There was one team fairly recently that thought they had developed one that got a lot of press, but it turned out to not be true.

But that was only for that one specific case, it didn’t prove that room temperature superconductors can’t exist in general, there are still other teams working on developing them, and theoretically they could be possible, we just haven’t quite worked out what materials will exhibit superconductivity at room temperature, under what circumstances, and how to make them.

And we have some materials that come pretty damn close, Lanthanum decahydride can exhibit superconductivity at temperatures just a few degrees colder than some home freezers can manage (although at very high pressures)

I don’t really like that they seem to be floating the idea of adding ads to the mix, but as long as this stays a separate part of the service from the on-demand section, I don’t exactly hate it.

I’ll occasionally have parties where we’ll use Pluto or similar services just to have something on. Usually something like the The Asylum channel to have a stream of something going that we’re not really invested in but that we can comment on and go “what the fuck was that‽” once in a while, and kind of do our own little MST3K thing.

And sometimes you just kind of want something on in the background while you’re doing stuff, and I know I’ll sometimes get a little bogged down trying to choose what I want to have on even though I’m not really going to be actively watching it.

I remember once upon a time there were some people who really wanted Netflix to add a “random episode” option, I wasn’t really one of them, but this could kind of fill that niche.

Also, if they curate it right, it could be kind of a cool way to drop new episodes. Say a new episode of a star wars show drops at midnight (or whatever-o’clock) For those who care to watch it immediately as it drops, they just need to be tuned to the star wars channel and it will come on automatically, no having to refresh and hit play. And leading up to the new episode they can do a mini marathon of relevant episodes from other star wars shows and movies that will help you understand what’s going on in the episode, maybe even create some new content summarizing content from the books, comics, and video games, etc. sort of an extended “last time on…” segment for the new episode. I’d also want it to be immediately available on-demand when it drops, but it could be kind of a good way to get yourself back up to speed about what’s going on in the show.

So there are ways this could be a cool addition to the service. Whether they actually use it that way is another matter entirely.

Growing up my mom lived on one of the biggest hills in a town that was basically all hills. She remembers when it snowed they’d watch all kinds of cars and trucks get stuck trying to make it up that hill, and then watch a guy in a little VW beetle go right up the hill like it was nothing, perfectly happy will of that engine weight right over the rear drive wheels.

Years later I’m a new driver borrowing my parents’s cars, a '93 RWD ranger, and a '92 Buick century, and that comparison did a good job of driving home how much difference that weight distribution matters. The ranger had some pretty good grippy tires, but without any weight in the bed, it didn’t take much to make those wheels spin. The buick, on the other hand, handled snow beautifully, it had all the weight of that big boat-like front end over those front drive wheels, never once struggled to find traction, the only limiting factor was that it sat pretty low to the ground so it didn’t take too much snow before that front end was just trying it’s damnedest to plow through snow. If some mad scientist ever thought to lift an old Buick a few inches, I’m pretty confident that 4wd/AWD would become all but obsolete.

HP Omen

Only tangentially related, but I’m still kind of pissed about HP buying VoodooPC and doing basic fuck-all with it and just slapping the Omen name on stuff once in a while.

For those who don’t remember, VoodooPC used to be a higher end prebuilt gaming computer company. You can go ahead and argue about why prebuilts are trash, not really the point, I don’t know if they were at all good computers or worth the cost, but I thought they made some really cool looking computers if nothing else, and occasionally had some pretty cool ideas. The omen was one of their flagship offerings.

I may be misremembering, it’s been like a decade, but I think HP acquired them pretty soon after Dell bought Alienware so it was probably their way of trying to stay competitive. I think by most accounts Dell kind of turned Alienware into shit, but at least they’ve kept the branding around and still make some cool-looking computers if nothing else.

Your comment was true, but not exactly relevant since we were talking about airtag-like devices that don’t have connectivity besides Bluetooth, saying that a device like them exists that has GPS built-in is kind of moot since they don’t have any additional ways to send that location info.

The thing you linked would fall under the walkie-talkie-like device I described.

