So I don’t have any specific insight to what’s available in the Netherlands

But I kind of feel like maybe you’re explaining what you’re looking for poorly

First some terminology

SIM and e-SIM are basically how your cellular service provider knows that your phone is connected to your account. The phone that has either that physical SIM card inserted, or that e-SIM data gets the calls, texts, data, etc. that are supposed to go to you. Take the SIM card out or change the e-SIM, and that phone no longer gets those calls, texts, and data. Put that same sim or e sim on another phone and it starts getting all those calls texts and data.

VoIP is Voice over Internet protocol, basically sending a phone call over the Internet instead of over phone lines. This might be from a computer, or from something that looks like a landline phone (or maybe even is a regular landline phone with some sort of adapter) or from a cell phone with a VoIP app installed. To use it from a cell phone you’d need to have either a WiFi connection, or a cellular data connection, and to have that cellular data connection you need to have either a sim or e-sim.

I don’t think there’s any VoIP provider that’s set up to just use your phone’s dialer and text app to directly handle calls and texts (though I could be wrong on that, I don’t try to keep up with all of the different types of phone services out there) everything would have to go through their app. If you want to do that, and you’re either ok having no cellular data and all of your calls, texts, and data use would have to go over WiFi, or if you keep paying for a cell plan (and the associated SIM/e-SIM) maybe either just a data plan with no talk/text, or a regular plan and you just don’t use the talk and text parts, then you just need to track down a VoIP provider, sign up for an account, and install their app on your phone.

If you want to transfer your actual phone number from your cell phone to a VoIP account, either to use on your cell phone through that VoIP app, from a computer, or from one of those landline VoIP devices, I don’t think that’s really a thing. If you just want calls to your cell to go to your VoIP phone number as well you’re looking for call forwarding.

You might also be getting tripped up with things like WiFi calling, VoLTE/VoNR (marked by some carriers with terms like “HD Voice”) which are things that are all going to be dependent on a regular cell carrier, not a specific VoIP company, and may depend a bit on their network infrastructure and what features your partic6 phone does or doesn’t support.

Yeah, didn’t mean to imply that you were, just wanted to expand on options for deaf people that are already out there, and point out some of the relative strengths and weaknesses they have compared to text-to-911

This absolutely can be a useful tool for deaf people or others with hearing/speech difficulties.

However, there are already several ways for deaf people to contact 911 without text-to-911

I work in 911 dispatch, probably the most common way I’ve gotten calls from deaf people is through a video really interpreter. The caller is basically on a video call with an interpreter and they relay what’s being said to us. There’s very little delay in communication like there can be when you’re typing back and forth, and usually it works pretty well. There are some situations where it has its issues, if the caller is somewhere dark it can be hard for the interpreter to see what they’re signing, if they don’t have a video-capable device they of course can’t use it at all, and a lot of our deaf callers come from a behavioral health group home place in our county, and some of those callers have a tendency to just kind of walk off-street in the middle of the call, though it’s still kind of useful because the interpreter can at least try to describe what they’re seeing and hearing in the background if the caller didn’t hang up.

Also all 911 centers (in the US at least, I assume it’s probably the same elsewhere in the world) are required to take TTY/TTD calls. The classic example of these is the caller has a device that kind of looks like a typewriter with a little screen and a speaker and microphone they place a phone handset on. They type out their message,the device turns it into a bunch of beeping noises that go out over the phone line like a regular voice call, and the person on the other end’s TTY device (in our case it’s built into our computer phone system) decodes the beeps back into text. Most, if not all cell phones these days also have TTY built into them in the accessibility settings somewhere. There’s some grammar peculiarities because it doesn’t really include punctuation, and some tty users will use ASL gloss, which is a written form of ASL (ASL isn’t totally 1:1 with English, and if you don’t know what you’re looking at ASL gloss reads kind of like that bit from The Office “why waste time say lot word when few word do trick.”) It also allows for hearing or voice carryover, where the caller is able to hear but not speak or vice-versa, so you only need to use TTY for half the conversation and can communicate verbally for the other half. The 2 biggest drawback is that we hear all of these TTY beeps in our headset, and they get pretty annoying really quick, small price to pay though, and generally only one party can be typing at a time, so you have to wait for them to finish before you can reply.

