Old guy in the USA. My first car was a sport motorcycle so six speed with clutch and shifter. I have a sedan with an auto trans, but also a 4WD truck with manual. When I learned to drive in my teens automatic transmissions were not as nice as they are now, just three speeds and not very smooth. Now they’re typically six speed and much nicer. I really dislike a manual trans in heavy traffic, quite a chore.

I do 76F in the summer for AC and 68F in the winter for heating. Try to use minimal heating and air and still maintain a comfortable range. Can get expensive if working the system too hard. If it wasn’t a matter of cost I’d leave it on 72F all the time.

Evaporative coolers are great if you live where you can use one, much cheaper to run and they can work pretty good as long as humidity isn’t too high. I had one in a house I lived in before along with a regular AC system. It was a good to have and saved a lot on the electric bill. If it was dry enough out the AC unit was not needed.

Haven’t used a heat pump before and don’t know much about them. If they work as well and cost less to operate that would be a good option, but I wouldn’t use one if it’s a downgrade in performance. Rather pay for the comfort.

Also why the seemingly arbitrary graduations, 24 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds. If it was say 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour, 100 seconds in a minute, seconds would be close to the same amount of time. Same with latitude and longitude, why 360 degrees in a circle with 60 minutes in a degree and 60 seconds in a minute.

In any case digging up fossil fuels is also pretty dirty, and has been known to pollute indigenous people’s drinking water, steal their land, and on occasion pay for private militias and government troops to put down protests.

There isn’t much in industry exempt from that kind of thing, but countries go to war over access to oil. Anything that reduces consumption is good for mankind.

Is LMFP actually available in quantity? Wikipedia suggests not.

I realized that, I put an edit on there to not specify LMFP which has only been used in EVs in a limited fashion. I was confusing NMC which is actually the most common, oops. I changed it to a generic reference.

The problem with sodium ion batteries, apart from lower density, is that they have a shorter lifespan.

I’ve read differing reports on that. But yeah, cycle life is a big deal. In general it’s not great for the common Li-Ion types. LFP has pretty amazing cycle life, about five times greater and rivals the NiMH king. In many cases it’s well worth the additional size and weight, but for things sensitive to it like cars and handheld devices it’s a problem.

Also Sodium Ion (Na-Ion) batteries are currently in production and could be a viable alternative as the technology advances and production ramps up.

Right now Na-Ion batteries rival only the LFP type of Li-Ion battery (lithium-iron-phosphate) having a lower energy density than other Lithium chemistries. LFP is used commonly in utility power storage for its much greater safety and longevity, but it carries about 20% less power for size and weight compared to other lithium chemistries.

At present the favored battery type for EVs are Lithium types with the highest energy density. Some combine several advantages of the various Li-Ion chemistries having the highest energy density with somewhat greater safety and longevity.

Na-Ion is a new type of battery chemistry with lots of potential for improvement. They use more sustainable materials being cheaper and more abundant. If they could get the Na-Ion battery type within range of presently used Lithium technologies it would be a hugely better solution, a lot cheaper, a lot safer, and much easier on the environment.

CO meter for sure, but a CO2 meter? It’s actually a good idea to have CO alarms in your house if using natural gas powered appliances. However CO2 is only a concern if you’re in a hermetically sealed environment like a submarine or space ship. I suppose it could be useful to check proper ventilation in the home, but normally you can just open a window.

Anyway the Earth has a carbon cycle, in other words it filters natural CO2 emissions through environmental processes. The problem is the amount added by industry is more than the natural carbon cycle can process. So levels are steadily increasing.

When we talk about zero carbon footprint we mean sources from industry like driving gasoline powered cars, generation of electricity, and production of consumer goods. A good amount already comes from natural processes like volcanos and erosion so we don’t actually need a zero carbon footprint, just need it low enough to avoid overwhelming the natural cycle.

At a personal level it would be just about impossible to have a zero carbon footprint. If you had a solar and wind powered home off-grid and used it to charge an electric car you could be well below average. However any consumer goods you use put carbon in the air to produce them. Even if you went full native you’d still be putting carbon in the air burning wood and candles.

