Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "Technology Connections"
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You say it couldn't be done, pirates of that time would say: Hold my beer. xD
If anything, I'd say Sony was lucky they didn't do a whole new format for PS1 and PS2.
I have no way to prove this, and perhaps some might be able to disprove my theory here... but I bet the success of both Playstation 1 and 2 had LARGELY to do with piracy.
Like, not even a tiny part... the majority of it. And by extention, I also posit that the popularization of games into a full blown industry that is larger than Hollywood also has majorly to do with piracy.
As much as Sony and the usual industry associations will never ever give away officials statistics or admit it themselves, the only reason why consoles like Playstation, older cartridge based ones, and portables like DS were ever huge successes, was exactly because of piracy.
Perhaps not so much in the US, but in some countries where piracy was rampant most definitely. And they were not few. Probably over half the countries these consoles were ever sold, officially or not.
Companies don't even touch the subject much outside giving distorted statistics and hillarious assumptions using piracy as scapegoat because it's a convenient target. But I bet all you want the growth of several mediums have all to do with piracy. Because piracy enabled an unsurmountable ammount of people to get access to something they couldn't afford. And that's how games really got popularized.
I for one wouldn't be here watching this video and talking about games if it wasn't for it. I'm not sure I'd even have gotten into computers if it wasn't for it.
I can speak of my own - Brazil. Consoles were imported here pretty fast, demand on the gray market was so big that it was partially responsible for funding entire cities economies. But since NES times, piracy was were you got the games themselves. Importation taxes plus currency exchange rates always made any sort of electronic (up to this day) a luxury. It's basically double the price what you pay in US, and then you apply currency exchange... it becomes an investment.
If after buying a console you'd still need to pay double the price for each game, tons of people wouldn't be able to afford it. By tons, I mean, the vast majority. Only the 1% rich in Brazil would be able to get it.
But pirated games were everywhere... NES, SNES, Genesis... can't remember if it goes back as far as Master System, but yeah, possibly. By the time Playstation came, you had hawkers selling those in streets of every major brazilian capital, stores that sold only that, fixed shopping malls where you could probably find a bunch of stores, in major capitals you had commercial districts where you could find several stores, people who serviced game consoles who knew all the modchips, hacks and charged a reasonable price to install and every other trick in the book. :P
Yes, there were several attempts of crackdown, along with other types of piracy - music, movies, series, etc - but it was useless. It became big business that sustained tons and tons of people in an informal economy that had multiple layers behind it. Like, in Playstation 1 and 2 days, it'd probably be easier for police to find, arrest and extinguish drug cartels and traffic rather than the piracy business. That's how big it used to be.
So you see, a larger disc would make it initially harder to pirate. Potentially not worth it. But if pirated cartridges were made, I don't think it'd be too much of an obstacle to overcome, really.
Pirates would find a way. They either hack the console, or even start pressing discs themselves. Like I said, it was very big business, so it's not completely out of the scope.
People eventually figured out a way to crack even the infamous GameCube copy protection... though that one never got popular enough to justify scaling things up. Well, not as much as PS1 and PS2.
So while people who really don't like piracy might be angry with me for saying all this... it is my opinion, but I think it's just logical. I mean no disrespect or ill intent towards the industries that gave us lots of entertainment, no revolt or bad feelings towards the studios and developers that gave us great games, music, movies and overall content... but the reality of it is, if there was no piracy back then, the vast majority of people would not be able to have access to all this content. Forget the fallacy of lost sales RIAA, MPAA and other organizations always pulls out of their asses. One pirated cd or dvd would never translate into one original copy sold. Because the vast majority of people paying for those could not afford it.
I know for a fact that piracy made kids learn english, become computer fans, become gamers, become developers themselves, made games, music and movies part of their culture, grow up to be avid payers for official content, become more aware of american culture, and the chain reaction goes on and on.