I will say that, at least in my area, TTY is vanishingly rare. In the 6 years I’ve been here, I’d be amazed if we’ve gotten 3 calls from an actual deaf person using TTY, although we did have one mental health patient who used it on his cell phone and used it to just ramble nonsense at us. He had no hearing or speech difficulties, sometimes we were able to get him to talk to us

In either case, if you call from a landline, we get your address just like a regular phone call, with tty from a cell we also get your cellular location like a regular call. Video relay calls from cell phones can get a little funny location wise because of how the call needs to be routed, often it works out that we get a home address they have on file and not their actual current location. With texts the location data often isn’t very good (although we’re implementing some new technologies at my center that improve on it a bit, though it’s still not as reliable as a voice call in some ways)

I posted another comment/rant in this thread with some of my gripes about how people use text to 911 if you haven’t already seen that, and I do want to reiterate that it is a really good option to have available, we can always use more tools in our toolbox, and it can definitely be useful in some circumstances, but it does tend to get misused in some frustrating ways for us.

I work in 911 dispatch, there is an audible groan whenever anyone here gets a text to 911

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that it’s a tool that’s available, there are certain cases where it can be really useful, domestic abuse situations where you’re unable to make a voice call because you’re abuser is in the room or car with you, an active shooter situation where you’re hiding and don’t want to give away your location, people with hearing or speech issues, etc.

That’s almost never what it gets used for.

Most of the time it’s someone calling in some non-emergency. I suspect in their minds it’s probably quicker and more convenient for us to get a text, but it really isn’t. We’re not multitasking and taking other calls at the same time we’re on the text, when we’re on the text, that is what we’re doing, same as if we were on a regular 911 call. And that first text usually is missing some crucial information about what is going on, and it takes a whole lot longer to go back and for asking questions and waiting for an answer by text than if you just made a phone call, if they even reply at all to answer my questions, very often they put their phone in their pocket and never look at it again for the rest of the night. We can’t even call them back because we don’t know if it’s safe for them to speak on the phone, we just have to sit there for 5 minutes waiting for a reply that isn’t coming before we can disconnect.

I’ve also definitely had at least one instance where the caller was definitely texting while driving, and not for anything remotely urgent enough that they couldn’t have found somewhere safe to pull over first.

Agency policies will vary on how texts to be handled, I can only really speak for where I work.

Most calls, even a lot of actual actual emergencies, if my caller is cooperative and knows where they are, and the situation isn’t actively evolving while I’m on the phone, I can handle in about 2 minutes or less, sometimes I can even get it down to less than a minute. I’m going to easily spend twice that on most text conversations, and often I’m going to be tied up on it significantly longer.

Technology also varies a bit from one place to another, but we also don’t get the same kind of location info with a text like we do on a regular phonecall (and even on a call our location data may not always be super accurate or useful) we did recently get some of our systems updated, and we get more information than we did before, but it’s still less reliable than on a phone call.

And we also can’t transfer a text like we can with a voice call, so if you’re texting regarding something going on at your grandma’s house in another state (we get calls like that all the time, where someone tells a friend or relative about something going on, but can’t or won’t call 911 themselves) we have to either A convince you to take a voice call so we can transfer you, or B make a call to them while still texting you, and play middle man relaying questions and answers between you and the other dispatcher, so you’re tying up dispatchers in 2 jurisdictions on your call (it used to be that we weren’t able to make an outgoing call while we were on a text, so we’d have to have 2 dispatchers at our center tied up on these texts, one to message back and forth with you, and another to relay the info to the correct agency by phone. We’re a pretty well-funded county, so I’m sure there’s a lot of dispatch centers still out there where that’s still the case)

I already occasionally get people trying to send us pictures and links with no explanation (pro-tip, we can’t see your pictures or open your links with our current tech, and even if we could opening links would probably be a no-no from a cyber security standpoint)

If at all possible, please just make a voice call, it will be quicker. If you genuinely cannot make a voice call, at least make sure your first text contains the correct location (address, municipality, nearest cross street, apartment number or name of the business if applicable should cover your bases pretty well) and a good description of what is going on. Then please keep your phone with you and try to answer any follow up texts we send you quickly and succinctly.

