Wes George's blog

EV Charging and Navigation

2025-10-14T15:16:00.000-04:00

I never got around to writing the follow up post to my previous post, which would have been to say that I concluded in February that I should sell the Model Y before the bottom totally dropped out of the market, so I did, and replaced it with a 2023 Hyundai Ioniq 5. I still need to write my overall review and impressions so far, but the short, short version is that the driver aids aren't quite as good as FSD but they're good enough for what I want, the car charges faster on a compatible charger, I like having Android Auto, and generally it feels more like a regular car - it has buttons and switches, a normal display in front of the driver, etc. There are some things I don't like, but I have a bit of a rant about one of the major things, so I'm writing that part now, and I'll get to the general review later, I guess.

One of the things that Tesla had well-sorted, which made the lack of Android Auto/Carplay support tolerable, was integrating charge stops into trip routing. It did the hard work of figuring out where you needed to stop, told you how long til that stop and what SOC you'd arrive at, and how long you needed to charge to make it to your destination or the next charge stop. It even adapted and added charge stops if the burn rate was higher than expected for some reason, or warned you to reduce speed to conserve power so you'd make it, and later in my ownership it would even route around busy chargers where it could. It still had some blind spots, but it worked well the vast majority of the time.

I didn't realize how spoiled I was by this, beyond knowing that Tesla's charging network was better developed and thus trip routing was somewhat easier than CCS-based options, until I started using Hyundai's equivalent, which... to say that it's inferior is being quite kind.

My first trip in the car, I used Android Auto/Google Maps for navigation. While AFAIK it's available in some cars, in this car it has no integration with the EV parts of the car, so it can't see burn rate, state of charge, etc. and thus does nothing with charge stops unless you manually add them. It also doesn't precondition the battery or tell you projected SOC for your destination, though the car's estimated range remaining is pretty accurate. This, coupled with the fact that this car has a higher coefficient of drag than the Model Y and is thus way more affected by headwinds at highway speeds, meant that I found myself pretty suddenly going from it being tight but I have enough indicated range to make it, to a point where I didn't have enough charge to make it to my destination anymore and scrambling to find a charger. I switched to the in-car navigation and was looking for chargers nearby. Default sort is by name rather than by distance, and then there's no way to filter other than by name or address, most notably: no option to show me only DC fast chargers. And while it lists the charge rate, for reasons only clear to some engineer at Hyundai, it lists Level 2 (AC) chargers not by their actual rate, but as "<60 kW", which is how I ended up spending 40 minutes at a 6 kW charger to get enough charge to get to the charger it should have sent me to in the first place. I will note that due to being sort of flustered, it didn't occur to me to talk to Google via Android Auto to tell it to find me the closest DC Fast Charger, so I don't know if that would have worked better.

Ok, lesson learned, use the car's Nav so that it adds charging stops more intelligently next time. Except... after doing this a few times, I can confidently say that it doesn't do much of anything more intelligently in this area.

Pre-charge battery conditioning, which gets the battery to the temperature necessary to take advantage of the fastest charge rates, is disabled by default, and seems like I have to re-enable it almost every trip, so I had a couple of slower than expected charges before I figured this out. And of course, this only works if you're navigating to a charger via the car's Nav system, so it knows to trigger the preconditioning.
While there is a place in the route guidance that shows charge stops, charge duration, and projected arrival SOC, it's not exactly easy to find and it's not displayed anywhere. This also means that when you arrive at the charger/while charging, there is no guidance for how long to charge, so mostly you just assume you're charging to 80% and hope for the best.
Trip routing appears to have a very narrow cone of what it considers to be along your route, and it seems like based on my most recent experience, it refuses to alter your route to get to an available fast charger that is close but not directly on your route, even if the route solution it arrives at involves multiple hours at a Level 2 charger instead. In other words, it's not taking charge time into account when determining the "shortest" route.

