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Or: don't take your rental car that relies on cell service out of cell range. Was anyone else expecting a story about actually going off the grid, you know, permanently?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's DRM for you. Never trust it. Get a phone with expandable storage and fill your SD card(s) with GBs of non-DRM encumbered media and you can enjoy having it all instantly accessible to you whenever/wherever you want it for as long as you like. Control is what DRM takes from you, but we have the technology to take it back for ourselves.
Or run your own server like emby or plex both have offline access / download for their mobile apps...
I'd like to learn how to take my cellular-enabled car off the grid permanently.
As Apple is making emergency satellite communication a consumer thing, I expect other companies will follow. So at least in unusual situations like this no-cell-service one, spending a cold night in the woods is hopefully less of a risk.
I’d put it in the same bin as lidar: it’s cool they got something working at all in such a constrained package. Hopefully it will become better/more generally useful within a decade.
(nowadays satellite phones or portable modems are actually pretty small, capable, and not that expensive. Consumer level access is already a thing in that regard)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How was this ever allowed? This sounds like litigation central. How you can rent cars that will brick themselves in tunnels, valleys, and in the country? Do cell phones even work in most parking buildings?
> Do cell phones even work in most parking buildings? This is why Zipcar issues a card for unlocking the car. I'm not sure why the people in the article didn't have one.
This is specifically a Zipcar (multiple vehicle vendors, less car infotainment integration) problem, even happens in urban garages. Similar article written about this a year or two ago. Reachnow (BMW based) when it was around solved the issue by having a pin code you enter, Car2Go (Mercedes based) probably also did I think. Here's the other hn post from 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20873234 , and…
Or: don't take your rental car that relies on cell service out of cell range. Was anyone else expecting a story about actually going off the grid, you know, permanently?
Maybe that's ok since you're likely only going a few km
But it reminds me of vending machines in Japan. If I understand correctly they're set supposed to allow dispensing in the event of an earthquake. Of course Japanese society has less petty theft and vandalism which is why they can have the vending machines in the first place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's unreasonable to expect everyone to critique the engineering of their rental car before renting it. It's the engineers job to make sure the product is capable of being fit for the task it's intended for.
Fair, sort of. I shouldn't blame the victim too much. That said, engineers have to make assumptions somewhere. I suspect remote camping trips are just too far out of the envelope that ZipCar was designing for, that envelope being cities. But really I'm just irritated by the bait and switch title, that to me promised a much more interesting topic than "here's a thing that can go wrong with one car rental company in si…
If zipcar put a huge banner prior to checkout saying that you will not be able to access the car if you don’t have cell service, I bet a lot of people would think twice, which is why they don’t, which is what makes it shitty
We downloaded some shows from netflix before we went off grid so we would have something to watch in case there was some down time. Sure enough, we couldn't watch them. The netflix app needed to phone home before it would allow us to see them.
That's DRM for you. Never trust it. Get a phone with expandable storage and fill your SD card(s) with GBs of non-DRM encumbered media and you can enjoy having it all instantly accessible to you whenever/wherever you want it for as long as you like. Control is what DRM takes from you, but we have the technology to take it back for ourselves.