And again, don’t get me wrong, it really can be an amazing tool when it’s needed, but it’s a massive pain in the ass for us when people use it when it’s not necessary and usually makes just about every part of our job harder and slower, which means slower responses to your emergency.

It’s going to depend a bit on the agency, different places use different systems and have different policies available to them.

Where I work, we used to have Google maps integrated into our CAD (Computer Added Dispatch) so it would sync to the built in map in our CAD. I believe it was some sort of 3rd party plugin, not something the cad developers officially supported, so it was always kind of slow and buggy, and some update that happened a couple years ago totally broke it so we no longer have that.

We do use Google maps through a web browser pretty frequently. We have most of the businesses, parks, schools, cemeteries, etc. loaded into our CAD, but they’re not labeled on the map, and sometimes being able to ask “can you see the Starbucks from where you are” can be kind of useful, and the satellite view is really useful for our more rural areas where they may not be many obvious landmarks and it’s all fields and trees.

Some departments have some stricter internet usage policies and such and may not be able to use Google maps.

Street view has its uses, mostly for narrowing down the exact address. Most of the time it’s not super necessary, we can send police out to the nearest intersection if needed, and they can find “the big house with a red door” or whatever themselves, but if we can narrow down the exact address, sometimes we may have important caution note attached to the address, and of course it can sometimes shave a few minutes off of our response time if our responders don’t have to go hunting for the right house.

One of the times street view came in particular handy for me was one time I had a 3rd party calling about something for a friend. They weren’t sure of the exact address, but they knew the road and some nearby landmarks that had it narrowed down to about 2 or 3 blocks. The caller kept saying that there was a “big yellow walkman” on the front porch, and was too worked up to really elaborate on what she meant by that. I turned to street view and just kind of went down the block looking at porches until I found one that had one of those fluorescent yellow/green “children at play” signs people put in the street that are shaped like a kid walking and it clicked that that was what she meant.

It’s not just youth, it’s people across the entire population that have issues reading maps.

I work in 911 dispatch, obviously a big part of the job is all about location. We spend a lot of our shift looking at maps on our screen trying to figure out where people are so we can send them help.

In training for a couple days, they busted out paper maps of our county and had us locate different intersections, landmarks, etc. our class skewed a bit younger, mostly millennials at the time (this was about 6 years ago) but also some Gen x and boomers. I’d say only about 3 out of the 12 of us were really proficient at all at reading a map.theru wasn’t any particular age bias, really what it seemed to come down to is “who was in boy scouts”

And it’s not a new thing, a lot of people have had a hard time with maps probably since maps were invented. It takes certain kinds of spatial reasoning skills that some people just struggle with. My boomer mom could never read a map, a lot of my grade school years were the days before GPS and half of my class always struggled with it when it came up in history/geography/social studies, it’s been used as a joke in movies for decades. It’s probably gotten somewhat worse since people don’t use paper maps as much anymore, but there’s also a “use it or lose it” aspect, I noticed that my own map and compass skills have degraded a little recently while hiking a new trail with a paper map, there’s probably a few older people who used to be pretty proficient at reading a map but would have a hard time with it since they haven’t had to in over a decade.

Even if it was for batteries, unless we get fusion factors down to something that can fit in a car, power drill, smartphone, etc. batteries are still going to be a big part of the equation.

Sure, you can generate enough juice to power whatever you want, but only as long as it’s plugged in, anything that needs to get detached from the grid is still going to need batteries, and you probably don’t want your car hooked up to a 10 mile long power cord for your commute.

