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12 hours agoOut of curiosity, what form of cargo bike are you seeing? Regular-ish bike with racks, or something more exotic like an Urban Arrow?
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023
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2·3 days agoI’m with you there.
Not too long ago, my company was informed by letter (as you should have been) of a price increase. I can’t remember exactly, but I want to say it was a 600% increase on the company’s rates. There’s never been any claims on the policy, they just decided they could do it to enough of their clients, and probably enough would pay it that it wouldn’t matter they’d lose a bunch.
I understand the provide we switched to actually provides greater coverage for less than the original amount we paid the first provider. Unbelievable.
It wasn’t specifically for insurance reasons, but I got rid of my car after I noticed I wasn’t driving very far. Now we have a couple cargo trailers and we do the shopping and the errands just as easily and we’re saving tens of thousands doing it. We go through the winter as well, it’s not for everyone but dress appropriately and have lights and you’ll do great.
I have Viofo 129 Pros. Looks like they now have a 229 Pro in various bundles.
At the time, I looked into various brands and models and was consistently finding so many models were the same device with a different brand on them. That was a huge turn off because it means no firmware updates, support, or a real company behind the product.
Here’s what I was looking for and think is good to be mindful of:
No large display screen
I didn’t want something with a huge display screen, because I don’t want my view to be obstructed by stuff on the windscreen.
No built in secondary camera
A secondary, driver facing camera built in. To achieve a second camera, in my opinion, the main exterior facing camera quality must be compromised to maintain overall price parity with single camera competitors.
Also, on the topic of insurance, there’s absolutely nothing an insurance company would see on the driver facing video that would be to your benefit. They’ll claim you didn’t look down at the speedometer once the entire drive before your accident and therefore they believe you to have been speeding. This also applies to law enforcement in my opinion. Everything you say / provide can and will be used against you.
Additive secondary camera
A number of models, Viofo included, have a input port on them to allow a second camera to be used to combine footage. Think of any video you’ve seen where the front facing footage has a smaller rear facing video in the corner. These aren’t bad, but I noticed that most of the rear facing cameras are lower resolution than the main camera. To me, this doesn’t make a lot of sense as there’s the same likelihood of an incident behind me as in front of me. This might not be an issue anymore, given its been five or so years since I bought mine, the new models might be 4k 60fps all the way around.
A minor detail is also that with additive cameras, a portion of the front view is obstructed in the recording by the rear view. Maybe this is circumventable, and they save as multiple files independently, I don’t know. The resolution thing bothered me more.
Personally, I don’t have rear specific cameras. All of mine are the 129 Pro model, each set to the same video settings. I’m kind of particular and wanted full 360° coverage, so each of our vehicles have four cameras, front, rear, and both sides. Obviously not exactly economical to start out, but one of the side cameras already paid for the entire camera set up in a sense as it captured someone breaking into a neighbour’s house and lead to arrests and prosecution. I call that a win.
Tactile buttons only
Capacitive buttons are garbage and should be outlawed in vehicles as you can’t feel for them. More specifically though, a dedicated toggle button for microphone recording. I like to have mine on in the event I need to read a license plate, or I am in an accident significant enough where recording a final message to family would be important.
That said, I do regularly turn the mic off when there are private conversations taking place, and this is important enough to me I feel it’s worth mentioning.
Night performance
The hard truth is that night vision is these cameras is never going to be great as the sensors are pretty small and they tend to adjust to your headlights anyway, but the Viofo cameras I’ve had have all been able to read a plate when illuminated. I wouldn’t count on it though, also read aloud the plate so the mic picks it up.
Parking modes
Most cameras have some for of parking mode, where they activate when it senses the vehicle get bumped. They do this with a g force sensor.
Not all, but some cameras, including Viofo, also have motion sensing abilities, so they will record a set length (5 or 10 minutes) after they see something move. These tend to have sensitivity options which is great if you live in a windy area with trees, because then it’ll basically be on all night.
There’s also just a time lapse option for when the vehicle is off, and the camera will just take a low frame rate video - as in 10 frames per minute - and kick up the frame rate if it sees something or experiences movement. In my mind this is the best of both worlds, so this is what mine are set to.
GPS
Some reviews I came across way back when were finding some cameras had GPS data displayed on the video with no option to turn it off. This data included the current speed of the vehicle. This circles back to giving the insurer or authority data that can incriminate you. You were going 55 in a 50 and so it’s your fault an inebriated driver went through a red light and slammed into you. No thanks.
That said, I do have the GPS coordinates displayed on mine. In the event the vehicle is stolen and found ditched somewhere, there’s a slim possibility the coordinates could come in handy. Unlike the speed display, the insurer would have to calculate travel speed based off changing coordinates which would be changing at a non standard rate. I find this an acceptable hurdle that an insurer would not traverse.
