• 6 Posts
  • 118 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
cake
Cake day: August 26th, 2024

help-circle



  • I bought this one off Amazon recently for $79 USD (currently has a 20% discount too) Anyski 3 channel 5GHz (can’t link here because comment gets removed).

    Reasons I liked it:

    • it mounts to the window and won’t do that thing where it gets knocked out of place in the event of extreme force such as getting rear ended. You’ll see a lot of YouTube dash cam videos where the camera goes up after the car has been rear ended because it wasn’t on a fixed mount like this one but a swivel. Avoid swivels if possible for this reason.
    • has a total of 3 cameras, 1 facing the street, 1 facing the cab, and 1 facing the rear view window behind the car
    • the rear view camera is not necessary to hook up so you could just do the main unit with 2 cameras and still have a camera, just smaller POV, of the back
    • the sound quality was decent for interior of the car
    • it had a WiFi hotspot feature so you can remotely connect using your phone to easily and quickly grab videos and not have to mess with the SD card (but you still had that option if you wished)
    • the video quality is really good

    I think it might meet your criteria.


  • You’re not an asshole for “not doing anything”. You were a child. Even as an adult, it’s difficult to step up and make decisions like that against a parent, especially when he can physically overpower you and there are likely severe physical consequences as a result. It’s nice when you can, but it’s difficult and not easy. This is going to sound bad, but I feel it’s truth that it was not your job to step up and defend your mom. No child should ever have that as an obligation placed on them. I’m sure your mother doesn’t think that of you if she knew you knew this and had overheard what she went through. In fact, your mom would likely feel sadness for you having to be a part of that and assume she had to do something to protect you from being exposed to it. She did the best she could with what she had at the time as did you. Both you and your mother are victims (in different degrees, but still victims, nonetheless) and don’t forget that. A victim does what they can with what they have and there is no right or wrong about how they handle the unjust abuse they endure.

    This is all on your dad for being the only asshole by not having a basic level of respect for another human being, his partner, the mother of his children. Additionally, exposing his children to that in the house they also lived in, to have to hear and know their own mother was being abused by their father, a man who was supposed to protect the family, not be the cause of something so horrific.

    Your mom stood up to him eventually and that’s what matters most. I’m glad she’s out of that now as are you.

    If you feel you need to, then you should cease contact with your dad, but that is a decision you should make for yourself depending on how you feel about everything. Of course with what little the rest of us know, we feel you should cease contact for your safety, but you know the bigger picture and are best equipped to make that decision for yourself. Don’t feel bad if you do feel he deserves forgiveness and his child still in his life because you have decided that. That’s your decision to make and no one can or should fault you for that decision you make for your life.

    I hope you and your mother are doing better now. I’m sorry for all the pain you two endured as a result of this and your other experience. I’m doubly sorry that you are hard on yourself, which I don’t feel is warranted.


  • I used to be a transportation manager and oversaw drivers who would drive older adults with developmental disabilities to and from their home and the day care facilities they would attend.

    One afternoon, one of the drivers called me and was in a panic saying that she had called the paramedics because one of her passengers had passed away in the van on the way back home. She had pulled off to the side of the road while waiting for paramedics to get there with the rest of the people in a not so great area. Thankfully most of the gangs in the area knew us and wouldn’t bother our population, probably defend them if something happened, but I still wanted to get there and help out any way I could so they could get on with their day.

    I got there and the van, one of those long 15 passenger vans, was parked on the corner and all of the people were standing on the curb with the driver and the police and paramedics were there.

    We got another couple drivers to come take the rest of the people with them so they could go home, but this driver, this was her personal van. Like she owned it and contracts with us to use it, so she didn’t want to leave it unattended.

    The police had confirmed that the woman had passed away and was still in the van. She was in the very backseat in the middle between two other passengers. One of the passengers had to literally crawl over her dead body to get out of the van.

    So I told her to get into my truck and we’d just sit there and wait for the coroner.

    We sat in my truck for hours and just stared at the back of that van, all the while only we knew there was a dead person sitting in there. She didn’t want to go anywhere to make sure no one stole her van so I just sat there with her and we talked for a while.

    It was about 5 hours when a Honda Odyssey van pulled up and a bunch of guys in suits got out. We greeted them and they got inside and put the woman’s dead body into one of those bags you see on TV. I remember when they were pulling the bag out and I remember hearing it drop on the concrete. It’s such a weird sound to hear and like nothing you’ve ever heard or experienced.

    People were now crowding on the streets as it was obvious what was going on now.

    The driver just couldn’t take it and turned around and I held her while I faced the whole thing. They put her in the back of this van and drove off.

    Last part was to take the van back to her house but obviously she didn’t want to drive it back so I let her drive my truck and I drove that van back to her house. The whole drive was just so creepy. The rear view mirror had a perfect position on that particular seat the whole ride and I just couldn’t get over the fact that someone literally just died there a few hours ago.

    I made sure to give her a few days off and rearranged my schedule because that was enough for me and I wasn’t even the one driving when it happened, so I couldn’t imagine what she was going through. And not just for her but the safety of the others, it seemed best to have her take some time to recoup before returning.

    Just one of the creepiest experiences of my life.


  • Voyager works pretty well on iPad (and iPhone) for me. It’s a lot like a spiritual successor to Apollo for Reddit.

    I love the filter aspect of it. Easily lets you block an entire community or user from the browser. Also lets you block entire instances if you wish to do so.

    The overall look and feel and ease of use is also just easy and clean. Everything is there for you that you need.

    The search function always works wonderfully but does require you to be on an instance that is federated to other instances in order to view everything possible, so if you’re on an obscure instance like mine, you won’t always find everything but that’s not the fault of Voyager.

    They have a support community too which is fairly active every time I’ve had a question in the past.

    It also let you switch between accounts very easily.

    All this is free and doesn’t require purchase but it is good if you can donate if you find it as useful as I have. They don’t beg for donations and there are no ads. They even let you change the app icon.






  • My dad was in a really bad mood and overly negative. I didn’t want a party or anything anyway, but I didn’t want to be in a negative place and be around him when he was just complaining about everything.

    I didn’t know at the time, but he had recently found out that he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and not only that, his former health insurance had hid the diagnosis from him for over 6 months while he was in pain and waiting for an answer. Probably because of his age and they thought they’d just wait him out and let him die. That very likely led to it metastasizing throughout his body and causing all sorts of problems and his eventual death. He tried suing the insurance company but no lawyer wanted to take them on because they’re massive.

    Ah…sorry for the tangent.

    Though the next few birthdays weren’t bad or good, just okay which is how I like it. I don’t want to celebrate it, but people acknowledging it feels nice.




  • I just gave away my Chromebook to someone who was affected by a local natural disaster and I ended up putting Linux Mint on it for them.

    I think that distro would get you this experience.

    Honestly, I’d recommend getting a used laptop. Get one that’s 5 years or newer. You don’t need the best hardware, so as little as 4GB of RAM and 128GB SSD should suit you fine. But you can get more if you’d like for better performance. You shouldn’t have to pay anymore than $150 USD for something like this in my area. Your area may vary, depending on availability. I’d recommend staying away from HP only because I have encountered issues in the past with them making it slightly more difficult than others to install another OS than Windows on. It’s not impossible, but they just do stuff that adds an extra layer.

    If you’d like something else other than Linux Mint, I’d suggest looking into Ubuntu, PopOS, Vanilla OS, for some other very friendly, lite versions of Linux that are easy to set up and very good for basic tasks.