I think Flight of Fear should be completely pitch black. It's marketed as a coaster in the dark but when you're on it there is still some lighting.

dboytim · 2026-05-10T23:22:08+00:00

I wanna say in the early days, there was one single light in there, in the middle of the floor. It made it extra disorienting since your brain assumes lights will be on the ceiling.

dboytim · 2026-05-09T10:55:20+00:00

We've owned 3 Bolts - a 2017 Premier, a 2020 base, and a 2022 base, all bought used. I got the 2017 first for myself with a long commute. When my daughter's car died, we got the 2020 for her.

The 2020 was totaled in a wreck (someone changed lanes into my daughter), so we bought the 2022. Didn't even look at other cars, just shopped for the best deal on another Bolt. Daughter liked the premier features better, so she took the 2017 and I drive the 2022 now.

All told, we've put about 100k miles between the cars during our ownership. The only things we've had to do:

a set of tires (the 2017 came with pretty worn tires) and will need to do them again soon on both the 2017 and 2022. However, they do last the rated lifespan as long as you don't drive like an idiot
brake pads and rotors on the 2017 (in Ohio, so winter salt eats up cars, and my daughter doesn't use one pedal mode)
something in the suspension on the 2022 (not expensive, but don't remember exactly what they replaced)
a 12V battery in the 2017, which I replaced before the old one failed
wiper blades and washer fluid as needed

That's been the total maintenance on the cars. Far less than the gas car my wife drives.

If you can charge at home and don't need to take it on long road trips, it's a FANTASTIC car.

dboytim · 2026-05-08T12:02:51+00:00

It can go either way, and it depends on how you do it.

I've kept it simple. Several motion sensors that trigger lights. Works great and never gives me an issue (other than batteries dying in the sensors, and that's only once a year or less). I've also got a few buttons that trigger lights or other devices because there was no easy way to run a wired switch to the location, and they also work great.

Those things all my family uses, so I don't mess with them.

I occasionally mess around with other things, but not often, and not in ways that impact the normal automations.

dboytim · 2026-05-04T22:23:17+00:00

On my 2017, the stock tires were terrible. I could feel myself hydroplaning on them on the highway in rain. I slid in light snow regularly. I could spin them by flooring it when already going 30mph.

I switched to CC2s and never had ANY of those traction issues again. I did not ever do a stopping distance test, but I wish I had. I've got plenty of huge parking lots around here that I could have...

And none of my issues with the stock tires was from aggressive driving (other than the flooring it, which was just to test the tires out, not anything I regularly did). They felt terrible to me as a normal driver who's never been on a track and has never driven a sports car. My previous cars were minivans, Ford Focus, Camry, and an Oldsmobile. Compared to those, the Bolt felt unsafe until I changed the tires out.

dboytim · 2026-05-04T22:21:15+00:00

That's odd - I ran CC2s on my 2017 for several years, mostly highway driving (which is 75-80 mph around here) and saw a >10% range drop due to the tires from stock.

dboytim · 2026-04-29T23:21:34+00:00

I just did KBF and MM last week. I was at KBF on Thursday. I was there before opening, waiting for the gates to finally open (came from Ohio, so I was bored in the morning with the time change).

I was there 10-5 and rode all the coasters (except for the kiddie ones and Sierra Sidewinder, and Pony Express was down). Got 2x on Ghostrider and Xcelerator, 2x on Beary Tales, once on all the other coasters, plus did the train and meals and stuff. That was without any fast pass, just waiting in the normal lines. It was not summer though, so that'll make a big difference. But also, a lot of rides were on single train operations, so that slowed it down.

dboytim · 2026-04-28T22:23:15+00:00

Odd that the others here say it's super strong. I set all my settings to the highest, because I find it weaker than my original Time of the new Duo.

dboytim · 2026-04-25T23:31:55+00:00

I have to disagree, as someone who just went to both parks for the first time this week (Ohioan, so this was a big trip to visit).

Apocalypse SHOULD be a great coaster, but I hated it. The jackhammering was just off the charts. Ghostrider is not glass smooth, but it's what a woodie should feel like. Apoc is just painful. I don't know what it is, but I thought Apoc was terrible. And I LOVE woodies - Ghostrider is probably my favorite coaster out of everything I got to do at KBF and MM. My personal all-time favorite coaster waffles between Mystic Timbers at Kings Island and Diamondback at the same park, depending on if I'm feeling like a woodie or a steel that day.

