Yeah, I’m holding onto hope for the electric VW bus when that comes out. Fingers crossed it kicks off a wave of electric vans

The flex was a cool car, never had one but I remember trying to convince my parents to get one when they traded in the family minivan during Cash for Clunkers (also I love minivans in general, there’s a good chance I’ll be a minivan guy someday )

That also touches on something that drives me nuts about a lot of pickup trucks- the short beds that so many of them have these days. It feels like it misses the point of a truck- being able to haul big shit around. If I can’t fit a mattress, couch, or refrigerator comfortably in the bed, what’s the point? My dad’s truck is a single cab with a 7ft bed and I can’t imagine having a smaller bed, it’s going to be a sad day when that truck finally dies (although it’s a '93 with less than 100k miles on it, so at this rate it may well outlive me)

Even though we had the truck, we got just as much use out of the van hauling mattresses and such for exactly the reason you gave- it was covered. My wife and I actually borrowed their van once for a road trip (different van, after they traded it in my parents realized they missed having a van and got another) because we could fit a full sized air mattress in the back and camp out in the car with some room to spare for a cooler and our bags.

Yeah, I kind of ended up here accidentally while scrolling through someone else’s comment history. Thought about not commenting since this thread is a few weeks old, but I figured I have some thoughts and Lemmy can always use more activity in general.

Also I do want to say that while there are some different concerns with driving a pickup truck vs other types of vehicles, 99% of the time it’s not all that different than driving any other car, it’s just that for that 1% of the time it really pays to know what you’re doing and take a little extra care.

And for all my words, my personal biggest concern with people driving trucks (rented or otherwise) is people not securing their loads properly, which is totally independent of weather. If I could add one thing to school curriculums it would be how to use a ratchet strap.

Think of a pickup truck, you have a big engine and a cab up front, and then not much in the back except a big empty bed.

Most pickup trucks are rear wheel drive, so there’s not much weight over those drive wheels. That can create some traction issues in rain, snow, loose sand, mud, etc. if you’re not careful, it’s not hard to spin your tires when starting from a stop, or oversteer hydroplane. Having some weight in the bed-cargo, sandbags, etc. can help a lot with that. They also have a higher center of gravity than most smaller vehicles so they’re a higher rollover risk when that kind of thing happens.

Most people who drive trucks regularly are used to this in their vehicles and know how to compensate for it. It also helps to have some weight in the bed over those rear wheels- cargo, sandbags, etc. Or depending on what sort of 4wd system it has (if equipped, I’m not sure if home Depot rentals are 4wd or not) you may also be able to put it in 4wd to help, some are able to be driven on dry pavement in 4wd provided you stay under a certain speed, others should really only be put into 4wd if you’re driving through significant mud or snow or similar conditions or you risk significant wear and damage to various vehicle component, or at least compromising some of the handling characteristics or increased fuel usage.

It’s something most people should be able to learn and adapt to pretty quickly, but frankly I’ve seen how people drive, and I don’t exactly blame the lawyers and bean counters for hedging their bets there. You can’t know for certain what that person’s driving experience is like, but since they need to rent a truck, it’s probably a pretty safe bet that they don’t regularly drive one, and may not know how to drive one safely in inclement weather.

One of the cars I learned how to drive in was my dad’s rwd ranger. It’s kind of shitty in any kind of weather, and it has occasionally struggled to get up some sheepish gravel driveways without some weight in the bed, even though other cars had absolutely no issues making it.

Is not potato man, is secret police. Such is life.

If you take up the project and decide to make my dream your reality, all I ask is that you share the code

I haven’t done a deep dive into how I’m going to make it happen, my programming is rusty as all hell, and I’ve never tinkered too much with a pie or this kind of project

But on its surface it seems like an easy enough problem, just need to turn on the appropriate lights when an emulator starts.

Easier said than done I’m sure, I also suspect you’d probably need some kind of led controller or maybe an Arduino or something between the pie and the lights, I don’t think the 3.3v it puts out from its GPIO pins would be enough for some light strips.

If someone had a lot of money to throw at the project, I imagine you could also do a pretty cool setup with smart lights like Philips Hue that would be pretty clean and require minimal tinkering with the physical electronics side of things, but you’d probably be throwing as much or more at it in bulbs as the rest of the project put together.

