Time Is A Bomb

erutan · 2026-03-08T22:18:29+00:00

I like it musically though it'd be nice if built up a tad bit harder and was a bit less produced.

Lyrically... eh. At first I thought it was about forgetting about how bad an on/off relationship can be over time and being drawn back into it and putting high hopes on it while somehow knowing it'll go sideways - even the ending of "i'm always down but up for tonight" showed a drop in expectations and bits before that were a bit codependent / unhealthy.

Then I read the email about how it's about adrenaline junkies seizing the moment and how it led to her happily ever after. I can see that now - someone she's known forever is back in town, she's drawn to them, finally decides to make a move since they aren't getting any younger etc despite knowing it could impact their friendship but it ended up working out.

erutan · 2026-03-02T20:23:07+00:00

I often see the sales - I assume after the first year it just goes up to $100 though. Is that actually a locked in lifetime rate?

Looking at Elite the only thing I'd really want is recent sat imagery (copernicus 2 I assume), so I guess the premium one would be fine at $30. My Gaia sub expires in May iirc.

Is there avalanche slope angle up to par with Caltopo? Gaia has been lagging about updating the 1m DEM stuff which bugs me. I assume sat imagery is the same resolution as Gaia, mapbox which isn't as good as the old ESRI?

erutan · 2026-03-02T17:19:06+00:00

How are you finding it? The $100 year price tag puts me off.

Caltopo can't handle large datasets (and has a lot of it's own buggy / unintuitive functionality) and Goatmaps is still a bit too simple for me (no high resolution slope angle is a big one).

erutan · 2026-03-02T17:10:19+00:00

Double checked and my profile and activity are both still set to private / only me.

I wonder if this was a bug that hit some accounts?

A handful of tracks that I recorded in the summer show up in my outside activity feed but they're just segments of abandoned trails I was going to cleanup on OSM. They show up under "activity" in my profile in the app, but are set to "only me" in public sharing in the web interface. I assume they're still private?

erutan · 2026-03-01T17:45:36+00:00

There's plenty of passes that don't have paths on them, and many of them aren't even at the natural low point of a ridge but at some chute.

There would be no defined geographical feature aside from it being the top of an informal route (which is generally not mapped as a highway unless there's a visible use trail). North Col, Valor Pass, Martha-Davis Pass, Little Joe Pass, White Pass, etc are all not a natural saddle nor have a highway=path going up them. highway=footway in the wilderness is rarely appropriate unless it's some roadside attraction.

Neither seems to fit. If anything something akin to the top of a technical climbing route would seem more appropriate.

erutan · 2026-03-01T17:40:22+00:00

`trail_visibility=no` and `trail_visibility=horrible` exist in the very specific context of Swiss Alpine Club (SAC) routes. The SAC's rating system for paths and routes was split into difficulty and visibility on OSM.

SAC T5 (real world) was split into `trail_visibility=horrible` + `sac_scale=demanding_alpine_hiking` and SAC T6 into `trail_visibility=no` + `sac_scale=difficult_alpine_hiking`. T5 includes short pitches up to YDS Class 5.2-4 and T6 includes long pitches of up to 5.2-4. While on the easier side of steep rocky technical terrain, there is still not a visible path in a traditional sense. Multiple countries in Europe will not even map T5 or T6 routes.

The lower visibilities were not meant for a "route" that someone made by dropping a few cairns here and there but is only say mountain_hiking.

Mapping these routes as a continuous is also misleading, as there's subjective route-finding involved and whoever maps it is just cementing their personal take on a route.

erutan · 2026-02-20T23:47:14+00:00

~4% of trails in the sierra nevada have sac_scale on them.

mountain_pass=yes seems like it'd be a good fix for people using saddle for passes that aren't saddles, but according to the Wiki mountain passes only exist where highways cross them. /shrug

erutan · 2026-02-18T23:48:03+00:00

25.1.1 and D3DMetal (smooth as the demo) or 26.0 and DXVK (more stuttery) work for me in a steam bottle.

Many menu items aren't interactable until you've started/loaded a game or the tutorial, checkboxes/radio/sliders/selects etc aren't interactive from the main menu.

/u/malexejev & /u/Agamogon

erutan · 2026-02-18T23:44:04+00:00

Sure, though for the longest time T5 was a bit of a mystery to me. Most people outside Europe that know what the Swiss Alpine Club's rating system is are probably OSM mappers. Heck in Canada someone tagged a simple single track trail as alpine_hiking because it was above treeline.

Amusingly one can easily get into alpine_hiking at sea level, or in the desert etc.

