My EV sits in the driveway and soaks up excess production from my PV setup.
My main problem is it’s never really empty enough.

If I’m on the road, a high voltage DC charger gets me from 10% to 50% in about 10 minutes. Barely enough time for a coffee and a leak, then it’s another 2 hours of driving. Rinse, repeat.

Sure, you can’t barrel down the Autobahn for 10 hours straight without stopping but who wants that?

Aside from budget and time overruns it looks like they overshot the target of “futuristic” and landed in the middle of dystopian…

Sounds quite similar to Markov chains which made me think of this story:

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the-automated-curse-generator

Still gets a snort out of me every time Markov chains are mentioned.

IF you already have an email domain you control.

Calling “acquiring and setting up an email domain and configuring the mail server for wildcards” “basically no extra effort” is a bit disingenuous compared to “solve a captcha for a Gmail account”

Yeah, inductive charging is basically a must.

Especially because it eliminates the guesswork if the watch is correctly seated to charge

Oh, they’re putting a lot of thought into it I’m sure.

That thought being “Money, Money, Money, Profit, Profit” of course.

No actual technical solution here, but it smells slightly of XY-Problems.

From what you described it seems the main issues are

• too many calls
• not knowing who’s calling
• not wanting to answer the phone
• not reaching the phone in time

Maybe you could look into solutions like setting a custom ringtone for important callers or having the phone announce caller names so your mother can decide if she wants to make the effort to get her phone.

I’m speculating a bit here but I can imagine that getting up and answering the phone is exhausting for your mother. Also if her mindset is " a ringing phone means it’s important" that could make it even more stressful.

Maybe you could find a way to let her silence all calls except caregivers and ICE contacts. (On Android DND exceptions could work for that)

That way she doesn’t feel pressured to answer the phone every time it rings and stays reachable.

If it’s actually just the physical issue of reaching the phone in time, does she have a convenient way to carry the phone indoors like a lanyard?

Hope some of this helps you

No idea, but it was my parent’s box for loose tea leaves…

Not the only one.

Threema is decent, too. Crypto is comparable, and allows signups without email or phone number. It’s a paid app, though, but anonymous purchase options are available.

There should be an external hard drive full of portable game installs in some drawer that fits the time period.

Should easily kill a week.

That’s a legitimate concern, but this can be easily mitigated by routing “guest” traffic into a VPN.

Guests might encounter more captchas than usual but better than no internet.

That feature is right on the border between real neat tech and deeply unsettling.

“Hey, my phone uses its last few electrons to turn into a bluetooth beacon to stay findable” sounds like sci-fi “reserve power emergency mode”

“I can’t turn off the locator chip in a device that holds half my life and memories” is just dystopian.

I’m wondering if there would be a way to keep it useful while minimizing impact for people who stay off the grid. A hardware switch would probably be a good start but they won’t fly with current all-touch designs.

Is that a reference to Angleton?

Wow, that sounds like a decent start for an architecture.

I’m tempted to spin up a few Jellyfin instances to see how it might work…

Decent writeup by Charles Stross:

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/01/worldcon-in-the-news.html

The mode of operation of WorldCon/the Hugos seems interesting as in “May you live in interesting times”

Edit: fixed auto-co-wrecked spelling of Charles Stross

JellyFed(eration) would be awesome. It should use an anonymous overlay network so federation is not limited to people you trust in copyright-zealous jurisdictions.

I didn’t know you could hear a picture so clearly.

Teenagers and a dog sound like Scooby Doo. No idea how specific the rest is.

That’s the equivalent of leaving the door open and hanging a sign “Internet over there” pointing at a wall.

Programs don’t need to respect those registry keys. If you’re worried about internet access, set up a firewall.

Also, if you’re worried about malware, the damage is probably done before anything connects to the internet.

B stands for Billion (Parameters) IIRC