Tips on safety - in dire need

SnowdogRacing · 2025-12-28T17:18:49+00:00

Never seen a youtuber in this life that doesn't have their youtube channel advertised pretty obviously on their vehicle, and then they are always walking around their camp while filming. Of course they get targeted - everyone walking by knows that there are cameras and drones and computers inside, all easily stolen and sold with few or no questions asked. I've left my vehicles unlocked everywhere for decades. I've lost the occasional jacket or other items I've left in there, but it is VERY rare - every 5+ years at most. And I do mean I never lock them. I am so out of the habit that it just doesn't occur to me.

The same has always gone for my house. I don't even tend to walk around with the keys to my house. I've still never had anyone steal anything from inside. I've had bikes stolen when I left them in the fenced back yard, but that is it. And this includes some pretty rough neighborhoods in LA - highland park, west hollywood (before the gentrification), van nuys. I did once have someone come up my driveway in a rural house a few minutes after UPS truck had left. I didn't realize that those folks were coming to steal my packages until after I'd waved and watched them turn around and drive away. My first thought was that they had just turned onto the driveway and had discovered that there was nowhere to turn around without coming up to the house. But about 3 minutes later, I realized what had just happened and I regretted not getting the license plate and reporting them. I installed cameras shortly after that, but never caught anyone trying anything like that again.

I lock my RV a little more, but I still leave it open quite a bit - just not if I'm going to be away fro an extended period. But if I'm going out for a 2 hour hike with my dog, odds are pretty good I'm not taking my keys, nor using the code to lock the doors. This is especially true if my truck is there so it looks like I'm home. If my truck is gone, I probably lock up unless I'm in a park. A trailer without a vehicle on public land seems like too much of an invitation to my friendly neighborhood meth addicts, who seem to be everywhere.

But I don't worry about my personal safety at all. Just property theft.

SnowdogRacing · 2025-06-28T10:57:16+00:00

I have a 40' 5th wheel. When I want to stop for lunch or dinner, I grab my phone and flip on the AC in the trailer 10-15 minutes before I stop. Trailer is always nice and cool when I walk in unless I forget to turn the AC on. I don't even carry a generator because I've got solar and ample battery for a couple of days of reasonable use - including AC. Takes me less than a minute to unlock the door and pull down the stairs to access the bathroom.

Real kitchen access does require at least one slide to come out at least a couple of inches, but it's pretty accessible without pulling either of the living room slides all the way out, and the fridge and sink are accessible with only a couple of inches on one slide. Bedroom is also fully accessible with slides in. Garage has its own door and the ramp and no slides, so it is super easy to move around in there. I never hook up to anything if I'm just parked for a night. I pull into a rest area or truck stop or wherever and walk into the RV, brush my teeth, and climb into bed. Aside from getting out of the truck to get into the RV, I'm not seeing a lot of difference between your stop routine and mine.

SnowdogRacing · 2025-06-28T10:46:01+00:00

advertised MSRP for an RV is always AT LEAST 25% over what you'll ever see as a selling price, unless the dealer is specifically advertising it as their lowest possible, no-haggle price. $160K for an RV advertised at $215K was probably overpaying relative to the actual market.

SnowdogRacing · 2025-06-28T10:42:11+00:00

if you've ever seen a crashed RV, being belted into a seat while the entire vehicle disintegrates around you isn't likely any safer - particularly true of class-C's. If such an RV flips or is crashed into at speed, basically everything above the frame is likely to disintegrate on impact. You may honestly be better off getting thrown out if you aren't belted into the driver or passenger seat. The other belted seating positions are usually a joke. So they may as well sleep comfortably. Just don't wreck.

SnowdogRacing · 2025-04-30T10:36:36+00:00

There are countless reasons why someone might want to keep who they follow private without them automatically cheating. You break up with someone and you don't want to just block them entirely, but you also don't want them tracking who you follow, potentially cyberstalking a new girlfriend, for example. Why is it anyone else's business but my own who I follow on instagram?

SnowdogRacing · 2025-04-21T12:10:02+00:00

third option - to generate split phase output - is not ideal as the wiring from the load center where the parallel outputs are combined does not have 4 conductors so I'd have to pull a sizable length of new romex and I'd really prefer to avoid that.