This past weekend, I took a day trip that was about 350 miles round trip. As I usually do, I pulled it up ahead of time in ABRP to get an idea of what the trip would look like in terms of range and charge stops - sometimes it makes more sense to stop and charge before you get there even if the first leg doesn't actually require a charge stop, so that you have sufficient charge to get back to your return trip charge stop. Looked fine to do the first leg with no charge, and then charge on the return trip. Except unfortunately, parts of the trip had significant wind, so arrival SOC was a bit lower than projected (30% instead of 38 or so). Get in the car and set the destination for the return trip, and it adds chargers, we set off. I look at the route, just because I'm curious how close I'm going to be cutting it or if it found a different charger, only to see that it has me charging for multiple hours at my first charge stop. I realized that it has concluded I don't have the range to make it to the charger I was supposed to use, and sent me to a local slow charger. Repeated attempts to get the Nav system to figure this out don't net different results, especially given what I previously mentioned about the filter and sorting of available chargers, so I ended up pulling out my phone, looking up close DC fast chargers in the Plugshare app, and then manually telling the car to navigate to the one that was 22 miles away so that it hopefully does the preconditioning. Fortunately this worked, and other than the stress and annoyance of having to pull over to fight with the UI and override it to do something sensible, there wasn't any additional drama, but this would have been a mess if I hadn't caught it and I used my remaining range to arrive at a charger that wouldn't actually help.

I said at the beginning of this post that this felt much more like a normal car - i.e. people could mostly get in it and drive with little or no learning curve. The fact that handling charge stops on a trip works this poorly really means that isn't the case. If I lent this car to a friend or family member who doesn't normally drive an electric car, and didn't give them any guidance about this, it would have resulted in a really terrible experience unless they resorted to external means to do what the car should have figured out for them. Hyundai pushes updates to the system periodically, but I strongly suspect on a car going on 3 years old, I shouldn't be holding my breath for a massive feature update to address this issue and am better off figuring it out myself. Might be time to start using ABRP via Android Auto, since that's at least the most electric car focused nav option I have available, even if I have to give it some data manually.

Home Server Rebuild

2025-05-09T09:29:00.001-04:00

Home Server Upgrades

I have had 2 servers at home for all of my infra, both of which were either free or budget builds and should charitably be described as ancient at this point. While I definitely learn plenty wrangling this stuff, they're not formally a homelab, and over time it's gone from just a file server for backups and media centralization to things that are a bit more critical to the daily function of the house, namely HomeAssistant for automation. So I need these to be reliable and relatively maintenance free, because I have plenty to do without also needing to do tech support or help figure out flakiness in the home automation stuff for those residents of the home that are going to be annoyed if it's anything other than 100% transparent to them.

HP DL360 G7 with a single E5620, 32GB RAM, and 4x300G SAS SSD storage in a hardware RAID that runs a number of my docker containers that have stuff I'd potentially want to expose to the outside world (Minecraft servers, Home assistant, etc). Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

This isn't very power-efficient, and the RAID's cache card has already failed once and been replaced with a spare, and that spare has long since disabled the cache because it doesn't like the battery, has had glitches where it freaks out and declares the file system read only, making me think it's going to fail entirely. Plus every time it does that, I have to manually go into the RAID card and tell it to boot normally and recover things, which required pulling the system out of the rack and removing the GPU so that it would use the onboard video, because I never could get the GPU to put out a console display, all of which is a serious PITA. Since bypassing the RAID card to move to JBOD/software RAID or replacing an actually failed card was going to require a rebuild anyway, I figured I'm better off just building a new system.

Dell Power Edge T110-II (tower) with a single E3-1230 V2 and 16GB of RAM, plus 5x3TB storage in ZFS. Runs TrueNAS. serves as primary file server, and also has a plex jail since that's where all of the media lives. I've been running this since it was FreeNAS, I think version 10, and there are some older posts on the blog about previous iterations of this build.

TrueNAS Core (the version I'm running) is based on FreeBSD 13 and is basically end of support. There are multiple sub-versions of 13 that never got integrated, and no plans for anything using 14.
TrueNAS really wants you to go to Scale (Linux based), and they've formally dropped support for jails and VMs running on Core now, so I can't even update to the (likely final) maintenance release of Core without risking breaking something..
There's an upgrade path from Core to Scale but it requires hard drives, no USB live boot support anymore. I have no SATA ports available on this system, and it's more than a decade old so it's not like it even has USB3 or something that could be used for more drives.