I have never met a single gamer in a group, particularly around my age, here where I live who can say "I have never played a pirated game in my life". Might be annedoctal, but I feel it's representative of my entire country, and several other countries in the world.
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@dstinnettmusic Sorry, didn't see your reply until today... didn't know so many replied. xD
I'll explain what you see as an incongruence to make things clearer for those who don't know how piracy works in other countries, as well as acknowledge some stuff.
See, I didn't mean to legitimize the piracy practice. I understand it is still a big source of loss for developers and console manufacturers alike, though how much is often overblown by them, and I understand it's also not cool to just take something you didn't compensate people for as if it was nothing.
I also understand that the entire system wouldn't work if it was moved by piracy alone. It works because there are developed countries where most people purchase original games, while poorer countries get by with piracy, which serves to popularize and spread gaming as a whole. It's a global phenomena because of that combination, as are other forms of entertainment.
But, the way piracy worked fo several years in countries like Brazil, and the way it probably still works to some level, is on an industry level of production.
You are indeed right that most people wouldn't be bothered with downloading, burning and testing game images and roms, as well as modding consoles when necessary - but that's not how it works.
Stores sold consoles pre-modded with a slight cost increase, and the informal market took care of selling pirated games, music, movies and software by themselves. And mind you, this informal market didn't do it by themselves too, they imported directly from China or mass distributors for say, 5 bucks a piece in bulk quantities, and then sold for 10... or something similar, I dunno actual numbers.
To the point that some people never knew they were commiting copyright infringement. Buying pirated games in a store of your local shopping mall, kiosks, street sellers, and whatnot is just the reality of it. Buying original stuff was simply harder and more expensive.
Back sometime ago even big game store chains would sometimes sell you the console, have lots of original games on display, but if you asked to look at their "game catalog", they'd pull a folder filled with titles that you could ask for a fixed price (say 10 bucks per DVD), and they'd give you a pirated copy of the game, simple as that.
Brazil had several rounds of piracy crackdown periods over the years, but it was most for show, because it was just plain impossible to stop all shops involved from doing it one way or another. It's a huge business, you couldn't stop it even if you threw the entire army plus police force at it.
You put a cop in front of every shop, the people inside the shop would just give you some contact information with someone who gets pirated games industrially so that you could still buy it, because store owners knew they couldn't sell you an expensive console system if you didn't have the option to get games cheaper than original market price.
So, in summary, people didn't have to bother with the entire ripping, burning and testing process by themselves. Pirated stuff, including games, music, movies and software is bought on bulk in countries like China (or just made internally by media pressing industries) and smuggled into the country to be sold as a complete ready to use package. In practice, no different an experience for the consumer in comparison to buying original stuff, only waaaay cheaper.
But of course, with the advent of digital stores, Steam sales, online DRM, Humble Bundle, online services and subscriptions... piracy has considerably diminished. Or rather, perhaps, it moved market from middle and upper class to lower class, because I still see them being sold everywhere, and if it's still being sold, there is a market for it.
I have personally stopped pirating games ever since Steam came out, and currently have a library of over 1000 Steam games. Lots of people I know also went that way. Because like you said, convenience.
But in the past, from NES times up to Playstation 2 and 3, this is just how the game market worked here. The actual convenient way to do it was to pirate.
It was not only incredibly expensive to buy everything original, you also had a pretty limited selection of original games to go for, because it was too expensive - most stores wouldn't stock on titles and wouldn't get recently released triple A titles from fear of not selling it at all.
You practically had to pirate stuff to be on top of recently released games, specially if you lived in smaller cities. Big capital cities usually had big multinational retail stores that could handle original games only, but that's a tiny percentage of the overall market. You can imagine hundreds of towns where the only place you could go to get a recently released triple A title was your local pirated games supplier.
