Rookeh

I went from a manual to an EV. For an everyday use point of view there is just no comparison. Acceleration is effortless, start/stop traffic is no longer a nightmare, it's quiet and refined. It is the ideal daily driver. Even on longer trips I no longer feel fatigued after driving for 4-5 hours (the enforced charging stop helps with that).

I personally would not go back to an ICE car in general, manual or not, for everyday use.

From an enthusiasts perspective, however, this is a different question. I wouldn't rule out getting an ICE manual for fun/weekend use in the future - the kind of driving where you can actually enjoy the level of fine control and feedback that a manual gives you, rather than just wasting it in traffic. But it would have to be something pretty special.

If your employer expects you to access corporate resources or be available to respond / on-call out of hours, then they should issue you a corporate device to do so.

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.

I use both. Pi-hole running in a docker container on one of my home servers which my gateway is configured to assign as the default DNS for all clients, and uBlock Origin on all my browsers to catch everything else.

Pihole is pretty good at catching ads on platforms that are not suited to browser based blockers (IoT devices, streaming boxes etc) but it isn't perfect and is best used in conjunction with another solution.

That is exactly what I did with my dumb washing machine (and dishwasher).

Each has a ZigBee energy monitoring smart plug which is connected to a local Home Assistant instance. Spent an hour or two writing automations based on the power draw reported by the plugs and now I get push notifications that report whenever either machine finishes its cycle (including how long it took).

A few thousand years later, Ed decides to create ~~20~~ 18 superhuman clones of himself, and things start to get pretty grimdark.

Worf is in the opening scene because he's trying to sue Picard over that barrel.

This seems like a brilliant solution to a problem that shouldn't exist.

Oh yes, 100% - if they were to implement a fuel system, then just mining for fuel manually on the existing planets would be incredibly dull. Building something like a fuel refinery on the other hand would make sense - it would even give a purpose to habitats/planetary bases, which are completely superfluous at the moment. At no point in the game did I need to build one, and if the game didn't keep reminding me that base building existed I would probably have forgotten all about that feature.

I got Starfield free with my new graphics card and tbh I'm glad that was the case as otherwise I'd have serious buyers remorse. I put a good 50 or so hours into the game, enough to finish the main storyline and most of the factions quests, but at the end of the day it just felt like a hollow experience, and I doubt I'll be going back to replay it.

The NPCs are shallow and robotic, and once you've explored their dialogue tree once you may as well never talk to them again as they'll never say anything new.

The game worlds look quite visually impressive but aside from the handful of cities and occasional settlements and outposts there is just nothing to do. Who would have guessed simulating a lifeless grey rock would be boring?

The fast travel system is completely broken and ruins the purported objective of the game; to explore. Instead of encouraging the player to do so by landing on planets to find fuel for their ship, the player can just teleport across the galaxy with no consequences.

The only aspect of the game I found to be really fun was the space combat. The ship builder, while quite frustrating at times, was also enjoyable.

Overall, Starfield feels like a game whose ambitions exceed the technical capabilities of the engine it is based on. You can see the janky workarounds that are used to make the game fit the engine from a mile away; cutscenes of a ship taking off rather than an interactive first person view, invisible barriers in the world to prevent you from walking too far without reloading, a cut to black when transiting between interiors and exteriors, and the same dull and lifeless NPC "AI" (I use that term very generously given recent advances) as we saw in older Bethesda titles.

It's past time that BGS put the rotting hulk that is Gamebryo/Creation Engine/whatever this latest iteration is called out to pasture (at least for new IPs like this) as clearly it is now actively hindering their creative ambitions.