In a car with a combustion engine, it is easy to understand why it takes quite a long time in winter for the interior to warm up - up to 15 minutes. After all, the engine first has to heat up the cooling water. It's different in an electric vehicle: Here the heat comes from the electric heater, so it should actually be much faster, right? Not really. Sometimes it feels like an eternity.

Fans of eternal ice can already try the heated flops Fiat 500e, Renault Zoe, Tesla Model Y and VW e-up! deal with They are the losers in the ADAC comparison test, which parked e-cars in the cold chamber at minus ten degrees. The aforementioned frostbite needed more than 30 minutes until the front seats reached 20 degrees.

Warm air blows out of the vents fairly quickly on all of the candidates tested - it just brings a different amount.

Blessed are those who can climb into a BMW iX after a bitterly cold winter night. A feel-good atmosphere prevailed here after just 20 minutes. VW ID.3 and Hyundai Kona Elektro needed more than 20 minutes for this.

Particularly noticeable: some vehicles did not manage to get the rear warm even after 30 minutes of continuous heating. The manufacturers sometimes save on the air vents or pursue inadequate heating strategies.

differences in insulation
There are also differences when it comes to thermal insulation: in some vehicles, the temperature drops much more slowly than in others. This is important for short stops, because less energy is required to heat it up again, which means that the range is protected more. In the test, BMW and VW performed best in this regard - with an interior temperature of 16 and 15 degrees after five minutes of engine standstill and 10 and 9 degrees after a half-hour break. The other cars cool faster and further.


Heating goes on the range
It was also shown that all of the cars examined require around 1.5 to 2 kW of power to keep the interior at a permanent 20 degrees when the outside temperature is minus 10 degrees. So if you had to endure 10 hours of traffic jams in extreme cases, you would need 15 to 20 kWh of energy from the battery to stay warm all the time.

   

Hy, if I want to answer a thread, the text in the field is missing when answering (except in standard style)
click or drop ..... 
and 
the buttons Remove and insert into post

       

I take online privacy fairly seriously, particularly when cross-site trackers are involved. If you've ever wondered how Facebook and Google know so much about their users, this is how. They aren't just tracking your activity across Facebook, they're also buying data from data mining companies that themselves buy tracking data from various other respective apps, including Spotify, TikTok, DoorDash, and many others. The end result is that most of what you do on your phone is tracked and it is often unclear where it goes. 

Facebook also has ways of tracking many of its users' web browsing habits through what is known as the "facebook pixel" (a single pixel "image" that Facebook encourages web developers to embed, which phones home and lets Facebook know that a particular user is on this website). Facebook isn't the only offender here, there are several companies that tend to do a good job of tracking people's activity in fairly creepy ways as well. These companies can track most of your activity online, and they have a pretty detailed profile of it too. (Rest assured, Makestation does not have any of these. We have zero cross site trackers, and have no plans of adding any.) 

I started using Brave Browser a little over a year ago to block these, and I've been pretty happy with it. It's Chromium based, so it's still a RAM hog. But it's pretty stable and does a decent job blocking creepy cross-site tracking on the Internet. It's grown fairly popular, it's actually founded by the founder of the Mozilla Foundation, so it's definitely been able to get a decent amount of traction. 

Do you take steps to preserve privacy online? If so, what are your thoughts on Brave Browser?

Hey there, so you're interested in affiliating with makestation?

here's what ya gotta do.

first, submit a request!  just post it here and include the following.

A link to your site

An 88x31 pixels button like the following.



then once affiliation is requested place our button on your site and link to it.

linking can be done with the following code.

Reddit recently changed the behavior of how their blocking system is managed, and it's resulted in some strange behavior from certain accounts. If a user blocks you, you will now be unable to reply to any of their replies to your comments, and neither will you be able to reply to any replies of replies either (even if the person you are replying to wasn't the person who blocked you). It basically prevents you from seeing much of the thread and prevents you from responding to any of it. 

At first glance, this makes sense. If a user blocks you, why would you want to reply to it? But some users have apparently figured out how to take advantage of it by posting information that is objectively controversial and easily disproven, and then by blocking the accounts of those who reply. In some cases, they are doing it at the post level, preventing many from being able to reply (or to even see the responses), and thereby manipulating public perception in the post. It makes it appear as though their opinions are more widely held than they actually are, and prevents users who might offer rebuttals from participating.