And you know, I think piracy might be making a comeback, all due to economics once again, for Brazil in particular. What usually dictates this are economics. Like I said in my original post, brazilians have an importation tax on all products aside from books, that basically doubles the price of products. Back during PS1, PS2, PS3 times, we also had to contend with currency exchange rates that puts imported consoles and games at 2 to 3 times more. So, compounded with taxes, comparatively, for original games, brazilians would have to pay 4 to 6 times the price an american, japanese or european gamer would. Comparatively speaking that is, because you need you consider average wages and cost of living in all of this.
Now our currency value is crashing down, and our currency is currently valued at 5.3 per dollar. So brazilians are paying between 10 to 15 times more for imported electronics and whatnot, including games and consoles.
It's just not something most brazilians can afford doing realistically, spending almost a year's worth of minimum wage on gaming alone.
So alternatives starts showing up, legal or not. And Brazil is a country full of gamers. I bet there's a ton of unlocked Switches in Brazil, and a lot of gamers with hacked console systems too. I became mostly a pc gamer these days, so I'm out of the loop, and my Switch remains locked... but I'm mostly playing indie games. The decision to get a bigger Nintendo title is done carefully given how expensive it has become. At most, one title a year. I just don't want to unlock it for now, because I'm not that much of a gamer right now, and I do have a huge backlog on PC anyways. But if I was gaming on the Switch exclusively, and really reaaaaally wanted to play all the main Nintendo titles, I'd probably have unlocked my Switch by now, in all honesty.
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Lifegoals for 20+ years, that's what this is.
No, really... the very first laptop I ever bought, an Acer Ferrari 5000 series, was supposed to be a desktop replacement so I could get rid of the huge box and too many cables.
It never really worked out. Because games.
After several years, I tried once again with a Dell XPS m1330. It also didn't work out.
This time because games AND video editing.
Of course, they worked plenty well as laptops during trips, which I needed anyways, so disappointing but not useless.
I also wasted too much money on a stupid purchase thinking about this: A Dell made absolute crap Windows tablet that had a pretty sturdy but badly designed docking station... forgot the model right now, but it was bad. I only got it because back then it was the only choice for Windows tablet, Microsoft doesn't sell the surface line officially in my country, and it didn't have any dock solution back then too. This is a purchase I regret.
But when nVidia came out with the thousands series, and then the MaxQ line, at the prices they came out, it was then that I started thinking that hey, 3rd/4th time might be the charm after all.
That plus improvements regarding USB-C, Thunderbolt 3, docks and dongles, plus general power of small devices including mobiles.
I have no money for the investment right now, but that is likely the way I'm going next time I have money to invest in a new system. A beefy docking station, a Thunderbolt 3 capable laptop, single cable solution to connect to peripherals and monitor.
I actually kinda did an experimental step further for mobile, currently testing and prodding. My mom and I needed a smartphone upgrade, and so I chose, despite not being a huge fan of the brand, Samsung phones that are mirroring and DeX (desktop mode) capable.
I forcibly learned during the pandemic that I can do almost everything I need with an Android device, albeit not as fast and efficiently as with a regular Windows PC. And that my mom probably could do everything she needs with a smartphone plus a desktop mode, with a bit of adaptation.
Further, I've been trying to do a bunch of stuff for several years now using all sorts of hacks in holiday trips to relatives homes. I used wireless dongles, chromecast, Android boxes, android tablets, windows tablet, laptops, mhl cables, and a bunch of other stuff.
This year, when I was looking for a new smartphone for my mom, I found these Samsung models I didn't hear much about. The 10e and 10 Lite. It has almost all specs I need for relatively cheap right now. So I went for it.
It's gonna at the very least solve this whole holiday trip problem. Perhaps it'll solve some others.
Huge tangent aside, it's been a dream of mine for a very long time to have a setup like that. Not only for mobility mind you, but also to reduce the number of devices I have to deal with and maintain on a daily basis. It's too much time spent with updates, synchronization, transfering and whatnot when you use both a desktop and laptop daily. Even if you use cloud sync stuff, automation software to keep configurations as cloned as possible, and whatnot... it's still a painful process that takes time.
