I will admit this is somewhat of a selfish topic as I am struggling to make a decision about selling or keeping a used car I own. I have two vehicles, a relatively newer model crossover which is our primary family car, and my daily driver when running errands with the baby. Our second car is an '06 Acura RSX which is a little coupe (although, it's quite practical and spacious for a coupe)

Our current situation is that my wife works less than a mile from home, and I am a stay at home dad. My wife generally walks or rides our electric scooter to work, while very rarely (extremely snowy or rainy days) we will load up and drive her down the road. The result of this is that the RSX sits unused a lot of the time, except for specific times like when she takes the baby somewhere on the weekend and I have errands to run as well, or when the crossover is otherwise occupied (oil changes, tire rotation etc)

For these reasons, we have been considering selling the RSX. Since used car prices have been spiking it would pay off all of our remaining debt on the crossover, and leave us with a few thousand in the bank. It's not a huge amount of money but it will save us a few hundred a month. We are not well-off on a single income, but we're not struggling by any means.

My hesitancy is basically two economic reasons and one personal:

1. With the tariff insanity, used car prices do seem to be spiking and I don't think (or know if) we're necessarily at the price peak. I would regret selling it and having the price jump 25% a few months later.

2. Because of the same reasons, replacing it in a year or two when I want to go back to work might end up costing us more than we made from selling it. My daughter is 18 months now and we'll probably be looking to get her into daycare by 2.5-3 years old.

3. As for the personal reason, I just really like this car. I bought it outright from the insurance payment on my first real car getting totaled, and it has gotten me through some tough times in my life. I have done a lot of work on it to make it "my" car. I love the fact that it's from the era where cars were just machines, but its still modern enough for tech upgrades, and parts for it (both OEM and third party) are basically everywhere. It's cheap to work on and barely needs work to begin with. That being said, it does need a few things done that might be outside of my skill set in the next year or so. I might be able to manage a serpentine belt replacement, but the front control arm bushings are wearing out and it seems like you need a lot of specialized tools for that replacement so I'm not sure I'm confident in doing it myself.

As for the less "me specific" portion of the conversation, I'm just curious what the smart people of Tildes think about what's going to happen in the near/mid future in the US regarding the car market, used cars, the transition to electric vehicles, and what you're thinking about in regards buying, selling, or holding vehicles in these uncertain times.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like windows.10, tech industry and changemyview. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was curious.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

In the spirit of all the recent Linux posts, I feel like sharing my thoughts too. I've been using Fedora on my laptop for about ~1.5 years, and I've just began using Arch about 5 days ago. I moved to Arch because of all the Windows 11 shenanigans, and I really enjoyed the workflow of i3 on my laptop - the only thing I was unsure of was gaming. But I decided to take the dive anyway.

I installed Arch using the wiki, and it truly felt awesome being able to choose what exactly you want in your system and what you don't. After following the guide, I installed a tiling manger (hyprland), waybar, and a launcher (wofi). It was much easier than I expected (granted I had experience with Linux), after hearing all the Arch boogeyman stories. Though I did accidentally break my system by foolishly doing a `sudo pacman -Rcns ....'. But my configs were still all there and I just had to install everything back, which did not take long at all.

Everything just worked after installing, except for audio. My audio experience was bad, it was crackling and popping all the time. The Arch wiki didn't really have info on this problem, so I took to other avenues. I found a guide that said to change the 'quantums' for pipewire, to some values that I didn't really understand (nor want to tbh). But that fixed it for the most part!

My next problem was discord not picking up on audio for certain applications at all - I narrowed it down to apps that were using ALSA as the backend. So, some apps like Plexamp and Firefox wouldn't get picked up by discord. I changed the backend of Firefox to ALSA due to a longstanding bug which resets the per-app volume level of Firefox every now and then. Setting the backend to ALSA is a workaround, but I didn't know it'd prevent discord from picking up audio. I can't find a solution except to revert to the normal backend - if anyone knows a fix the tech support would be welcome haha

Also the different backends for audio (pipewire/pulseaudio/alsa) make it confusing at times. To me, this is a big hurdle to overcome before the "year of the linux desktop" ever becomes reality - I've had so many issues, even on my laptop. Other than that, the experience is really quite fantastic, the modularity and customization is nuts. I've had quite a bunch of fun tailoring my experience and creating scripts to make the system do exactly what I want.

