Showroom7561

Samsung has gone hard promoting AI in their phones, and now OnePlus has also announced some heavy AI-based features in their new Android OS. Pretty much every other brand is now doing the same, so you can't escape it.

I've been in the market to upgrade my nearly 6-year-old phone, but seeing all these AI features, especially when they rely on Google's Gemini (or other cloud AI), and it feels deflating.

Will privacy ultimately have to be sacrificed "from now on"?

By not using these AI features, you pay a lot for features you won't be using. And the usefulness of the device becomes limited as nearly all functions now have AI-based components to them.

I'm totally fine with on-device AI, but many features I'm seeing don't seem to be on-device, and I've spent years trying to stop sending my data to companies like Google. I don't want to go backwards for the sake of market trends.

What are your future plans when it comes to smartphones?

We have bike routes all over, and they are signed with something as shown.

But most of these will have a bike lane or sharrows along with the Bike Route signs.

However, I ran into one road that doesn't, it's just signed.

What's the best way to tag these roads? I don't want to cause confusion, but these unpainted (but signed) roads do actually lead to/from better cycling infrastructure, so they should be known.

UPDATE: Thanks for all the input, guys. Having looked into this further, I'm comfortable using the designated tag, at least for this specific road.

My municipality is a bit bipolar with their application of these signs. Most are signed as bike routes with toad markings, but a few are signed only.

Because these "bike routes" connect to more significant cycling infrastructure, I think its more than valid to tag them as “designated” as opposed to "yes" (which would be pretty much every road).

To add even more confusion to the situation, the official Cycling infrastructure map for my municipality seems to not include several areas that have both bike route signs and road markings, so i will ask them if the data is just lagging or if it needs to be updated.

So, unless there's a critical reason why the "designated" tag shouldn't be used in this context, I will leave it at that.

I wanted to share my experience with waxing my bike chains.

I was resistant to waxing my chains because it seems that a lot of people felt it was "too much work".

But having to constantly clean black shit off my chains after every ride, then spend time degreasing and re-lubing, I figured I'd try waxing when I got my gravel bike.

Now, thousands of KM later and having converted all three bikes to waxed, there's no way I'd go back. The time saved could be measured in hours per month.

First, the biggest complaint is chain prep. Yeah, regardless if you're waxing or not, you'll need to prep a new chain by removing the factory grease. With waxed, you do this once, and no more worrying about degreasing ever again. Make like easy and get Silca's chain stripper, and it's a 10 minute, one-step process.

Ongoing chain maintenance couldn't be easier. After every ride, give the chain a quick wipe (or not). My chain stays clean, even after a 200 km ride.

And if you ride in wet or dirty conditions? Guess what, you're in for a LOT of work if you lube your chain. With waxed, keep a second (or third) chain ready to go, and you just swap it out (10 seconds of effort). Take the dirty chain, give it a wipe if it's only been wet, or pour boiled water onto it if you want to "reset" the chain to bare metal. Then drop it into the waxing pot for a re-wax. You don't have to stand at the pot, so there's no real time commitment here. I've spent more time completely dirtying large microfiber cloths trying to get my chain "clean" when lubed (hint: it's never clean if you use a wet lube, not without solvents and an ultrasonic cleaner).

For actual immersion wax, I do it every 1000 km (sooner than you need to), and use a drip wax every 200 - 250 km to keep things fresh.

Honestly, wax is easier, cleaner, and takes less time to maintain vs wet lube.

The only downsides? The initial cost to get started. But this is offset by not having to replace chains or other components prematurely. You actually save money in the long-term when using waxed chains.

Some might argue that "you can't run waxed chains in muddy or constantly rainy conditions". Well, at the same time, your wet lube isn't really helping matters in those situations, either. Waxed is still better, and you can swap chains much faster than you can clean the grinding paste from a wet lubed chain.

Who would I not recommend waxed chains to? Someone who rarely uses their bike. Drip lube will be "good enough" in those cases. But anyone else would benefit from waxing their chain.

... and they use YouTube to host their informational videos.

"Please allow us to interrupt your research with intrusive targeted ads, so you can have a superior browsing experience." 🤡

This store just opened up a few months back, and they had zero bike parking.

I emailed their head office, saying that I was planning to shop there, but not until they added a bike rack.

Went to check last night, and boom! Bike rack!

Walking my grandkid to/from school, it absolutely floors me how many dangerous drivers there are around kids.

