They should flash when they are first turned on, so you can tell that they turned on. That helps diagnose connection issues versus power issues. After that, though, darkness please.

For me, the worst part of setting up some new distro or service is when it’s done and everything works. Then it just… Sits there. Working. Usually at some task I don’t need very often. Very anticlimactic and boring. Then I have to find some other new thing to try, which is why my HTPC has been through like 4 distros in the past year.

I’m with you in some cases. Who you take money from is not the same as who you give money or support to, necessarily. I think the worry in this case is that it’s a surveillance company.

Why pre-wipe? This feels like washing your dishes before putting them in the dishwasher.

In theory I guess it provides better security in some ways, but certainly not all over giving you hardware and a VPN. So there’s that. But yeah, it sucks.

SyncThing has been great for me. I tried NextCloud and OwnCloud first, granted years ago, and they were not great. So I’ve been using SyncThing at least 5 years now.

I’m trying out something mildly nutty by putting .steam in /home/steam, then making user-neon, and symlinking so that I can try kde without reinstalling steam games. If I succeed I might try it with other files.

I just switched my gaming PC to Linux yesterday. Well, switch is strong, I still have Windows in case I need to go back.

It’s come a long way, though. I started using Linux desktop around 2000, and it was not a fun experience. I tried again in 2019 with a System76 laptop, and it’s been just fine. My home theater/gaming PC was the last holdout.

So far, it works great. Steam Link works, my games all seem to work, RetroArch is going strong. The only downside is Oculus support doesn’t seem to exist at all, so I might need to keep my Windows drive a bit longer just for VR.

It’s a bit of both! Certain commands to the car can be done locally via Bluetooth OR via Tesla servers. The tricky bit is that status always comes from the server. If you are on a VPN that is blocked (like I use NordVPN and it is often blocked) then the app can’t get status and as long as it can’t get status it may not even try a local command. It’s unclear to me under what circumstances it does local vs cloud commands, and it may have to do with a Bluetooth LE connection that you can’t really control.

When you don’t have service, or you’re on VPN, it may be worthwhile to try disabling and reenabling Bluetooth. I have had success with this before. If you’re using android, it seems like the widget also uses Bluetooth, so you could try adding the widget to your home screen and using that. You can also try setting the Tesla app to not be power controlled, so it never gets closed.

Either way, there’s a definite engineering problem here that feels like it should be fixed by Tesla. But I can at least confirm that, even in situations with zero connectivity, you should be able to perform basic commands like unlock and open trunk without data service.

Robert Heinlein. His works were all over the place, and it would be a mistake to assume that he believed in something just because he wrote it in a fiction novel, so on that front I think he gets a fair amount of undeserved heat. He was pushing the limits of progressivism for his time, tossing out and seemingly defending everything on all sides from fascism to anarchy to direct democracy.

If we discount his fiction, though, since it can be hard to tell from that what he actually believed, then he still falls pretty short by modern standards. A homophobe, almost certainly racist, and although he was practically a feminist by the standards of his time I would have to admit that he’s pretty misogynistic by our standards.

I got in to Dilbert Young, too. I don’t know why it appealed to me exactly, but I started reading his comic strips around 8 or so, and even got some compilation books. I also read some of his non-comic books… They were largely hippy woowoo bullshit, but still good reads. Then he came out with God’s Debris which I thought was genuinely interesting.

So I don’t think he was always this way, or maybe he hid it better. To teenage me, at least, he seemed pretty logical and fairly progressive. A bit of a hippie at times, a bit of a look at times, fairly anti-corporate and pro-little guy, overall his writing made him seem like a decent person. Maybe some vaguely problematic takes here and there, but nothing all that bad.

It was like some combination of success and wealth and Twitter access broke his mind. Or maybe it was always there and I just didn’t recognize it and I’m blinded by nostalgia. It was just a wild rollercoaster ride watching him melt down.

Doesn’t the truth still remain through that it’s not an unlimited resource, it’s absolutely crucial for modern life, but also we use large quantities of it on absolutely mundane bullshit?

So many things are unnecessarily wrapped in plastic. We use bubble wrap in situations where paper would be a perfectly fine buffer for shipping. We use plastic bags when paper and reusable bags work perfectly well.

I get so frustrated about it not even because I’m scared of the environmental impact of all this plastic floating around, although that does suck, but because plastic is currently absolutely crucial for modern medicine. One day maybe we’ll find alternatives but until then I think a rational society would be preserving the limited life-saving miracle material for uses that aren’t as basic as “use it to take home groceries, then throw it away.”

I thought I was pretty left til I started browsing Lemmy and watching all the pro-Russia communists arguing with the pro-China communists arguing with the anti-Russia and anti-China communists…

It’s unnecessarily annoying to set up, as the other user pointed out. But it can be set up by itself using https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/calibre-web docker, and used standalone. The only trick is needing an empty database.

I got it because it’s fun to drive, because I hate cars but have to have one, I figure even if it’s not much better for the planet it’s at least better for my health and my family’s health to spend less time at gas stations and breathing exhaust, and because I was finally at a point in my life I could afford an expensive car.

I didn’t realize that I was making a public political decision that would make everyone hate me. It’s weird the way some pickup trucks just decide to go fucking nuts around me. It’s weird that my mother is in a constant state of fear that my car will suddenly come to life, drive itself off a cliff, and then catch fire. It’s weird that random people will be like “It’s not actually better for the planet.”

Seconded. PopOS doesn’t get enough love. For a drop-in desktop it’s pretty great. I totally get why other distros have some weirdness around closed source and binaries and things. However, the average person just coming from Windows doesn’t care, so just make it easy to install Steam and whatever else they want without making them go through extra steps.