We had to make an emergency trip to Quebec in January 2022 because of health issues with the in-laws. Father-in-law advised to get the stuff rated to -20°F, but it wasn’t available where we live and I’d gotten the car serviced before we hit the road and they filled the washer fluid with what they had, I’m guessing 0°F. I bought some -20°F in Buffalo but didn’t have room to add any. The temperature was rapidly dropping as we headed farther north and as we neared Watertown, NY the fluid wasn’t spraying well. I tried adding what I could of the -20°F but by the time we stopped east of Montreal that night it was -45°F and the whole system had frozen solid. Tried using a hairdryer at the hotel, but we couldn’t melt it until we got it in the in-laws garage. Without fluid running the wipers can mean just smearing crud across your windshield, making it impossible to see.

Now I always make sure whenever we leave Quebec that I have a bottle of -49°F rated fluid and fill the reservoir at home before heading up in the winter. If there’s a lot of warmer-rated fluid in the car I’ll actually siphon it out.

Efficiency

How did you end up working for him a second time?

A friend lived in a similar small town and if I went down to see him Applebee’s was the only place with TVs where we could watch sports. We were so happy when they got a Buffalo Wild Wings, even if they’re overpriced and I can go to better, local sports bars at my house, it’s a dramatic upgrade for his town.

I’d need to see what comparable x86 processors and graphics are to the M4, but yeah, this seems like it could be one of the first Macs in a while to be really competitive on price. It doesn’t happen often but it does happen. Fifteen years ago, a couple years after Macintosh went to Intel, I bought a Mac Pro. I had a hard time comparing prices at first, but once I finally realized I needed to be looking at workstations instead of desktops the Mac Pro actually came out to be about $300 less than identically spec’d workstations from Dell and HP. That was about the price of a full retail license on Windows Vista Ultimate (or later Windows 7 Ultimate). With Boot Camp and feeling like I could find Windows on sale for less it actually seemed to make the most sense with the added benefit of access to both Windows and OS X. It was frankly the best Windows machine I’ve ever used. No bloat, and all the drivers worked.

Eh, sometimes getting kids started like this can spark their interest.

I had always expected the Mac mini to be about the size of the current Apple TV and was surprised by how much larger they were when I finally saw one in person. I don’t know if it really makes much difference, but I’m glad to see this.

Based on this week I feel like 16 GB of RAM is going to be the standard minimum on all new Macs going forward for at least a couple years, and it’s about time!

I suppose that does depend on what kind of coverages you have, bare minimum liability vs. full coverage, etc. $350/month just for auto still sounds insanely high, though!

I seem to remember many years ago if I was home from school hers was one of the better daytime TV talk shows.

I wasn’t thinking about it in this way, but that makes sense. When I was a teenager I was going to a dermatologist for acne treatment. When I started college for whatever reason I wound up with appointments on Mondays a few times. This was probably around 2005 and while computerized calendars were a thing, mobile calendars were not widespread except with PDAs like Palm Pilot and I wasn’t using them, nor did I use a paper calendar to organize my schedule. In retrospect this was a bad idea with my then-undiagnosed ADHD. Anyway, the doctor’s office had this helpful automated phone reminder system that would call you the day before your appointment so if you needed to cancel/reschedule you could do it enough in advance that there wasn’t a penalty for late cancellation. The only problem was it didn’t take into account the weekends, so if your appointment was on a Monday it would call you on Sunday and if you canceled no one from the office would know until Monday morning and you’d get hit with a late cancellation fee. I think I actually did that 3 times and they sent me a letter saying they were dropping me as a patient. I felt that was unfair because their system should’ve been smart enough to call on Friday, but also I wasn’t really doing the prescribed acne treatments much at that point and I think I was getting old enough it kind of went away on its own around then anyways, so I didn’t mind not paying for the visits and medicine anymore. I’m still annoyed as an adult in my 40s, though, because I think that practice is supposed to have some of the better doctors in the area for skin cancer and I’m not sure if they’d still remember and not let me come if I ever needed treatment or screening for that.

Does PeerTube offer RSS feeds?

Ah yes, the man whose ownership of the Dodgers became a messy part of his divorce as his ex-wife tried to claim shared ownership. It turned into what the L.A. Times called the most expensive divorce in California history.

How does that work for discovery, though?

I wish it said more about the camera sensor; guess I’ll have to look that up separately

Is the cost worth the vehicle? Buying new is expensive, buying used can be risky. Do your research thoroughly and you’ll be able to decide what fits what you NEED (and that answer may easily be a used ICE vehicle instead)

This is one of the rare cases where, at least for right now, leasing a new vehicle may make more sense financially than purchasing outright. For one thing, many more cars are eligible for the $7500 federal tax rebate when leased instead of purchased. For another, used electric vehicles seem to lose their value a lot more than ICE vehicles. This is a combination of newer, better cars being released at lower prices than previous vehicles and consumers being unsure of the capacities of older battery packs. The latter is seeming to be less of an issue than feared based on preliminary data, but we really only have long-term results for a few models. The former is much more volatile from the market, though. Elon Musk single-handedly tanked used car values when he dropped prices on model 3 and Y vehicles, and it happens every time they cut prices, but Tesla is not the only electric manufacturer that’s been cutting prices on new cars. While manufacturers would love to sell for high prices, the reality is they need a larger market to be profitable from economies of scale, so as they reduce costs there’s been a general trend to cut prices too, either by cutting prices on existing models or introducing new, less-expensive models.

All of that is to say, it looks like the leasing companies aren’t factoring in enough depreciation on current leases. A lease is essentially you paying for the depreciation of the car. If you’re paying for a $50,000 car to be worth $35,00 in two years but it actually ends up being worth $25,000 in that time you’ve come out ahead, especially compared to if you bought it and tried to sell it yourself.

That’s a neat solution

I don’t think PCVR works on Linux yet. The gaming support on Linux being driven largely by Valve is removing a lot of the reasons for consumers to use Windows, though. I wonder how long before big corporations push back on this Microsoft spyware, though.

“There’s two problems in the retail industry. The experience for customers sucks. Secondly, it’s very hard to process all of the sales information in real time,” said Vasco Portugal, CEO and co-founder of Sensei.

I’d say the first problem largely revolves around having employees who are overworked and underpaid. Keeping enough staff around that checkout moves quickly and paying them enough that they don’t visibly hate their job can go a long way toward solving that. This is a customer service issue and removing employees is basically never a solution to improve customer service, except perhaps for specific bad employees.

For the second problem, I don’t see how the added data overhead of AI/Machine Learning helps improve processing time. This also doesn’t seem like a real problem to me. Processing transactions from a dozen or so registers simultaneously really shouldn’t be beyond the capabilities of a modern system, or even many old systems. The real issue I’ve seen is a lot of stores don’t seem to have good information on how much inventory is on their shelves, especially when stocking. The other challenge is the delay between someone putting something in their cart and reaching the register. I’m not sure how much of a problem that really is, though; stores can just display an alert if stock is low and if it’s gone from the shelf when someone gets there, too bad. You could put a barcode scanner on people’s carts that wirelessly updates your inventory and lets customers see their running total, but a lot of stores wouldn’t want that because it would probably reduce impulse purchases; it’s a lot easier psychologically for customers to put items back at the shelf than at the register.

This seems like a “solution” using the latest buzzword in search of a problem.

In one sense this could actually be an interesting idea for an in-between device between the somewhat resurgent dumbphone and a smartphone. Still get some of the connectivity but with an E Ink display it would preclude many of the more time sucking aspects of a smartphone. Of course, they didn’t actually make this a phone.

I find it weird this device has a camera, though.