The goal was to replace the above with some combination of 1-2 systems that had similar power usage (TDP for CPU, etc) but taking advantage of improvements to performance per watt that much newer chips would provide, preferably in similar form factors and allowing me to reuse the various disks involved. I run Folding at Home on my stuff when it's idle, and the heat generated ultimately feeds my heat pump water heater, especially in the winter time, so there's some incentive to have stuff that is still efficient under heavy load. I'd decided I wanted to move away from appliance OS in favor of regular Linux + openZFS because I don't really need the UI for management and didn't want to end up in the same situation I was in with TrueNAS again later. I considered either consolidating everything to one larger rackmount system or keeping 2 systems and using a purpose-built NAS case and motherboard (lots of SATA ports) to replace the Dell tower. Increasing to a 2RU system would mean I'd have to find a different switch that wasn't rack-mounted, because I only have a 4RU rack, and I got analysis paralysis on the DIY NAS route due to the large number of options.

The forcing function that led to me figuring out my plan and moving forward was that a Dell R330 with 4x4TB hard drives came available free as in beer, and I discovered that Dell does still make tower servers that are the newer gen to what I have, and found a T340 on eBay for under $400. The T340 has 8x3.5" hot swap SATA/SAS bays, plus 3 more 5.25 bays and 2 onboard SATA ports. So after some discussion about the merits of various ZFS/RAID configurations, I ended up with the following:

Dell R330, E3-1230 v5, 32GB RAM, PERC H330 (in JBOD mode)

4x200GB SAS SSDs (from the HP) in 2 ZFS mirror vDevs (basically RAID10) for storage

adapters to use them in the existing 3.5" bay/caddy

Linux software RAID1 for OS made up of

1x256GB SATA SSD in the optical drive bay via an adapter
1x256GB NVME SSD in an "external" USB3 case plugged into the internal USB3 port

Dell T340, E-2244G, 32GB RAM, PERC H330 (in JBOD mode)

2x200GB SAS SSDs (spares for the HP) in linux software RAID for OS, same 2.5 -> 3.5 caddy adapters
ZFS storage pool consisting of the following mirror vDevs

2x4TB SATA
2x4TB SATA
2x3TB SATA
2x3TB SATA (via HDD cage for the 5.25 bays and the onboard SATA ports)

eBay Nvidia Quadro P2200

for FaH ~~and Plex transcode~~
Replaced a Quadro K2000 that had been in the HP and died

Software considerations

I ended up using Debian 12 on both. I've been fairly happy with Ubuntu, that HP ran 18 LTS and seamlessly upgraded to 20 and 22, but they seem to be really trying to focus on their paid support models - each new LTS release includes more nagging about the updates you could be getting but aren't, plus with the latest LTS release (24) they're pretty aggressively pushing Snap instead of apt for package management, and there's a limit to how much more that's different largely for the sake of being different I'm interested in being forced to learn in order to have the stuff I use at home Just Work, especially in the age of AI Slop overtaking all the good documentation and search. Yes, I have Opinions about systemd (more on that below), but for ease of use and compatibility reasons, I'd rather just live with the enemy I know than Prove a Point by finding a Linux flavor that doesn't use it and dealing with always having the "weird" OS anytime I need to do something or install something.

As much as possible* lives in Docker. I was already running Home Assistant and Minecraft servers (Java and Bedrock) on Docker in the existing system. Plex was previously running in a FreeBSD Jail on the TrueNAS box, so I built a container to do that on the new box. Both hosts are running Watchtower to keep the containers automagically up-to-date. For the most part, migration involved deploying the appropriate software or containers on the new system, and then copying over the directories from the old system, or doing backup/restore - Minecraft was the former, Home Assistant and Unifi were the latter, and Plex appears to store most of the relevant account settings online now, so it was just as easy to log in to the clean install and re-add my libraries and let it rescan everything.

*with a couple of exceptions:

Unifi - conflicting info about whether their docker container is really supported/which one to use
Folding at Home - at least the FAH-GPU container has gone unsupported. No updates for multiple years is causing the newer projects' work units to fail on account of missing/outdated libraries, especially for GPU. Plus there's now a completely new major rev of FAH (v8) that has no current Docker container. Also I'm starting to think that GPU + Docker isn't worth the hassle.
Plex - I thought I was going to have to do this outside of a container, see the issues below.