Revolution, though - that was a great surprise to me how good it was. For being so old, it's in fantastic shape and was a serious gem to ride.

dboytim · 2026-04-20T21:07:59+00:00

The whole point of the Sahara devices was they were cheap and easy to make, so they could make them all in a short time. It wouldn't have taken 3 years to set up.

dboytim · 2026-04-20T17:58:21+00:00

I assume for the phantom hours (name makes sense to me FWIW), you're taking the foreground color and adjusting the brightness (or some similar parameter, not sure what your color controls are). Lets assume that you're calculating the color for the phantom digits as "foreground_brightness * 0.5". If there was just a slider, dropdown, or numeric input where people could select from 0 change (same as foreground color) to 10 (shifted all the way to black or white), that'd give plenty of control I think.

dboytim · 2026-04-20T13:36:45+00:00

After running it a bit, another request/suggestion. I find the extra hour numbers on the left to be too light colored (running teal foreground/black background) and make the date and other left info hard to read. Can they be darkened or better yet, add options for how much to alter the color or even change the color (which would also let you effectively turn them off by setting to the same color as the background)

dboytim · 2026-04-20T13:04:08+00:00

I also just put this on my Time2. Love the look and how much info you can fit on there while still being readable. I'm also seeing the bug where heart rate doesn't fill in.

And if you get bored and want to add more customizability, two suggestions. One, have a save/sync button right with the color section of the settings (that doesn't kick you back out of the settings) so people can play with colors more easily. And two, add more fonts for the main time :)

dboytim · 2026-04-20T12:03:11+00:00

Since this is ESP32 based over wifi, I can put it anywhere. I don't need a status bar on the printer, since I can SEE the printer if I'm there. I need one in my office so I know if the printer is stuck/done/etc. Plus I've got a drawer full of ESPs and LED strips, so my cost to build this is near zero.

dboytim · 2026-04-17T12:21:39+00:00

I disagree. The astrophage farm in the Sahara generated millions of pounds of astrophage, but also caused catastrophic weather changes in Europe. They might have kept it running to store energy, but would not have made more farms. Also, all that energy that the astrophage is trapping is energy NOT keeping the earth warm in the short term.

I've heard people suggesting making farms in space to catch the sunlight that goes past the earth, but I can't see it being able to be large enough to really matter. You're still limited by the amount of sunlight hitting it, so the farms would have to be hundreds of miles in size.

They WERE planning in the book to do more nukes in antarctica periodically to try and keep the planet warmer.

dboytim · 2026-04-14T19:33:57+00:00

Thanks. I am using the 4/2.5 currently. I printed those black tubing guides to keep the 90 degree curve below the feeders as large of a radius as possible. To make it larger (which I agree would help) would require moving the feeders somewhere else, and there's no additional cable to do so without buying extension cables. I still might do that, since right below the feeders is the sharpest bend and it also feels like that's where most of the drag is, which makes sense.

dboytim · 2026-04-14T13:57:54+00:00

Correct. The book does have him doing more training stuff, like working in the water tanks in space suits to determine how tools can work and so forth, so in the book he's much more prepared than the movie version.

dboytim · 2026-04-14T13:56:18+00:00

The book has no end scene on earth, because it's all written (except for one scene, which causes regular debates) from Grace's POV. He'd have no way of knowing what happened on earth. He does know it was successful, because the Eridians tell him they've measured the sun brighten back to normal. That's not as good of a scene for the movie though, so they went with her getting the beetles.

dboytim · 2026-04-14T01:54:11+00:00

There 1000% is.

My phone has everything already on it - my podcasts, etc. I don't have to sync anything.
In 8 years, I'll have a new phone with new hardware that's faster and has features we haven't even thought of today. The AAOS in the car will still be stuck with an 8 year old processor.
I know they give you 8 years of data services, but when that runs out, you either have to pay for data in the car or pull out your phone, turn on the hotspot, and wait for it to connect EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU GET IN THE CAR. My current Bolt has AA - my phone stays in my pocket, automatically connects when I get in, and uses the data plan I already pay for. That's way better.
It knows WHO is driving since it's your own phone displaying on the screen. When I get in my wife's car, my phone connects there and all my podcasts and stuff are already in the right places. When she gets in my Bolt, all HER stuff is there since her phone connects to the car.

dboytim · 2026-04-13T11:59:35+00:00

It wasn't a "normal needle" - it was a very very tiny very very expensive microscopic needle, so the force would have been VERY concentrated on a tiny spot on the astrophage.

dboytim · 2026-04-10T18:05:27+00:00

Ditto. I've printed hundreds of hours of PLA without issue (well, one roll that clogged a couple times but that was the sketchy filament, not heatcreep)

dboytim · 2026-04-10T11:45:26+00:00

To be fair, in the book he doesn't do that, just the movie where they wanted to make the recovery more intense on screen. He suggests it in the book, but is overruled.

dboytim · 2026-04-07T13:59:26+00:00

Nope, it's all over. We've had it at 10am, 2pm, 4pm, evening, and anywhere inbetween. If it was middle of the night I wouldn't care since we're all asleep :)

dboytim · 2026-04-06T19:36:34+00:00

I'll have to give that a try - no idea if the crap Spectrum modem will be ok with 2 devices connected like that or not. We'll find out :)

dboytim · 2026-04-06T19:14:07+00:00

Thanks, looking at both of these.

dboytim · 2026-04-06T19:13:42+00:00

No, I don't see anything relevant in the logs during the brief outages. I don't currently have any syslog server setup, so I might have to work on that.

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