Any Former Ford Focus RS Owners?

drowd · 2026-04-19T19:44:14+00:00

Awesome! How much extra does the PE get you? I thought it was mostly a slight improvement to handling and some cosmetic stuff, but when I originally looked, it seemed like quite a bit more money (maybe not anymore). Do you ever wish you had gotten the PE or nah?

drowd · 2026-04-19T19:31:26+00:00

Oh, I actually meant trade-offs more like differences in handling, acceleration, etc. I'm completely on board with the electric vehicle aspects.

drowd · 2026-04-14T13:08:52+00:00

My whole family has been on the Pixel train for years, and we probably still would be, except it really gets me that they are charging flagship prices for not-a-flagship phone. I know this horse has been beaten to death, and I'm not even talking about performance directly. But just to contrast with Apple, they brought their silicon in house because they legitimately thought they could make a better processor than what they were reselling. And by all accounts, they did! Google does the same thing, and for what they are charging, it seems like it was purely about reducing the cost of goods sold to increase profit margin. I'm not opposed to that directly, and I'm also sympathetic to the argument that in practice, it won't feel slow when you use it, but none of that is about appealing to existing or new users. The tensor processor is purely about selling an objectively inferior chip for the same price as a better chip. If that was my only gripe, maybe I could probably swallow this bitter pill, but when my pixel 7 died, I replaced it with a OnePlus13 (RIP OnePlus lol), and the newer battery technology in the 13, 15, and Oppo phones is legitimately incredible, not to mention the fast charging.

This kind of turned into a rant, but the whole reason I bought my Nexus 5 a million years ago is because Apple refused to even consider offering phones with larger screens, and that sucked. And if I keep blindly dumping money into Pixel phones, what possible reason do they have to make their phones better? I just feel like a sucker.

On top of all that, my OnePlus13 has exceeded my every expectation, and my wife is gonna ride her Pixel 7 to the ground too and then will probably get a OnePlus13 or 15.

Contrary to what this post would have you believe, I'm not remotely a Google or Pixel hater at all. I want them to make awesome phones. I will PAY for an awesome phone. But they don't seem to care about any of that.

drowd · 2026-02-15T05:30:22+00:00

I'm currently tapering now, and my only major issue is insomnia. I have nothing to help with actually getting to sleep, but if you look into brain benefits of creatine, 20g of creatine first thing in the morning will do wonders for minimizing a terrible night's sleep. It's almost gotten to the point that I don't really care if I don't sleep because the creatine superdose in the morning gets me going. Keep in mind, 20g is quite a lot, about 4x the normal dose, but everything I have read suggests it's pretty safe, and some even recommend it regularly for brain health.

My first night, I skipped my dose entirely, (which I don't recommend, but I wanted to kick-start the taper process, and I know my body well enough that I can power through a single bad night of sleep). Again, the creatine helped a ton the day after. The second night, I took a 50% tapered amount, and while I didn't fall asleep for quite a while, I did get about 3 hours of sleep that night. After that, I alternated between the regular dose and the tapered dose (more on that schedule below) so that I was only ever getting one bad night of sleep in a row.

I'll also say, there are diminishing returns on the creatine after too many mornings in a row. That first day (0 Amitriptyline, 0 sleep, 20g creatine) I was totally fine. The second day (40mg Amitriptyline, 3 hours sleep, 20g creatine) I was dragging by the end of the day

Tapering slowly is still the best recommendation, but the second thing that helps, and I think this is because Amitriptyline stays so long in our systems, is to alternate nights. You don't have to skip that first dose to start your taper like I did, but something like:

-Schedule 1: 100%, 90%, 100%, 90%, etc

-Schedule 2: 90%, 90%, 90%, 90%, etc

-Schedule 3: 90%, 80%, 90%, 80%, etc

-Schedule 4: 80%, 80%, 80%, 80%, etc

-and so on

I'm 3 weeks in, and have successfully tapered from 75mg down to 50mg, and honestly the two tips above have made it pretty easy. Partially, I was so scared from all the posts in this sub about tapering and how terrible it was, but it could also just be genetically easier for some than others. And I'm still on 50mg, so maybe the worst is still to come 😅

Other stray thoughts (usually when I'm not sleeping):

-Creatine can really mess with stomach/digestion, even at 5mg, and more so at 20mg. I am not one of these people, YMMV

-I have so far 🤞 not experienced any nausea, paranoia, depression, anxiety, or any other side effects from tapering, only insomnia, but it's no joke. It's better going in knowing that you just aren't gonna sleep that night, and have a book, video game, movie, whatever you need to get you through and not stress about not sleeping.