Issues

Software RAID for OS

OpenZFS is pretty well-supported in Linux, but the prevailing wisdom is that you don't really want to try to boot your OS off of that, hence the Linux software RAID. But Debian's installer also doesn't know how to manage setting up the software RAID in a guided partition setup, and you end up with it failing to write grub to the disk. I started with instructions that told me to disable EFI boot, which worked on the R330 because it wasn't using anything hanging off of the PERC for the OS, so it didn't matter whether the installer could see it. The T340 has SAS OS disks, which hang off of the PERC. I was convinced I had some sort of hardware problem, which I lost several days troubleshooting because neither the installer or an actual install of Debian would see the disks behind that despite recognizing the PERC in logs, lspci, etc. Turns out that despite them both being 330s and both running the same (most current) firmware, there's something newer about the one in the T340 that makes it not work unless you're in EFI boot. Once I found the equivalent instructions for EFI things worked pretty well, though I have noticed that the grub script to copy the current boot image to the second disk is a bit fragile, especially if the disks ever change designations.

SMB/CIFS

Between Windows defaults changing so that it tries to use your Microsoft login for network shares (which among other things is almost guaranteed to be too long/contain illegal chars for an actual user account) and disabling guest login, I fought with smb.conf for entirely too long before I had a working network share. Lots of conflicting info about how to do this, and the config files that TrueNAS's webUI generates don't seem to translate directly.

This was what I finally found that made guest access work though note that there's also a command you have to run on the windows side. I still don't entirely understand why, but force user/group nobody within each share configuration stanza doesn't seem to work.

Plex/FAH GPU Funtimes

I originally tried to do Plex in Docker, including exposing the GPU to it for transcoding. Once I actually completed that, not only was I not seeing hardware transcoding as an option for plex, it appears that maybe Docker (or FAH) expects exclusive use of the GPU, because the GPU instance for Folding at Home, which is installed on the OS itself, failed and declared the GPU unavailable. As soon as I stopped Docker and restarted the FAH client, everything was fine.

My next try was to install Plex directly on the OS, thinking that maybe Docker was complicating things and the OS should be able to handle two programs sharing the GPU. This also didn't result in hardware transcoding support on Plex, and it broke FAH's GPU access in a similar way. So what I ended up doing was disabling the nvidia-container-runtime in docker, and starting the Plex container back up that way, and uninstalling the OS installation of Plex. Long-term, I ended up having to uninstall nvidia-container-runtime altogether and then redeploy a vanilla plex container in docker because there was still some sort of conflict trying to steal FAH's access to the GPU, which would result in things working, but then failing before the WU could actually complete successfully.

There is still some sort of race condition in the order services are loading which results in FAH starting before the GPU drivers are fully initialized and ready, so it doesn't find the GPU and you have to restart the service a few minutes after the system reboots.

Kernel and Virtualization

I was chasing some other random failures with the GPU, noticed I was getting these DMAR/IOMMU errors in the kernel logs, and one of the first search results implies this is some sort of issue with the 6.x kernel that can result in things like filesystem corruption if you don't disable VT-D (direct access for PCI passthrough virtualization). Since this was roughly coincident with a new crop of ZFS errors that happened after I fixed the thermal issues below, and I'm not using that set of virtualization anyway, I figured I'd better disable it. Dell's BIOS on the T340 doesn't have a separate option for VT-D, only enable/disable Virtualization technology, but it does have another setting for x2APIC mode, which is only necessary on machines with a lot of CPUs. It is disabled by default, but was enabled on my machine (I thought BIOS was already reset to defaults but it appears not). I tried disabling just that, but the same errors showed up pretty quickly, so I ended up disabling virtualization in the BIOS entirely. Docker still works, and everything else seems happy with it disabled - several days of stability and no kernel messages.

Diskname juggling

I have 10 disks in the T340. For whatever reason, every time I reboot the thing, they play 3 card monte with their /dev/sdX names. Makes it kinda hard to make a sane smartd.conf, especially since 2 of those disks are SAS (aka SCSI) and the rest are SATA, and the schedule is a little different for the 2 OS SSDs vs the aging spinning rust. Ended up having to use /dev/disk/by-id. The grub copy script I'm using references a specific partition on each of the two /dev/sdX devices, so I'm going to have to spend some time thinking about the best way to address that so I can use by-id references. So meantime, every time I see that a kernel or kernel module (ZFS, nvidia drivers) get an update, I check where the OS disks have migrated to and update the script with the device name du jour.

