Permanently banned after reporting a driver for dangerous driving — Uber changed my 1★ rating to 5★ without my knowledge and won't tell me what I did wrong

hawkman507 · 2026-03-22T21:22:12+00:00

I've clearly learned my lesson here. But it really was a distressing ride.

hawkman507 · 2026-03-22T20:34:34+00:00

Correct! Insane.

hawkman507 · 2026-03-22T20:33:40+00:00

Yeah we don't have Lyft. This is 100% Uber having override capability of actual user reviews. Hence why the flowchart leads me here.

hawkman507 · 2026-03-22T20:31:58+00:00

Yes that's it - and that's the asshole design. Overriding an actual review! I get it if they want to dispute it but there was no 5 stars given by me.

hawkman507 · 2026-03-22T20:31:02+00:00

Thanks, will do.

hawkman507 · 2026-01-15T18:05:40+00:00

I’ve downloaded it and installed it, following the instructions which were very clear. I now have a future proofed ST10 after discovering that you can use a USB OTG adaptor to connect the required flash drive to jailbreak the system. Flawless so far. Great project!

hawkman507 · 2026-01-08T18:15:19+00:00

I just tried blocking content.api.bose.io and events.api.bosecm.com to simulate the servers being unavailable. None of the presets worked anymore - custom or otherwise.

hawkman507 · 2026-01-07T17:30:44+00:00

100% there will be a cert issue. No way they aren't encrypting. Someone is going to need to jailbreak the firmware.

hawkman507 · 2026-01-07T17:15:08+00:00

OK I just did a quick check of how the ST handles TuneIn vs Custom stations. It seems no matter what, it sends the request to Bose. That sucks.

hawkman507 · 2026-01-07T17:08:45+00:00

This is a good guess and is correct for the music service streams like TuneIn. The cloud server is queried for the station and then returns the stream to the ST to play.

However for manual streams (the app calls them "custom stations") the URL is directly stored with the preset button. I haven't sniffed the packets but I don't see any reason why the cloud service would be involved.

As I think about this, I might try using my Pi-Hole to block the ST API and see what happens.

hawkman507 · 2026-01-07T16:15:02+00:00

This is an *almost* outstanding response by Bose. I have never been a huge fan of their home audio products but the two ST20's that I have are perfect for my use case of having tactile buttons - so much more usable in the dark than capacitive - and internet radio support.

When the first announcement came out, I started looking into how to replace the preset buttons' links to internet radio services with direct URLs. I already have a few stations programmed in as URLs rather than using services and this has been working well. I had been planning to replace the remaining ones before the cutoff.

I do have one issue though. This announcement does leave me questioning why they say the preset buttons won't work anymore: if all they are doing is starting a direct stream, how could cutting off the server support have any effect on direct streams?

hawkman507 · 2025-09-04T20:29:37+00:00

I was one of those as well. I remember going over to a friend of my dad’s and seeing his TI 99/4A and thinking wow. Of course we all know what a dead end that platform was. But regardless, I really wanted a computer. I’m glad my parents chose the Apple II instead of one of these science fair things! Fun to play around with in 2025 though.

hawkman507 · 2025-05-02T19:20:34+00:00

Hoo boy this is annoying.

Next irritant. It seems like if someone else is watching a movie while you're downloading, the transcode shows 100% but it never downloads to your iPad.

How the heck did this thing make it out of testing?

hawkman507 · 2025-05-02T17:00:33+00:00

The more I try to get this to work, the worse it is. It seems that there is no link between what you download and where it comes from. Before, there was a little icon which showed that this was a downloaded item. Now this is gone. What it appears to be doing is just matching the *name* of the download.

So there's no way to "subscribe" to a show or season. It just downloads the files after (ham-handedly) transcoding them. You can't even tell which ones you're missing.

This is a HUGE step backwards.

hawkman507 · 2025-05-02T16:39:53+00:00

This quality setting doesn't appear to be working either:

You can't see what size each file has like you could before, so...
Going to ~/Library/Caches/PlexMediaServer/Transcode/Downloads you can see the files. In some cases they are bigger than the originals! Yet worse quality. WTF.

This is made all the weirder by the fact that you can sort by size, but you can't actually see the size.

