lh7777

> if the system fails to detect any other vehicles for a period of more than about 90 minutes, it assumes that there is a sensor fault, and refuses to operate

I have a current model Sprinter and this behavior is frustrating (thanks for the explanation, by the way, I thought it was a random bug). Cruise will also disengage in heavy rain or snow, with the system saying the sensor is dirty. It wouldn’t be so bad if traditional cruise control would keep working without the active braking assist, etc. but unfortunately it’s all or nothing. I do like the system when it works, which is most of the time, and it’s never done something that felt unsafe.

I haven’t had any problems with the info system. This is my first vehicle with a touchscreen, and I was worried that it’d be a pain to use. But Mercedes provides real buttons for common actions, little trackpads on the steering wheel that can control the system without ever having to touch the screen, Car Play works great, and the built-in nav system is useful for those times I need directions and don’t have a cell signal.

My biggest worry is how these delicate parts will hold up over the years. My 10 year old car has a monochrome dot matrix display that loses a good number of pixels when it gets hot out. Will I really be able to get replacement parts for the Sprinter when the screen or computer start to die in 10-15 years?

The Inflation Reduction Act provides a 30% tax credit for clean energy upgrades, including batteries IIRC.

Another option in Firefox: right clicking and selecting Open in new tab works on most (but not all) links in McMaster.

How about the Columbia? Average discharge is 265,000 cfs, which has been pretty consistent over the past 100+ years.[1] That's approximately 200 million acre feet just flowing into the Pacific every year.

For comparison, the Phoenix metro area uses 2.3 million acre feet of water per year (40% of which is used in agriculture).[2] So a bit over 1% of the Columbia's annual flow.

Another comparison: the Colorado "in its natural state" averaged just 22,500 cfs, less than 10% of the Columbia.[3]

I'm not saying that piping water from Oregon to the southwest is a good idea, but it's not as if we don't have water in the west. It's just a lot further north than most of the population centers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_River#Discharge [2] https://askabiologist.asu.edu/questions/how-much-water-are-w... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River#Discharge

Solidworks is still available to buy as a perpetual license -- pricing starts at $4200 for Standard. It costs $1500/yr for "maintenance", but that's optional if you don't need updates.

I have a $60 SCD-30 CO2 sensor board[0] hooked up to a Raspberry Pi Zero W that serves up air quality data in chart form via Grafana. It’s not as portable as the device in TFA, but is a lot cheaper (at least if you already have a RPi) and you can easily look back at how the levels vary over weeks, months, etc.

By far the biggest source of CO2 in my house is the gas oven — its days are numbered!

[0] https://www.adafruit.com/product/4867

FYI, Haggen has been owned by Albertsons since 2016.

The article mentions a few:

"In the last few years, some US cities made a surprising break with the mobile-exclusionary tradition by legalizing residence in RVs or tiny houses on wheels on residential lots. First Fresno, then Los Angeles and San Jose, and various cities & states now allow mobile Accessory Dwelling Units. Portland allowed one movable home per residential lot in the 2021 Shelter to Housing Continuum zoning reforms, and Oakland created a new residential type, “Vehicular Residential Facilities,” which allows multiple vehicle dwellings on sites with sufficient area."

For all its flaws, this is why I still check the Wirecutter before I buy a lot of things. Although they seem to make their picks in part based on what will get them affiliate revenue, you can be sure someone on the staff has actually picked up the product and used it enough to understand how well it works.

I've also found user reviews on Home Depot to be more helpful than most. I'm not sure what they're doing to combat spam, but it seems to be working.

Is this a common risk? Most subscriptions I can think of are prepaid —- they charge you when service starts. If your card expires or is cancelled, they shut down your account once the paid subscription runs out.

A notable exception is US cell phone plans. I think most people still have postpaid plans and of course the carrier will send you to collections if you don’t pay.

That’s why you have to agree to a credit check, though. I’ve never been subject to a credit check to sign up for a software or streaming service.

Looks like they bought the standalone Office suite, a lifetime license, for about double the price of a year of Office 365. Makes sense if you only need Office on a single PC or Mac (365 can be installed on 5 computers) and store less than 5gb on OneDrive.

I'm no expert here, but was interested in why EUR has always been somewhat close in value to USD instead of being worth a lot more or a lot less, so I tried to look it up. EUR was set 1:1 to a previous unit of account (not a circulating currency) called the European Currency Unit (ECU), which was set 1:1 to an even earlier iteration, the European Unit of Account (EUA). According to Wikipedia, EUA "was defined as 0.888671 grams of gold, or one US dollar."[1] This was in 1962 when the US was on the gold standard. USD and ECU/EUA began drifting apart starting in 1971 when we abandoned the gold standard. So I guess you could say that the original intent was for dollar parity, but that decision was pretty far removed from the creation of the euro over 30 years later.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Unit_of_Account

I don't know about Calculator, but Weather for iPad is coming: https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/6/23156804/apple-weather-app...

I use Tree Style Tab -- it's actually one of the main reasons I use Firefox -- and this does make me a bit nervous. TST and its competitor Sidebery are both Firefox "Recommended Extensions"[1], which receive extra scrutiny from Firefox staff. I'd like to think that these extensions are as trustworthy as the browser itself, but the Firefox article doesn't go into great detail about how (and how frequently) they review these extensions.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recommended-extensions-...

Also, the slug is "harbringer-of-doom.html".

One of my favorite things about my 2020 13" MBP (Intel) is that it has USB-C ports on both sides, so it's a bit disappointing that Apple decided not to carry that feature on to the smaller M1 Macbooks. The 14" M1 seems like a big hit to portability just to get a few extra ports.

On a related note, I've been using Catalog Choice[1] for years to unsubscribe from unwanted catalogs (which for me is all of them). It's free and I find it's quicker and easier than figuring out how each company's opt-out process works.