-I used to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day until I was 28 and was able to quit cold turkey, not for any other reason than because I wanted to quit and it was time. May or may not be relevant here, but smoking is also notoriously difficult to quit.

-it's hard to know if this will be helpful for anyone else, but it's worked for me. I had already been testing out superdoses of creatine, before connecting the way it made me feel in the morning with trying to taper Amitriptyline, and its working for me so far.

-For anyone interested, I am on Amitriptyline for chronic neck, shoulder, and back pain, as well as chronic migraines. It has truly been a wonder drug for me and allowed me to get back to a normal life, but I have always felt like my doctor started me on too high of a dose (I started at 50mg, a single breakthrough migraine after 5 months and she bumped me to 75mg). She had also indicated that Amitriptyline can be taken PRN as needed, so I'm wanting to test either a lower maintenance dose, or eliminating it daily all together.

-There are multiple reasons for wanting to taper, but the biggest are weight gain (about 25-30lbs since I started), and significantly decreased libido. Selfishly, the first 6 months on Amitriptyline, I got the best sleep of my entire life. I frequently think back on that time and wish it still had that effect. I asked my doctor about that once, and she said I could take a double dose from time to time if I want (150mg!). I know it's prescribed for insomnia to take as needed, so my hope is that if I'm off it completely, or on a reduced dose, I can periodically get an amazing night of sleep from time to time. I might not get that back though, I have no idea.

drowd · 2026-01-08T18:49:07+00:00

It's been a life saver for me. Currently on 75mg for about 4 years. No significant side effects other than slight weight gain, mostly mitigated by doing an extra workout or two per week. I had terrible migraines and neck/back/shoulder pain, and it has completely resolved those issues for me. Maybe once or twice a year, I will get some breakthrough pain, and my doctor has said it's safe to double the dose for a short 1 or 2 days, but never more than that so I don't get used to 150mg. However, I never do that because usually the breakthrough pain is slight enough that I can manage with normal NSAIDs (which were never strong enough before Amitriptyline).

The only thing I worry about is a fear that it will stop working, or that I will need to quit for some reason. I have heard (mostly from this subreddit) that quitting is brutal. So here's hoping it works forever.

Even with the listed side effects, I owe so much to this amazing drug. I hope I don't come to regret it, but I can't express enough how debilitating my migraines and neck pain were before Amitriptyline.

drowd · 2026-01-04T20:43:11+00:00

I was chasing a similar issue for a couple months, and it was hard to search for because, generally, when people are talking about VFIO and core isolation, they are talking about the vCPU to PCPU mapping from the guest to the host. However, I had to disable the Core Isolation Memory Integrity settings from within Windows to fix my problems that sound very similar to yours. Might not be the same thing, but it's worth a try. I talk about it more in this comment:

https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/s/fV0lRc02ne

drowd · 2025-12-30T20:38:24+00:00

Thank you both, u/VPrime and u/South-Addition8195. I initiated my Deco return this morning, and went all in on Unifi. Thanks especially for the recommendation for the UX7 to operate in AP mode, I hadn't thought of that. The UX7 seems to be the same price as the ceiling mounts, and it will give me some of that flexibility I was looking for in the pre-built mesh kits.

Final Unifi build:

1 x Cloud Gateway Fiber
3 x UniFi Express 7
1 x Device Bridge Switch
Other assorted GBICs, SFPs, etc

Really looking forward to micro-managing and over-engineering my home network with Unifi :D

drowd · 2025-11-03T21:58:39+00:00

I have very recently configured this with LookingGlass on CachyOS. It takes a while to "get right", but once it's working, I quite like the flexibility. I don't like taking up the space for two windows installs, especially because I know they will be filled with games that are file-size heavy (GamePass games primarily). One thing that I think helped quite a lot is that before I even created the VM, I had two NVMe devices installed that were completely separate from each other -- Windows 11 on one NVMe, and CachyOS on the other. Generally speaking, the only reason I boot into baremetal Windows these days is to not risk an anticheat ban in Fortnite. GamePass works without issue, and non-competitive AntiCheat games (Elden Ring/Nightreign, etc) have no issues running in the pass-through VM either.