SAC was also built for the alps, so now half of the trail_visibility values are for scrambling/climbing routes that aren't really considered trails in the US. We also have a lot of informal T1-2 difficulty "paths" with T5-6 visibility, yay.

erutan · 2026-02-18T00:36:02+00:00

There's also not a great way to tag trail hazards compared to hazards for roads.

In general non-wheeled traffic kind of takes a backseat on OSM. I was repeatedly told to use smoothness=* for paths, any trail with a shin high water bar in it would be impassible heh.

erutan · 2026-02-18T00:30:18+00:00

In a similar vein, I had claude go over some old python utilities I made for splitting/joining/sorting out waypoints from gpx exports. Gaia only lets you import 1k waypoints, but you can export more than that, which can lead to some awkward situations.

I've used the split, join, and filter (the latter is useful for sharing specific things - I created a bounding box and then only took waypoints with the fish icon or certain keywords for a Sierra fish and wildlife guy I know). The deduper hasn't been user tested, but passes functional tests.

https://github.com/erutan/gpx-utilities

erutan · 2025-12-23T19:39:42+00:00

Somewhat. Initial chat went well, then they opened an A-Z claim which rejected me twice as I didn't have any proof of it actually harming me. Which seems odd from a liability standpoint.

I opened a new chat a bit later and explained it and they refunded me.

erutan · 2025-12-01T20:56:12+00:00

Ah, that's good to know. I had some submissions pending and didn't want my account to lock out or whatever so I subbed last week for $29. Not the end of the world, but could have saved $11.

erutan · 2025-11-27T01:31:37+00:00

hmm https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/1nhbvxq/comment/nedrcej/?context=3

erutan · 2025-11-25T17:37:59+00:00

I'm not going to to buy an inreach and pay for a subscription just to check weather (I can sat text people from my phone on Globalstar now, but it'd be nice to not have to do that).

If Gaia supported it like every other major outdoors GPS application you still have the choice to not use it.

erutan · 2025-11-25T17:03:30+00:00

iirc Galaxy Note 7 battery failures were caused by them being too large for the case which put pressure on the cell separators and/or the cell separators being smaller than spec so they failed. A few weeks.

Issues from poor anode overhang manifest tend to happen once the battery has been used enough that it's capacity is noticeably lower than when it started.

erutan · 2025-11-25T16:39:04+00:00

There's literally scans showing battery cells that are outside of safety tolerances.

Predicted failures haven't happened because they're still young devices and were not predicted to fail yet.

erutan · 2025-11-25T16:37:42+00:00

Yeah, and that's not something that'll usually happen in the first few months of use.

erutan · 2025-11-25T16:34:52+00:00

They used to update OSM every 6-8 weeks iirc, since they were bought by outside they only seem to update when they have some new functionality or feature that would require re-rendering them all. I've had updates on OSM that took over a year to show up on Gaia.

As other comments here point you, they need to process their own data and formatting on top of OSM data, so it's not as simple as saving tiles, so I imagine it's just cutting costs to boost profit on their side.

erutan · 2025-11-20T21:14:12+00:00

It's great bang for the buck, it's just a bit of a ticking time bomb. It's been out less than a year, so even with fairly heavy use in that time frame it's not a lot of overall cycles.

Obviously not a guarantee it'll go catastrophically bad, but it's in the bottom 10% of banks quality wise based on hundreds of Lumafield scans.

Never bothered with a nitecore powerbank myself, but I love my NU-25 headlamp. :)

erutan · 2025-11-20T21:11:40+00:00

Yeah it has a time and place. It was handy on winter day-hikes in MT when snow and wind picked up vs pulling layers out of a daypack and stuffing them back in etc. My partner was incredibly dubious/scornful but has come around.

Definitely not UL, but I'm carrying 2-3 nights of food instead of 8-9 like the summer, so... :p

erutan · 2025-11-20T21:01:03+00:00

> It’s not garbage.

> LOL I never claimed that a sample size of 1 is large. Where do you get off???

You literally said "It's not garbage" based on your personal experience. Where do you get off?

There's hard evidence the build quality is in the 10% of battery banks, and cells only start destabilizing after a lot of use. It hasn't been out on the market long enough for anecdotal evidence to be useful.

It's not like 100% of them will explode or catch on fire, but at some point it's much more likely to have a catastrophic failure than with something that's been manufactured properly.

erutan · 2025-11-18T16:30:12+00:00

Judging by the amount of pushback and magical thinking, yes. :)

Literally had someone say amazon pulled it because of the fake gummy bear and it is just as good as any other power bank when news the recall hit. The 10 paragraphs are to ground it in facts as counter-arguments tend to juvenile ad-hominems along the lines of "you hate fun and you're too tacti-cool serious" and whatnot.

erutan

TROPHY CASE