I've seen it crop up more often lately, and it's usually from troll accounts that post blatantly disprovable information (or sometimes spread FUD based on false premises about a specific person or company). There isn't really much you can do when it happens because it's generally not obvious to the onlooker what has happened (unless folks who replied before getting blocked edit their posts to inform readers about what has occured).

Apparently some folks on Reddit noticed as well, and what's scary is that there is nothing stopping dodgy PR firms from doing the same thing (and effectively manipulating public perception to be different than it actually is.)

A major difference between Christmas in the USA and Europe is the role of religion. In Europe, almost every child knows the story of Jesus and his birth in Bethlehem. Meanwhile, Santa Claus is the main character in the USA in the USA.

The Christmas season in Europe

In most European countries, the Christmas season is heralded with the 1st Advent and the opening of the Christmas markets. Windows are decorated, mulled wine is drunk, overpriced bratwurst eaten and many houses inspire with fairy lights and great window decorations. On December 24, the nativity play is performed in the churches and Christmas services invite families to sing Christmas carols together and celebrate the birth of Jesus. Families enjoy a festive or traditional meal, which varies from country to country. In Austria, a cold plate is usually served or “sausages with fish”, fondue chinoise or raclette in Switzerland, in Germany goose or roast or potato salad with sausages or fondue and in England the turkey is very popular.


On Christmas Eve, children primarily unpack their gifts, which miraculously appeared under the Christmas tree. In the evening, families spend the Christmas evening alone and watch films comfortably or use the time for joint game evenings. The Christmas holidays on December 25th and 26th are usually used to visit good friends and family at a Christmas dinner, coffee and cake. The Christmas decoration often stays stuck until the beginning of January and Christmas trees often only disappear to the festival of the Three Kings.

The USA: Santa Claus and X-Mas
In the United States, the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is used to visit family and friends and send greeting. Performing dishes are often on the meal plan during these visits. Santa Claus is the focus of Christmas itself. In the United States, religion and belief in God play an important role for many families, but on December 25th. Brings Santa Claus gifts. The red reindeer Rudolph has been located by North American air defense using infrared signal for over 50 years and parents and children can inquire about the location on the Internet.


On December 24, large socks are hung up or placed on the table. On the morning of December 25th, children find that Santa Claus was there and put numerous gifts under the tree - there are many sweets in the socks. On December 26th, many gifts are exchanged in shops, after which normality quickly returns to everyday life. Decorating in the run -up to Christmas, many Americans take a little more serious than the Europeans: Not only windows or the Christmas tree are decorated, but often the entire house including the garden. In some regions, neighbors outdo each other and many streets are like a large sea of lights from colorful Christmas decoration at night.

Merry  Merry Christmas Tc4me

I tried ChatGPT recently, and I'm quite impressed with how smart it is. 

   

I wouldn't have expected AI to catch onto what I was doing, but evidently it understood that this was a completely baseless claim that I was attempting to prove. Wanted to see if it would catch on to it (something that would clearly fail the "common sense test" for a human, but AI evidently has learned to apply common sense too.)

   

Not only did it write a program correctly, but it managed to explain it too! 

ChatGPT has been more impressive than I expected it to be. The fact that it can write code AND comprehend (in English) what it's writing is incredible, and I have a feeling AI technology will get even smarter than this in the coming years. It's almost eerie how advanced artificial intelligence has become.

I was looking through lists of bad web designs recently, and I came across something on the Web Archive that pretty much puts everything else to shame. This web design is probably one of the worst web designs I've ever seen: https://web.archive.org/web/200606240738...forum.com/

   

It was from 2006, so I suppose the standards were a little lower back then. But what's shocking is that this forum still exists today, even though it looks quite different (still not great, but better than it did). And I mean, if it worked for them, you can't argue with results I suppose. It might have looked absolutely terrible, but their website still exists 16 years later.

What are the worst, most cringeworthy web designs you've ever seen? (Don't be hyper-critical of good-faith efforts of course. We're looking for hall-of-fame cringe, things that people couldn't have possibly made without intentionally making them look bad. )

I can't see myself in the list of members?

Lg Tc

Instead of my bike... a new toy for the Audi
SUV Mercedes AMG 63 . here with Ben :-) It's still at Mercedes but I'll get it next week