sparky1337 @ sparky1337 @ttrpg.network

Posts

8

Comments

147

Joined

2 yr. ago

Yep. When I moved into my house the previous owner had used all garbage Walmart LED’s. I think I had one fail each month and just bought a bunch on sale from Phillips eventually.

Most common failure was the driver. So they turned into strobe lights lol. Most annoying failure ever.

And more importantly, not every LED is dimmer compatible. Sometimes they’re super picky or just plain don’t work.

Take a look at Keychron. They have a lot to offer for around your budget and they go on sale frequently.

Are you looking to be able to swap switches out? If so you will need to find hot swappable switches.

If you care about backlighting they might be a little more expensive. But Keychron is reasonable. I’ve had their K2 for years and it has a better feel in it vs Corsair or Razer stuff in my opinion.

I feel like mines the opposite. I pay $20/mo and we get access to a huge and well taken care of community pool, park, and basketball court. They also host community parties for each holiday that you can go to. They certainly allow you to get your $20 worth. Idk how they do it.

When it comes to architectural control, they’re pretty lax. We’ve got some vibrant and eclectic houses, but they are well put together. I haven’t found anything yet they won’t approve if you stay within a standard palette offering when it comes to shingles, siding etc. But some of these colors are yellows and reds so it’s not all boring either.

They also don’t allow signage in the yard to be displayed. So political signs etc will get you a violation. But it’s just a “remove by x date” and there’s no penalty if you do. I don’t mind this rule.

We do have to keep grass cut to an extent, but my neighbors cut it once a month at most and it’s usually a non issue. Honestly, other than safety things I’ve not seen anything crazy in mine. The two lady’s that operate it are super nice.

Honestly anything would have been better than those old iron dukes. They were dated in the 80’s

I will at least point out, that unless it’s a safety or moving violation you can’t get something like a window tint ticket in Virginia if your car is registered in North Carolina because the window tint laws are different.

Also, in rare cases, if the vehicle comes from the factory with super dark tint, you can’t get a ticket period because it is federally allowed. See the GM Pontiac fiero rear limo tint from the 80’s.

And this is just one aspect of a vehicle across state lines. So yea, it’s chaos and the police will give you a ticket anyways, especially if you’re a visitor.

Allegedly the EPA is monitoring the 8500 Gross weight through 2027, so it’s on the radar.

They were not designed for vehicles over 5000 lbs allegedly. Which is weird since lots of the older cars pushed that threshold. Maybe they meant 80’s cars.

Anything mini led with local dimming and HDR will be more than enough at a lower budget. Hisense has some pretty nice ones.

Check out rtings to get a general idea of features and their usefulness.

With budget pre builts, you’re usually sacrificing performance to an extent of cheap power supplys (that can blow up) and a tier or two lesser graphics unit for the same price as you would building it yourself.

Honestly, if you’re happy with the performance the steam deck provides then you should stick with that long enough to either realize your need for a purpose built desktop, or put it in a gen 2 steam deck down the road.

If you’re looking for strictly mileage, the hybrid will do better. The turbo motor would be in boost and consuming more fuel.

Coming from VW/Audi it’s easier to just grab a factory unit and have it programmed. Yea it’s expensive, but the German cars aren’t super easy to tinker with.

Generally Keynote is held on a Tuesday, preorders open Friday morning the same week. Phones then ship the following week.

Wolfenstein 3D or Doom. It’s hard to think which I played first. Probably Doom.

Clearance, tires, and open diffs are the big 3.

Most awd vehicles use torque sensors to brake the wheel that has no traction to push power to wheels that do. It doesn’t always work and most awd systems are clutch based so there’s slippage.

More of the basic 4wd vehicles these days come with electric lockers, more power, and better clearance. They still have road tires though so there’s room for improvement there.

I will say, most people that don’t do this stuff on a semi decent basis have ZERO idea on how to actually wheel. You can get pretty far in a base model but even the cheapest new bronco or wrangler are better equipped to deal with actual wheeling than a Subaru.

Driving Sports TV on YouTube shows how most of the vehicles work in light off-roading, and spoiler, most are terrible.

Congrats!

At this point I’d just say enjoy the new build.

Easy first steps. Enable the XMP profile in the bios to get the most out of your ram since ryzen is very sensitive to that.

Otherwise, I’d leave it as-is. Maybe grab 3DMark on sale ($5 or so) from steam and bench your system just to make sure you’re within expected results compared to others.

PBO for the cpu pretty much gets you 90% there on your max cpu overclock plus a little more voltage than you’d have with a manual one. The X3D cpus are really thick with the stacked cache so they do require decent cooling compared to non X3D skus. So it may just run a little warm but nothing crazy.

The big thing these days for gpu’s is undervolting. I’ve been able to cut out 50w or so from my 3080 with no discernible performance hit when coupled with my 5600x. Check out the Optimum YouTube channel (formerly Optimum Tech) on his undervolting results. His videos are a little older but are applicable to most gpus that are power hungry.

I never thought about a sudden change in brake compound affecting the AEB system and its calibrations. I’ve always tried to stay OEM or comparable aftermarket pads. For example, I swapped my pads on my GTI for some EBC’s mostly because of brake dust. They performed very well, but I also had sticky tires. I have noticed I was able to find parts much more easily with that car than I have my Mazda. And with how many parts revisions I’ve seen for that one car I’d believe that they demand a lot in parts manufacturing. I guess it comes with the territory when they do something like the global MQB platform where parts are so easily shared.

In 6 years and 150,000 miles I only had one incident of a false positive where the car braked for whatever the system saw as an obstacle. Fortunately, no one was behind me but it was a route I traveled every day and it happened early on (~40,000 miles). My newer Mazda has the whole camera setup etc and definitely triggers if with the adaptive cruise if someone in the lane next to me brakes or slows down so I can see the overly sensitive reactions making people angry.

For the headlights, I don’t think factory cars are much of an issue. Now that matrix style lights are making their way here we should be able to learn a lot from Europe.

Thanks for the insightful reply! It’s cool to see stuff like this.

I think I still have copies of GMR around here…….from my nostalgic memory I thought they were the better publication.

Gotcha. I figured AEB was pretty much getting to the point of being standard. Didn’t know it was decreed at this point.

I guess I was thinking more if third party targets were missed if it was possible to recalibrate or if new hardware was needed. In my experience, VW specifically, they used different radar units just about every year. And my Mazda is very different in comparison.

I welcome standard AEB. Maybe people will stop totaling my cars.

Serious question, how much does the IIHS tests affect your job?

A lot of the tests I’ve seen are 1-3 mph from making no contact and mitigating the whole incident when it comes to parallel/perpendicular tests for pedestrian systems.

Does anything other than a acceptable or good rating send you back to the drawing board?

At some point there has to be a crossover when it comes to profitability.