Play stupid geopolitical games, win stupid prizes…

Sold my Model 3 yesterday. In a sane world, where Tesla is not run by a fascist, I would have considered getting another one as my ownership experience was generally pretty positive.

Instead, my new Polestar arrives next week.

I have owned VWs in the past and been pretty happy with them, however, the last reviews I’ve seen of the ID series indicated there were still some software and build quality issues to iron out.

The front runner for me at the moment is the Polestar 2 - the latest refresh has switched to RWD from FWD and upgraded the motor and battery, which is now 82kWh (about twice the capacity of my current car), and as a result now promises a real world range of somewhere between 200-300 miles depending on conditions - that should be enough to get me from my place to my parents in just about a single charge, whereas currently I need to stop twice en-route.

It’s not priced as competitively as a Model 3, but it’s probably its nearest competitor at the moment. I’ll have to make a call about what I want to do in the next month or two, as there is an upcoming change to vehicle tax over here which would make any EV in this price bracket make less financial sense if purchased after the cutoff date. (Tesla, predictably, have snuck their base level Model 3 in just below this threshold.)

Same, my Model 3 turns 5 years old soon. My original plan was to keep it for at least 8 years until the HV battery warranty expires - but, it has had its first major breakdown in the last 6 months, and although Tesla did manage to fix it I’m now window shopping for a replacement.

I don’t think I’ll get another Tesla, at least not as the situation stands. If Elon decided to sell it to some unobtrusive billionaire who is content to sit there, shut up and get even richer without meddling in geopolitics - and if they put back the fucking turn signal stalks - then maybe I would consider it, as otherwise the car is easy to live with, pleasant to drive and has acceptable range for what I need - and newer versions will go even further. But, there are a lot of alternatives on the market to consider now as well.

I am sure there is a team of very talented engineers at Tesla, and that they are the reason the company has been as successful as it is, despite the moron in charge of it.

Our cat ushers us into bed when it’s near bedtime. If one of us is playing games late or otherwise up past midnight she will literally meow non-stop and chase us into the bedroom, it’s mildly annoying sometimes but very sweet haha. Then she’ll spend a few minutes with us in bed making biscuits before buggering off elsewhere, job completed.

As a developer myself I’m not sure if I would trust any application to safely handle a configuration that has become invalid due to a breaking change, especially not an app that is still under active development! Better safe than sorry.

Immich has completely replaced Google Photos for me, love it!

My only bugbear is that it is updated very frequently (what a nice problem to have!) which in my case requires a manual once-over of my docker-compose file every time in case there are breaking changes.

I donated once this month already but I’ll fucking do it again.

I have a Model 3 at the moment. I’ve had it for almost 5 years and it’s generally been great - cheap to run, quiet and comfortable on longer trips but still fun to drive on back roads.

Recently it had its first major breakdown, and although Tesla service did manage to take care of it, it’s got me browsing for new EVs - but now, buying a Tesla is not the foregone conclusion it once might have been.

First, they have been making some truly stupid design choices in their latest facelifts (deleting the indicator stalks and gear selector).

Second, their CEO has now gone completely mask-off fascist.

Third - after a few years for the competition to catch up, we now have genuine alternatives from other marques which are just as good if not better EVs than Tesla’s offerings.

I think my next car will likely be a Polestar 2.

I decided to set up Fedora on my new laptop as it was either take a chance on that or spend like 3 hours debloating a Win11 install.

It’s been over 10 years since I last tried dailying Linux, we have come a long way in that time. Everything just worked out of the box. No fucking around needed.

Even relatively niche stuff like my thunderbolt dock and the laptop’s fingerprint sensor was picked up. And, thanks to the investment Valve has been putting into Wine and Proton, pretty much every game I’ve tried has worked with no issue.

Next time my desktop is due for a clean install I’ll definitely be doing the same there.

Not at all.

Lemmy is overwhelmingly militantly anti-Tesla, which is understandable considering who owns it, but it does mean that users tend to interpret any neutral or factual statements (basically anything that is not outright criticism) as having a pro-Tesla bias.

In this case, all I am stating is the fact that this specific change currently only affects corporate users. That could of course change in the future.

There is a rich history of cloud based data providers pulling the rug from under users with no warning. Look at what happened to Nest users when Google took over.

There is most likely an overlap on what you can get from the OBD port, but generally speaking the API will provide more high level info e.g driving status, mileage, live location - and the OBD port will provide more low level data e.g. detailed battery stats from the BMS, energy usage, etc.

Highlight where in the above post I am defending anything.

Something to note: Tesla has two vehicle APIs, the Fleet API for commercial accounts and the Owner API for individuals. This change currently only impacts the Fleet API.

If you are an individual owner who accesses your vehicle data from the Owner API (usually via a self hosted tool like TeslaMate), this does not affect you. Yet.

How often do you need to travel the entire range your car allows?

If you do need to drop everything and drive across country in an EV, you should be stopping at service stations to do short fast charge sessions anyway, as with modern fast chargers and battery tech you will typically go from something like 30% SoC to say 70% in only a few minutes. This saves a lot of time on longer trips.

If you are driving an EV by depleting the battery completely and then charging it back to 100% every time, you are doing it wrong.

That also means we can still use the expansion cards for the Framework in any other device that also has a USB-C port. Need an SD card reader or a 2.5Gb LAN adapter? Not a problem, I’ll just grab one from my laptop.

Por qué no los dos?

I can’t speak from experience as I don’t own any Amazon devices, but I have read reports that it seems to work fine with the FireTV variant of Android.

The dev has only tested it against Chromecast with Google TV, with that said I’m using it on a Shield TV and a Shield Pro and it runs fine on both.

Google is already doing this with their default Android TV launcher. I tolerated their home screen ‘recommendations’ for a while as they occasionally highlighted something interesting to watch, but one day I switched on the TV and was greeted with a huge advert banner for a fucking watch on the home screen.

At that point I spent a few hours setting up FLauncher on all my ATV devices.

Same. Coming up to 4 years owning my Model 3 with no major issues and no work needed other than normal serviceable items common to all cars (tyres, wiper blades, cabin filters, etc).

On the flip side, one of my old coworkers who got his Model 3 at the same time as me had a litany of problems from day one. We used to joke that his car had been built by an intern on a Friday night before a major holiday.

I don’t do enough miles these days to justify getting rid of a perfectly good, functional, almost brand new car and buying a new one - I plan to just run it into the ground instead.

I don’t think I’d buy another Tesla in the future, though. Not necessarily because I care what people think of the car I drive, but because Tesla has made some astonishingly stupid decisions with their new/refreshed cars. No physical drive selector? No TURN SIGNAL STALK? Yes, because I love having critical vehicle controls on a movable surface. Come on now.