echan

Driving a car is boring. Which is not necessarily a bad thing! Every time I start a trip, I drive my car in reverse uphill on my gravel driveway like its nothing. Which is amazing! I couldn't have done that on a motorcycle, for multiple reasons, but in my car its trivial.

But with all driving being easy mode, the long straight highways that were already boring on a motorcycle are now that much worse. For some trips I take an early exit off the highway to take back roads to keep myself awake. But I'm trying to get better at highway driving, so I've got a music playlist I'm building, of songs that are both very familiar and high energy to keep me going.

Also I started working on a vid. Not any of the vids I haven't touched in over a year, not even the same editing program, but meh. Its one of those ideas that's not good by any objective metric, just two things you like shoved together.

I have spent the last week reading up on in-car technologies. I thought I had been paying attention the past 15 some odd years, but apparently I managed to miss the majority of the details. So here's a somewhat opinionated summary of what I've learned.

CarPlay (iPhone) and Android Auto (Android) let you use your smartphone on the car's infotainment screen. In the stone age you'd use a RAM mount on the dash to look at your actual smartphone screen. Now that cars have cameras and massive infotainment screens built-in, I guess it seems like a waste to not use that screen for your phone.

Android Automotive is a version of Android that IS a car's infotainment software. Considering how much people want to replace the car's native infotainment software, I guess it's not surprise that some car makers go for this option. Its got the usual android app permissions model. There's even an app store; only specific apps are supported, but that support extends pretty far, and includes "I swear I'll only use this in a parking lot" games like Candy Crush.

Android Automotive has multiuser support, via profiles. There's also a guest user profile, which seems like just another profile, but settings changes made to the guest user don't seem to persist, and get reset when the car is turned off. The active user profile can be changed at (mostly?) anytime; there's some lockscreen-style security options for auth when switching profiles that I haven't tried out yet.

It seems like profiles should be able to manage a whole bunch of settings. But actually... I have no f'ing idea what they manage because all I seem to find is exceptions. Ex: my car has an audio app, that combines AM/FM radio with SiriusXM and playing from USB. Every time I get in the car it forgets what I was listening to, and one time even forgot I had turned it off. Additionally, most (but not all!) of the settings that directly affect how the car drives are not even accessible from the infotainment screen's settings menu, they're only available from the speedometer screen's settings menu, and (AFAICT...) don't care about user profiles at all. So far the only setting I'm positive the user profile manages is the choice of animated background wallpaper for the speedometer screen. (WTH to every part of that sentence.)

I fully expect to spend at least another two months figuring out how to work everything in this car.

I bought a car on Monday, and sold my motorcycle on Friday.

Giving up the motorcycle feels like failing, despite everything. Lately, though, the universe has seen fit to emphasize the risk of riding a vehicle that can't keep itself upright -- the roads on the mountain have had a lot more dirt on them than usual. Nothing to trouble a vehicle with four wheels and enough wisdom to not go crazy fast around all the blind turns. But for two wheels that take turns at a lean, surprise dirt in the back half of a blind turn can a great way to have the bike slide out from under you, and if you're extra unlucky, you and the bike fall off the edge of the road and tumble down the side of the mountain. I've been safe, I haven't had any accidents, but I don't want this much worry or risk on a regular drive.

I bought a car. FINALLY. I paid more than I planned, but less than I feared, and finally can stop browsing car listings. It has all the cameras and driving assistance features a person could want, which sounds great, but considering my last car was from 1990, it is A LOT. I've dealt with it so far by skimming 800+ pages of manuals and making a mental list of the things I want to prioritize learning about (starting with, how to turn off all the driver assist features that are terrible at steep twisty mountain roads so they don't cause a crash) and Not Worrying About all the other features I'll figure out later.

I wonder if anyone designs & installs car wraps based on astronomy images...

These books have footnotes, but the sort that are joking asides, not explanatory notes. So there's no footnote on the passing reference to ThinkGeek, to explain to baby geeks and non-techies just what a marvel it was in its heyday. Also no footnote on the characters joking about being able to get a gov't purchase order approved for a computer from Dell but not Alienware, something that comes off much more sarcastic ever since Dell bought Alienware. And I myself could have used a footnote to highlight the Bastard Operator From Hell reference that I initially missed.

Does anyone make footnote annotated editions of books before they're hundreds of years old? Or cultural context footnotes for cultures that aren't countries or languages? If $someone were to setup a wiki for such notes, with context provided by limited quotes from the original, what'd be the mean estimated time to error 451 (down because lawsuit)?

I switched my morning soda for tea, starting last month. I'd been intending to do this for many years, but I didn't actually like tea much, until recently. I want to say its because I made a concerted effort to acclimate to tea and gain an appreciation for it. And maybe those efforts helped a little bit, but mostly it just... happened.

Lately I've been feeling older, as if I didn't age for many years and now suddenly things are going a lot faster, and part of that is apparently existential crises about what preferences are personal choices vs quirks of biology or something else.

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