When I bought my 3 it was $2200 including the harness for my car. Now the newer 3X is $1450 including harness (economies of scale!). I’ve been running it for 2 and a half years now and have 80,000 miles logged in my unit.

I’m using it in a 2016 Civic Touring which was their original dev car model so it’s well documented and had a modification available to get necessary torque in tighter highway turns and be able to slow to and resume from stop. Other cars may work better or worse in terms of torque and ability to control speed. They have pretty extensive vehicle listings on their site and GitHub detailing the capabilities they are available depending on the car.

https://comma.ai/shop/comma-3x

I don’t work for Comma or anything, just am a fan of the tech and how it has allowed the controls in my car to get better over time rather than being stuck with what they shipped in 2016. My wife’s 2021 CR-V has better stock driver assist than my 2016 Civic, but my Comma’s assist experience today is far better than either stock system.

A Comma 3 driver assist system for my car. I drive a lot for work, and it’s an absolute game changer for driving distance as an enhancement to the stock LKAS and ACC systems. Highway miles are dramatically less strain and effort, and it makes me more able to watch the flow of traffic and keep an eye out for hazards. Their tagline is that they’re “making driving chill” and it’s definitely the case as long as you have a fully compatible vehicle.

Lots of good advice here. I’ve got a bunch of older WD Reds still in service (from before the SMR BS). I’ve also had good luck shucking drives from external enclosures as well as decommissioned enterprise drives. If you go that route, depending on your enclosure or power supply in these scenarios you may run into issues with a live 3.3V SATA power pin causing drives to reboot. I’ve never had this issue on mine but it can be fixed with a little kapton tape or a modified SATA adapter. It’s definitely cheaper to shuck or get used enterprise for capacity! I’m running at least a dozen shucked drives right now and they’ve been great for my needs.

Also, if you start reaching the point of going beyond the ports available on your motherboard, do yourself a favor and get a quality HBA card flashed in IT mode to connect your drives. The cheapo 4 port cards I originally tried would have random dropouts in Unraid from time to time. Once I got a good HBA it’s been smooth sailing. It needs to be in IT mode to prevent hardware raid from kicking in so that Unraid can see the individual identifiers of the disks. You can flash it yourself or use an eBay seller like ThArtOfServer who will preflash them to IT mode.

Finally, be aware that expanding your array is a slippery slope. You start with 3 or 4 drives and next thing you know you have a rack and 15+ drive array.

Same, though I’ve got a couple Decepticons sprinkled in. They all connect to the Allspark ssid.

Now they’ve even started offering this at the check-in counter! Critically it’s after the “pay us $35 to check your bag” screen. It says it’s a one time special offer but I’ve done it a half dozen times now on American and twice on United. Bag just is supposed to be carry on sized. I don’t even have to take it through security when this option is available.

Seconding the Shield, for all of the above plus Nvidia’s update commitment to it. IIRC the 2015 Shield is the longest continually updated Android device ever. I have a 2015, 2017, and a 2019 at my house, and a couple of 2017s at my parents’ place. I upgraded the older ones to the toblerone remote last year. All are still working great, and continuing to receive regular updates.

My error, I just checked and apparently it’s actually a Precision. I don’t deal in Dells so I don’t know all their nomenclature! It’s still been a downgrade though from my ThinkPad.

Even on the Windows side of things they’re frustrating. Company took my perfectly working Thinkpad and replaced it last September with an “upgraded” Dell Inspiron laptop. It’s a piece of crap. Wakes up all the time in my bag, randomly drops wifi, and randomly drops ViewSonic monitors. Official IT solution: this happens sometimes, we don’t know why, and we’re going to send you Dell monitors instead.

*Edit I guess it’s actually a Precision, not Inspiron. I don’t buy Dells so I don’t know all the names!

The better upload requires using their modem/router, or one of the specific users owned ones that are approved by them to work with the mid-split tech. While my old modem could technically do it, it wasn’t “approved” for the speed. I was limited on upload to 35 but could usually hit 45 from over provisioning. I had to buy a new modem but now I get 1400/200. They just flipped the switch on being able to use consumer owned hardware at all with the mid-splits this fall.

Great advice from everyone here. For the transcoding side of things you want an 8th gen or newer Intel chip to handle quicksync and have a good level of quality. I’ve been using a 10th gen i5 for a couple of years now and it’s been great. Regularly handles multiple transcodes and has enough cores to do all the other server stuff without an issue. You need Plex Pass to do the hardware transcodes if you don’t already have it or can look at switching to Jellyfin.

