Chewie

Got a link? that name isn't very unique :(

I like the MorningStar brand, but they aren't cheap. I wrote a review here if you're interested: http://www.gogreenit.net/index.php?page=morningstar-tristar-60a-mppt

I’m not sure what you mean about “alternative process” for updates. In the chart you posted, the US got 466227 updates in 1 day which is about 14 million per month if that happens every day. If they are 100 bytes each (no idea if that is realistic), that’s 1.4GB a month for the whole US. Right now a new map download is something like 1.1GB for California alone. California is the biggest US state (not in terms of land area but certainly in terms of roads) but the whole US might be 10x or 20x bigger.

Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean by that.

I’d say OM is less in need of new features than of getting its existing features working solidly, warts ironed out, etc. The one major feature improvement i could see is getting the voice directions to include street names, but in practice it’s not that important, at least in my usage.

Fair enough

Google Maps has a sometimes useful feature that an offline app like OM can’t possibly get, which is routing and ETA calculations based on realtime road and traffic conditions. I don’t rely on that very often, but on occasion, it really helps. Unfortunately I suspect that much of the traffic data comes from the devices themselves phoning home with their locations, and only Google and Apple have enough devices out there to usefully do that.

Yes, that's exactly how it works. I get tracked enough without adding my location data, so however useful it is, I can live without it.

I know, but it shouldn't be like this :(

I don’t mean OM gives me a choice of routes. Rather, say there are two reasonable ways to reach the destination. OM chooses route A, says turn right, ok fine, I turn right. Then after a few seconds, OM changes its mind and wants route B instead. So it says take a U turn and go this other way, oops! But if you do that, it changes its mind AGAIN, and you end up going in circles.

Weird, i've never had that happen to me!

Re downloading a subset of the maps: yes I can do that, but then I have to predict which ones I’ll need, just another thing to remember. I have all the California maps installed so that if I suddenly decide to drive to Barstow or something, I don’t have to

Ok, but what' the alternative process?

figure out which counties I’ll traverse, since they are all already downloaded. What I really want is to download ALL the maps, the whole world, might be 50GB or whatever, but that’s ok, we can buy 2TB microSD cards now. If that download was a one-time event with occasional small updates I could deal with it, but I don’t want to do the whole thing every cycle.

Sure, it's not as efficient as it could be, but maybe that will change with time. They are pretty good at adding features to it fairly regularly.

I get terrible (not “suboptimal” but genuinely ridiculous) routes enough of the time to call the program not fully working. There is also a thing where if there are two routes of roughly equal quality, instead of choosing one and sticking to it, OM will keep trying to switch between them, asking for a lot of crazy U-turns. The POI search is also lame: if you

That's weird, I only see 1 route choice when I use it.

enter “McDonalds” and there are 10 of them in the area, it shows them in some weird random order instead of nearest first.

True, that is a bit annoying, although it's getting better, if you move the viewport over the area you want to search on (if you're not there already), it seems to try and show local stuff first.

I do use OM in preference to Google Maps because privacy and offline etc., but it is only usable maybe 75% of the time. If I’m in a hurry or otherwise unwilling to make some wrong turns, or if OM messes up, I end up using Google. Google simply works a lot better. Ugh.

That's a shame. It's pretty good where I live, and I can find most things I need to travel to, although yes, the index could be better.

It would also be nice if OM’s voice directions included street names, and that map updates didn’t download entire new maps, but those are features to be engineered. Still, the California map data is over 1GB all by itself, that has to be re-downloaded once a month or so. De Lorme Street Map in the Windows 95 era fit all the US streets on a CD-ROM (700MB) so while OSM data might be richer, there’s still a bunch of bloat going on. And streets don’t change that often, so the monthly update should be tiny compared to the initial download.

Fair enough. I'm in the UK, and both here and in Europe, sub-country areas are available for download, which helps. Maybe the streets don't change often, but load of POIs change from one month to the next. This is just 1 day of changes from https://osmstats.neis-one.org/?item=countries:

A lot of it will be "trivial" metadata i'm sure, but still, there's quite a lot of change going on!

What are peoples' issue with Organic Maps? (seriously - it would be interesting to know) I use it all the time, and it's great. Some of the routes are sub-optimal, but not often. Finally you can search with postcodes (that has been a problem in the past).

Maybe it's not perfect, but I only ever have to default to google maps when someone sends me a crappy shortened link to something. Once I get the actual address, i can swap back to Organic Maps. It used to eat battery on my Fairphone 2, but I had other problems with that phone too!. I love it, and the offline maps are perfect for when I am travelling.

I wish I could recommend Fairphone. I bought a "2" new a few years ago as my first smart phone, and while it worked, it wasn't very robust. I had to replace the "bottom module" (USB charging port and microphone) because it broke, which is ok, these things happen. Then, about a year ago, it went wrong again. I went back to the online shop, and the bottom module was there again. I went to buy it.... "out of stock"... "please try asking on the forums"... seriously? Go to the forums, loads of people wanting a replacement module, nobody selling theirs.

Soon after I get an email saying, "good news, android is now available for the Fairphone 2", and they were singing and dancing about how it was a load of hassle etc. etc. to port. Great, but no use to me if I can't get spares.

Much to the annoyance of my other half, I bought a Fairphone 3. After a while that started going buggy and not charging. There were a few other issues with it, so I thought I would send it back to get fixed. When I read the details of sending it back, they said to make sure it was backed up as it will be wiped "due to GDPR".. wtf??? That has nothing to do with GDPR - that's your poor data hygiene.

My Fairphone 3 isn't rooted, and I don't use google accounts, so it would be very difficult to back it up properly. I understand, if it's totally broken, there may be no way to retrieve the data, so you might loose it all, but that has nothing to do with GDPR.

I've not bothered sending it back, so it's yet another chunk of e-waste. A mate gave me his old Samsung s20, so I'm going to use that until it breaks.

I really want the company to succeed, but at this rate, it's cheaper and probably better for the environment if I just buy a second hand old "flagship" phone instead.

I am never buying Fairphone again 😢

Sounds good. Maybe some sort of forum system, like https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown (activitypub-based) or https://karrot.world or even an instance of lemmy ? Nextcloud is good as it has a lot of plugins for sharing photos and chatting etc. Video conferencing It would be worth looking at something like https://www.freedombox.org/ as it's all self-contained, and might be easier to set up. at least as a proof of concept?

True, but it still seems rather excessive....

Yes. There are a few other chat clients that you can run relays for - Tox, SimpleX, Jabber/XMPP etc, which are worth investigating.

I like camping and festivals, and it was fun to get a small solar panel to charge my phone etc. about a decade ago. My parents were in to gardening, and used a lot of water butts to store water at our house. My other half and I watched a lot of Doomsday Prepper episodes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Preppers) during Covid lockdowns, and while some of them were a bit crazy, others had really good ideas. It felt like a sensible idea to try and be a bit more self-sufficient.

It will all take a long time to pay for itself, but I am learning about DC circuits and it feels good to have a backup for everything, even though we live in a city and are grid-connected to water, electricity and gas.