Mercedes-Benz aired the idea a couple of times. Iām not aware of them actually having implemented it at this time but itās going to come as sure as the Pope is catholic.
With Cars having found their way into the IoT, thereās nothing stopping manufacturers from turning feature flags on and off at will. Itās gonna get really fun when they start selling telemetry data to insurances at scale. If you think that thatās dystopic rambling on my part, think again, it has already started.
With far less skin irritation at that. I donāt wet shave any more but if I did, Iād use a safety razor too.
There are exceptions, yes. Iāve been hearing good things about Brother as well, not just here.
Its already kind of happening. The Mercedes A class 1.3 diesl has a Renault engine. The renault Kaptur has 20hp less than the merc. Its precisely the same engine. Electronically limited. I donāt see any other reason other than mercedes wanting their car to be more pwer
I bought a Ford Ranger two weeks ago. Used vehicle, but only three years old. First thing I did was a factory reset. then turned off all the Ford Connect crap, will not pair my cell phone to the car & if I can get confirmation that unplugging the telematics/wi-fi module can be done without it throwing error codes I will.
Said the same about my 2005 Navara. Hopefully it isnāt the injector pump and it is just a perished fuel line thatās sucking air (literally about to go and replace the last sections of fuel line this afternoon). If I can get it going again I will keep it as a paddock basher, otherwise I will strip it for parts.
I would have preferred an Isuzu D-Max, but the Ranger was too good to pass up. Still has two years unlimited km factory warranty remaining, only thing āmissingā is a winch and I got it for $1000 less than my budget:
Yeah, Iāve heard good things about the D-Maxā¦ and more on topic, Isuzu are usually so bare bones I would be surprised if they actually included the parts for it to spy on you
That has been a thing for years. E.g. VW had several lines of cars where different price ranges would feature the exact same engine with different ratings.
Thatās not really what I was getting at though, since at least there you pay once and the rating stays the same for the lifetime of the car. Doing subscriptions and derating/uprating the engine based on your subscription status is another level of entirely.
Thereās so much possibility for shenenigans, e.g. you could geofence cars. Your insurance doesnāt cover that road surface. Enjoy your walk home.
Havenāt been to an authorized repair shop in the last 12 months? You now get 20ā less miles per galleon, because 3rd party mechanics donāt know how to ātuneā our engines. Or it wonāt turn on at all.
This happened to the polish railway service, btw. Thereās a talk from last chaos computer club summit where a bunch of security experts explain how they disassembled the trains firmware and turned the geofencing off.
The future is looking bright, fellas. Iām gonna keep spending my bucks on bycicles. At least if that gets derated, itās my own fault.
Everyone thought Mad Max was set in a post-apocalyptic worldā¦ really itās just about a bunch of people out west who refuse to pay the rough surface rating for the new Tesla/VW/Whomever-we-hate
Talking of the change in cars ā¦has anyone noticed that the sunroof seems to have become a thing of the past, at least in the uk ā¦ canāt recall the last time I saw a new car with one
Closest has been either a Kia or Hyundai (from memory) with a āglassā roof that would go from opaque to transparent at the touch of a button. But that was basically the entire roof, not just a pop open panel over the front seatsā¦ i.e. what I would call a sunroof.
I used to like Land Rovers and Range Rovers for the family bus, and they seemed to go from sunroof to āmoon roofā (tinted glass roof that didnāt open) to now even that being an extraā¦
Enpoopification is the bane of my existence. Lots of resources I use in the classroom have gone to ā ā ā ā .
Quizlet used to be 100% free with an optional paid tier for teachers, and didnāt require accounts for students. Now it requires everyone to sign up just to study more than 5 flashcards, and constantly spams you to get a paid subscription, all while shuffling the menus and stuff around every year so you have to hunt to find all the flashcards youāve spent who-knows-how-many total hours creating. Iāve made about 20 textbookās worth of vocab lists there over the years. And itās always fun stumbling upon some Mudhen pilotās study notes.