So it's getting there. Almost there. Mind you, I still need more than one complete system to separate things, but perhaps the ideal setup would be one Windows laptop with docking station, one Linux the same way, and an Android phone with desktop mode capabilities. It should cover almost any scenario.
Depending on stuff like trip length, where to, what projects I'm working on, and what I expect to use, I'd take one thing or the other.
Thanks for sharing!
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I think those lasted longer here where I live... or perhaps I had some on the back of a drawer for ages until I found them. xD Because I remember seeing those like just a few years ago.
In any case, interesting idea, but ultimately Alec gets it right - It never gets used because of how people regularly treats batteries. The standard already is to get a fresh set, replace, check if goes back to work, and if it does then you know it's really the batteries. :P
I think the few times I tried using those, other than for novelty, was mostly when I had a bunch of super old batteries laying around that I didn't know if they still held a charge.
So you get the thing, shove your nails hard into it, don't know if the tester is working or not, don't know if it finished the reading and the battery is dead or if you stopped pressing hard enough, and so on. xD
But it's the problem with lack of tactile feedback. Is it working or not? Do I have to press harder than this, or is the battery just dead? How long do I have to shove my nails into this thing for it to work? etc.
Might be wrong, but I think these would be used more often if it was something like pressing a button, a regular button I mean, and it giving you a definite answer - like a red or green check.
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Yep, agreed with all, same opinion.
I went a bit fancier with mine, got one with a deeper basket and made with more metal parts... but no extra electronics, the two dial setup. It was a priority for me for it to have as few electronic components as possible. I hate touch buttons with a passion, physical controls are the best.
After testing it for a while, also bought it for my mom, and I think she basically stopped using her regular sized oven. Same as induction cooktops, once you get used to it and port your recipes to work with it, it's just faster, more practical, and uses less power overall.
As for me, I had already been living without an oven at home for some 5 years up to the point I got an air fryer, so the addition of it was just that - an addition. xD
It's almost like if these companies didn't rely on trying to obscure what the product does and just gave us the control, it'd just make things simpler. You gotta understand the basics of how they work, and then you can adapt to it far easier.
The biggest variable I can see in all these options other than fan control and temperature, would be size of the vessel and perhaps some influence in how much air gets recirculated. A good tip on this is related to that - if you think your Air Fryer isn't working the way it should, check if you are not accidentally blocking air inlets and outlets.
There is a balance to hit in those too, because if you contain air too much inside, it gets too humid fast, and perhaps you'll end up cooking the food more and letting it get soggy instead of crispy. If it exchanges too much air with the outside, it could dry things too much and take longer to get to temperature.
Oh, the one nasty thing I'd share about air fryers... take the basket out and check what the situation is on the heating element and fan. This is of course also true for ovens... but sometimes you'll need to clean that, and it's pretty horrible. xD I cleaned mine recently after a few years of occasional use... it's a burnt oil greasy mess.
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Few things to add on the subject...
Perhaps Brazil shares a bit of blame on the bad fame of those plugs.
You see, until fairly recently... and I am talking some 5 to 10 years ago, Brazil didn't have it's own standard. Now it has, and of course it needed to be different to all other countries, but let's save that to another rant.
So, what we used was a mix of the american to prong flat standard with cilindrical ground, or european two cilindrical prong standard. The country is also a weird mix of 110V and-or 220V depending on what region you live.
Problem is, we never had strong quality control and standards to guarantee a good connection between male and female plugs.
So, thinking back to my childhood to early adulthood... lose sockets that couldn't hold to heavier plug transformer combos was a pretty common thing. I vividly remember having to put stuff under plugs to support the weight of things, particularly for video game plug transformers.
And sure, pehaps some of those wall plugs were just too old, used crap materials, or became too lose over the years... but I kinda remember this happening in brand new installations too - again, because quality control is crap here.