Logging

At the risk of this devolving into a rant, systemd continues to make its users suffer badly from its devteam's "not invented here" syndrome, or put another way, it continues to violate the principle of least astonishment if one is at all familiar with UNIX/Linux from the last couple of decades due to their insistence on reinventing well-understood and documented, functional, and modular things to (often poorly) re-implement them within the ever-increasing monolith that is systemd. My current sticking point is the transition from regular old text logs to binary files and journalctl, which I hadn't experienced on other iterations of Debian (raspi etc) and so this was my first exposure. I've mostly figured it out at this point, so it's probably not worth the hassle to go through and reconfigure everything to use regular syslog, but fail2ban breaks because it can't find the usual auth.log and the devs don't seem inclined to add a case to fix this on install. So you have to add "sshd_backend = systemd" to the [DEFAULT] section of /etc/fail2ban/paths-debian.conf manually.

Thermal Management

The T340 is kind of a stupid design in a couple of key ways:

First, it only has one fan, for everything, unless you count the power supply fans. Pictures and more details here. There's no forced airflow past the card slots, and no real way to add it, so all it really gets is the slight negative pressure the PSU fans create. The HDD cage I added to the 5.25 bays has a fan on the front, so there's a little air blowing toward the cards now, but it's pretty anemic.

Second, both of the full-length PCIe slots are in adjacent slots with an x4 and x8 slot below them. The PERC H330 lives in the top slot, and I put my GPU in the second slot. The H330 runs kinda hot anyway, and it only has a passive heatsink for cooling. But the real issue is that in my setup, bottom plate is way too close to the GPU's heat center, and I managed to trigger a thermal shutdown on the PERC, which is pretty much something you never, ever want to do unless you enjoy calming down several extremely angry file systems after they unceremoniously lost access to most or all their disks at the same time.

I thought about swapping the GPU and PERC between slots, but that will just block off the heat sink's airflow with the GPU and cook both cards, so the current workaround is a 70mm fan on top of the PERC's heatsink, and a PCIe extension cable so that I can move the GPU elsewhere. Since I don't need to use the display ports (the onboard graphics still work if I need to actually see the display), I don't actually need to put it in a slot, and can put it pretty much wherever it fits, as ghetto as that's likely to be. For its part, the GPU doesn't seem to notice that it's not really in direct airflow, as it still reports the same mid-60C temps under full load.

Also worth noting that because this sits on a shelf about 1.7M off of the floor and adjacent to where the other server, my switch, and UPS all hang in a vertical rack, the intake air is a little too warm, so I have a small fan blowing cool air off the ground toward the front of the chassis, which dropped the intake air about 5-6 degrees C (from 35 to 29).

To Do List

I have achieved minimum viable product after what ended up being about 2 weeks of work. There are a few things that are near term useful quality of life improvements I still need to work on.

Backups - on the old system, I was doing a set of backups/zips/copies to a CIFS mount via cron so that important files on the 1RU system were getting backed up elsewhere. On this setup, it probably can be ZFS snapshots that I just push around, but I have to figure all of that out. I also probably need to decide what I want to do about offsite backup for some stuff that isn't already covered in other ways now that I have a more straightforward way to do that with snapshots.
Login MOTD - Ubuntu has a pretty nice set of info it presents on login, including system load, updates pending, whether a restart is needed, etc, and I'd like to replicate that on my Debian boxes. Looks like this covers it.
Unattended upgrades - apply the security updates that are pending without me remembering to log in periodically to do it.
Alerts - I'm doing SMART monitoring and ZFS scrubs and such, but right now, it's all very much like Milhouse watching Bart's factory: "I saw the whole thing. First it started falling over, then it fell over." So I need to give it a way to demand attention when my monitoring detects a problem that isn't dependent on me logging in to check a half-dozen things every so often. .
Monitoring - one of the things that I do miss about TrueNAS's nice webUI is the pretty pre-built charts on most things - network IO, temps, memory, CPU, storage performance, that worked well to see how things behave normally and troubleshoot when they don't. Rolling my own means right now I have... CLI, and CLI, and also some CLI. Probably this means InfluxDB or Prometheus and Grafana, or maybe Netdata. It'd be nice to integrate it into my existing HomeAssistant instance, but so far most of what I've found that watches hardware on HomeAssistant is assuming you want to monitor the hardware that HA is actually running on when you deploy it as an appliance, not to monitor a couple of systems, one of which may be coincidentally running an HA container.