Depending on where you are and where you hike, you may have a very different idea of what a large forest looks like than some people. Unless you’ve really traveled to go camping and hiking, or just happen to live in a very heavily forested area, what you think of as a large forest patch and what others think of may be in entirely different leagues. And just being in the woods is only part of the issue, geography has a bigger effect than all of the trees.

I’m from the Philly area, we have a pretty big wooded park, something like 2000 acres, that is entirely within the city. It’s also in a valley, so when you’re in the park there’s usually steep hills or even cliffs all around you. Cell service gets spotty in a lot of the park, even though there is probably no place in the park where you’re more than about a mile or so from major roads and cell towers and all the other stuff you expect to find in a major city, the signal just can’t get through all the dirt and rock surrounding you.

It gets even worse when you get up into the mountains, driving along a winding mountain road you can see your signal going bonkers bouncing between full bars and no bars based on what mountain is in the way of a tower at any given moment. And towers and everything else are just more spread out in general, one area I go pretty regularly to you’re often driving a good half hour or so between anything you’d really recognize as being a town, without much but woods and mountains in-between.

By contrast, I’ve also done some hiking in the NJ pine barrens, some of the sections I’ve been to absolutely dwarf that park in Philly I mentioned, and are generally more remote, but they’re mostly pretty flat, trees aren’t great for cell signals but they’re a hell of a lot better than mountains, so I can usually get pretty deep into the woods before my signal starts failing me.

I’ve also been to Quetico Provincial Park in Canada, which dwarfs pretty much any other forest I’ve personally ever been to, just an absolutely massive tract of natural area, and relatively flat at that, but it’s just so big and remote that there is really no cell service to speak of.

GPS is one-way though, your device isn’t sending anything up to the satellites, it’s just looking for where they are.

You still need a way to get a signal from the collar to your phone or computer or whatever device you’re using to track it. Things like airtags and tiles use Bluetooth to talk to nearby phones that relay it onto the Internet. If no one is close enough with a phone they’re basically useless, and if the cell service is spotty, the location can’t be updated until the phone has a signal, and depending on the area, that could be a while which means your dog could be miles from where they were when a phone last picked up the signal from their collar.

If the collar itself is hooked up to the cell network, then you don’t have to rely on someone being nearby with a phone to pick up the location, but it is still reliant on having cell service, which may not be a given if you’re out hiking in the mountains for example.

Other than that, you would have to use other satellite services, or rely on having a direct radio connection to the collar, sort of like a walkie talkie except carrying the GPS data instead of voice.

I don’t know the ins and outs of how they work, and I’m sure there’s some catch and they overall skeeve me out a bit, but I have seen a few companies that offer very limited free service, something like 25 mb/month. I don’t know how much data a gps tracker would use but that might be doable

I’m sure those companies do everything in their power to get you to pay more than nothing, automatically change your plan if you go over, deceptive emails, etc. so definitely something to be careful about. I also wouldn’t have a whole lot of confidence in those companies sticking around for very long.

And while not free, there are some pretty affordable prepaid plans and such that may be competitive or slightly cheaper than what a regular subscription might cost.

Depending on where you live, it may be possible to forego the call plan entirely, in a dense urban area with lots of open public WiFi networks, you may be able to work it entirely off of WiFi.

If you wanted to get real weird with it and jump through the loopholes to get licensed, there might also be some options using ham radio stuff like APRS, though that’s probably going to leave your dogs location exposed to any ham who happens to be playing with their radios in your area.

Now I’m not saying that any of that is necessarily a good idea or worth the hassle of setting any of that up, I’m just spitballing some ideas for what someone could potentially do if they did want to homebrew such a thing.

I’m not sure what the defaults are on Gboard because I’ve tinkered with the settings a lot by now, but you can have both long press to change language and swipe to move cursor at the same time, they don’t really interfere with each other, I just did both while writing this comment.

Also I’m not sure how many people have more than one language enabled on their keyboard, I’m admittedly not in a great position to judge that as an American since not too many of us speak more than one language with any regularity or fluency. A lot of people don’t tinker with the settings too much and for a lot of languages that use some variant of the Latin alphabet using the keyboard of your main language is probably sufficient for most other Latin alphabet languages in like 99% of cases. I suspect a lot of people don’t bother (though I’m happy to be proven wrong)