There was one team fairly recently that thought they had developed one that got a lot of press, but it turned out to not be true.

But that was only for that one specific case, it didn’t prove that room temperature superconductors can’t exist in general, there are still other teams working on developing them, and theoretically they could be possible, we just haven’t quite worked out what materials will exhibit superconductivity at room temperature, under what circumstances, and how to make them.

And we have some materials that come pretty damn close, Lanthanum decahydride can exhibit superconductivity at temperatures just a few degrees colder than some home freezers can manage (although at very high pressures)

I don’t really like that they seem to be floating the idea of adding ads to the mix, but as long as this stays a separate part of the service from the on-demand section, I don’t exactly hate it.

I’ll occasionally have parties where we’ll use Pluto or similar services just to have something on. Usually something like the The Asylum channel to have a stream of something going that we’re not really invested in but that we can comment on and go “what the fuck was that‽” once in a while, and kind of do our own little MST3K thing.

And sometimes you just kind of want something on in the background while you’re doing stuff, and I know I’ll sometimes get a little bogged down trying to choose what I want to have on even though I’m not really going to be actively watching it.

I remember once upon a time there were some people who really wanted Netflix to add a “random episode” option, I wasn’t really one of them, but this could kind of fill that niche.

Also, if they curate it right, it could be kind of a cool way to drop new episodes. Say a new episode of a star wars show drops at midnight (or whatever-o’clock) For those who care to watch it immediately as it drops, they just need to be tuned to the star wars channel and it will come on automatically, no having to refresh and hit play. And leading up to the new episode they can do a mini marathon of relevant episodes from other star wars shows and movies that will help you understand what’s going on in the episode, maybe even create some new content summarizing content from the books, comics, and video games, etc. sort of an extended “last time on…” segment for the new episode. I’d also want it to be immediately available on-demand when it drops, but it could be kind of a good way to get yourself back up to speed about what’s going on in the show.

So there are ways this could be a cool addition to the service. Whether they actually use it that way is another matter entirely.

It’s useful, but a lot of places have a central dispatch that covers an entire county, or in some rural areas even a couple different counties. The center I work for covers almost 500 square miles and about 70 different towns, I’ve lived in this county my whole life, I know about half of the towns pretty well, the others not so much, and there’s maybe about 2 or 3 that I’m genuinely not sure if I’ve ever even driven through them, let alone spent any time there, so any familiarity I have with them is only from my job.

My personal familiarity with some areas does come in handy from time to time, but it’s not absolutely necessary in most cases, you pretty quickly learn what questions to ask and how to use the tools that are at your disposal to work around the gaps in your personal knowledge.

I’ve heard of some area where the dispatchers are technically considered LEOs and sometimes end up doing stuff like assisting with searching incoming prisoners and such.

It also kind of highlights another issue with the field, on the federal level we’re classified as clerical staff, basically just basic office staff. Different states, counties, and such may make different classifications, but it’s a bit of a crapshoot. That can have an effect on what kind of benefits we’re entitled to, how much we get paid, when we can retire, etc. There’s a bit of a push to have us reclassified to the same category (I believe it’s called “protective services” or something along those lines) as first responders (I believe the most recent version of that bill was called the 911 SAVES act, not sure what the current status of that is.) One of our little propaganda slogans is that we’re the first first responders. I don’t necessarily think we should be in the same category as cops and firefighters and such, were not on location putting ourselves physically in danger, but the kinds of stress and such from the job are probably more in-line with what they do than what some clerk working in an office at the courthouse experiences, IMO a 3rd category is probably most appropriate, but it’s probably a lot easier to just reclass us as first responders than to creat a whole new classification from scratch.

And depending on where you work, dispatch may be part of the local PD, it may be part of the county sheriff’s department or state police, or it may be part of your county’s department of public safety (that’s the case where I work)

A whole lot in this profession can be summed up as “it varies from one jurisdiction to another” so I can really only speak for where I work.

