Posts by apsteinmetz

Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

article might be missing something

So what were the initial conditions for these drivers? Do they not charge at home? Are they driving to charging stations with cold, nearly dead batteries? It sounds like it.

I don't identify with this at all. Bought my first Tesla in 2013 and now on my second. I'm the first to admit that, if you can't charge at home, EVs are not ideal. If you can, they are far superior to ICE cars. In the winter, I turn on my climate a few minutes before I leave and the cabin and battery are nice and toasty with a full charge. If I need to pull into a supercharger along the way, the battery is already "conditioned." If I let the range get fairly low (as I should) the miles pour back into the car very quickly. The nav system is very smart about when and where I need to stop. Grab a sandwich and off I go. A very pleasant experience (which is rarely needed because the battery range seems to be plenty for my driving).

The failure modes for EVs are different than the failure modes for ICE cars. Owners need to educate themselves (Looking at you Hertz, "Ohh, let's rent an EV"). It's not a technology problem and pleading for St. Elon to *do something* won't help. the The "answer is simply not to drive during a deep freeze" is nonsense, written by someone who has no experience with EVs.

HP customers claim firmware update rendered third-party ink verboten

This happened to me

Could a customer BE any more annoyed? I had been using non-HP ink for many months and literally one morning my printer is disabled ... on purpose...with no notice or opt-in provision. Given that a person might be expected to buy several laptops/computers/printers over the course of many years, creating sworn enemies is not a good marketing strategy. I really wish I could have been in the room when HP approved this even after getting spanked previously.

It is possible to roll back the firmware to a DRM-free version if you search around for the file. It's a colossal PITA to do. Once done, it is also possible to find, buried deep in settings, the ability to turn off auto firmware updates.

I am now firmly in the never-HP - for anything - camp.

For password protection, dump LastPass for open source Bitwarden

I'm sticking with LastPass, for now

The brand promise of LastPass was "Even if we get hacked, we don't know your password and it would be practically impossible to brute force a good master password." This seems to still be valid. I have deobfuscated my vault and the unencrypted info are my URLs and time of last visit. My master password had 65 bits of entropy. I'm pretty relaxed. As you say a lot of my dumb old passwords are already out there and I get phishing attempts all the time. That's life, not LastPass. What I am doing is:

1. changed master password (I know that doesn't cure this problem since the bad guys have the vault locked with the old MPW).

2. changing passwords at sensitive sites (you can have netflix) even though it's low risk. We all use 2FA, as well, right?

3. waiting to see what LastPass does to restore trust. I may go to bitwarden, if I'm not satisfied but switching has costs, eh?