There was a huge push in recent years to use the newer standard that is safer and better thought out, but again, instead of adopting an existing standard, it had to come up with it's own thing cause huge headaches to this day for just about everyone.
One big reason why we had mixed standards in the first place is because in Brazil tons of people use directly imported products. The reasons range all the way between contraband and grey market, all the way to the product simply not existing at all in Brazil requiring importation one way or another.
So, government tried to forbid even standard convention plugs (travel plugs) from being sold in hardware stores and whatnot, which of course failed hard.
Another point that I found kinda funny and Alec didn't mention on the video - the other kinda meme kinda stupid explanation that those holes are there so that you can put a small lock on it so that the device cannot be powered on. xD I mean, it's not the actual reason they are there, and it's actually kinda dangerous, but interesting in a last resort kinda scenario. xD
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ROFL, that HD DVD joke. xD
So... I've been using Toslink since I got my first laptop (an Acer Ferrari 4000) and my 15 years old 5.1 home theater system - Logitech Z-5500 (DTS 5.1 with THX). That's because I got, for the laptop, a Soundblaster PCMCIA card that had the mini Toslink port.
It also doubled as a headphone jack. Pretty interesting adaptation for the form factor:
https://ksassets.timeincuk.net/wp/uploads/sites/54/2005/01/943-ports-1.jpg
And then, like I said, I never switched to another home theater system, this one is perfect for my needs and it works like a champ. And even though not many people knows about Toslink, it's always been there right? The past 3 PCs I had all came with a Toslink port for sound.
I'm not even an audiophile in anyway... but you know, despite not being anything special, these days not only can you get some super cheap toslink cables anywhere - I'm talking eBay cheap crap stuff, not fancy overpriced crap like Monster cables - but they are also pretty reliable because of how they work.
Here's one advantage of it from my personal experience: you don't have to worry about contact point corrosion. You know when you connect your speakers or headphones to a headphone jack and it gets all crackly? And then overtime the connector will get oxidized or gunky and you have to keep messing around, twisting it or flicking it to make a proper connection? With light, there's none of that.
The other advantage is more about it being a digital transmission rather than because it's fiber optics, but yeah... it either works, or you know the cable is broken. None of that crap that happens when wires are getting frayed and broken little by little and you keep jiggling it around to see if it makes things better. :P
HDMI is indeed superior, but for instance, because Toslink became the de facto standard for digital audio for a while, it's easier for me to pull a cable from my desktop to the speakers with a single, very thin, Toslink cable, rather than either 3 cables for 5.1 analog audio, or even a thicker HDMI cable. But HDMI is not an option for my set of speakers... yep, it's THIS old. xD It has input and output for Toslink, or all analog. No HDMI.
I've got these super thin Toslink cables that puts even my flat HDMI cables to shame. They are even thinner than the audio cables shown in video. When I took a look at them I thought they were gonna break or just not work at all, but I was wrong.
But indeed, they cannot go longer than 5 meters.
Another weird piece of related tech that I have here is a Toslink switcher... because the speakers only have one toslink input, and I had both a desktop and a laptop that could output toslink, I got a mechanical switcher to change between channels. This guy here:
http://www.homewired.com.au/images/ebay/toslinkSwitch.jpg
It really is totally mechanical. Either mirrors or fixed pieces of fiber optics that switches with that channel selector there. And it works, no power needed. xD It probably weakens the signal even more, but still doing the job fine.
I won't recommend it for anyone else though, specially those building new rigs... just that it works for my current setup. :P
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Ooof, everyone feeling ancient already? xD
I was among the nerds who knew and anticipated this feature when it started showing up. Early adopter of CD, DVD and Blu-ray burning drives here too. I'm a digital hoarder. :P
Oh, and I also had a Diamond/Rio mp3 player in the early times... it wasn't the same as Alec's model there, rather it was a collab between Nike and Rio, a sports-y model. People will know what I'm talking about, yes, that one that looked like a weird puck/bean or something. xD
Only I think the one I bought was either counterfeit or some sort of janky prototype using crap materials.