[1] https://www.catalogchoice.org/

Not the OP, but I've been using St. Brendan's Isle[1] for about a year and it's been great. I've also heard good things about My RV Mail[2]. Both are in Florida, I think mostly because it's a popular state for full-time RVers to establish as their domicile -- no income tax, low vehicle licensing fees, etc. I looked at bigger name services like Anytime Mailbox and Earthclass Mail, but found a lot of complaints about reliability, hidden fees, etc. in the reviews. Many of these services contract with local businesses (like convenience stores and independent shipping shops) to actually receive your mail, so your experience could be great or terrible depending on the address you choose. St. Brendan's Isle and My RV Mail both handle all mail in-house.

[1] https://www.sbimailservice.com/ [2] https://myrvmail.com/

Also interesting: employee email addresses are @mmm.com rather than @3m.com.

> I hope something like a radiator-heat-pump can be made soon.

These exist, but are quite rare in the U.S. Check out air-to-water heat pumps from Sanden[1] and Chiltrix[2]. I seriously considered this for my new house (still in planning stages), but at double the cost of an air-to-water heat pump system it didn't make the cut. If they were more common, the cost would come down, but I think it's a chicken/egg thing at this point.

Of course, water-to-water (geothermal) heat pumps have been in the States for decades, and if I recall there are still federal tax credits available for them, but they're even more expensive and probably only make sense in very cold climates.

[1] https://www.smallplanetsupply.com/sanco2-for-combi-systems [2] https://www.chiltrix.com/air-to-water/

Good point, although ideally the house would be wired to make it easy to connect that battery to just the gas appliances so that other stuff (lights, fans, refrigerator, etc.) wouldn't drain it much sooner.

Personally, I'd rather have the generator if I had the space, but this would be a good option for people in townhouses and condos.

You can power all those gas appliances with a reasonably-sized generator, though. It's also possible to run a heat pump on a generator, but you'd need a much bigger generator and a soft-start for the heat pump to limit starting current.

I'd like to know this too -- have had my eye on the Bolt for some time.

The 2022 Bolt base price is $31k and it is no longer eligible for federal tax credits. In my state, EVs are partially exempt from state sales tax, but that just means the total price is something like $32k including tax (instead of $33.5k).

If Build Back Better passed, the Bolt would be eligible for a $12.5k federal credit, so I'd be looking at $19.5k. But that bill is stalled and the Bolt isn't even available to buy new right now -- GM halted manufacturing until at least February due to a battery defect.

It looks like a few states offer tax rebates of $3-5k, so that might get you close to $11k if you could get the dealer to knock a few thousand off MSRP, but I have no idea if that's realistic (and again, this assumes BBB or something similar passes).

When did Apple start disallowing local backups? I'll admit I haven't tried recently -- there's no data worth backing up on my iPhone anyway -- but it definitely worked just fine a few years ago. Apple's "Back up iPhone" support page[1] agrees with me.

[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/back-up-iphone-iph3ec...

I have a mailbox at an independent mail & package storefront in my neighborhood. I just use their address and my box number, e.g. "123 Main St. #111" and have never had an issue with financial institutions, etc. accepting it. They receive my UPS, FedEx, and USPS packages as well.

> But people wanting 5" phones are apparently in a minority.

Let alone 4" phones! I'm still happy with my original SE, but the nuisances are starting to add up. I really prefer TouchID to FaceID and still use my headphone jack, so there's nothing in Apple's current lineup for me.

Fingers crossed that the rumors are right about the return of TouchID and the rumors are wrong about the mini being discontinued. If they finally dump Lightning in favor of USB-C, that'd solve my headphone jack dilemma as I could just use USB-C headphones on all devices. I'm not optimistic that all of this will come together before Apple discontinues support of the original SE, though.

The 2016 SE has a retina display and runs the latest version of iOS just fine. It's only a little taller but quite a bit thinner than the original iPhone. You can still buy used ones in excellent shape for well under $200. I'm not sure what I'm going to do when iOS stops supporting them -- maybe next year?

This is frustrating, but it doesn't bother me too much on the iPhone -- I can just not use iCloud and periodically back up my phone locally. I don't really need to sync anything but photos because I don't create or edit documents on my phone.

On the other hand, the iPad is a very capable device for content creation, but I couldn't find a reliable way to sync files that doesn't leave them readable to Apple or another party. That'd probably be OK if I could use an iPad as my only computer, but I can't (or won't) today.

Even for online bill pay, checks are still very much a thing. Payments to big financial institutions, like credit card and mortgage payments, usually go electronically and are more or less instant. But not everyone is set up to receive electronic payments -- when I pay my property taxes or dentist using online bill pay, my bank just prints out and mails them a paper check, and it takes a week for them to receive it!

Definitely not a dumb question. The newest Sonos speakers are Airplay 2 compatible, but mine are older and don't support it. You're right that I could've bought one new Sonos speaker to enable Airplay 2 for my whole system, but I'd always have to group that new speaker with older speaker(s) to use Airplay.

I could replace all my old Sonos gear with the new versions to solve that problem, but that's a pretty expensive proposition. The Sonos One and Zipp aren't that different in price ($200 vs $190), but the Zipp really competes with the $400 Sonos Move portable. And the Sonos Port (connects Sonos directly to a traditional amp) is ridiculously priced at $450, although I suppose I could just use the Airport Express if I'm not going to use the Sonos software.

The real reason, though, is that I don't want voice control and you can't get Sonos speakers that support Airplay 2 but don't have voice control. The Zipp also supports Bluetooth and line-in, so they're more flexible.

Edit: forgot that the Sonos Move also support Bluetooth (but that's their only device that does).