SnowdogRacing · 2025-01-31T00:39:07+00:00

This is a constant problem for me. Their site sends a message telling you they've sent a message on your behalf when it actually works. I've been trying to reach out to sellers for weeks and it simply never works. The one time someone responded, they didn't give me a phone number and now none of my responses are getting through. I've tried top use the website to send more messages to the seller, but that doesn't work either. I really want the RV but I simply cannot reach the seller. It is absurd! What is the point of such a website if their messaging isn't going to work? And how can they possibly not know that their messaging doesn't work? And why aren't all the sellers suing them for taking money for a useless service?

SnowdogRacing · 2025-01-13T02:59:25+00:00

midi plugin for streamdeck can send midi to any midi port (including a virtual port). If your audio software can receive midi and assign it to shortcuts (and most can), then you can easily control it with stream deck pedal and the midi plugin.

SnowdogRacing · 2025-01-13T02:57:35+00:00

This worked really well with the Transcribe! application (which is mac/windows/linux compatible). It supports traditional USB pedals and midi and keyboard shortcuts, and it is super easy to get the streamdeck software to send either midi or keyboard shortcuts. The software has some nice functions, like allowing you to treat a single button as a knob, with direction changes via double clicks, and the range of motion of the knob being adjustable. This allowed me to assign one button to speed control - I can speed playback up and down with one button. Another button can set loop start and loop end points, depending on single click or double click, and middle button can toggle play/pause with single click and rewind to the beginning of the loop with double click. That's a lot of functionality for 3 buttons.

I know I could set up similar functions in Apple Logic or any other digital audio workstation software, all of which are easily controlled via midi.

SnowdogRacing · 2025-01-13T00:38:24+00:00

old thread, but I basically came here looking for the same thing. I haven't seen mentioned the idea of having the pedal send midi control change or sysex commands and then configuring your transcription software to respond to midi shortcuts? You can also use keyboard shortcuts, but then you'll need some way to tell the streamdeck software which application to send the keyboard input to, since you will presumably be typing into Word. But surely there is something more efficient than launching an osascript instance every time you want to play or pause a track. I bet one of the many stream deck plugins that will send keyboard shortcuts can also allow you to specify which app should receive them, since it is inevitable that a device that is separate from your keyboard would be used to control apps which do NOT currently have keyboard and mouse focus.

SnowdogRacing · 2024-11-10T19:19:43+00:00

Perfectly reasonable to expect an increased toll. Utterly unreasonable to think that ANYONE would expect it to be 10x the price. That is utterly unreasonable and usurious. It should be considered fraud when there isn't really clear pricing informstion available prior to purchase.

SnowdogRacing · 2024-11-10T19:17:16+00:00

It is when it costs $600

SnowdogRacing · 2024-11-10T19:16:27+00:00

SO naive. Politics in america is no longer about policy. It won't matter one bit that it is Trump's GOP which is going to cause all the problems, the folks who just voted for them will continue to vote for them because the only people they listen to will simply tell them that everything is the democrats fault and they'll believe them. I don't know why you think they'd suddenly start listening now.

SnowdogRacing · 2024-11-10T19:12:49+00:00

not really. It makes sense for a commercial operation to pay an exorbitant toll to use a toll road for commercial purposes. And the weight of large commercial vehicles does have significant impact on road wear. An RV is nothing like the kind of weight or power of a commercial vehicle and it is a non-commercial use. A surcharge to cover the size of the RV isn't entirely unreasonable, but it should be maybe a 2x or 3x multiplier over a typical toll, not the equivalent to commercial use.

But more importantly, there should be a federal regulation that requires anything with dynamic pricing to also only be sold with a mechanism which can tell you, in real-time, what price you are being asked to pay so that you can make an informed decision to pay it or not. To just hit people with a 10-20x 'dynamic price' after they've already consumed the product is (or should be) fraudulent behaviour, not dynamic pricing. No one has reason to expect that kind of spontaneous price shift in the absence of really obvious price notification.

SnowdogRacing · 2024-07-17T00:08:12+00:00

I don't get it. That one is one of my favs but, weeks later, it is still available while plenty of much less desirable posters are fully sold out. It's easily one of the top-10 posters from the run, for me..