It was also among the very first eBay purchases I've ever made, iirc. I paid full price for an original one, but it clearly was some jank crap. I was pissed at first, but other than having poor quality materials, it worked, so ended up relenting.
But for the mp3 CD player, I do recall going for a portable CD player specifically because it had a CD MP3 function, to use it in my car with a jank connection to it's K7 player. xD Few things I needed with the portable CD player - that it could play mp3 CDs, that it had a good buffer in it, and that it came with a car-kit. Plus of course not being too expensive. I got some Aiwa, probably still have it laying around somewhere. It was pretty crap, but kinda worked for what I wanted. The kit came with a physical plasticky shock absorber of sorts, anyone remember those? xD
But I do remember one major issue about the mp3 player stuff - because it wasn't a solid well defined standard, you had major issues with things just not working depending on all the variables regarding mp3 files, different types of media, encoding settings and whatnot.
In my mind, this was why it kinda failed back then. It was the whole experience of - hey, my sound system has an mp3 function, you can bring your mp3 cds to play. And then you took it there, and it wouldn't play for whatever reason. Can it read from folders or do the files have to be all on the root folder? Can it read mp3 encoded in 16-bit?128kbps only or more? Can it read CD+R? Only CD-R? I have some .ogg and other format files mixed in, will it skip it or just crash? Yadda yadda yadda
I imagine if your music experience was more centered in iTunes, you'd have your files in a more standard format with less problems on your hands... but here where I live Apple stuff has always been just too expensive. Your average middle class kid, plus budget conscious adults would never spend that much money for functionality that alternatives could do for a fraction of the price. To music file formats were even more chaotic.
This was a huge problem for mp3 players too in the beginning... I lost count on how many tutorials and step by step instructions, plus all the hours I spent testing different software and combinations, to encode music files in good quality, occupying the least amount of space, with the right settings, that my players could still read. :P
And then right after music, we had this entire thing for videos too. Images before that.
Well, we still kinda do, but it's much less noticeable these days I guess. We've come down to more fixed standards nowadays.
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Great explainer! Split system anytime of the day for me... but I did have to recommend a portable AC for relatives. Very particular case though. They needed something more than a fan or humidifier, but they live in an ancient house partially very badly built by ancestors, zero insulation, tons of entry and exit points for air, creaky boards all around, rooms that are impractically big for anything to work well, and multiple rooms to cool each at different times of the day. Any AC solution would be extremely inefficient one way or another, and there are basically no walls you can really trust with drilling vents, opening up a hole for an wall AC or installing brackets to support an extermal unit for a split system. Yes, it's that bad.
But summers are killers there, so the extra cold and dryness that the portable AC creates worked miracles. The town they live in is not only hellish hot during summers, the air is also stale and humid (thus, humidifiers being useless). Basically a sauna.
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Awesome content, thanks Alec! Down here in the backwater country, infrastructure and EV prices are still a bit more of an impediment for a potential switch, but I'm increasingly more into the idea of, when the time comes that I decide to replace my ancient junker of a car, it could be with an EV. Or at least a hybrid.
Few problems to solve though. Chargers in highways are still very few and far between here... particularly on the stretches I have to go through to visit relatives. In fact, it's unnerving enough with a regular ol' gas car. xD
Down here, in middle of the state rural grounds, there are stretches of 150-200+ miles that you can drive without seeing any gas or rest station at all... and then, some routes only have small gas stations that don't seem to care of have anything ready for EVs.
The other unnerving thing is the state of the roads... from potholes to full craters, things will definitely not be optimal for EVs with huge thermal runaway prone caskets of batteries. xD I know there is a whole ton of protection and mitigation that goes on with those, just that sometimes the conditions of roads down here gets closer to just being offroad. But you know, it also isn't great for running around with gallons of gas in those conditions anyways, so there's that.