Yeah, I like to bring it up and put the idea out into the world whenever I get an opportunity because part of me is kind of hoping that maybe someone out there will do the hard work and write the code and share it online so someday when I have the space for it all I have to do is wire up the lights

Also when it comes time to fill in the gaps in my collection, I can save some money and still get the same effect because the console doesn’t even have to be in working order, it just has to not be too beat-up looking. I could probably even 3d print some dummy consoles to hold me over (though of course I’d prefer to have actual working consoles if possible)

A dream project for me, when I have the space for it, is to have a set of Ikea kallax shelves with a cubby for each retro console with some LEDs inside hooked up to a retropie emulating those consoles so those cubbies light up when that console is being emulated.

I have a lot of the actual consoles and they’re in working order, but it’s a bit of a pain in the ass to get them hooked up, swap cartridges, etc. sometimes. And I have just enough programming and electronics background that I feel up to the task of trying to make it work, just don’t have the space for a big display shelf at the moment.

I can appreciate the experience of playing on the actual hardware and the cases where it’s superior, but for me the experience emulating them is 99% as good with significantly less effort. Totally cool if others prioritize things differently though.

I think this is kind of a thing for a lot of stereoscopic 3d technology.

I could play the virtual boy, 3ds, watch 3d movies, etc. for hours without issue, and other people can’t take it at all.

I don’t know what factors play into that, maybe it’s genetic, maybe there’s some kind of skill/technique/habits about how you focus your eyes, or how often you blink, maybe it’s just luck of the draw that your pupil distance is just right or wrong. Maybe it comes down to something ridiculous like how many hours you spent trying to make sense of Magic Eye books when you were a kid.

(and no inputing the number corresponding to the letters like on an old phone didn’t work either)

Just to be sure, are you trying to enter the numbers like T9 texting by hitting 222 to type a C, so you’d be entering “* # * # 222 44 33 222 55 444 66 # * # *”

Or are you entering like you’re dialing JG Wentworth at 877-CASHNOW, where the C would just be a single 2? So what you’d want to enter is “* # * # 2 4 3 2 5 4 6 # * # *”

And have you tried the other method?

A bit more context about what/why you’re trying to do may also help us to help you figure it out.

I don’t think any common phone system is set up to accept actual text input, so I doubt you’re supposed to be sending the actual characters “CHECKIN”

I just entered “##2432546##” into my phone’s stock dialer, and I got a pop-up saying that check in was successful, so I suspect that’s what you’re , but I’m not entirely sure what that means.

Also when I copy/pasted “##CHECKIN##” into my dialer it automatically converted the letters into 2432546

From a little googling, it looks like its a way of forcing your phone to check for updates, but most of the sites I could find referencing it were a decade or so old, so there’s a chance that may not be used as much anymore, or it’s possibly something that varies from one manufacturer, carrier, whether your phone is locked to a carrier or unlocked, software version, etc. to another.

43wpm, 95% accuracy, Gboard Dvorak no swipe

Fingers are a bit cold from just walking the dog, and I’m tired from getting off a 12 hour shift, have a feeling I could do better under different circumstances.

Haven’t tested myself on a real keyboard in a long time, but once upon a time I could hit well north of 100wpm pretty consistently if I tried. When I tested myself in preparation for my current job about 5 years ago I think I usually hovered somewhere around 80-90 (911 dispatch, my agency requires at least 60 to pass the aptitude test, I wasn’t worried about passing but I was curious where I was at since I hadn’t been typing much at the time)

Your comment was true, but not exactly relevant since we were talking about airtag-like devices that don’t have connectivity besides Bluetooth, saying that a device like them exists that has GPS built-in is kind of moot since they don’t have any additional ways to send that location info.

The thing you linked would fall under the walkie-talkie-like device I described.

Depending on where you are and where you hike, you may have a very different idea of what a large forest looks like than some people. Unless you’ve really traveled to go camping and hiking, or just happen to live in a very heavily forested area, what you think of as a large forest patch and what others think of may be in entirely different leagues. And just being in the woods is only part of the issue, geography has a bigger effect than all of the trees.

