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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • I drive a car built in 2018 and I’m really happy with the balance between buttons and screen.

    I’ve got stalks for indicators, wipers and cruise control. Physical switches for lights, windows, mirrors, climate temp, fan, air source, defrost front and rear, odometer reset, driving mode, master door unlock and opening the boot/tailgate. Vents are manually operated and the glovebox and fuel tank flap are too. The steering wheel has physical buttons for media source, track skip/radio seek, phone calls, starting the voice control mic, and scroll wheels for volume and cycling through information displays on the small screen between the large analogue gauges on the dashboard. And a 10 inch touchscreen for everything else (reverse camera, media and maps, mostly, but includes all the car settings you don’t fiddle with often, like light delays, beep volumes, summer time offset etc.).

    Basically anything I’m likely to want to use whilst driving I can find and operate with at most a quick glance, if not by touch alone, and have immediate feedback that I got it right because I felt the switch/stalk/button move under my fingertips as I expected.

    I’ve wondered what functions I’d be happy with moving from a physical control to the touchscreen or capacitive button. I haven’t come up with a single one. Yet if I were to buy the latest version of this car just about anything that is currently a physical button is now a capacitive touch button. Yeah, no thanks.




  • We keep a list of possible meals. Just favourites we’ve gathered over time. Once a week we sit down as a family and work out a series of meals for the upcoming week. Then it’s simple to work out what we need to get vs what we have already and do a shopping list on a whiteboard we keep for the purpose. Easy enough to mark items for purchase later (eg buy fresh closer to when we need them), or add staples as we run out. Whoever is doing the shopping just copies down what’s on the board before they go.

    Takes maybe an hour to do as a family, gets everyone involved in and involves the kids in family decision making.









  • I always lean towards Bosch where possible, mainly because of their charitable work. The founder set things up so that it’s perpetually funded from the company profits. That just appeals to me as the tiebreaker when deciding between a bunch of similarly priced tools that will otherwise do the job well enough.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bosch_Stiftung

    That said, I tend to go for corded options where practical. I have some corded tools that I’ve owned for over thirty years now that still get occasional use. Battery tools are convenient for their portability, but they do have a limit to their useful life.