As a former smoker and vaper for 12 years this is unfathomable to me. Vaping is just better in every way. It takes some getting used to when coming straight from cigarettes, but after that the flavor of tobacco is just pure stench when compared to vanilla, strawberries etc.
I thought this too, but then it hit me that it will need pagination as the number of blog posts grow. Also updating links, footers, menus, headers etc also quickly becomes a nightmare.
This summer I went through a lengthy process of replacing one of the cogwheels in my Bosch e-bike motor from 2012. The cogwheel is known to break in this revision of Bosch motors, and an improved replica is available on ebay. This cost me totally around €250. Right after that the brakes had to be replaced probably because of hydraulic liquid leakage which was another €400.
The miracle is that the battery is still chugging along, my guess is that it must be around 70% capacity compared to new. I do realize this was quite a big gamble since who knows how much longer the battery will last.
I wish e-bikes was designed to be more modular and less proprietary so you could easily swap out for example (parts of) the motor and battery for a reasonable sum. As examplified in TFA the frame can last more or less forever and the rest of the parts are changeable and can also last a pretty long time.
Next time I get an e-bike I will probably convert an mechanical bike using a Bafang kit or something like that, since they seem to have more of those traits.
Bosch is a huge company, and attitudes vary across divisions. I've been spending more time than I care about talking with their hydraulics division - Bosch/Rexroth, earlier known as Mannesmann/Rexroth.
Their manic attention to detail is only surpassed by an almost fanatical devotion to documentation and standardization.
They still make replacement parts for 30+ year old designs, and sounded almost apologetic when explaining to me (very patiently) that a critical component for an embedded device manufactured in Western Germany was no longer available, so I had to upgrade the control to the next generation (introduced way back in 2012 or so...).
No sweat - the replacement device could be configured as a drop-in replacement.
The original way you built an e-bike was with a motor hub, wires, some sort of speed controller, and a battery pack. You had to figure out what that all meant in practice for your frame of choice but there were several forums for bikes that could help. I’m sure all that is on Reddit now as well.
Framework is solving the “I’d like something modular but slicker than a Clevo and with a support line that is willing to go a bit further than selling an ODM unit to a middle man like Sager.”
If you don’t know who Clevo is but you know who Framework is, that means Framework’s plan is winning.
For E Bikes there are a couple big brands with good support and some boutiques that will take care of you. The big box store stuff using Bosch parts are more of a Wild West.
We have most of those, but they're high-level abstractions (voltage levels, Vulkan), so you need bulky translation layers (shims, drivers) to interoperate with the hardware.
What I really want is detailed schematics, ideally machine-readable, so I can attach things together at the lowest level that my use-case requires, while still able to use high-level interfaces if I need to.
When two devices that naturally speak the same, simple wire protocol have to interoperate via USB-C because of regulations, I cry a little. This isn't how things were meant to be, and isn't what the regulations were meant to achieve.
There already are ebike conversion kits like that. The problem is they generally aren’t legal since they aren’t capped at a certain speed. And the battery packs have a history of exploding in flames
I had a mid-drive ebike and while it definitely shined on the extreme hills found in Seattle, i think my next ebike is gonna be a wheel hub motor type and just be really over-powered. Trying to change gears while under power or applying power too early after a shift was super annoying and constantly caused the chain to slip off and made terrible clunky noises.
I think front hub motor + internal geared hub on back + belt drive is the ideal bike for me. Only downside is not getting to do power wheelies :)
Never had a similar experience with a mid-drive. I’ve found every bike with a hub motor I’ve tried disappointing on hilly terrain or with a lot of start/stop and if you only cycle on flat what’s even the point of having an ebike? (Assuming it’s one that’s legal in Europe).
A Europe legal hub drive is gonna be super weak. My hub drive isnt technically legal but cops literally can’t be bothered to do their basic jobs these days in the US so it’s not like I’m ever gonna get caught
Non-technical iOS users probably don't give a flying crap and would not even know if it was possible to download a PC emulator from a third party app store. The iPhone does lots of things right, and having some obscure options which only the technical crowd cares about will not change that.
To become another Android iOS would have to be licensed to other vendors and appear on cheaply made devices dragging its name through the mud.
If you want to be able to run your software, on your device, buy an Android or Linux or even Windows device. Anything but Apple. The dollars don't lie: for some reason, people want to be controlled.
Except they don't. Some might and they seem intent on telling everybody else how it's the best option for them. Just let me install whatever I want. My choice if it explodes.
Being fluid device with zero (non-Apple) spyware and sane default with UI/UX that don’t change every major release while providing ecosystem that has literally no competitors in sight, but yeah, it’s definitely walled garden that is a main differentiator. Facepalm
Actually, yes. If the iPhone was an open platform that could open it up for many use cases involving shell scripting and such. As for game emulators I already run several on my Android phone with great luck, so that is indeed a valid use case.
> But the App Store isn’t just a store, it’s also the only way of installing software on the most popular smartphone in the world, and the company’s decisions about what businesses it wants to support have a way of warping the entire culture.
In the case of porn this is not much of an issue, but the fact that these companies have that kind if power I find really scary. As stated in the article Apple (and Google too one would think) have the power to shut down many businesses for whatever reason they see fit.
Google allows sideloading of apps. Of course if you start on the play store and get kicked off that can kill your business, but if you build your audience elsewhere it can work out just fine. There's a pornhub Android app, and an ecosystem of dating sims, visual novels containing erotic content, etc. Patreon is probably responsible for a couple of million dollars a month in Android app "subscriptions".
This is probably only viable when your entire category of business is forbidden by the two big app stores. That is to say, it's possible to survive as "the big porn service", but not as "the mainstream social network that doesn't ban porn" (unless you're Twitter/Reddit and you're too big to ban).
While this is a technically correct statement, it is also hiding the truth. Android makes up 70% of the smartphone market still, but the phones are made by different companies (hence why the iphone is the post popular smartphone, just not the most popular OS). So 70% of phones can still sideload.
>As stated in the article Apple (and Google too one would think) have the power to shut down many businesses for whatever reason they see fit.
And the situation is even worse when you factor in AWS and Cloudflare. When "free markets" are controlled by a few powerful gatekeepers they cease to be free markets.
OR, they should be on the hook more if they're going to exercise this degree of control; ie, a common carrier rule (though its inability to actually get applied to social media leaves me less than hopeful). IF they want editorial capacity on what gets allowed, and what doesn't, then they should be taking on liability for harms caused by businesses they support (ie, going after Visa for lung cancer because they support purchasing cigarettes). On the other hand, if that sounds draconian (it should!) then they should have the option to avoid this by acting as dumb pipes.
If they're saying they want to pick winners, they should be responsible for the harms those winners they pick create. Otherwise, let the police do the policing.
What's banned is marking a data page as executable (which happens to be required if you want to build a competitive javascript engine).
The practical upshot of this is that nobody has bothered porting a browser engine to iOS, since it's javascript performance would be unacceptably slow.
https://blog.freecad.org/2026/03/16/rules-regarding-ai-gener...