And now Weblio, which I use a lot in class when Iām stumped on an English-Japanese equivalent, forces you to watch a 1-minute full screen video ad between dictionary searches.
Oh and Googleās free VR exploration app that had a lot of museums and user-created 3D tours stopped service a couple years ago, so now I have a pile of useless Google Cardboard glasses in the corner of my office.
And Google Drive, where I keep all my class resources, refuses to take me to my full drive and often only shows āmost frequently accessed,ā and endlessly intrudes upon my lessons with popups wanting me to take a tour of some new useless feature no one bloody asked for. It now takes 2-4x more mouse clicks to get somewhere that used to take one click.
On the hobby side, thereās an awesome app I used to keep track of my massive stash of paints, and had an amazing tool for finding equivalent or near-equivalent color matches. After five years it started requiring a monthly subscription. Not for certain features, mind you, but to use the entire app at all.
Whatās worse is I tend to have a very good memory with these things, so when something loses quality or gets more expensive, I immediately notice the change. When I mention it to other people itās like theyāre NPCs blindly existing and not paying attention to everything thatās crumbling around them.
This probably explains my recent, likely short-lived, return to film photography. It started with my daughter. She has long heard me wax nostalgic for the joys of planning the shot, noting the light, setting the aperture, framing and releasing the shutter. She asked if she could rummage through my old stuff. First we pulled out my Nikon F3, beat to hell for years at some newspaperās photo pool before finding itās way to me through ebay 20 years ago. She knew the basics. We just needed to buy a battery to work the meter. She took that to college and has already gone through a few rolls of film. My beloved Contax T3 point-and-shoot was also in the box. It still had a roll of Ilford black and white film loaded with 10 shots remaining. That was 15 years ago. No idea whatās been captured. The camera was expensive when I bought it in Japan 22 years ago. But that was just a fraction of the $2900 the camera will fetch today. It seems lots of people share the nostalgia.
I ordered a Paterson starter kit on B&H Photo so I could develop the roll in a dark bag. I also ran a fresh roll through the camera at a nearby park, burning all 36 frames in 45 minutes of dying light. Developing is a PITA. But the anticipation is an aspect of photography that was lost the instant we went digital. I found my lightbox and loupe. But both rolls were negative B&W and I was never a good enough photographer to be able to make sense of a negative. Back to B&H for an Epson scanner and a bunch of Kodak 400Tx. Last night I used the scanner for the first time. The old roll was from a two-day hike covering the NJ portion of the Appalachian Trail and a couple of my then 5yo daughter playing by the High Point monolith. None were very good tbh. But of the 36 I snapped in the park maybe 5 were pretty good. There is a reason that little Contax fetches such an outrageous price. The Zeiss 35/2.8 can focus down to inches with minimal fisheye. Itās incredibly clear for such a small thing. Iāve now spent $500 and a dozen hours on the road through film nostalgia. And maybe Iāll keep doing it from time to time just to scratch an old itch. The next roll goes through my near-mint Nikon FM2n which I turned the house upside-down looking for last weekend.
What does any of this have to do with en-poop-ification? Not much really. The transition to digital freed up photography for billions of people and made photography much cheaper for all. But the angst that we all feel from the digital prison that we are in is real. This is how we bang our cups against the bars.
Never a truer word was spoken. However I canāt escape the feeling that my nostalgia for a stubby pencil and slide rule is simply so I can maintain an air of smug superiority?
I still keep a CR computer in my flight bag. For those under 50 it is the professional version of an E6B. To the amusement (and likely worry) of FOās, I still compute mach, wind correction and time over fix. It is completely pointless. But if feels good.
Thereās a terrific doc on HBO about bitcoin. (Turns out we probably DO know who Satoshi Nakamoto is!) The film really gave me newfound respect for paper money.
Which one is that, if I may ask?
I used such an app (PaintRack) for my Warhammer hobby, but I havenāt painted in a while so I have no clue if it still works. Last I checked itās cooler functions (like photographing something and it tells you which colors fit) were paid, but the basic āinventoryā stuff was free.
entirely.