[Rant] Tech Whine Like a baby thread

Three out of my first four cars were all stick shifts, and so many of the skills I developed behind the wheel there to improve MPG are still relevant now that I'm driving a hybrid. People behind me frequently (appear to) complain at my slower starts and the way I will just lift and coast when coming up to lights/going up exit ramps to decelerate instead of waiting until I'm almost at the end and then stomping on the brake because they want to get/keep their car going the speed limit for as long as possible. I ignore them, though, because those people who have to blaze around me in order to screech to a halt at the upcoming stop light (for a net gain of one car length) are also the same people who will complain their EV doesn't get the advertised range, and also people who end up paying 25% more on car maintenance. Not me. I like to have more control over where my money goes.

tl:dr; Momentum is a sunk cost. The more of it you conserve, the less additional energy you will need to spend.

--Patrick
 
I grew up in the Iran gasoline crisis, so I’ve heard of hypermiling. I’m not quite the “shut your engine off while driving” type, but I will definitely optimize any process which affects my wallet if it can do so in my favor without making my conscience unhappy.

—Patrick
 
I grew up in the Iran gasoline crisis, so I’ve heard of hypermiling. I’m not quite the “shut your engine off while driving” type, but I will definitely optimize any process which affects my wallet if it can do so in my favor without making my conscience unhappy.

—Patrick
Though I also remember the gas crisis, I learned about hypermiling on Mythbusters
 

GasBandit

Staff member
I grew up in the Iran gasoline crisis, so I’ve heard of hypermiling. I’m not quite the “shut your engine off while driving” type, but I will definitely optimize any process which affects my wallet if it can do so in my favor without making my conscience unhappy.

—Patrick
My dad used to like to shut off the engine coming down the mountain passes, until I convinced him he was probably just transferring costs from gasoline to brake pads, and maybe he'd be better off just engine braking in 4th or something.
 
I learned about hypermiling on Mythbusters
I learned about it from reading (in NatGeo World magazine, I think?) about some guy who was obsessed with maximizing MPG. Beyond hypermiling, he also had a project car with insulation wrapped around the engine, a chain-driven transmission, etc. I remember serendipitously reading a number of years later that the car was rediscovered and thinking, “Hey! I remember reading about that car as a kid!”

—Patrick
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Today I did an experimental drive down to the Bucee's in Katy, TX and back to see how my adjusted driving method held up. The results were much better.

1679781369184.png


The battery is 65kWh, and the vehicle's listed range is 248 miles on one charge. These numbers would get me about 240, which is MUCH better than what I was getting with OPM on.

Also I was pleased to find that, unlike the heater, the A/C has a negligible power draw on the system. I was kind of worried about that as I bought in the winter, and as I think I mentioned before, running the heater cranks that "Climate settings" red circle up to 20-30%.

Normally I don't charge to 100%, only the night before a big drive. The time it'll take to charge back to 80% is just under 5 hours on a level 2 charger (the home charger is 11kw max, supposedly the Bolt can take up to 50 kw at public charging stations).

All in all I'm pretty happy with this thing now, aside from a few little nitpicks. For example, I wish they'd have given me a dash option for faux-analog speedometer instead of being limited to a digital readout, but I'm adapting slowly. I'd also like to be able to customize that bottom ribbon - that navigation icon is only for OnStar navigation, which I don't subscribe to - but to use my android auto nav I have to hit home, then make selections from the main menu. It'd be nice to be able to just drop Waze, teams, discord, etc on the taskbar and ditch the onstar nav icon.
 
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GasBandit

Staff member
I take it the Bolt has a resistive heater? From what I understand EVs with heat pumps don’t suffer quite as badly in cold weather
It has what it calls a "battery conditioner" which both heats it when it is cold and cools it when it's hot. The energy expended doing so is tracked separately in the energy monitoring page of the UI, and it is a notable amount, but it still saves you WAY more headache than running with a frozen or hot battery (both are bad).