Stardew Valley: I really enjoy the game and play it on PC. It saves the game only at end of turn which is a game day. If I’m not able to finish my turn I have to put the computer to sleep instead of shut it down. Also if I make a mistake which is easy to do I have to start from the last save which can lose a good amount of progress and sometimes random pickups. Though it’s my only peeve with the game so it’s still doing better than most.

I never thought Reddit was addictive. I actually spend more time on Lemmy in a day than I did on Reddit. My browsing habits changed though. Reddit is so big I only looked at a few niche subreddits. Lemmy being much smaller I view a much wider range of topics. It’s a different and better experience for me.

Lemm.ee best instance, lemmy.world worst instance.

It doesn’t matter how many communities an instance hosts since you can interact with any community on any instance (barring any defederation). Lemm.ee’s strength is in being a fast, reliable instance with the best admin.

Haha, most of my opinions are unpopular. Some posted in this in thread I agree with.

Not going to read the article so in response to the comment, electric bicycles put people in a strange place in terms of safety. You’ve got the speeds of a motorcycle without the ability to flow with traffic. In the presence of high density traffic I’d say an e-bike is more dangerous than a motorcycle.

I’ve been a motorcyclist most of my life and I can say you have to be super vigilant about situational awareness and ready to evade at all times. People driving in cars are not programmed to notice motorcycles. They’re always looking for cars and sometimes don’t register other hazards. It shouldn’t be that way, but nothing is going to change that as long as human beings are driving.

My recommendation to anyone who wants to use an e-bike for regular transportation is just go to a motorcycle, it’s going to be much safer in traffic. There’s some really nice electric motorcycles now. For e-bike users you have to be extra careful. Drivers don’t see bicyclists anyway and you’re going a lot faster most of the time. A head injury at 10 mph can be fatal.

Do each app need to manually integrate with another app to be considered federated or is any app using ActivityPub automatically integrated to your app?

ActivityPub provides the framework, but a platform also has to be designed to support another platform. It’s not automatic.

Can always tell when a show is 4:3 aspect. Recently I’ve noticed some modern TV shows adopting the theater aspects of flat (1.85:1) or scope (2.4:1) which I think is pretty cool. The last episode of Strange New Worlds I watched was in scope, that’s some high end filming.

I think sci-fi has it right with that, I mean you’d only get up out of your chair or whatever receptacle to perform bodily functions. Most people think everyone would turn into fat blobs, but I think that’s not the case. There’s this one sci-fi where I think they got it right, most people became emaciated due to a failure to eat and get any exercise.

Oh and I’ll take the blue pill, VR all the way, reality blows. Though some might say reality is already virtual. It’s an interesting hypothesis, sure would explain a lot.

Dogs were instrumental in early human survival and they’ve benefited for it. There’s almost a billion dogs in the world, but only a quarter million wolves. So in a natural selective sense that was a good move wolves made by becoming companions with humans.

Behavior has been bred into dogs going way back to the beginning. Fetch is one of those behaviors. I recently watched a documentary that showed the unique interaction of dogs with humans. Dogs are really good at understanding human body language. For example you can point at something and a dog will cue on it. No other animals reliably respond to that gesture, even chimpanzees which are genetically closest to us.

uBlock Origin forever and always.

Haha, most important program on my computer. My browser is a uBO support system.

I’ve ripped a good number of blu-rays to network storage. If you’re looking for older, less popular stuff it’s the best option. And older releases are usually just a few bucks. The new stuff I torrent because I can usually find a decent rip, but for stuff I want to put in my library a rip from optical disk is the best, but not free of course. You can even do it for free, public libraries often have a good collection of older releases on optical disk.

I can have trouble sleeping and have to battle fatigue at times. Not long ago I crunched the bumper of my car into the side of the garage because I was too mentally fatigued to drive. Didn’t do a lot of damage, scratched the bumper and did minor damage to the the wall, but something I would have never done if I was properly rested and alert. Mental fatigue is a strange thing, it can make you fail in performing simple tasks you do routinely.

I’ve been using “Subscribed” and “Top Day” for a while. Works well for me. If I used “All” there would be a large number of communities I’d need to block. Easier to just join the ones you want to see.