Thank you!

Do you have a link to a story of what happened to ScummVM? I love that project and I’d be really upset if it was lost!

I’ll check them out. I once applied for a job at ecobee without knowing what they did!

That’s a good point. I should look into that. It does have the ability to connect to the thermostat with an app but I never tried that.

Tone policing is a much older and more common tactic than that. It’s fallacious because it’s responding to the implied tone of a person’s writing (or their emotions) rather than the specific claims of their argument.

Yes, it’s just hard to do, especially for people without a car. Hauling a large number of heavy glass bottles to the grocery store on public transit is quite a burden!

The number of times I’ve been camping in 41 years of life can be counted on one hand, so I wouldn’t exactly call it my hobby. Would you care to try again?

Also what’s the big deal with reading about camping safety so that you know to bring a first aid kit, extra warm blankets, pitch your tent on high ground, and any other reasonable measures to keep yourself warm, dry, and reasonably safe from infections or illnesses?

As for “you sound like…” that’s called responding to tone or tone policing. There’s unfortunately far too much of it on Lemmy and it’s a pretty strong sign of its immaturity as a discussion community. Unfortunate!

My issue is home insurance and HVAC regulation in Canada. I don’t know what is legal and what isn’t as far as HVAC system modifications go, given that I’m not a licensed HVAC technician. Doing my own home automation mods badly could damage or destroy either my heat pump or furnace, resulting in thousands of dollars in repair bills. Or it could jeopardize my home insurance in case of a fire and result in even greater financial losses, even if my modifications were only tangentially related to the cause of the fire.

Glass bottles aren’t a free win. Glass is very heavy to transport and extremely energy-intensive to manufacture. It made sense back when people hardly drank any soda. It still makes sense for things like condiments (soy sauce, vinegar, etc) and alcoholic drinks but it doesn’t make any sense for everyday drinks like water or soda.

We should be investing in better municipal water treatment facilities so that tap water doesn’t taste awful. Where I live the tap water is horrible but I’ve visited places where the tap water tastes perfectly clean and pleasant. If we had universally tasty tap water then people would stop buying plastic water bottles.

As for soda, I could see glass bottles being excellent if we could bring consumption down to a reasonable level. Many people guzzle soda as if it were water which is both terrible for their health and the environment.

I have a heat pump and furnace combo. The heat pump works extremely well down to around -10C. Below that it takes a very long time to move the needle by half a degree. The furnace doesn’t kick in until the thermostat sees the house temperature trending in the opposite direction it’s attempting to achieve.

Unfortunately, its method of determining the time gradient of temperature is rather moronic and doesn’t take the temperature schedule into account. This means every morning when the schedule calls for higher daytime temperatures (even by just half a degree) the thermostat freaks out thinking that the house is cooling rapidly and kicks on the furnace to bring up the temperature.

This causes the system to needlessly run the furnace every single morning. It annoys the hell out of me but I don’t know what to do about it. Aftermarket thermostats aren’t very common around here (Canada).

Note that the 240V outlets in Canada are actually just two separate 120V circuits plus a neutral. This is different from a UK outlet which has 240V AC on a single conductor and then a neutral and a protective earth.

I would normally agree with you on the “get good” sentiment being obnoxious to deal with but…. nature doesn’t fuck around. People who go into the wilderness unprepared can and do die.

It’s not just bears and starvation that can kill you. You can get sick, get infections, get poisoned, get frostbite, hypothermia, heat stroke, and many other afflictions that will either ruin your trip, ruin your life, or kill you if you’re unlucky enough. Even just something as simple as scraping your knee on a rock can give you a staph infection that costs you your leg, a risk that can be averted just by wearing a pair of jeans when walking in the woods.

But besides all that: camping is way more enjoyable when you do some basic research, make a plan, and do the basic preparations you need for the plan to be successful. If you’re not willing to do that then you probably shouldn’t go camping in the first place!