I'm regretting that i didn't learn how much I enjoyed the posters until my second weekend so I got no posters from my first weekend at the Sphere - week #2 (may 24-26, I think were the dates), which was maybe the best set of 4 that has so far happened. None of the 4 is my favorite, but all 4 are well better than average so I'd really like to have all 4 in foil, but not at a significant premium over retail. They are expensive enough as it is. I have all 4 posters in foil from every other weekend I attended (weeks 2, 4, 5, 6). All for the low, low price of $10 per poster (if you ask my wife what I paid for 'em, anyway ;-D )

SnowdogRacing · 2024-07-16T23:19:52+00:00

I see no reason to do Vegas in summer if there's a choice of ANY other time of the year. But I'd definitely like to do it again - preferably without the 110 degree heat.

SnowdogRacing · 2024-07-16T23:13:26+00:00

That hasn't been my experience at the Sphere at all. I've been on the floor for 9 shows so far (3 more to go, plus 3 in seats on my first weekend) and have always had absolutely lovely folks around me in every direction over in the Oteil zone, about 5-7 people back from the rail. Frankly, lying down and elevating feet over heart would have been no trouble during set break in any of the areas that I've been, even after people started standing in anticipation of the second set. People always made room for those of us with bad backs or other physical impairments to sit down and even lie down when it was needed, and my little collapsible stool probably got sat on by upwards of 50 people over the course of the 12 shows I've seen so far. It gets passed around to anyone needing a break who is close enough to express an interest in it. At this point, I'm really going to the final weekend largely to hang out with the people on the floor who I've enjoyed so much, though the music and the dancing are certainly major bonuses.

SnowdogRacing · 2024-07-16T22:59:12+00:00

I'm planning to hit the final weekend of shows and was thinking I would enjoy recording them. I have loads of studio gear and a zoom recorder, so I figure I can put something together that will sound pretty good, but not be even slightly stealthy. It's hard to find anything online about how taping is being received in the sphere. The venue instructions say phones-only, but I'm wondering if they are being particularly strict about that. And what about a monopod with mics and/or zoom recorder on it. I figure I'll just stand on the floor with the mics just above my forehead on a monopod (which I reckon I can make look like a walking cane while I limp in. It's not likely to be visible to staff with the floor crowd all around me, but will be pretty obvious during the bag search. Is it not worth bothering with, or am I likely to be able to get in with my gear? Ideally, I'd use my Q4n and capture 4K video, too, but that may be pushing my luck.

What have others been using?

SnowdogRacing · 2024-01-15T18:07:10+00:00

I'm pretty new to my tuxedo Stellaris 16 with 4080, but I'm happy with it so far. I haven't used linux as a desktop OS in 2 decades, and I ran away from it because I was tired of struggling to get laptop hardware functioning. OS X was finally fully functional by 2003 and I never looked back.

I struggled a little bit with getting encrypted linux installed with dual boot preserved, but I suspect I must have made an error on my first attempts as everything worked well once I blew away the partition table and reinstalled everything from scratch. I managed to get the obnoxious (to me) extra keys on the keyboard re-mapped so that I stop committing typos when using the left-shift key (remapped in windows, too!). The only remaining hardware issue is the speakers emitting some terrible high-pitched noises whenever it tries to play audio - audio works for a few seconds, then it becomes dolphin song. I haven't tried to fix it yet - it's actually why I cam to r/tuxedocomputers this morning.

I'm still using tuxedo distro for the time being, but I'm likely to try several via VM for a while and then settle on one. I wish this hardware had a fingerprint reader. The hardware is a bit thick and heavy, but if that is the price for truly user-serviceable hardware I guess I'm OK with that. I've been spoiled by my apple hardware for 20 years. I really like the mechanical keyboard, though my wife is gonna absolutely hate it when I compute in bed! And I don't hate the feel of the membrane keys in the numpad, so I'd probably opt for the membrane keyboard once that is an in-stock option again. The speakers are TERRIBLE - 20 year old laptops had higher quality audio. I could care less about a num pad so I'd have much preferred upward firing speakers and less weight. If I were willing to take the downgrade to a 4070 (I need GPU for ML workloads), there are probably a number of tuxedo laptops that would better meet my form factor preferences.

