Hahaha, that’s what I love the most! The downvotes come flying fast 'n furious on driving-related posts. It’s so consistent, across any social media or forum site. I can only speculate, but I think it’s the cognitive dissonance, because know from extensive real-life observation that driving makes people miserable and angry, even while they claim to enjoy it. Thus, it’s really easy to make observations that puncture the illusion.

Our criminal “justice” system sucks, period. It’s about vengeance, and racism, not about rehabilitation. We should reform it from top to bottom for every crime, not simply exempt one in particular because folks wanna zoom-zoom.

John could just follow the law. I love these discussions, because drivers get so angry when I call out their criminal behavior.

Oh, my heavens, a THIRD PARTY! /s

Yes, these devices cost money to produce, install, and operate. Don’t want to pay for one? Stop breaking the law.

Food is even more fundamental to survival than our four-wheeled toys, but if you habitually go to the grocery store and eat without paying, you’ll end up in jail. Shelter is more important, too, but that doesn’t mean that I can just take up residence in any house or apartment that I please. I’d go to jail for trying.

So, I really have no sympathy for the claim, “we can’t take away cars!” Take them away from people who can’t be bothered to follow the laws that let us live together in society, even though they knew the consequences. Maybe sell them off and use the funds to provide food and shelter to the homeless.

Agreed. The best solution, as always, is to design streets and roads so that driving unsafely feels unsafe, so that everybody naturally slows down. Until that happens, this is a good program.

What happened to “don’t do the crime, if you can’t do the time,” or, “shoulda thought of that before breaking the law”?

This scheme would reduce ticket revenue, though. And if criminal scofflaws have to pay, good, fuck 'em. The New York taxpayers shouldn’t take on the burden. The scumbags could avoid the cost trivially.

That’s exactly what I need to know. Thanks!

I was about to get in the car and go buy the Sonos soundbar, but I checked the manual first. The network setup itself is done through an app that connects via BLE, and to use the app, you first have to create a Sonos account. That’s a ‘no’ from me. I may be unreasonable, but I don’t want to share my personal data and be gate-kept by a company, just to use hardware that I ostensibly own and is sitting in my living room. It’s too bad, because from what I read, the sound quality is excellent.

Why didn’t I ever think about RS232 control with an ESP32 device? Great idea!

So the LG TV can get connected to the local network without an app or cloud account? Perfect! I guess HA integration for a soundbar would be a nice-to-have-feature, but not critical. It would be nice to have Music Assistant connect to it directly for music playback, but as long as it turns on and off via CEC, I can continue to play music through Kodi/LibreELEC.

Absolutely! I guess I left out the part about what I want to do. I have an RPi4 with LibreELEC for media playback, so getting a smart TV and never connecting to the Internet is a fine plan. I want to be able to control the basics with HA, like powering it on and off, changing volume, and such. The RPi can turn on the TV that I have using CEC, but the TV doesn’t support powering itself off via CEC. And, even if it did, it’s a chore to integrate CEC with Home Assistant automations.

Long-press (or long-click) on the “Home Assistant” title at the top of the sidebar. That brings up a dialog box in which you can hide the items you don’t want to see. (It’s available in user settings, too, but this is a shortcut.)