kstokes's discussions

Does it feel like the quality of MS software has really gone downhill in the past five years or so, or is it just me? Read more

Also, at least in my opinion, it’s really not “scamming” when somebody idly places items which solve a non-existent problem onto an online marketplace. Placebo is actually very effective for some people. Read more

I think it’s easy to say that Volvo knows it’s customers very well. Read more

Americans have a habit of being completely unable to see more than three years ahead of time. They treat their finances this way (let’s buy it now, we will figure out how to pay for it later), their assets and infrastructure this way (if it ain’t broke then don’t fix it!), their healthcare this way (I’m fine! I don’t… Read more

Cool. I wish them the best of luck. Read more

CPC has more or less proven that the Transit Connect is entirely too “consumer use” focused to be a serious mail truck. They’re broken about as often as they’re on the road. They just aren’t well suited to the duty cycles that package delivery puts on them. 

They would likely even go as far as victim-shaming. “Well they should have had their own generator, just like any sane person would!”. 

If the Tesla crazies had their way... 

Solder splices are really common in general aviation. They work well, are easy to use, are reliable. You see them everywhere. Read more

There’s one for all of British Columbia. Want a Tesla and live in Victoria? Better be cool with having to take a ferry ride to the mainland to have anything done that their roadside contractors can’t fix. 

For 99.5% of my use cases, about 250km is enough. For the other 0.5%, a rental car will fill in the gap. Read more

“No reverse gear” is the norm in hybrids - always has been. Prius has never had a reverse gear, for instance. Just spins MG2 backwards. 

No thanks. I'll stick with my NiMH batteries. They're cheap and I'm guaranteed not to run into a failed proprietary internal LiIon battery in year four.

I dunno - maybe I’m an outlier - but I tend to find it far more freeing to just fix shit properly and never have to worry about the day that the tape (etc) will inevitably detach at the least convenient time. Read more

Largely yes: but customers don’t have much of a say in how Amazon packages things. There’s no good reason that they shipped my laptop sleeve -- already packaged into its own plastic bag - in a paper/plastic bubble envelope. That’s just wasteful! I would have been more than happy to receive it in a simple paper bag /… Read more

I can live with the cardboard boxes: those are largely benign. I just wish they would stop it with the paper/plastic combination bubble envelopes! They aren’t recyclable and they don’t rot. There’s no reason to wrap everything thall that they ship in them! Just toss it into a paper bag, please!

No, other way around. “Why use six parts when one will do?” is the German way. And that one part will have the functionality of six built into it - when any one function fails, it’s time to switch out the whole assembly. Read more

I’ll be honest: I’ve been a car nut forever, but I will never understand the draw of a mechanical watch. I’m a “simplify, never complicate” person, with an engineering background. Mechanical watches are the antithesis of fundamental engineering: thoroughly obsolete, needlessly complicated, perform less desirably than… Read more

Holy crap, Trader is still a thing?
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It will be interesting to see what happens when there is less demand for specific types of petroleum products, but steady demands for others.
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