacturers: no badges on the outside saying this is an M class or performance or whatever. Maybe they have to add outside screens on the car to show the extra-cost options currently active.

What most people like about Lyft or Uber: known price, known route, and backup drivers automatically located if there's an issue with the first driver.

That peace of mind seems worth paying for.

Replacing the Dropbox client with Maestral https://maestral.app meant a much happier system with a lighter application running. Also no prompts for the SD card to be uploaded.

When Dropbox limited an account to 3 devices, it made sense to use Google Drive more.

Google kept changing the naming and functionality of its client. The final blow, though, is the way that they insist on showing a screen of files instead of the folders that were carefully created.

A lot of people don't use folders very much or at all and that's definitely the trend. But it means that all the work somebody does in organizing their files is thrown out the window.

Google Drive seems like it's more and more forcing people into having a Google Account even if they use a hotmail or yahoo email address.

iCloud with a family subscription means that a family of 5 can have all of their devices and files backed up for $10/month. BackBlaze for laptops and desktops is $7/month these days so $10/month seems like a reasonable deal.

Dropbox decided that the business world was their market and that's reasonable.

For individuals, there still seems to be a market for file serving with no ads, good security and easy access for people regardless of their email domain. Say sharing photos from a family trip or the soccer games your kid played in.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...

Entering random dates is not a great idea because I seem to recall one site (Yahoo!, maybe?) insisting on me entering the correct birthday and I had no idea what I put in.

Intuitively it seems like more would be better so that in the case of that engine failing you could use the other engines to push up and maybe light another engine.

Of course, if there's two engines and one fails, it's going to tilt. Same with 3, though to a lesser degree. 4 engines lessen it even more, etc. etc.

Or maybe they can detect a bad center engine on descent (it doesn't light or flame is detectably not the right) and then go to outer engines. Or drop it in the ocean. Hope there aren't people on that one.

I'm sure there are similar things for FireFox or Chromium browsers but Hush seems Safari-only.

Some of the incentives may be limited if you have too much income.

I was able to get the latest Ecobee thermostat for $90 instead of the list price of $250.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I started reading about how 3rd party thermostats can't talk to multi-stage furnaces or air handlers except in very blunt increments. Maybe as blunt as on or off. Each manufacturer has their own, undocumented protocol for doing fine adjustments. I tried running the fan all the time (now I do 10 minutes every hour) and it was quite expensive for that month. Anyway, I'm hesitating about putting in the nice Ecobee thermostat because it could conceivably cost quite a bit more in electricity.

I tried doing the chat to cancel. I said multiple times that we wanted to cancel and the person (presumably a person following a script, although they certainly seemed robotic) just kept ignoring that. Eventually I said I'm cancelling, if you charge us, I'll charge it back and took a screenshot of that.

When they charged me, I charged it back. No need for the screenshot, which was mildly disappointing because this was one time where I felt I had proof that I tried to cancel.

We'll never subscribe to The Economist again. If you make it this difficult to leave, better not to start.

1) Adjustable playback speed. Probably other apps have this but my default is 1.75X So an hour podcast is cut down to more like 40 minutes.

2) Smart Speed. Takes out silences.

3) Skip intros, outros, etc. on a per-podcast basis.

Another great feature is skipping ahead 30 seconds for two clicks (fast forward) on my AirPods Pro.

I do find that I have to listen on AirPods Pro because the speed of the conversations is too fast for regular speakers, meaning I have to focus a fair amount on the podcast. Maybe other people don't have that problem.

It took a while but eventually we went our separate ways.

https://www.portland.gov/police/divisions/photo-enforcement makes it sound like a business can pay the fine on behalf of the driver without having to reveal who the driver was.

The Arizona laws seem similar. There was a man who got 37 tickets, all while wearing a gorilla mask: https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix-traffic/2...

In Oregon, all photos had to be reviewed by law enforcement until less than a year ago. https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2022/03/10/legislators-scrap...

Mobile speed cameras still have to be manned by a uniformed police officer. https://www.portland.gov/transportation/vision-zero/speed-ca... I have a bit of sympathy for that since I can imagine a person being threatened to remove the evidence.

If people would aim more for that kind of infrastructure - really slow but "too cheap to meter" - it would be more widespread. No need for the expensive upgrades to the electrical system, no need for cabinets with cooling systems, no internet, no computers at all.

You could put all the EV slots in one part of an apartment or shopping center parking lot, like now. It'd be nice if there was a proportional circuit breaker, so that if every EV was charging they'd get half charge instead of tripping the breaker.

I really should have her write out a few key passwords and put them in an envelope for me to keep.

It used to be that my first priority would be to go into the terminal and try to talk to somebody. I figured they were the experts. From what I've read, the staff use an antiquated system that takes you from one airport to another, then they can try to get you from that city to where you want to go. That's why there's so much tapping of keys and why it takes so long.

It's better to present them with a route that you've found on Google Flights or similar. The Southwest first flight out was supposed to be yesterday evening, the day after Christmas. In our case, the only thing we could find before Christmas was getting us from SJC to Seattle via Phoenix on Alaska. We ended up renting a car and driving home to Portland. Things got bad around Eugene - I stopped counting after 40 wrecked cars and semis - and got worse as you got closer to Portland.

What I installed instead (myself) was an Ecobee 3+. I've been very happy with it. I have it set to run the fans 10 minutes of every hour to move air around a little bit. With a previous dumb thermostat, using the fan more often caused a noticeable spike in the electric bill. We live in a 1914 house with multiple levels and minimal air returns so there tends to be variations in temperature (top hot in summer, cool in winter; basement coldest in summer even with vents closed but exposed pipes are full of cold air, etc.) that aren't easily fixable.

Ecobee has started selling security cameras, which I haven't looked into. I really do like the idea of having a best-of-breed thermostat and I hope that Amazon doesn't buy them. I'm a little surprised that they haven't.

Absolutely not, because being put in the remedial class was "tracking" so there could be no separating kids by ability. My daughter was sent to the library about every other day because she got her work done the first day and it was supposed to take two or three.

I am sympathetic to the idea that when a student is a little behind at one point doesn't mean that they always will be. Maybe things are going on at home, maybe they don't have a home, etc.

But our local school system insists on treating them all the same, regardless of their abilities.

My advice to my kids was to take any AP class that you could. It would be harder but you'd be in a class where the other students wanted to learn and almost always the teacher wanted to teach.