u/mike8111

What bike gets made fun of the most?

I think it's the 883 Sportster. it's got a few things going against it:

1-it's a harley, so non-harley riders will make fun of you for riding a harley
2-it's the smallest harley (not counting the Street, which, what even was that?), so harley riders will tease you for having a "lady's bike"
3-It's the smallest sportster, so 1200 sporty owners will tease you for not having a "real sportster"

I think the 883 Sporty is a great bike. Anyone could ride it and love it. Would I personally own one? no. absolutely not.

I'd award the runner up to the Ninja 250. Same problem, it's a small displacement bike that looks like a sportbike but sounds like an angry hornet. 🐝

Bikes that are silly but you don't get teased for? The Grom, the VanVan, the BMW R18.

The BMW R18 though? It's absurdly wide, and still manages to only pull 91 horsepower. I wouldn't tease an R18 owner to their face, but you know I'm talking about them behind their back.

My claw Henry has taken over my life.

I have a legitimate task for him to perform, and it's complex, and he is the right tool for the job. But this job means messing with his config in ways that will certainly lead to failures and debugging and more failures and another week of a broken claw.

So i found myself setting up a second cloud instance to not risk my main claw.

That's not healthy lads.

I set up my openclaw using Telegram originally. It's great, but I can't talk to it while I'm at work because telegram is blocked on the corporate VPN.

I've been searching for the best channel for openclaw. My criteria: needs to be allowed on the corporate VPN, ideally it will have the ability to separate conversations and keep context in each one. Here are my adventures:

1-WhatsApp--complete failure. Works okay, but on iphone, the phone puts the app to sleep and that disconnects the openclaw and it doesn't easily reconnect or post messages. Did not get through my corporate firewall.

2- Discord-- discord is pretty great with openclaw. You can set different channels for different conversations, you can communicate with your claw using emoji to approve or disapprove whatever. Some filesharing capability, but I never messed with that much. Did not get through my corporate firewall, so I stopped trying before I got far down this road.

3- Nextcloud--I set up a locally hosted nextcloud instance, and connected my claw to that. This does bypass the corporate firewall, Conversations in different chat rooms works great and keeps context. The big downsides here--filesharing doesn't really work. Openclaw cannot recognize individual emojis on nextcloud. Openclaw doesn't seem to understand threading on nextcloud. You have no idea if openclaw heard you, you just have to wait and see if it responds.

4- Slack-- I was surprised that this got through the firewall, but it did so cool. Openclaw bot uses a socket connection to Slack, which is amazing because that allows all kinds of neat stuff like filesharing, emojis, threading. It gives you that "thinking...conjugating...combobulating..." text that let you know it's actually thinking. Slack is SO MUCH MORE POLISHED than nextcloud. Very professional, and free. Downsides to slack? It looks like slack. My office doesn't use slack, so having slack up on my screen is a little sus.

5-Gmail--This works fine. The claw has his own gmail and gsuite with sheets and docs and stuff. It's fine. It's slow, clunky, and not amazing, but it does work. Sending email back and forth doesn't feel like a conversation, but it can do file sharing, attachments, detailed responses, and it can be asynchronous. Downside: There's no way to know if it's listening though, you just have to wait for the response.

6-Microsoft Teams-- next on my list to try.

Right now I'm on Slack and I love it. Debating jumping to teams just to see.

I'd be interested to hear from anyone who's tried more than one channel, and what you liked about it.

Well this was embarrassing.

Had my three brothers out for a sail.

I'm on a 34 foot Catalina. None of my brothers really have any experience at all with sailing, so I talked them through the boat systems and told them about how I'm going to back out and their job is to fend off the pilings and then we'll be on our way.

They gave me the universal head nod of either understanding or "I wasn't listening".

I started backing out the slip, the wind was about 15 knots and there was a slow current, so we were pushed way over to the starboard side.

Get halfway out when all of a sudden the steering is all wrong. the boat isn't moving how I need it to, and we're in the marina so there's only about a boat length and a half between my slip and the one on the other side. I'm getting close to the other boats behind me, the bow is just not swinging around. I yell up to the front "hey, fend off those pilings!" and I'm trying to figure out what's happening.

Guys at the front are all yelling, I can't hear them over each other, the wind, and the engine under me.

then one of my brothers runs back to the cockpit and says "the anchor fell off when we bumped that piling and the anchor chain is racing out! We don't know how to use the crank to pull it back in!"

...

"just use your hands and pull it up!"

Now I'm frantically trying to use the engine to keep the boat slowly easing in while not ramming anyting on either side or the million dollar boats behind me. Hard port, hard starboard, back to port, full throttle burst, back to idle

Finally they say they got it up, back out slowly and we were on our way. I had one of them take the wheel and went up to inspect, everything looked fine except THE ANCHOR CLIP LINE WAS ROTTEN. Clip was still on the chain, the line was torn in half.

I don't know how I didn't notice that before, but it turns out that's a more important piece of equipment than I thought.

Check yer bitter end folks!