There's white smoke on St. Peter's Square (at 18:08 local time). Given the time it's probably been the fourth round of voting that yielded a positive result. You can watch the vatican media livestream here with english commentary and here without any commentary.

Thought I'd post this as a text post to keep it updated with relevant information (e.g. who it is) over the next hour or so.

The swiss guard has arrived on the square shortly after 18:30. If the previous two conclaves are anything to go by it'll be another 30 minutes or so until Cardinal Mamberti will step onto the balcony to announce the new pope's name.

Update 19:13: Mamberti has entered the balcony and is making his announcement (rewatch here):

Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum; habemus Papam:

Eminentissimum ac reverendissimum dominum, dominum Robertum Franciscum, Sanctæ Romanæ Ecclesiæ Cardinalem Prevost, qui sibi nomen imposui Leonem XIV.

Pope Leo XIV, formerly Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, is a US American by birth, but moved to Peru later on and became bishop there, making him the second pope from America and first ever US American to hold the title. He's generally viewed as a compromise candidate between progressives and conservatives within the catholic church as far as I know. He was created (as a cardinal) by pope francis and was responsible for personell management under him.

Update 19:23: Pope Leo XIV has entered the balcony and is making his first public statement (rewatch original here or with english subtitles here).

Update 19:40: After speaking for more than 10 minutes (a lot longer than his predrcessors during their first appearance) he's now issued the traditional blessing 'urbi et orbi' and has left the balcony.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

There used to be lively discussion about this topic.

For context: I find it fairly obvious that the Israeli government is deliberately attempting to wipe out the Palestinian people in a way that is slow/ambiguous enough to perhaps not officially qualify as genocide in a legal sense, but that is nevertheless effectively genocide from an emotionally aware human perspective.

I've mostly steered clear of the related conversation because many people seemed to have gotten tangled up in the legal definitions, as if Tildes were a branch of the International Court of Justice, which made me feel like the humanitarian view is getting dismissed or implied as being inferior. I wanted to see if this approach or its popularity on Tildes might have shifted with the new developments, such as Israel blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza and its recent plans to seize the area and hand aid distribution to private companies.

Am I somehow just not able to find the megathread? I believe I may have tried to filter it out earlier but it's not on my filters list and I'm unsure if there are other ways to hide content on Tildes that I may have forgotten about.

Week 2 has begun!

Post your current bingo cards.
Continue updating us on your games!

If you did not participate in Week 1 but want to start this week, that's fine!
Reminder: playing bingo is OPTIONAL.

Quick links:

• Backlog Bingo Site
• Week 1 Discussion and Event Guidelines

Week 1 Recap

10 participants played 7 bingo cards and moved 23 games out of their backlogs!

At least 6 different platforms were used: Nintendo DS, PC, Playdate, Switch, Wii U, Wonderswan

There were 0 bingo wins.

• 4 people played Flow bingo cards
• 1 person played a Flow Golf bingo card
• 2 people played Flux bingo cards
• 3 people played free choice

Game list:

• Advance Wars: Dual Strike
• beatmania
• The Botanist
• Braid
• Chicory: A Colorful Tale
• Costume Quest
• Cranky Cove
• DREDGE
• The Farmer Was Replaced
• Fire Emblem: Three Houses
• The Letter
• Life is Feudal
• Lugaru HD
• Match-o-3000
• Ratropolis
• Resident Evil 2
• Roundguard
• Shelter
• Shelter 2
• Suzerain
• Theresia
• Trackminia
• Trauma

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?