I’m from the Philly area, we have a pretty big wooded park, something like 2000 acres, that is entirely within the city. It’s also in a valley, so when you’re in the park there’s usually steep hills or even cliffs all around you. Cell service gets spotty in a lot of the park, even though there is probably no place in the park where you’re more than about a mile or so from major roads and cell towers and all the other stuff you expect to find in a major city, the signal just can’t get through all the dirt and rock surrounding you.

It gets even worse when you get up into the mountains, driving along a winding mountain road you can see your signal going bonkers bouncing between full bars and no bars based on what mountain is in the way of a tower at any given moment. And towers and everything else are just more spread out in general, one area I go pretty regularly to you’re often driving a good half hour or so between anything you’d really recognize as being a town, without much but woods and mountains in-between.

By contrast, I’ve also done some hiking in the NJ pine barrens, some of the sections I’ve been to absolutely dwarf that park in Philly I mentioned, and are generally more remote, but they’re mostly pretty flat, trees aren’t great for cell signals but they’re a hell of a lot better than mountains, so I can usually get pretty deep into the woods before my signal starts failing me.

I’ve also been to Quetico Provincial Park in Canada, which dwarfs pretty much any other forest I’ve personally ever been to, just an absolutely massive tract of natural area, and relatively flat at that, but it’s just so big and remote that there is really no cell service to speak of.

GPS is one-way though, your device isn’t sending anything up to the satellites, it’s just looking for where they are.

You still need a way to get a signal from the collar to your phone or computer or whatever device you’re using to track it. Things like airtags and tiles use Bluetooth to talk to nearby phones that relay it onto the Internet. If no one is close enough with a phone they’re basically useless, and if the cell service is spotty, the location can’t be updated until the phone has a signal, and depending on the area, that could be a while which means your dog could be miles from where they were when a phone last picked up the signal from their collar.

If the collar itself is hooked up to the cell network, then you don’t have to rely on someone being nearby with a phone to pick up the location, but it is still reliant on having cell service, which may not be a given if you’re out hiking in the mountains for example.

Other than that, you would have to use other satellite services, or rely on having a direct radio connection to the collar, sort of like a walkie talkie except carrying the GPS data instead of voice.

I don’t know the ins and outs of how they work, and I’m sure there’s some catch and they overall skeeve me out a bit, but I have seen a few companies that offer very limited free service, something like 25 mb/month. I don’t know how much data a gps tracker would use but that might be doable

I’m sure those companies do everything in their power to get you to pay more than nothing, automatically change your plan if you go over, deceptive emails, etc. so definitely something to be careful about. I also wouldn’t have a whole lot of confidence in those companies sticking around for very long.

And while not free, there are some pretty affordable prepaid plans and such that may be competitive or slightly cheaper than what a regular subscription might cost.

Depending on where you live, it may be possible to forego the call plan entirely, in a dense urban area with lots of open public WiFi networks, you may be able to work it entirely off of WiFi.

If you wanted to get real weird with it and jump through the loopholes to get licensed, there might also be some options using ham radio stuff like APRS, though that’s probably going to leave your dogs location exposed to any ham who happens to be playing with their radios in your area.

Now I’m not saying that any of that is necessarily a good idea or worth the hassle of setting any of that up, I’m just spitballing some ideas for what someone could potentially do if they did want to homebrew such a thing.

You cannot and should not separate politics from controversy. Politics is the means through which we address our controversies, and the controversies impact how our political systems operate.

If we didn’t have controversy, there would be no need for politics, we’d all simply agree and do what needs to be done without needing to discuss anything, appoint leaders, make decisions, etc.

If you’re going to get this caught up in worrying about exact definitions, you need to take a step back and accept that colloquial/informal usage of words often differs from their technical definition.

Social issues are hopelessly entangled with politics in the world we live in, it’s basically impossible to discuss one without the other in any real meaningful, practical way. Trying to make that distinction is really a purely theoretical exercise, it’s sort of a “spherical cows in a vacuum” situation, if you try to discuss politics without acknowledging the vast array of social issues that impact them (or vice-versa) you’re left with something too far-removed from reality that it has no real practical applications.

Now that kind of thing can certainly make for some interesting discussions with people who enjoy that kind of thought experiment, but you’re not going to find anyone who’s willing to have that kind of conversation in a space where it’s been made clear that they don’t want to talk about politics.

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