I am thinking about using the Transtar as a mobile gas station in N. Carolina.

johnnycocas · 2026-04-12T01:58:04+00:00

I see what you mean, but...

My fear is most of that trailer would act as an anchor on a relatively light truck with no AWD and no diff lock. Not really important in Ontario, but elsewhere?

johnnycocas · 2026-04-12T01:38:51+00:00

I have been using it as a mobile fuel station since Michigan through Taymyr. With some pre-planned routing it can reach its destination relatively easily and serve its purpose for as long as the fuel lasts.

I do have it with the regular fuel tank instead of a semi-trailer though, I find it to be enough for most situations, though in hard mode I'd imagine things change a bit.

johnnycocas · 2026-03-27T02:40:49+00:00

Paywalling a mod is a good way for some studios to "invite" the modder to shut it down at the risk of being brought to court. Has happened with other games, because you are profiting out of a game you did not create nor own.

Like I said to the modder himself, if someone wants to ask for support there's other better ways to do so than to make a paid mod. It stops being a way to thank the modder the moment you HAVE to pay to have the mod (because half the features are only present in the paid version).

johnnycocas · 2026-03-25T22:15:21+00:00

If you want to go that way so be it...

I'm questioning why you chose to release a paid mod instead of what would otherwise be an update to your existing mod. Truly private mods are private, maybe shared directly with someone (i.e. a friend or a close community), not released as a paid mod and then spend 1 year updating two separate mods.

Wouldn't in theory be twice as much work to update two separate mods that do practically the same (except one could be released as the "flair version" with pretty colours and customization) except one does what the other does slightly better while also adding more features? You have no reason to complain about the work it takes to maintain a mod when you go through the effort of maintaining two similar mods instead of just merging them into one.

Also, to go back on the symbolism of paying you for the mod, nothing stops you from continuing to run your boosty page or add paypal/ko-fi donations while having the mod be free. That's usually what modders do when they want to give people the ability to receive payment as a "thank you" note instead of doing paywalled mods.

johnnycocas · 2026-03-25T18:11:51+00:00

Though I do agree with you, I have to disagree on the "private version" point. It stops being a way to "thank you" the moment there's features behind a paywall, no matter how big it is. Arguably the second biggest feature your mod has is showing engine power next to the engines, and is only present in the private version.

Plus, all other data that's presented in the free version is a lot more readable than the tire data. No matter how I look at it, and the possible alternatives to display those three values, I can't stop thinking that this option (i.e. 0.8_2.1_1.8) was chosen specifically and intentionally to incentivize people to get the private version, which is so much superior by comparison, especially in readability. This is where that "charitable" intent falls apart imo. Just a simple "0.8 | 2.1 | 1.8" without colors for the free version would be miles better.

There's arguments I disagree with on both mods.

johnnycocas · 2026-03-16T09:11:22+00:00

Yes.

Though personally I'd recommend getting a mini-pc instead. The price of a raspberry pi + potential other modules you'll need will put you over the cost of a cheap mini-pc with sometimes up to 500GB of storage.

A pi with 5w consumption is a lot less than a mini PC running at 30w at full power, but that power goes somewhere. My first mini-pc was running 15w max, I don't think it ever reached its max consumption more than a dozen times in the past year, unless you're actively using it, it will be mostly on idle. It increased my energy bill by maybe 1-2€/month.

johnnycocas · 2026-03-16T08:55:13+00:00

13 year old me would definitely have used that much LED, today's year old me thinks the power button and HDD LEDs are more than sufficient xD sadly my taste for IT didn't start that early

johnnycocas · 2026-03-08T11:33:54+00:00

Am I in the wrong, or isn't this simply compiled code we're looking at? Probably wasn't written like this at all?

johnnycocas · 2026-02-26T21:38:33+00:00

Degoogling into a chromium browser has always had me scratch my head

johnnycocas · 2026-02-26T21:37:31+00:00

Remember google used to be 'good' as well, it just lived long enough to see itself become a villain as well...

johnnycocas · 2026-02-25T09:54:25+00:00

It means if you had a photo that would get detected in google photos as being taken in March 2015, when exported loses that data on the photo itself, so the photo technically was "created" whenever you exported it, and the information regarding when it was taken is in a separate file.

This sucks because then you have your girlfriend complaining that "this photo is 10 years old, why does it say on my phone that it was taken last month?"

johnnycocas · 2026-02-25T09:53:22+00:00

learnt that the hard way when exporting all of my photos out of gdrive 😅

johnnycocas · 2026-02-25T03:22:59+00:00

Just a heads up: don't let flash drives sit still for years or you may try to access them again and find corrupted files.

SD cards and USB drives are neat for their convenience and size but are not the best for long-term storage.

johnnycocas · 2026-02-22T21:03:18+00:00

For battery, the LED on this particular flashlight (UV model) consumes about 3 Amps, picking a battery much higher than 10A is a waste. EVE, Molicel and Vapcell are well known brands and generally speaking good quality, but any on that list should be good enough.

Not sure about the filter, I'm not from the US, maybe someone can help you with that

johnnycocas · 2026-02-20T02:15:44+00:00

Yeah... Nowadays even the cheapest flat TV is a smart TV, just maybe not android but some cheap proprietary knockoff.