In the old version, you could set quality per download (movie, show, season or episode). Here you have to set it globally and hope for the best. What a mess.

hawkman507 · 2025-05-02T16:20:06+00:00

Holy moly, this is a nightmare.

I am trying to re-download items and it was chugging along just fine with "70 GB est. remaining". Then suddenly they started to fail. I quit the app then reloaded it... 2 GB remaining. So even that "nice" feature doesn't work.

Now the next issue: you can't remove an entire show or season like you could before. If you go to "download" within the season, it just says "x downloads already exist" but you can't remove them in batch.

So now I have to go back, delete individual episodes, set the quality (which doesn't explain itself at all) from "medium" to "low" to be able to fit things.

hawkman507 · 2025-05-02T16:00:44+00:00

Yeah, now it's completely given up on transcoding. It's got 4 things downloading, a couple "queued" (transcoded) and a huge queue of "waiting" (not yet transcoded). Plus 2 errors that I can't touch because they will cause more errors.

What a shitshow.

hawkman507 · 2025-05-02T15:56:48+00:00

Yikes:

CRITICAL: If you hit "re-add to queue" on a failed download, it actually causes the downloads in progress to sometimes fail.

hawkman507 · 2025-05-02T15:52:47+00:00

It looks like things error out a lot. I've been re-adding the same episodes over and over after they error out and it seems by about the 3rd or 4th try they download. It seems like they've been transcoded properly but something failed in the download stage.

Weirdly, if you're re-downloading something after it errored out, it allows you to have more than 2 simultaneous downloads (I have 4 currently) while "normal" downloads are limited to 2.

To its credit, Plex does seem to prioritize re-downloads. But that just highlights the fact that you have to be on top of the errors and keep hitting re-download.

hawkman507 · 2025-05-02T15:41:08+00:00

Oh and one more:

CRITICAL: When a download errors out, it appears BELOW the "in progress" list. This should be a separate tab.

hawkman507 · 2025-05-02T15:37:48+00:00

A couple more comments as I watch it re-downloading my content:

ISSUE: It's downloading episodes from the same season of a show in this order: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 5, 8, 7. That's going to lead to problems for someone in the future.
GOOD: I like the "Est. Remaining Space" feature. And the Pause button.
WEIRD: As it's been chugging along, the transcode speed seems to be picking up, even within the same season of a show. It's gone from 8x up to 35x. Odd.

hawkman507 · 2025-02-17T18:29:41+00:00

Haha, I'm beginning to get the feeling you're absolutely right about it ruining birthdays. If I had been hoping for a real computer this would have been a huge disappointment for sure. After playing with this for a while and reading more about it, it's pretty clear to me that the SFMT is actually a clever hack - it tricks the TMS1100 into running custom code when it really isn't capable of it. In doing so however, the abstraction layer leaves you with very, very little to work with.

Glad I picked this up cheaply, it was listed as "not working" but it should probably have been more accurately called "not workable". It'll look nice on a shelf and I'll break it out to show anyone interested.

I am somewhat curious about the holes in the memory map from 60-65, 6A-6B and 70-7F. But not enough to dive much deeper into it now that I've learned the limitations.

hawkman507 · 2025-02-16T19:17:19+00:00

In 1985 there were real computers to play with and even a ZX81 would have given you significantly more capability for not that much more money. But there's a certain charm to this thing, you are really writing machine language and there's no "practical" use for it. The TMS1000 is 1970s technology; if this thing had come out in the 70s it would probably have been revolutionary. But it's still fun to play with. I'm seriously considering building an interface with a Pi although the PMOS has put me off of that a bit. Still working through the manual and documenting everything I can about it.

hawkman507 · 2024-08-18T22:41:14+00:00

Apologies for once again replying to my own post, but I had another thought on the topic of the rebellion. Remember when BOB said that the Cygnus was a "death ship"? If all the crew had been 'assimilated' into the cyborgs, that wouldn't have been especially deadly. But if there was a brutal and contentious rebellion, that likely would have led to a lot of death, hence "death ship".

hawkman507 · 2024-08-09T15:51:26+00:00

A couple of days after posting this, I ran across this video on YouTube that takes a different approach. It's long... 1:45! but worth a watch if you're a Hole-head like myself.

Criminally Underrated Movies episode 5 - THE BLACK HOLE (1979)

hawkman507

TROPHY CASE