flynnguy

Agreed, 3-4 seems to be a sweet spot, 10 seems to be pretty much only for boiling water. 🤣

I've been using Home Assistant for a while now. I do recommend setting up a VLAN that can't communicate with the internet which is where any wifi devices live. However I really like ZigBee and/or Z-Wave devices as they don't require any internet connection.

Lights alone are a game changer. Timers never really worked well for us because we're pretty far north of the equator and sunrises/sunsets have a pretty big swing. I currently have the lights come on 1 hour before sunset so it adjusts to this swing without me having to do anything. Then I have a button on my nightstand that turns off all the lights that aren't night lights.

The downsides are that it can be expensive. You start with a couple of light bulbs, maybe a couple of outlets, next thing you know you are pricing out how much it will cost to change all your switches and trying to figure out if they all have neutral wires or not. You'll start watching youtube videos of people's setups and looking for ways to do more with your smart home. It's a fun hobby but can be a lot of work.

Induction is where it's at if you want electric. It works similar to how a transformer works. The stove makes a magnetic field that your cookware reacts to. The downside is that all your pots and pans need to be magnetic. Fortunately this is easy to test with any magnet (like a fridge magnet even).

You can get single stand alone induction burners for less than $100 if you want to try it out. Some are more powerful than others.

I've been wanting to replace my stove for a while and I still keep going back and forth between gas an induction. I still kind of prefer cooking on gas but there's some controversy about air quality and gas stoves. But I can tell you, if I don't get a gas stove... I'm gonna get an induction one.

Before I got my EV, all my vehicles were manual transmission vehicles except for one truck. That truck's transmission was such a piece of shit and I had to have it rebuilt 2x while I owned it.

EVs have no transmission (well, I've seen some conversions that do but that's a little different). At first I thought it would be like driving an automatic but it's really not.

In an automatic, the transmission starts pushing you forward as soon as you let off the brake. In a manual and EVs, when you take your foot off the brake, nothing happens.

In an automatic, there's not really a good way to decelerate without pressing on the brake. In a manual you can downshift (I know you can kindof downshift in an automatic but it's really not the same) and in an EV you have the regenerative braking.

Accelerating in an EV is just better than anything because it's just smooth acceleration right to wherever speed you are going to. Manuals can be fun to shift but I would say that EVs are better in this regard. Automatics still shift, they just shift for you and will often do it at the wrong times and can sometimes feel jerky if trying to accelerate quickly.

Really I think some people are just hesitant to adopt something new, especially if they feel like it's being forced upon them as some sort of agenda. I think as they drop in price and more people try them, they will like them. Then there's just the issue of range. I think if someone could get a $20-30k car with 300+mi range, it would be super popular.

Oh boy, this article is 20 years old. Still relevant though so go read it if you still aren't sure about Unicode!

I mostly like it, I think there are still a few things that are rough around the edges and there have been some scaling issues with the massive influx of new people (I think mostly to be expected, we'll see how things are going forward)

I think the biggest question is will more people move over? Reddit was what it was because of the people there, not because of the software. If we can develop a similar community here, I see no reason to go back to reddit.