As mentioned elsewhere, using an HBA is great when you start getting to large numbers of drives. I haven’t seen random drops the way I’ve seen occasionally on the cheap SATA PCI cards. If you get one that’s flashed in “IT mode” the drives appear normally to your OS and you can then build software raid however you want. If you don’t want to flash it yourself, I’ve had good luck with stuff from The Art of Server

I know some people like to use old “real” server hardware for reliability or ECC memory but I’ve personally had good luck with quality consumer hardware and keeping everything running on a UPS. I’ve learned a lot from serverbuilds.net about compatibility works between some of the consumer gear, and making sense of some of the used enterprise gear that’s useful for this hobby. They also have good info on trying to do “budget” build outs.

Most of the drives in my rack have been running for years and were shucked from external drives to save money. I think the key to success here has been keeping them cool and under consistent UPS power. Some of mine are in a disk shelf, and some are in the Rosewill case with the 12 hot swap bays. Drives are sitting at 24-28 degrees Celsius.

Moving to the rack is a slippery slope… You start with one rack mounted server, and soon you’re adding a disk shelf and setting up 10 gigabit networking between devices. Give yourself more drive bays than you need now if you can so you have expansion space and not have to completely rearrange the rack 3 years later.

Also if your budget can swing it, it’s nice keeping other older hardware around for testing. I leave my “critical” stuff running on one server now so that a reboot when tinkering doesn’t take down all the stuff running the house. That one only gets rebooted or has major changes made when it’s not in use (and wife isn’t watching Plex). The stuff that doesn’t quite need to be 24/7 gets tested on the other server that is safe to reboot.

I’ve been using one for several years now with one of the documented switches that add multiple ports. https://docs.pikvm.org/ezcoo/#connections First in a DIY and then with the v3 hat Kickstarter I guess total I’m at $270 between the Kickstarter HAT and ezcoo switch plus the cost of a Pi (which I already had) I can reach 4 machines over my Tailnet and jump between them reliably. I can also control power on my primary server. (others are on a network managed PDU and can be forcibly reset that way if needed)

I had an old console from a job but it was so old that it required an ancient version of Java to access through the web interface. I’m sure there may be better options, but for my homelab setup the pikvm has worked well at a price that fit in my budget.

A Comma 3 to run Openpilot on my Honda Civic. It’s lane keep / adaptive cruise control on steroids. I drive about 40 thousand miles each year for work, 46 miles round trip on “local” days. Having that level of driver assist on the highway makes a life changing difference. I arrive less fatigued and feel more capable of reacting to hazards. Their tagline is making driving chill, and it really has delivered. I don’t know how I did this mileage before Openpilot.

A bunch of companies seem to be implementing that version (not being able to paste the 6 digits). It’s just asinine and makes me think less of any product / company using that style.

Both. Verizon service at one of my offices is trash, but our family unlimited plan is ideal for just about everywhere else. I can’t beat the present pricing for the number of lines we have. My phone supports DSDS so I’ve got a physical Verizon sim as my primary and then a secondary esim that connects to T-Mo when needed.

Prosthetics. Costs are always blown way out of proportion because the media looks at just the device and ignores the professional expertise and custom fabrication work that goes into the devices. They also all like to hype that arms are “mind controlled” when they’re all using different variations of the same myoelectric technology that’s been around for years. There have certainly been dramatic advances as a result of better battery technology and 3D printing improvements to rapid prototyping, but what the media presents is typically very out of touch with reality. It’s even worse when you go from news media to movies and TV shows that set completely unrealistic expectations for patients.

I’ve had the exact opposite experience historically. Of 5 Seagate drives I’ve purchased over the last decade or so, only 1 of them is still working. Meanwhile 25+ WD hard drives are still in production over the same time with only 1 that started throwing smart errors a couple years back.

Wife and I had a similar experience. We kept thinking “oh, here’s the part where we’re going to talk about all the science and physics!” but then went off on another track. I liked it overall though and have generally been a Nolan fan.

Not necessarily. I’m on a daily medication that has a generic but is available in both extended release and immediate release forms. The extended release provides a more consistent dosage and has historically prevented me from getting sick. The immediate release causes inconsistent spikes and I have a history of getting sick on it. Insurance refused to pay for the extended release type for about 2 years before it made it onto their “formulary.” In the meantime I was using GoodRx and paying $100/mo instead of my paid health insurance pharmacy plan to make sure I wouldn’t get sick. The person I spoke to at the pharmacy management wing of the insurance company literally told me “you can get an app on your phone which will tell you when to take the immediate release medication.”

Yes, but they’ll have to add you to the group chat using your Apple ID instead of your primary phone number unless you use one of the “workarounds” to get your number attached to iMessage.

https://airmessage.org/help/guide/phone-number

The workarounds listed are for Airmessage but they apply to Beeper as well in terms of getting your phone number attached. I’ve been using method #1 successfully for about a month now.

No need for an always on Mac with Beeper. I was previously using Airmessage and then Bluebubbles in this manner on an old Mac Mini. Have been on Beeper for a couple of months now. They use their own Macs as servers.