Some places do much more complicated background check processes than others. Whatever the background check process at my county is, it was pretty streamlined and out-of-sight, out-of-mind for me as an applicant, so I can’t give too much detail on it.

I don’t remember them calling any of my references, though I was able to get someone who already worked here to put in a good word for me so that may have given me a leg-up on that. There was a psych eval, I wouldn’t exactly call it extensive, it was a quick sit-down with the county shrink and then a long multiple choice personality test thing that seemed more like it was measuring ability to play well with others than screening for any significant mental issues.

I did have to pass a drug test, and it was a hair test which I believe has a longer window of detection than a pee test, but as long as you can pass that they don’t really care about past drug use if you’re up-front about it, and honestly I’m pretty sure a pretty decent amount of my coworkers and at least one of my supervisors like to smoke up occasionally, if we ever cause a significant incident or they have reason to suspect that we’re intoxicated at work, we are subject to drug testing, but it’s not like we’re getting regularly tested, and I’ve never heard of anyone having to get tested in the 5+ years I’ve been here. Of course we are subject to a lot of different federal and state regulations so of course pot is officially forbidden,but you’d kind of have to really fuck up to get caught for it. Certain things like a DUI could lead to your certifications being revoked.

I’ve heard a lot of places have you do a polygraph test, mine doesn’t (which is good because polygraphs are all kinds of bullshit)

We also did get fingerprinted by our county detectives and I assume that got ran through the background check as well.

We did have one or two hires with some kind of sketchy things in their past that probably shouldn’t have made it through our background checks but did, though I will say they were weeded out pretty quickly during training.

As far as pay goes, again it varies a lot. I think I make ok money, I’m not rolling in it by a longshot but I’m staying afloat and managing to save a bit. The benefits are solid of course. Last I checked, I think we’re one of the lowest-paid dispatch centers in our immediate area, although we’re also one of the only non-union ones around here too, which is probably to be expected. That has its pluses and minuses, one of the first things that usually that comes with the contract negotiations is mandatory OT since every dispatch center struggles with staffing so we’ve managed to avoid that.

I made about 66k last year after my shift differential (night shift gets paid a bit more,) overtime (I rarely come in for unscheduled OT, but the way our regular schedule works we go over 40 hours a week every other week) etc. people who have more certifications than I do can make a decent bit more than that at my center. I think it’s decent pay for the actual work we do, but not necessarily for the amount of liability we take on. There’s a lot of places that definitely pay a lot less than that. Some of the higher-ups in our department and county government have really been going to bat for us and wrangled us some pretty substantial raises over the last couple years and I’m making substantially more than I did when I started, so at least here the situation is definitely improving.

I work in a 911 dispatch center, were starting to do some remote trials, but I’m not part of the test group, so I’m not totally clear on all the details about how we’re handling it.

But some concerns I’d have are

1. Backup power supplies, phone and Internet connections, etc. our dispatch center has massive generators, several redundant phone and Internet lines, etc. You wouldn’t want to be on the phone with your call taker and have your call drop in the middle because there’s a storm and they just lost power or Internet to their home.

2. Radio equipment- phones and call taking are only half the game, the other half is on the radio with our field units. If somehow everything else goes offline, the dispatchers still have walkie talkies to communicate with the units in the field.

3. Security concerns, both physical and cyber. We’re handling a lot of sensitive information, have access to various local, state, and federal databases, etc. I’d be a little sketched out by some of that going over someone’s home WiFi. Yes, you can do a lot with vpns and virtual machines and such, but it still introduces a whole lot of variables that need to be accounted for. Also if something really crazy happens, most dispatch centers are fairly secure places, I personally work in a underground bunker on the property of a prison, tall fences, armed security, multiple security doors, etc. You also have less control over who is in the room and what they’re doing. We’re not allowed to take any pictures or video in the room, some dispatch centers go so far as you can’t have your cell phone out at all, no one can just walk in unless they have business in there, it’s a pretty controlled environment.