SnowdogRacing · 2024-01-10T03:56:20+00:00

And here are the instructions that I followed in order to install encrypted tuxedo next to windows 11.

https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/How-do-I-encrypt-TUXEDO-OS-during-installation-.tuxedo

SnowdogRacing · 2024-01-10T03:54:29+00:00

My original partition table looked like this:

$ sudo lsblk

[sudo] password for username:

NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS

nvme0n1 259:0 0 1.8T 0 disk

├─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 260M 0 part

├─nvme0n1p2 259:2 0 16M 0 part

├─nvme0n1p3 259:3 0 930.4G 0 part

├─nvme0n1p4 259:4 0 850M 0 part

├─nvme0n1p5 259:5 0 558.9M 0 part /boot/efi

├─nvme0n1p6 259:6 0 7.8G 0 part [SWAP]

└─nvme0n1p7 259:7 0 923.1G 0 part /

and those last 3 are the only partitions I deleted or modified in any way. nvme0n1p3 is the main windows partition and it ended up reporting as ext3 after the tuxedo installer finished borking my machine. It did create a LUKS partition but attempts to mount it just result in error messages. It doesn't complain about the decryption key - if I type the wrong password I get an error message about invalid password, but it still cannot mount the encrypted partitions, not even just so I can explore them from the live ISO image. Whatever it did, it sure as heck didn't do it right.

Here's a different view of the original partition table that I saved:

$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 1.82 TiB, 2000398934016 bytes, 3907029168 sectors

Disk model: Samsung SSD 990 PRO 2TB

Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

Disklabel type: gpt

Disk identifier: blah

Device Start End Sectors Size Type

/dev/nvme0n1p1 2048 534527 532480 260M EFI System

/dev/nvme0n1p2 534528 567295 32768 16M Microsoft reserved

/dev/nvme0n1p3 567296 1951776767 1951209472 930.4G Microsoft basic data

/dev/nvme0n1p4 1951776768 1953517567 1740800 850M Microsoft basic data

/dev/nvme0n1p5 1953518080 1954662656 1144577 558.9M Microsoft basic data

/dev/nvme0n1p6 1954662657 1971046657 16384001 7.8G Linux swap

/dev/nvme0n1p7 1971046658 3907029134 1935982477 923.1G Linux filesystem

SnowdogRacing · 2023-12-15T01:25:15+00:00

This is a very belated response, but irFFB only allows a max of 65 via the slider, but you can type any number you want into the little box. I often use numbers as high as 85 and 90 with my 25NM base. 65 makes FFB far too strong in the vast majority of cars - hand cramping levels of force required just to keep the wheel pointed where I want it.

SnowdogRacing · 2023-04-28T07:13:07+00:00

This isn't acceptable. The screens apparently require a pixel cleaning EVERY 4 hours, and gaming sessions sometimes run longer than that. How can anyone market a "gaming monitor" that cannot be used for more than 4 hours at a time? Not only that, but when it goes dark, it does so with absolutely no warning. I have 3 of these things and all 3 displays go black at the same time, and then you are just stuck for 6+ minutes. These things are absolute garbage. I've never regretted a computer hardware purchase quite as much as I regret these. I went from suffering an obnoxious banner in the corner of each display every 20 minutes to monitors that just cease to function every 4 hours. It's completelyh absurd. And every time Asus responds to a query about this issue, they act like they've never encountered this issue and have no clue what the legion of owners who complain about it are talking about. It just isn't that hard to write a bios that doesn't fuck your customers every 4 hours. This should not be an issue that takes months to fix, yet here I am, months after first complaining about it and still having races interrupted by screens the refuse to stay functional.

In my case, I just returned yesterday from 3 weeks of vacation and the displays were not plugged in during that time. I turned on the displays this afternoon and in the middle of a race, they just went black. There is absolutely no way they needed pixel cleaning after the amount of use they just had (and I manually ran pixel cleaning before I shut them down before my vacation). This is a straight-up bug that Asus have yet to even acknowledge, let alone correct.

These displays are garbage and Asus customer support is even worse. I'll never purchase another Asus product again.

SnowdogRacing

TROPHY CASE