Also the recommendation is to keep the Bolt plugged in to the charger at home even when not charging (you can set a max level to charge to, I generally keep mine at 80% except the night before a big drive), because then it will use your AC outlet power to run its battery conditioner.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
My internet apparently conked out sometime last night after I went to bed, and hasn't come back up yet. Rebooting my modem doesn't help. Kind of irritating, as that keeps my plex server offline too >_<
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Soooo I've been rebuilding my music library in Plex, and playing it on Plexamp on my phone while I drive. I've had quite a few out-of-town trips for work this month, and it's really helped pass the time.

Uhhhhh so guess who just hit his 6 gig mobile data warning with 12 days left on the billing cycle? Maybe all those FLAC albums weren't such a good idea! :Leyla:

On the one hand, Google Fi means I can keep streaming another 9 gigs and not pay any extra, and even after that, I just get throttled.

But it means that I'm on the hook for the full $65 this month, because I'm on the flexible plan because that USUALLY is cheaper because, until now, I barely ever used much cellular data >_< (typically my bill is like $30)
 
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Have you considered storing your music directly on the phone? You can get phones with 1TB storage now, y'know.

--Patrick
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Have you considered storing your music directly on the phone? You can get phones with 1TB storage now, y'know.

--Patrick
Much of the point of the excercise was to have a centrally located, curated, streamable library. It'd be a pain in the ass to do that on my phone.

SUPPOSEDLY it's supposed to transcode down to 320kbit if you're on cellular data, but it doesn't seem to be doing that. I might have figured out another method to get it to play nice.

When you tell it to randomly play from your entire library, it builds a queue (of all 1500+ songs!) at that moment and feeds it to the phone and starts playing. I can set it to precache songs in the queue, with separate numbers for cellular and wifi data. So I've set it to the maximum (40 songs) on wifi, and only the next song on cellular data. Then I hit play when I'm about to leave the house in the morning... then pause, then head out to the car. It won't solve the "long trip" problem, but it should at least make my in-town work commutes not chew up data.
 
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As some of you may know, I claim to know more than the average computer user. More than the average computer tech, even. As such, even though I am not technically (heh) a member of the infrastructure team at my work, I am frequently tapped to help out with things. A task came down from corporate on Tue and was assigned to me to erase and set up and configure 13 laptops for staff use with a deadline of Fri (because of “big changes” (whatever that means) coming April 1). Thing is, I was off Tue and Wed, and didn’t find out about this until about 6pm Thu.
I managed to finish the whole thing by 11am Fri but COME ON, GUYS.

—Patrick
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Soooo I've been rebuilding my music library in Plex, and playing it on Plexamp on my phone while I drive. I've had quite a few out-of-town trips for work this month, and it's really helped pass the time.

Uhhhhh so guess who just hit his 6 gig mobile data warning with 12 days left on the billing cycle? Maybe all those FLAC albums weren't such a good idea! :Leyla:

On the one hand, Google Fi means I can keep streaming another 9 gigs and not pay any extra, and even after that, I just get throttled.

But it means that I'm on the hook for the full $65 this month, because I'm on the flexible plan because that USUALLY is cheaper because, until now, I barely ever used much cellular data >_< (typically my bill is like $30)
When you tell it to randomly play from your entire library, it builds a queue (of all 1500+ songs!) at that moment and feeds it to the phone and starts playing. I can set it to precache songs in the queue, with separate numbers for cellular and wifi data. So I've set it to the maximum (40 songs) on wifi, and only the next song on cellular data. Then I hit play when I'm about to leave the house in the morning... then pause, then head out to the car. It won't solve the "long trip" problem, but it should at least make my in-town work commutes not chew up data.
Well apparently that worked, because my data usage for the month was only 1.35 gigs. That makes my cellular bill for the month only about $43. So I was feeling pretty good about my fix.