4. Physical proximity to other people is useful, we’re always turning around and asking other people sitting near us for help with something or another, whether it’s asking them to call another agency while we’re on the phone with someone, look something up for us, asking them how to do something in the computer (there’s a lot going on in our system, and they’re constantly adding and changing how some things work, so I’m not sure anyone really knows how to do everything off the top of their head.) If our computer freezes up while taking a call, we can still yell across the room to the dispatcher that they need to send someone to a location because something is going on there (there’s a famous story in our dispatch center from a few decades ago when we were first getting computerized where someone called in that a cop was getting beaten up and couldn’t get to his radio, the person taking the call couldn’t find the location in the system and had to yell over to the dispatcher for that zone to get backup started for him over the radio.) Also about half of us are working night shift and our hours are long, having people around you and keeping an eye on each other is some easy insurance to make sure no one’s literally falling asleep on the job.

5. Space for the computer equipment. Where I work, call takers have 5 monitors, dispatchers have 6, and we make use of all of them, we have a lot of information we’re constantly shifting through, and all those screens are very useful to us, we could, in a real pinch, make do with 2 or 3 screens, but it would be a pretty big hindrance. I don’t have space in my home to squeeze in a 5 or 5 screen setup, and I wouldn’t really want to work without them long term (once in a while we’ve had to use aour backup center which has 1 fewer screen at each console, and it’s a pretty big pain in the ass)

Some of these are weird edge cases, but that’s also kind of exactly the sort of situations that 911 exists for. I do think if done right working from home can add extra redundancy, hypothetically if someone blows up our dispatch center or something it’s better if half of us aren’t even in the building and can continue working, but on the other hand if there’s widespread power and Internet outages, it doesn’t do us any good to have half of our staff sitting at home in the dark either. There’s a balance to be struck, I’m not totally sure what it is, but it’s something that needs to be approached carefully to make sure we’re still able to provide an acceptable level of service.

Pen-testing: penetration testing, basically good guy hacking to find security vulnerabilities so that they can be fixed, basically finding out how easy a security system is to penetrate.

Debugging: fixing problems in hardware and software

RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification), radio, NFC (Near Field Communication,) infrared, Bluetooth: different forms of wireless communication.

RFID is used for stuff like security tags on merchandise, car key fobs

NFC is similar (you could probably make an argument that NFC is basically a type of RFID) with a very short range used for things like making payments with your phone

Bluetooth you’re probably somewhat familiar with, in used for a lot of consumer electronics, wireless headphones, speakers, computer mice, etc.

All of those use radio waves in some form to pass information from one device to another.

Infrared uses a infrared light to send information, the most common use you’ve probably seen is for TV remotes, which is why you have to point the remote at the TV to work, you’re basically flashing an invisible flashlight at the sensor on the TV

This device can basically mimic any of those kinds of signals allowing it access, control, or bypass devices and systems that use those protocols.

This can be useful for people working on those kinds of systems, you don’t need to have the actual key card, remote, device, etc. to test it out, you can try a bunch of different configurations without needing to reprogram the card a bunch of times, and gives you a lot of options to test for different vulnerabilities and issues.

But those same capabilities make it attractive to people who would use it maliciously. If they don’t have the right security measures in place, something like this device could be used to gain access to secure areas by spoofing a key card, unlock cars, interfere with cell phones, snoop on wireless communications, gain access to a someone’s devices, etc.

I think there’s also the issue of where do kids have to go hang out anymore?

By and large, malls are dead/dying, and some don’t even allow unsupervised kids anymore.

Movies are expensive. Restaurants are expensive. Concerts are expensive (if you’re lucky enough to live somewhere with easy access to concert venues, if you’re in the suburbs you probably have an uphill battle trying to convince your parents to let you go wandering around the city unsupervised to go to a concert) Arcades basically don’t even exist anymore.

They can barely even go hang out in a park without being harassed by some Karen or the cops, and of course parks usually close at dusk and kind of depend on the weather being decent so in many places there’s a good chunk of the year where parks are undesirable.

