Easier on my wrist, less arm motion, and my hand doesn’t lock into a claw shape after using it all day.

I really like my trackball mouse, though I had to buy it myself.

No they didn’t.

In a strictly technical / laboratory sense, maybe not. But in practice, they stopped just the same. I also slow down to a stop (regen braking is amazing) and don’t slam on my brakes at a stop light (like some drivers I routinely scowl at). And driving through the country and having to slam on the brakes when a deer jumps out (which was common where I lived), I noticed no appreciable difference in stopping distance between the two tire types.

…huh? ABS has nothing to do with rolling resistance…

ABS prevents the tires from locking up and skidding (anti-lock braking system, hence the name). Under normal driving conditions, it merely helps you maintain control, but on slick roads, locking up the wheels can skid you further than without it. So, no, ABS doesn’t directly relate to rolling resistance, but it’s part of a system along with the tires that contribute to stopping distance…which is what I was talking about.

I wouldn’t think stopping distance would be noticeably impacted by less rolling resistance. My original “eco” tires stopped the same as the standard ones. They’re “eco” because they have less rolling resistance and are slightly lighter.

Plus, with ABS, you’re not likely to lock the wheels up such that the decreased resistance would be significant.

On slick roads would be my only concern, but a good and season appropriate tread should mitigate that.

It’s going to be all about the price.

My hybrid recommends “eco” style tires to get the best gas mileage. Those were $100 more, per tire, than the standard low-profiles. At the time, I commuted about 110 miles/day, so tires typically only lasted me about a year before they were either officially worn out or too worn to be safe to drive in winter.

I only noticed about a 1-2 MPG loss with the “standard” tires versus the “eco” ones that came with it. Over the course of a year, I doubt that 1-2 MPG added up to the $400 difference.

So, these cleaner tires are a good thing, assuming they’re not more expensive than current-style tires. Depending on use-case, 35% longer life (if that holds true) may be able to tempt price-conscious buyers.

All that said, I could definitely see these becoming the “factory” tires for new EVs, though.

If only we had the technology to open doors without power. One day, perhaps.

A Quiet Place

Maybe, lol? Depends on the context, but I feel like that’s generally more sticking it to yourself.

Ha, thanks. It’s pretty much my only “sticking it to the man” story, so at least it’s a good one.

The ending is a little less infuriating when you realize the old miser lady probably called back to get those account fees refunded (I reversed the refunds I did‡) and was told by someone else (who wanted to keep their job) that she was out of luck (those were legit fees). She most definitely would have said something like, “well, the other guy I talked to said he was going to refund two of them” (as if we don’t hear that all the time) and then still being told no.

I’d like to think she reflected on that and realized that her entitlement caused her to get nothing, but people who complain like that usually don’t do that kind of soul searching.

‡ Not really reversed, just didn’t finalize the process after she went on her tirade.

That totally sounds like something I would do. Oof.

Hey, nothing wrong with small and petty. Everything, everywhere generally sucks these days, so take joy when and where you can, I say.

I’m totally on your side with regard to the word ‘hack’: Context matters, and in that context, ‘hack’ pretty much always means a kludge of a fix that works but could be better. It’s also a signal to whoever looks at the code later to take a better look / improve it. OTOH, auditors are the worst (though I would not personally want their job lol), and I can’t say I’ve never had to do similar pedantic things to appease them.

Hell yeah! Working “for exposure” is a crock of crap. Good for you for knowing your worth.

TL;DR: I worked at a bank call center, the bank was super shady, and I went on an overdraft fee refund spree my last week.

In college, I worked at a call center for one of the worst Bank of America (oops, meant banks in America 😉). That bank, which will remain unnamed, was doing all kinds of shady stuff (probably still is). For brevity, I’m going to focus only on one specific shady thing they did: processing payments out of order in order to maximize overdraft fees (OD fees from here on). Each OD fee was $34 ($51.50 adjusted for inflation).

There were guidelines for refunding OD fees, and they all had to be the bank’s fault. That said, you weren’t expected to give out many, if any, per month.

After about 7 or 8 months of dealing with customers that the bank was kicking while they were down, I couldn’t take it anymore. I went in on a Monday just knowing it was my last week.

First call of the day was this lady who overdrafted her card 6 times at a fast food place. All of the offending transactions were all $1-4. I didn’t really ask why (irrelevant), but looking at the transaction history, yep, they were processed out of order. She had a big payment go through later the same day which overdrew the account. Had the transactions been processed in order, only the big payment would have overdrawn (1 fee instead of 6).

However, according to policy, none of those were technically the bank’s fault because in the super fine print somewhere it said that the bank processed transactions largest to smallest and it was her fault.

That’s when “this is my last week” went from a “probably” to a “definitely”.

I said I could only refund one as a courtesy (the bank did let us do that occasionally), but just made up something about her being my 1,000,000th caller and I was gonna refund all of them. And I did. She was fucking ecstatic.

From Monday to Thursday mid-morning (more on that below), every caller that wanted an OD fee waived got it. Some guy even called in with a question, didn’t even mention the OD fee, and I was like “Oh, I see you have an overdraft fee last week. Lemme take care of that for you”. Bam, refunded.

My goal was to Robin Hood until Friday and quit, but some lady’s arrogance and entitlement on Thursday morning absolutely broke me. She had like $175K in checking and was complaining about three tiny, $3 yearly fees. I was all set to refund them (not that she needed them, but hey, I’m sticking it to the man here). The system wouldn’t let me touch one of them since it was over 2 years old. So I let her know I knocked off 2 out of 3. That wasn’t good enough, and she went on a tirade.

So I undid the refunds, apologized, and said I’d check with my manager. I put her on hold, left my badge on my desk, and just left.

I wonder if she’s still holding trying to claw back that last $3.

Yeah, just try seeing if SANE supports it out of the box. Someone else commented with a link showing it may have a compatible driver already.

Not directly, no. They’re completely different architectures. You may be able to emulate x86 on a Pi with QEMU and run Vista as a VM, but it’s going to be very, very slow (probably unusably so).

Your best chance would be a ultra small form factor PC and try to get Vista running on that (if using Vista is the only way to interface with it.

Have you tried hooking the scanner up to the Pi (running Raspbian), installing SANE, and checking if it has built-in drivers that work?

I didn’t even see the model page for that one lol.

Unless there’s a driver wrapper, you’d still need Linux drivers AFAIK.

Assuming there’s drivers for it, yeah. A quick look on Canon’s driver/support section doesn’t show any results for that model.

I’ve got a Brother MFC that has Linux drivers, and I built a scan server for it. Basically just a Docker container that has the drivers configured along with SANEd. My other PCs just connect their SANE daemons to the server’s and can scan without having to have the driver installed.

So the idea will definitely work as long as you can get drivers working.

Good to know! Will keep an eye out for sure.

Literally what I was wondering, lol. My first thought was “how well does it run Debian?”

OTOH, I really don’t want to contribute to a sale that may make MS or the hardware manufacturers think people want this AI crap. I just want a beefy ARM laptop that runs Linux lol.

Maybe they just have really bad breath and are doing everyone else a solid?

Does them wearing a mask affect you in any way whatsoever, or would minding your own business be the prudent choice?

Were people like this when shoes were first invented?