Category: General

We purchased a 2024 Nissan Pathfinder last fall. It’s been a great family hauler and it’s nice to have a naturally aspirated V6 and 9 speed automatic transmission (no CVT or Turbo to worry about). We evaluated all the 3 row SUV options on the market and the Honda Pilot and Nissan Pathfinder were the two options we liked most. The pathfinder was significantly cheaper than the pilot for the options we wanted which is what ultimately pushed us in that direction.

One quirk we’ve noticed with the Pathfinder is when using the phone app to start the car in cold weather it leaves the HVAC settings how they were when the car was shut off which is not ideal when it gets to -30 over night. However using the remote start button on the key fob turns on defrost, heated seats and heated steering wheel.

I’m not sure why these two remote start options behave differently but I couldn’t find anything online about it so I wanted to document it for anyone else who’s experiencing the same issue.

I recently purchased a new ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen10 which came preloaded with Windows 11 pro. While I understand there were some core TPM and Kernel scheduler enhancements that make use of Intel 12th gen and newer CPU changes (P-Cores and E-Cores) the UI itself is somehow worse. I won’t belabor the point since there are a lot of review on-line already but I found Windows 11 quite frustrating to use.

Sometimes settings are in the new control panel, sometimes they’re hidden in some old control panel that looks like it came from Windows 2000. They’ve managed to make the settings panel such a confusing mess that you basically have to use the search function to find anything. And the constant installing of apps and adds that I didn’t ask for is absolutely infuriating on an operating system I paid for. At this point Microsoft’s platform dominance must just be skating by on inertia.

Lastly, support for scaling and DCI-P3 colour management is sorely lacking. If you have a DCI-P3 panel unless you’re in a colour managed application like Photoshop the rest of the colours are really over-saturated. There doesn’t appear to be an “sRGB” mode in windows. It’s a complete mess.

I’ve had great luck with X1 Carbons running Fedora Linux for work, they’re great laptops with tier 1 hardware. However my experience with Windows 11 was terrible. Long story short I returned that laptop today and I’m likely just going to get a MacBook pro.

One of my team mates shared a quote he saw on Reddit and it’s been tumbling around in my brain all week.

“20 years from now, the only people who will remember that you worked late are your kids”

We had a particularly difficult week at work where there has been a round of layoffs. I’ve been fortunate that no one on my team was affected however a lot of great people are now looking for a new job.

Times like this remind me that work is just the thing you do to be able to provide for your life but it should never be your life.