Capacitor, no battery
No nuance here, batteries tend to swell in the heat experienced by vehicles in the summer sun. Instead, having a capacitor solves this issue.
Memory card
Get the fastest and highest capacity SD card the camera you get will accept. No sense spending money on a good camera if the card fails you. This is a guide to understanding various SD card related terms. It has a good comparison table partway down.
Adhesive mounting, no suction cups
I prefer a bracket with adhesive that the camera clips into instead of a suction cup. I’ve had suction cups let go in both heat and cold. It’s difficult to achieve the same angle once it’s fallen off. Also, this happening while driving can be startling.
Versatility
Bit of a unique situation to my use case, but I often remove a couple cameras to attach to my bike when going on a ride with a lot of road riding, or sometimes with my family. I have mounts on my bikes I just clip them into and I slip a USB power pack in a pouch with a cable running to the cameras. Basically this let’s me not have dedicated bike cameras.
Insurance on your insurance
As I mentioned before, the camera can be considered your insurance policy. Something I recommend to anyone that asks about dash cameras is to consider guarding your possession of the camera a tertiary insurance policy.
If you are ever involved in an accident, don’t say a thing to anyone about the video evidence. Best case scenario, it throws a would be liar a curveball and they admit whatever fault is theirs. In my opinion, it’s not worth bringing up because of the risk that someone is desperate enough, they might try to commandeer the camera from your vehicle. This also helps trap someone in a lie should they go that route.
Final paranoia
I addition to your primary insurance (policy), your secondary insurance (the camera), and your tertiary insurance (not volunteering the footage), I also practice a fourth level of insanity - I mean insurance - whereby I keep extra SD cards in the vehicle so following an accident, I can quickly replace the cards with the accident footage on them with empty cards to record the aftermath.
This way if anyone sees the camera in the windscreen and removes the card or even the entire camera, I’m still covered. These extra cards aren’t huge capacity, maybe enough for an hour of footage.
I didn’t realise I had quite so much to say on this topic. Hopefully the insane parts were outweighed by the useful parts haha.
Goes to show how strange modern life is that it was easier for them to cut a cheque than send someone down there. Happens all the time unfortunately. I wonder if someone at the impound lot rode it home.
I realised in a similar, though less detrimental, encounter that true insurance comes in the form of dash cameras. For the equivalent of an insurance payment or two, a high fidelity video of the entire vehicle surroundings can be had.
Honestly though, with a few witnesses and half a plate, it’s a surprise they couldn’t find the car that drove into you. Decerning the colour, and style of car, surely it’d be only a handful of vehicles matching both the description and the numbers.
I’m sorry that happened to you.
What commonly goes unsaid in these conversations of insurance cost is the immediate disputes that occur with the provider.
Why am I paying tens of thousands a year to engage in an argument when making a claim?
12·5 days agoI’ve been annoyed by a minor change in the stock Samsung clock app for some time now. I just installed the Fossify one you linked.
Minor nitpick: 24h time doesn’t start with a leading zero.
Everything else seems exactly how it should be.
Thanks.
2·19 days agoAh okay, I like that implementation. Good to have it be eye-catching and not just a bunch of text. Thanks for letting me know.
Par for the course with online discussions, I’d say. Always difficult to discern the tone of a comment when it’s written down. No harm done.
Cheers!
Do you ever find there are a lot of these signs at any given time? Having them in a designated area by the entryway then maybe again by the shelf where they stock it seems like a good combination.
In my head I worry it might become overwhelming to the point no one reads them anymore. Though I suppose that could be mitigated with a large image of the recalled product, to make it easier to check at a glance without having to stop and read for a minute. I can’t remember ever seeing signage at the shops near me. I wish we had that.
Maybe I’m overthinking it and it’s a rarity to ever have more than a couple products be recalled at a single time. Can’t say I’ve put much thought into any of this before.
I understood that from your comment. I wasn’t contradicting you or challenging what you said, just wondering aloud how we might go about it and pointing out some flaws in my own point.
That said, even if this article was published the day of the recall, I imagine only a minority of the affected purchasers would ever see it. I couldn’t say I’ve ever looked at a recipes website to inform me of important consumer news.
I’m not quite sure how this would done in a timely-er fashion. Signage in the stores? In theory, anyone paying with plastic could have been contacted through the card company.
That would involve the manufacturer alerting the store, the store alerting all the various card companies, then the card companies alerting the customer. That’s a lot of infrastructure to keep running and to do so fast enough that the customer finds out within a day or two of the recall.