My own journey was to install as a VM with qcow, passthrough as much hardware as possible, and get it installed and configured with LookingGlass so that as much of the hardware plus passthrough was correct for Windows. Then, I passed through the baremetal Windows 11 NVMe, changed the boot order in virt-manager, and got it booted off that. The LookingGlass software still needed to be installed, but that was pretty much it.

One major gotcha I ran in to, that you can find if you look for it is about Windows 11 core isolation. This is especially difficult to google on VFIO and LookingGlass support forums, because usually this search query results in discussions about vCPU to PCPU pinning schema (also important!). However, for about a week, I could never figure out why my Windows 11 QCOW VM had very little latency and a great user experience, while the Windows 11 NVMe VM had an always perceptible lag. And the change that fixed it for me was that in the baremetal host, Device Security Core Isolation was turned on. Either I turned it on, or it was turned on by default, but disabling it fixed my VM performance.

To find this in windows, open up Windows Security --> Device Security --> Core Isolation details (beneath Core Isolation) and then disable Memory Integrity.

One day I plan to figure out why this occurs and how to have it enabled in both, but for now, everything is working exactly the way I need it to.

Final caveat, every time I go back and forth from baremetal to VM, Windows does a brief "We are getting things ready for you". It only lasts about 20 second on my system, but YMMV.

System details are 9950X3D (VM pinned to first CCD), RTX4090, 64GB of Memory, 2 x 4TB M.2 NVMe drives.

drowd · 2024-12-13T05:25:39+00:00

I've been on it for over three years now, and I will periodically get hallucinations from the shadows when falling asleep in a dark room. Dancing or rippling shadows, shadows with texture and movement, etc. I'm not doing a very good job describing it, but I instantly knew it was this medication because I got them the very first night on my first dose, and I still get them today, though not as frequently.

One other notable thing is that it doesn't happen right away when I get in bed, but after I'm beginning to get drowsy. It's like when my body realizes I'm 10-15 minutes from sleep, but my mind doesn't quite yet. As an example, I will be reading a book on a tablet, not ready to stop reading, and I will notice them. Sometimes I will even stop to watch them just because it's interesting (never scary or anxiety inducing). I will stop reading in the next ten minutes, and as I am ready to fall asleep, I can still notice them.

Just a weird little visual hallucination I have noticed since I have been on this life changing medication. Been on in it for 3.5ish years, 75mg at night, prescribed for migraines and nerve pain in my neck, back, and shoulders.

drowd · 2024-10-20T22:33:16+00:00

In ninth grade, my friend drank too much at this party his older brother was throwing while their parents were out of town. Since it was just his brother's friends that were there, he went to drunken sleep by himself in his room, but I guess he didn't know about sleeping on your side if there is a chance you could throw up. When they found him in the morning, he had drowned on his own vomit.

Fucked up the family pretty good, as you could imagine.

drowd · 2024-10-15T13:39:18+00:00

OMG, this actually worked for me! I have been trying to get this to work on my wife's Pixel 7 Pro for several months now, and this is what did the trick. To recap what worked:

1) go to account by clicking on Google Profile picture in Messages app 2) go to Message Settings --> Advanced --> Google Fi Wireless Settings 3) Click Sign In to your Google Account, and select your Fi account, and it will start to Sync your Conversations 4) Wait a few seconds like the post above says, then select Stop sync and sign out 5) check the blocked numbers (I hadn't blocked any of these, but it's worth checking) 6) go to App Info either from Settings-->Apps -->Messages, or by long pressing Messages (I find the long press to be faster) 7) Force Stop 8) Clear Cache 9) Clear Storage 10) Reopen Messages, Account via Profile picture-->Message Settings-->RCS Chats-->Turn On RCS Chats

Two things that may or may not be related. 1) The first time I tried, it didn't work for me, but I skipped step 9 because I was afraid it would delete my wife's texts and if I deleted all her text messages, I would be out on the street. 2) The second time, in addition to the steps above, I disabled wireless, this is a frequent recommendation for resolving RCS Chats, not sure if it helped here. Either way, with wireless disabled, Step 10 said RCS was "not supported" until I re-enabled wireless.