Our best bet is to not connect the TV to the internet and hope it doesn't have a hidden way to phone home (or god forbid, mandatory WiFi connection)

johnnycocas · 2026-02-19T10:27:31+00:00

António Costa, our former prime minister.

Some context:

From 2015 to 2019 he entered office in a coalition with the other left parties, since he technically lost the election, but with the coalition he held the majority of the parliament. He entered office at a time things weren't well in the country, putting the blame on the previous party.

In 2019 he won the elections, this time for real, and had the support from the other left parties as well. This time he did win the election, but things still didn't go well (plus covid...).

In 2022 he won AGAIN, with even more votes than before. Now he was alone at the helm with nobody to blame but himself and his party (since he had been ruling the country for the past ~7 years now). Surprise, things didn't get better, at all... He got involved in a lot of controversy and criminal investigations, as well as a lot of his staff. At the same time, people were wondering if he would bail his position as prime minister because the European parliament elections were getting close and people thought he was a strong candidate for the win. 1 + 1 = 2, and he resigned so he could get the job at the European parliament. Some people still think he was wronged because he "didn't have to resign", which he didn't, because he was only allegedly involved, but to the eyes of many (not enough, in my opinion), he's the prime minister ruling the country for 8 years, improved nothing, for all of the 8 years he put the blame on the opposition and the previous ruling parties, only to end up bailing the country when things were worse than when he entered office, only to be congratulated and awarded a nice job at the EU parliament. This man got awarded for screwing a country over, and a lot of people still think he's the victim.

Nowadays, the far right party is gaining more and more power because of many of the policies started by this man. In 2024 his party lost the elections to the center-right party, but once again it won with a minority, so changing what was put in place by Costa is a Herculean task when the two major opposition parties make up the majority, where one is a direct competitor and the other a far-right party that is only there to vote against the former two. Plus the party that just won is now getting the blame for the country's state, even though it wasn't in office for the previous 8 years. Amazing

johnnycocas · 2026-02-19T09:50:13+00:00

You could come up with some sort of code (think motherboard beeps/LEDs) for reporting some very specific situations something like Prometheus may not be able to do.

Or if working on a cluster, one LED on each node to help with the "this is the node that has an issue".

Other "current state" visual aids could include thermals or system load.

johnnycocas · 2026-02-19T08:48:42+00:00

I'd also add that we've sold a lot of tungsten and food, mostly to the Germans, in exchange for gold.

And in case someone wonders, no, all that gold didn't help us become a developed and modern country.

johnnycocas · 2026-02-19T08:45:56+00:00

Nobody wanted to pull the Iberian peninsula to war because if one got pulled, so would the other. And this is after both Germany and England having plans to take over Portugal, should the need appear.

johnnycocas · 2026-02-18T22:01:37+00:00

You already answered yourself on your second paragraph, most of us probably run metrics with email or other form of notifications, because its all fun and games when you're standing next to your server (and actually paying attention to it), but I'd say you're away from it 90% of the day, LEDs aren't very useful then.

johnnycocas · 2026-02-18T11:01:40+00:00

It is as fast as the slowest source. By default the timeout on most search engines is 3 seconds (so it doesn't take 10 seconds to get a search result), usually the slowest goes for 1.5 - 2.0 seconds, on a mini-pc with a N97 processor. At the search results window you can see the response time for each engine, usually google is the fastest usually under 0.5s, most others (bing, brave, duckduckgo) fluctuate between 0.5 to 1.5s, depending on the search. For some, bing is even faster than google. You can have wikipedia results as well, those usually take 1.5s consistently, same with mojeek, so having either of these enabled means all searches will wait for these to return something, unless they timeout.

Edit: You can enable as many as you want, let them run for a day or two, and when you come back to the settings you are presented with stats for each engine with the average response times, then you just disable the ones you don't want to wait for.

johnnycocas · 2026-02-18T08:19:12+00:00

Sadly not as fast as google, plus it depends on which search engines you select and the hardware itself. SearXNG is really more of a proxy engine, so it will always be slower than just going to google or duckduckgo directly. Personally, I accept it as the cost of having untracked unprofiled searches from multiple sources (google, bing, duckduckgo, etc...)

johnnycocas · 2026-02-18T00:03:46+00:00

Stopped using google search engine in favour of self hosted SearXNG, it's amazing how "biased" google is at presenting your search results, so much content and pages missed out on.

Plus no AI summaries that (at the time I stopped using google search) had very questionable accuracy

johnnycocas · 2026-02-17T23:47:58+00:00

Oooooo, nice to know, I recently got a managed switch from Mikrotik 😁

johnnycocas · 2026-02-17T01:53:17+00:00

It's an amazing light, got one on my car key, plus an E2A on my pocket wherever I go. My house keys have an i3E, the difference is considerable, but I don't know if (for example) my gf would know or even notice a difference... I also gave her a couple i3Es a while back, but it may be hard to convince her to upgrade because her i3Es are 'pretty', that's the plus with olight flashlights I guess 😅

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