I recently decided it was time to purchase a new car and, having tasted the hybrid and electric lifestyles previously, decided that it was purely electric only this time.

My requirements:

• Decent range, at least 400 km
• Decent amount of space for SCUBA or climbing gear in the back. In both seats up and seats down configurations.
• Comfortable to drive.
• Comfortable to be a passenger in.
• Over 1,000 kg of towing capacity.
• Dash must have physical buttons for common items. I don’t want a fully glass cockpit. This cut out a surprising number of vehicles.
• No Tesla, I’m not supporting Musk in any way.
• Not US made. US manufacturers tend to have annoying “there are two markets: US and Rest of World” idiosyncrasies, not least of which is weirdness around measurements.
• Under $100,000 (although I could stretch a bit if the case was sufficiently compelling).

After combing through a number of review sites, I got it down to the following list:

The Internet is currently overwhelmingly centralised around ad companies collecting personally identifiable information (PII) in order to sell ads. They collect much more than they need and the whole thing (including ads) can often slow the user experience down quite a bit.

So, what to do about it?

While Firefox has recently taken a turn towards supporting the ad industry after many years of an inability to directly monetise outside of selling the default search engine to the highest bidder (which has become a problem), they’re still my current go to browser. There’s a lot of features built into the browser already to support privacy and this is enhanced with plugins. There’s also LibreWolf and other Firefox derivatives which can take this a step further.

Bundaberg has an annual rock festival, which I learned earlier this week and attended for the first time on Saturday.

A number of local acts, getting into bigger names as the day went on. Culminating with The Living End and Icehouse. Starting my day at Volunteer Marine Rescue, I missed the first few acts but spent most of the rest of the day and night only a few metres from the stage. I’ve been to concerts before, but this was my first festival. While there was a considerable amount of alcohol, there was pleasingly few partaking in tobacco or marijuana.

If you use LastPass your present from them this year is that your passwords are compromised and you should change them. While you’re at it, consider changing to another platform. The recent compromise puts your passwords at risk and their security practices mean they are not a good platform to use.

Password managers are an excellent tool. They allow for using strong passwords everywhere and not having to re-use any (because there’s only so far human memory goes). If you’re not using one I strongly suggest you change that. https://bitwarden.com/ is pretty good and open source.