188 karma · joined August 21, 2022
I have a seven year old Volkswagen, not financed. I'm security conscious and made sure to disable all the data collection I could find in the companion app before removing my account, turn off remote access services, dig through the infotainment to turn off what I could, etc.
Last year I requested a Carfax on it, and one of the fields in the request was current mileage. I entered an estimate like 75000 miles. On form submission, that field failed validation with red subtext along the lines of 'this is less than the last reported mileage of 75345, reported <5 or so days prior>'. Checking my odometer and looking at my past few days' trips, that was indeed accurate.
The car hadn't been to a shop or out of my possession in weeks, so I can only assume the telemetry was still dialing home and selling to third parties despite my best efforts to disable it.
Last year I requested a Carfax on it, and one of the fields in the request was current mileage. I entered an estimate like 75000 miles. On form submission, that field failed validation with the red subtext along the lines of 'this is less than the last reported mileage of 75345, reported <5 or so days prior>'. Checking my odometer and looking at my past few days' trips, that was indeed accurate.
The car hadn't been to a shop or out of my possession in weeks, so I can only assume the telemetry was still dialing home and selling to third parties despite my best efforts to disable it.
Anecdotal and not unexpected in the grand scheme, but it still surprised me.
It wasnt a anything special; Cursor could probably make a better one in one shot.
I recall fighting with ffmpeg for a long time trying to fix audio drift in the transcodes, and I think I settled on handbrake-cli (which I think just does ffmpeg itself) because I was getting decent results.
A quick python script around dvcam lets me drop a tape in and type in the label on the tape, and it rewinds, captures the raw tape, transcodes it with ffmpeg, and adds it to a jellyfin library for family to view.
I also have a Sony DHR-1000 DVCAM/MiniDV deck I've been using for all the minidv tapes, but suddenly it started ejecting tapes with an error whenever I insert one. Does anyone know any good communities online that might be able to help me get the deck working again? I'm hoping it's just something that needs adjusting or cleaning, since it worked fine until now (though it is probably close to 30 years old now).