And then comes the fact that both me, my mom, an some of the relatives we visit are all currently apartment dwellers.
Though I think it only takes a few EVs to convince condominiums to put something that would attend the needs there, no problems sharing and taking a bit of the cost for those who needs it too - particularly when even if this is overestimated, it'd likely still cost far less than gas anyways.
The real current nail in the coffin though are prices. I think down here you have to expect to pay at least double for an equivalent EV car in comparison to gas, if not way more depending on your needs... the bigger the car, the more range, comfort points and whatnot, the bigger that rate is. But like, comparing the most basic EV with the most basic gas guzzler, it already can be double or more. Add taxes, insurance and all the tons and tons of extra stuff you have to pay here, it becomes a pretty expensive investment.
In any case, it's still great to see a comprehensive from experience explainer/tutorial like this one... I've watched a bunch of testimonial, reviews, and short videos on the subject over the years, but nothing as comprehensive as this, which I really wanted to see.
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Man, while I wouldn't vouch for such a hard and inflexible standard these days, I sure would love for my country to have at least SOME standards in place... specially now that I'm looking towards having to drive a lot on roadways. The myriad of different types of headlights, with glare issues, cars that will blind you with blue leds and whatnot, and getting too much variation between how much visibility one car gives you versus another is just kinda crap.
Proprietary designs are also so much crap. I've got used to changing my ancient Ford Fiesta halogen lamps by myself avoid the shop costs that would cost me like 10 to 20 times the cost of the lamps themselves, not looking forward for a car that will not only require me to go into a shop for that, but also pay for some proprietary design that will make the shop costs look cheap in comparison... that's of course added to all the electronic stuff and computer stuff that I simply don't want in the car at all.
All this stuff might not be the main reason why I haven't gotten a new car just yet (it's because I'm poor, that's it), but it definitely plays a role there. Honestly, I have zero interest in how my car looks and how much fancy gadgety tech stuff it has... for cars I'm super utilitarian. It needs to take me from point A to B, and give me the least headaches possible.
Then again, it's no wonder... I live in a country where regulations for all sorts of things are just kinda laughable. I follow a whole bunch of home improvement channels and DIY channels, it always impresses me how much regulation, standards and whatnot are there to ensure safety, make things easier to repair, and just general good practice so the next guy checking it don't face an uphill battle to figure things out...
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Oh, that schema is still sorely needed alright... :P
The problem is when these things gets all dusty, filthy, disgusting messes. Starting it on high prolongs, even if it's just by a bit, the lifetime of fans.
Some 4 years ago I went through 4 or 5 fans that relatives of mine had in storage... summer is a killer there, and they kept going through units for some reason.
All of them gave a humming noise, but didn't start turning.
Man, I have never seen filthy stuff like that. Not even decades old desktop PCs that were never cleaned.
Grease turned to glue, hair everywhere, some hard to identify greasy stuff, and so much dust you wouldn't believe it fits in so little space... no wonder the thing wouldn't turn.
Of course, not a great solution to force start the fan motor when it's in that condition, but at least it probably lasted a bit more than it would. I think only one of them was burnt to oblivion... the other 3 or 4 just needed a thorough cleaning. Which of course no one does there.
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Another timely and very relevant subject Alec, thanks!
I live in a country where smoke alarms are almost non-existent.
There is some usage in commercial installations and residential buildings, but it's just far from ideal... it's basically all left for firefighter inspections to mandate if necessary, and that often doesn't happen.... lax regulations and corruption gets in the way.
So I've been thinking of doing this by myself at least where I do have control... inside my own apartment, my mom's, etc. This info helps a lot.
Anyways, related separate question, have you had a chance to check air quality monitors? TVOC, HCHO, PM2.5, PM10, BTX and all this stuff.
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