In a matter of maybe 10 minutes, I've witnessed:

• at least a dozen cars illegal parked. It's not the parking that bothers me, but the fact that these cars are often parked on turns or just before intersections, making it impossible for other drivers to see small kids.
• Several people not stopping at stop signs, including at the exit of the school parking lot.
• One car, who completely blew through a stop sign at the front of the school, made a left turn and nearly hit a guy walking his kid. The driver didn't even slow down.
• Super fucking huge pickup trucks parked in the school parking lot, but their long ass hangs well over the sidewalk near the kindergarden area, leaving very little space to use the sidewalk.
• Speeding. Obviously, you have to have speeding in school zones, right?

This happens every day, during drop off and pick up. I was told that bylaw were “cracking down”, but no, they aren't. If they were, our municipality would generate $5000 in fines each and every day at every school.

The other day, I rode my bike past another school as kids were getting out. Not only was their massive parking lot completely full, but they had blocked the bike trail (WITH PYLONS) to make space for more cars. Then as I entered onto the road, cars were illegally parked along the road and on a bridge for a like 100m. Making it extremely difficult and dangerous to cross because they blocked visibility for me and other drivers on the road.

I asked the cross guard if these students all lived out of town, requiring every parent to drive them home; he obviously didn't get my joke.

Seriously, fuck cars. All of them!

"She said she didn’t see us. Didn’t see us. She was very, very upset."

The driver did stop and is not expected to be charged.

This makes me furious, but it's completely expected.

Cars are the only weapon where you can kill someone without consequence, even if it was pure negligence or entirely on purpose.

In my persistence to fit Linux in my life, I'm curious if some "must have" Windows software will work better if I just ran a Windows VM within Linux.

None of the software I need to work is needed to work continuously. They are basically programs that I fire up when needed, for a few minutes, then exited.

Wine will install them, but not run them, so I'm hoping a VM is the answer as I'm not interested in dual-booting to run a few Windows programs occasionally.

Also, "identical" has a different meaning here.

There's a special place in hell for the monster who dreamed up this captcha!

Another win for older tech?

When I want something cheap, I usually hit Aliexpress (website). As I was looking at the Aliexpress app page on the Google Play Store to check its privacy details, TEMU came up as a recommended app.

Now, my wife has used TEMU in the past, but since she often can't find her way around things, I downplayed her negative experience as "user error". That said, I went to the TEMU website and started looking around.

I found something that was a reasonable price, but then get this message saying I could get this item free through the app... sigh. OK. I sign up with my usual fake/random credentials and add this "free" item to my cart.

A spinning prize wheel comes up. Hey, I can get THREE free items now! Sweet. I spend the next 3 hours looking for stuff I can actually use, doom-scrolling through everything from women's underwear to t-shirts with assault rifle print. Literally something for everyone. LOL

Then I select my third "free" item, and another spinning prize wheel comes up. "100% off the next $35". Ok.

I didn't need more stuff, but hey, 100% off sounds like more free stuff!

I spend another hour looking, keeping an eye on the amount "saved" (apparently $600+, for stuff that is sold on Aliexpress for maybe $25).

When I finally get to check out, I get another spinning prize wheel. "100% off $100"!! Goddamn, I'm on a roll here. How do these guys make any money?!!

More time looking... I must have spent well over 4 hours on their app. Time to check out.

$67? Huh? What about 100% off and all that nonsense? Enter your phone number*

• You must agree to get promotional texts, or you can't check out... hmm, maybe my wife wasn't wrong.

In any case, there was no way to actually get anything "free". I deleted the app, deleted my account, and will never touch this scam ever again.

Do people actually end up getting anything from Temu? I thought AliExpress was bad, but the experience is 1000x better.

Hey guys, so it seems that Linkwarden isn't as good as I was hoping, since some websites will throw up a cookie popup or some other screen that basically prevents the capture.

Firefox Screenshot seems to work well, but it saves a PNG, which isn't really text searchable.

FF's "save page as..." feature seems to break things when viewing them back.

Save to PDF is another option, and that seems to be decent.

I'm not looking to copy entire websites, but I like to save web pages for later reference (i.e. instructions/specs).

I use Synology Note Station, but they don't have a web clipper for Firefox...

I'm fine with using a folder structure to store files, despite not being totally ideal when compared to Linkwarden.

Does anyone have any other suggestions that perhaps I've missed? Nothing too complicated... ideally, as simple as a button click would be great.