Yesterday was my first day of the new billing cycle. I went out to eat, and the phone chose the ONE two hour window where I was not on wi-fi to download the next major android update. The first day of the new billing cycle and I've already used up more mobile data than the entire previous month. Basically android just flicked me in the nose and took $15 out of my wallet because I had the audacity to be off my home wifi for 2 hours this weekend.

I know it's still less expensive than most people pay for cell service, but it's still galling.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Is there no "Don't do this on cellular" toggle?

--Patrick
Not that I am seeing. Google isn't interested in android being the "we give you full control, unlike apple" thing any more. They want their garden just as walled, and you will adjust your behavior to fit them. Or pay 15 bucks.
 
Not that I am seeing. Google isn't interested in android being the "we give you full control, unlike apple" thing any more. They want their garden just as walled, and you will adjust your behavior to fit them. Or pay 15 bucks.
Weird samsung asks before downloading....
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Weird samsung asks before downloading....
This one used to too. Samsung's usually a bit behind on revisions because they have to rejigger everything into their special samsung-specific crapware-laden flavor of Android, but a Pixel phone gets the vanilla unadulterated updates immediately. I expect you'll be in the same boat before too long, unless Samsung decides to counter that specifically.
 
This one used to too. Samsung's usually a bit behind on revisions because they have to rejigger everything into their special samsung-specific crapware-laden flavor of Android, but a Pixel phone gets the vanilla unadulterated updates immediately. I expect you'll be in the same boat before too long, unless Samsung decides to counter that specifically.
i have unlimited data, but i feel ya.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
i have unlimited data, but i feel ya.
It's just another annoyance in a long line of reduced functionality. I'm pretty sure the battery usage statistics are lying to me now, too. They always used to obfuscate battery use by system processes, and now it won't even show them at all. Swiping an app off the task switcher used to reliably close it. No longer, now you really do have to go all the way into settings to force it to stop. Wouldn't surprise me if the next update or two just flat out takes away the ability to force stop apps entirely.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
I've been unable to see any images hosted on imgur all day today. I thought it was a server problem, but clearly other people CAN see them (I see them commenting and nobody's raising hell about not seeing images). Attempting to go to the URL of an image in its own window generates an HTTP Error 429. It has affected every device and every browser in my house... but if I take my phone off WiFi and use mobile data, I can suddenly see the images again. So it looks like Imgur has now blacklisted my IP from their images, too.

At first I thought this was some kind of escalation of my ban, but it turns out this has been happening to other people for weeks.

Imgur isn't answering my e-mails to their support line. Which I guess isn't that surprising.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Now try tethering your desktop through your mobile, I guess?

--Patrick
Half the reason I got Google Fi was its early adoption of wifi calling - because the cell service where I am is utter balls.

I've also tried going through my VPN, no luck there - there's a lot of guesstimation that Imgur's panic-blocking IP ranges as their servers are getting hammered, with people scraping off their images from their accounts in advance of the Great NSFW Purge tomorrow.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Also it's the 15th, which is the drop dead day for nsfw content, and all my nsfw content is still on imgur... guess it takes time to go through the 9 septamajillion images looking for boobs even if you are AI.
 
Also it's the 15th, which is the drop dead day for nsfw content, and all my nsfw content is still on imgur... guess it takes time to go through the 9 septamajillion images looking for boobs even if you are AI.
... Has five fingers, ergo, not porn. I mean, that's what Ai seems to think more often than not.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
I was under the impression that they weren't removing anything, just shadow-banning it, removing it from all the searches, etc.

--Patrick
Nope. They have said they're taking the usage policies that apply to the social gallery side and applying it to all hosted media, and deleting anything that doesn't conform - whether submitted to the gallery or not. This is why reddit shat itself, a lot of redditors were still using imgur as nsfw hotlinkable hosting.
 
I'd also seen that you would still be able to log into your Imgur account, and still be able to view all your uploaded content, it would just be that nobody else would be able to view it, which was what was going to break all the external reddit stuff, etc.

--Patrick
 
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