Not really, they’ve all had telemetry for probably 20 years.

The cars with satellite radio are even worse (which isn’t saying much, since they put modems in cars about 20 years ago)

Jeep/Chrysler have always been banned from my life.

Garbage. Worse than any other American car company. They even managed to screw up cars made for them by Mitsubishi.

Which is why adding Tailscale to this KVM is a killer solution

Excellent, thanks for the link!

I like your thoughts on runtime and recharge time.

That four hour limit really outs things into perspective for someone just starting out. Most people don’t understand the constraints at first.

I believe mailbox.org is all renewable, and I’m pretty sure it’s solar.

But you need a massive battery bank to run stuff, batteries have a limited lifespan (especially the crap used in a UPS).

It’s not cheap, you generally want to overbuild everything, and there are ongoing costs (hardware failures, batteries, etc).

But it can be done. Just have to do the math for your max power draw, then how much uptime you need determines the size of your battery bank and number of panels (which is influenced by how much sun you get/how consistent it is). You need enough panels to run your system and charge batteries, given the limitations of sun availability.

This, so much.

What my parents grew up with - always cold and hungry. Not starving, just hungry. And I can go to the store and get almost anything - like fruits my parents never saw/knew of before they were adults.

My grandparents waited something like 2 years to get a fridge - that’s the wait list at the time. Even when I was a kid stuff wasn’t always immediately available, and they’d sell you the floor model for full price if you were lucky, otherwise you waited a week to a month for an appliance that I can buy by the dozen today.

I grew up being told “you have no idea how easy you have it” (not in a mean way, just my parents explaining how different things were just a few decades ago), and they were right. Now I’m surprised almost every day at the difference since even 1970, let alone early 20th century and farther back.

The world is getting worse?

Yea, methinks you need some history. Go watch Edwardian Farm on BBC or Amazon. We have it so much easier than our forbears did.

Are there problems? Of course? Humans gonna human, and in that way things haven’t changed since, well, forever. “We only get 80 years on the planet” (to quote a Brian Setzer tune), so we all get a limited time to learn to be better people.

But there are a lot of people who continually strive to make their local circle better - which is really about all of us can actually do - work on our own little corner, and hopefully have influence on others nearby.

Wow, install Tailscale or Wireguard and you’ve got a killer remote support solution.

Weird people would downvote this. I usually don’t care (still don’t, lol) but someone downvoted the idea of installing a mesh VPN on this KVM, yet it’s already been done.

True.

But one thing you control, the other you don’t.

It’s why you hire someone else to do it, like a network consultancy.

I think it’s one of those “technically” things, that isn’t useful.

Someone from The Americas is American, technically. That’s how language works.

But I’d venture* that 97.3% of people mean United States when they say “Americans”, or better, it’s what people mean 97.3% of the time. The only time I’ve seen people bring it up is when they’re from a South American country.

So I’d say context and scale of detail/granularity influence the meaning in the moment.

*Totally Made Up Stats

Los Angeles is not in North America

I don’t see a problem with that.

Plus, by tectonic plates, isn’t it America, since N/C/S America are on the same plate, right? (I don’t trust my memory of school from decades ago).

Well, they’re in South America

Not just Europe, everywhere. Look at all the breaches, every day.

Until those breaches cost companies serious money, they won’t do anything about it.

Both

I dunno, laptops have gotten tremendously better - can run most of a day without power anymore. I certainly have charged my phone 3x as much as my laptop. And I already carry an external 10k Wh battery for my phone.

OP actually raises a good point about power consumption that I hadn’t considered in a while.

NeoBackup only works if rooted, unfortunately. Well, unfortunately users don’t have full control over iOS and Android without having to sidestep stuff.

Laptops are arguably potentially far more secure. Most mobile apps collect every bit of data they can (and have internet access for no reason) , and mobile devices have standardized ways of enabling it - how often other apps are launched, what other apps are installed, etc, etc. PC OS’s don’t have that stuff built in, and apps rarely have that kind of code. Plus they’re just easier to firewall (as much of a nuisance as it is to do. Hell, GCM was built to do most of this stuff.

Paid $150 for a Pixel 5. Pixel 7 is $200.

I don’t waste money on new phones, or new cars.

*syntax

(Just an FYI, I’m guessing autoincorrect got you).

Great notes too, good point about the device name vs device ID.