Expensive. Worthwhile given the potential to save lives or hospital stays, but you know how companies are.
This would also involve admitting all your purchase history is collected and stored in a way that is not anonymized, which I don’t think people would quite like to be explicitly told about.
Just looked again and noticed this from their inventory sheet available on this auction page, emphasis mine, spelling errors theirs:
$707k = cost of on hand inventory $530k = cost of available inventory
On Hand inventoy means inventory is physically present in a building, regardless of whether it is committed to a customer or not
Available Inventory means on hand inventory that is not committed to a customer
This means they are auctioning off nearly two hundred thousand dollars of product that customers have already paid for.
This news will always be sad, but it’s hard to feel compassion when the entire organization stops communicating with its customer base.
Paid orders left unfulfilled for months; bikes in for service effectively held hostage; company vehicle being auctioned off.
It shouldn’t be handled in silence. This type of decline isn’t sudden. Juiced should have stopped providing service months ago so they didn’t end up with customer bikes in their possession by the time this all came to a head.
We won’t know specifically what caused this for some time, but assuming it’s not a case of greed or gross mismanagement, it’s a shame a company building alternative transportation options couldn’t be bailed out. Maybe that’s reserved for the auto industry.
31·23 days agoAnd here I thought jeans were problematic.
141·24 days agoSure, gram for gram, Tony’s has 34% more lead than California would like, but their chocolate is still sold in the state.
To add to what @Maalus@lemmy.world pointed out, the Mast bar is 70g for $8, while Tony’s bar is 180g for $6.
Gram for gram, Mast is more than triple the price.
2·26 days agoIf more people held themselves accountable, these products wouldn’t exist. I know it can be an awkward situation to deny a gift for ethical reasons. Kudos to you.
I feel the argument is a little different when it comes to physical goods.
Stealing a Nestlé product takes away revenue just like if it were left on the shelf, never purchased, and discarded by the shop. The main benefit there is the edible portion of the product doesn’t end up in a landfill.
1·28 days agoI suppose that makes me an idiot?
We go out of town every few months for a weekend, and when we go somewhere that doesn’t have train service, I rent a car to make the trip. It’s around $100 (not including fuel) for the two days depending on which model they have at the time. Even if we did this every month, it’s a bit silly to suggest that it’s cheaper to have bought a vehicle with double the range for these infrequent occurrences of long distance travel. Especially so considering the largest cost of manufacturing an electric vehicle by a hefty margin is the battery pack.
From this list of the 19 vehicles with over 450km range, 10 of them are trucks or SUVs so we can ignore them from this discussion. Of the 9 remaining, only 4 of them cost $60k CAD or below:
- $60k - Tesla Model Y
- $60k - KIA EV6
- $55k - Hyundai Ioniq 6
- $55k - Tesla Model 3
This year’s Nissan Leaf can go 240km, at $28k. At your minimum, you’re looking to spend double the money to get a car that can go double the range. For the extra $28k spent on an Ioniq 6 or Model 3 over the Leaf, you could rent a car for the weekend getaway every single month for the next two decades.
Some years ago, I wanted to know if an electric car would fit my lifestyle. I drove a gasoline sedan at the time. I decided to refuel my car at the end of every day, and take notes on the distance I had driven and where the needle was on the gas gauge. I did this for two months in the summer, when I knew I did most of my driving. The data I collected about my own habits showed me I didn’t really drive a lot most days. There were only a handful of times I went over 100km in a day. The gas needle rarely dipped below three quarters full, and never below half.
There’s about 12,000 gas stations in Canada, and nearly 9,000 charging stations - up 30% last year. If you’re able to plug in for fifteen minutes or so at a destination you’re already stopping at, that really helps with the longer distance issue. It’s only getting easier to have a low range car as the years go by.
Regarding charging times
I wouldn’t say batteries charge slower because of their smaller capacity. The lower charging speed is probably a cost saving measure which makes it incompatible with the fastest charging stations around. The Nissan Leaf will gain 190km of range in 40 minutes, or 5km per minute. Tesla’s can get 280km in 15 minutes, or 18km per minute. That’s about a 4x difference, but it costs so much more to get there.
The Leaf has a capacity that per kilowatt provides 6km of range. The Model 3 gets 7km per kilowatt. Is one extra kilometre per kilowatt worth buying the equivalent of two Nissan Leafs? Not to me it isn’t.
In my view, driving out of town every other week is a poor argument for buying a vehicle with twice the range than it needs the other 339 days of the year.
I see the root of your point being open source and right to repair, but given the electric assist bike format is a relatively new one, I think everyone here would settle for getting people on two wheels, regardless of form or repairability.