You can hang out at your friends’ houses, but depending on your area there’s a decent chance that they may be in walking or biking distance so no need for a car, and if you’re just going to be hanging around the house, not a big deal for Mom or Dad to drop you off/pick you up, not like you’re going to really need a car while you’re there, you got nowhere to go anyway. And of course we get some parents these days who are really weird about their kids going over to other people’s homes, which leaves staying home and hanging out online.

About the only thing I can think of that I used to do as a kid that might still be accessible for kids and might necessitate them having their own car is to go hang out at the local comic/game shop to play magic, d&d, etc. Because most of them are pretty cool about people just coming to hang out, but even that could really be a “hey parental unit, can I get a ride?” kind of thing.

Plus, if you have a tight group of friends you always hang out with, you may only need a couple drivers. Even going back to when I was a teen/young adult, a lot of my friends didn’t have a license and many of them who did didn’t have their own car or couldn’t count on borrowing their parents’ car. I know the core group I hung out with was probably around 6-10 people, and one other guy and I did 99% of our driving whenever we went to do something because we were the ones with cars. Probably up until I was about 23 I spent a lot of time picking friends up and giving them rides places because I had a car and they didn’t.

Growing up my mom lived on one of the biggest hills in a town that was basically all hills. She remembers when it snowed they’d watch all kinds of cars and trucks get stuck trying to make it up that hill, and then watch a guy in a little VW beetle go right up the hill like it was nothing, perfectly happy will of that engine weight right over the rear drive wheels.

Years later I’m a new driver borrowing my parents’s cars, a '93 RWD ranger, and a '92 Buick century, and that comparison did a good job of driving home how much difference that weight distribution matters. The ranger had some pretty good grippy tires, but without any weight in the bed, it didn’t take much to make those wheels spin. The buick, on the other hand, handled snow beautifully, it had all the weight of that big boat-like front end over those front drive wheels, never once struggled to find traction, the only limiting factor was that it sat pretty low to the ground so it didn’t take too much snow before that front end was just trying it’s damnedest to plow through snow. If some mad scientist ever thought to lift an old Buick a few inches, I’m pretty confident that 4wd/AWD would become all but obsolete.

HP Omen

Only tangentially related, but I’m still kind of pissed about HP buying VoodooPC and doing basic fuck-all with it and just slapping the Omen name on stuff once in a while.

For those who don’t remember, VoodooPC used to be a higher end prebuilt gaming computer company. You can go ahead and argue about why prebuilts are trash, not really the point, I don’t know if they were at all good computers or worth the cost, but I thought they made some really cool looking computers if nothing else, and occasionally had some pretty cool ideas. The omen was one of their flagship offerings.

I may be misremembering, it’s been like a decade, but I think HP acquired them pretty soon after Dell bought Alienware so it was probably their way of trying to stay competitive. I think by most accounts Dell kind of turned Alienware into shit, but at least they’ve kept the branding around and still make some cool-looking computers if nothing else.

I’m not sure what the defaults are on Gboard because I’ve tinkered with the settings a lot by now, but you can have both long press to change language and swipe to move cursor at the same time, they don’t really interfere with each other, I just did both while writing this comment.

Also I’m not sure how many people have more than one language enabled on their keyboard, I’m admittedly not in a great position to judge that as an American since not too many of us speak more than one language with any regularity or fluency. A lot of people don’t tinker with the settings too much and for a lot of languages that use some variant of the Latin alphabet using the keyboard of your main language is probably sufficient for most other Latin alphabet languages in like 99% of cases. I suspect a lot of people don’t bother (though I’m happy to be proven wrong)

IIRC Toyota bet hard on hydrogen fuel cell technology and have been stubbornly working on making them a thing instead of pivoting to BEVs.

Which I’m not exactly mad about or sure if it is (or isn’t, I genuinely don’t know enough about the technology to make a call) a bad decision. While it’s certainly looking right now like BEVs are the way of the future, maybe Toyota will make some breakthrough and hydrogen really will end up being the next big thing.