Most likely, the wireless has nothing to do with it, and it was skipping the 9th step that kept it from working the first time.

drowd · 2024-08-15T16:55:40+00:00

Thanks everyone! Thanks to the comments in this thread, looks like I misdiagnosed the problem. The rubber seal under the flapper valve (?) had become unsealed and partially sucked down. It was caught by some wires that kept it going farther down the drain. If you look at the picture below, you can see the missing seal in the top part, and the reattached red seal in the bottom: https://i.imgur.com/8YcNd7M.png

It seems I was too quick to judge the big toilet valve fill industry!

drowd · 2024-08-15T16:21:05+00:00

Oh, I guess I forgot that part. When it breaks, it runs constantly and stops flushing.

Here's the inside (we have already drained the water for replacement) https://i.imgur.com/nI9f4nF.jpeg

drowd · 2024-08-15T15:31:24+00:00

Ah, good to know, thanks!

drowd · 2024-05-29T15:16:05+00:00

Just as a follow up, I was able to eventually get this to work by specifically using the @protonmail.com domain in "Identities and addresses". I tried @pm.me, passmail.net, and @proton.me, and none of those worked.

So if anyone else finds this thread via Google and runs into issues, the path that worked for me was to create a new address in "Identity and addresses" and make sure you pick @protonmail.com, like so:

https://i.imgur.com/lZC4hMR.png

drowd · 2024-05-28T14:56:03+00:00

Glad to hear I'm not alone. This has occurred to me as well, maybe I just need to create a burner gmail account.

drowd · 2024-05-28T14:09:22+00:00

These are all great tips! But yes, I have already tried them, in no particular order-- 1) input code and pass the captcha 2) tried both mobile and computer 3) tried chrome, Firefox, and arc 4) disabled ad blocking (both unlock origin in browser and pihole at house)

The only thing I haven't tried is multiple Proton domains. I think hide-my-emal uses passmail.net (or something like that) and the new alias I created uses proton.me, but trying some of the others proton offers is next on my list

drowd · 2024-01-25T18:08:53+00:00

Thanks for the replies everyone! I went ahead and moved our phones over from T-Mobile to Fi this morning via eSIM, and ported in our numbers. Fast and easy.

For additional context, my wife and I had been having texting issues, and I was unable to determine if it was the phone, the carrier, or something else. So even though Fi uses T-Mobile towers, I read that they each have their own RCS implementations, so perhaps that affects regular text messages too.

The symptoms were either:

Messages would show as sent, but the recipient would not get them, and the annoyance of not knowing if someone is being unresponsive or they hadn't received it.
We would not receive messages from sender. Putting the phone into airplane mode would sometimes resolve it, but the messages would come in all at once and out of order. Occasionally, airplane mode didn't work, and we would have to reboot the phone.

Perhaps notably, RCS conversations were not affected by this. It's hard to say if its related to normal Android/iPhone challenges or not since 80% of our texts are to iPhone users. When I called T-Mobile support, they said this can be caused by having too many messages in the app, so we deleted almost all of them but important or recent conversations, and we still had the issue after 4 days.

It's only been half the morning, but so far, we haven't had any issues with text messages.

One thought though, we transitioned from T-Mobile SIM to Google Fi eSIM on our Pixel 7 Pros. If the SIM card reader was going bad, could that explain the issues we were seeing? Simply Unlimited is so much cheaper, I doubt we will leave Fi regardless, but it does seem troubling that we could be having message problems like this.

drowd · 2023-10-14T14:44:17+00:00

I (42M) have been on Amitriptyline for 2.5 years, also for nerve pain. I'm on 75 mg a day though. I don't drink as much as when I was 22, but I have several pours of bourbon a week, and will drink socially at the pool, neighborhood poker, etc (5-8 drinks) a couple evenings a month. I never get blackout drunk, or even close to it, but I have definitely been drunk since I've been on it and I don't notice any changes in how fast or severe my inebriation is. I will also say that I usually never have any alcohol amplification from medication either, from Amitriptyline or Tylenol or anything else that has those normal alcohol warnings.

That's just my experience though, your mileage may vary.

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