References

Some of the stuff I found most helpful is linked inline, but here's some additional stuff that I used that I didn't already link elsewhere:

ZFS

For what appears to be primarily license incompatibility reasons, you don't get ZFS on linux without a bit of work. It's not difficult, but it's nice to have some good recipes for it. Also I didn't completely understand ZFS when I initially set it up on the last machine, so I did some things wrong in a way that wasn't easy to fix without vacating and rebuilding. This was an opportunity to do it more "right" this time, especially as it concerned hierarchical datasets to enable easier snapshotting, so I needed some more background reading.

LACP

I don't have any 10GE on my switch yet, and while I could add a 2 port expansion card, it's probably overkill for my application right now, so since my T340 had 2 onboard and 2 card-based GE ports, I did a 4x1GE LAG,

Docker

I have created multiple datasets in my ZFS pools for ease of management and backups, and one of them is specifically for Docker, so I wanted to move where docker stores everything from the OS drives to the right ZFS dataset. https://forums.docker.com/t/change-the-default-docker-storage-location/140455

SMART

Needed something to base my config for making sure SMART was monitoring everything and doing periodic tests. https://dan.langille.org/2018/11/04/using-smartd-to-automatically-run-tests-on-your-drives/

Tesla Relationship Status: It's complicated!

2025-01-26T13:12:00.000-05:00

In late 2020, I bought a Tesla Model Y because at the time it was the best combination of things to meet my needs in a vehicle that got halfway decent fuel economy. That whole discussion occurs here. I'd say I had 2-3 years of very few regrets about that purchase. But we are now midway through year 5, and well, I probably should have sold it about 2.5 years ago when they were having supply problems and people were paying nearly what they cost new for lightly-used models.

The status report at 65K miles:

I'm on my third set of tires. The first ones lasted to almost 40K, the second wore out in less than 20K, and addressing that cost me another $4k on top of a new set of tires because apparently there are some design flaws in the Model Y's suspension that result in it wearing out the bushings (apparently the gutters for the windshield result in water being dripped directly on the control arm bushings) making them loose and squeaky, and even after they're replaced with OEM parts, being almost impossible to get the camber settings back in spec. My mechanic thinks that this is because as other parts of the suspension wear, it changes the overall geometry just enough that there isn't enough adjustment range in the control arms and it eats up the inner edge of the tires due to the excessive negative camber. So after a bunch of research, he fitted a set of aftermarket control arms with more adjustment range.
It's now out of warranty. Drivetrain is still covered for a while yet, but all the ancillaries are not.
My indicated range at full charge has dropped from 315 at new to about 285, which I think is a combination of Tesla revising the calculations that make the projections and actual capacity loss. 10% at 5 years isn't terrible, but it's not great either.
Self-driving still isn't, but it is useful if you operate within the significant limitations of the system.

But that's not why I'm writing this post. I need to address the Elonphant in the room, or more accurately, the n4zi at the bar. I hadn't realized until recently what a nice thing it is that we barely know the names of the overwhelming majority of CEOs at major automakers, and if we know anything about their controversial opinions, it might be something along the lines of whether they should still make cars with manual transmissions or where they stand on CAFE and the transition away from fossil fuels, maybe some light thoughts about union-busting. But I know way more about the shitty opinions of Tesla's CEO than I care to, which unfortunately means I have to reconcile those against owning one of their products and what that potentially says about me. Looking at this in hindsight, I was never really a True Believer in his cult of personality, but seeing his unmasking, through generic juvenile edgelord, to anti-trans bigot, to radical right-wing ideologue actively trying to swing the results of the election to benefit himself and his fellow oligarchs, to actual n4zi means that my red line for "I don't want to be associated with anything that benefits him" was crossed probably 2 years ago and it just keeps getting harder to ignore.

My problem comes when looking at what I can actually do about this. The obvious bit is not to support any of the companies he's associated with - vote with your wallet. That really only works with Twitter and Tesla, because I don't personally have much influence on my tax dollars going to SpaceX, and this unfortunately doesn't seem to be a problem for most of the folks that do. But I'm already pretty much there - I bought the Model Y rather than leased it, my low-interest financing is not through Tesla, and I have a bit more than a year left until it's paid for, so they've already gotten their money from that. I'm paying for the data connectivity, and supercharging when I'm on trips. Neither of those are more than rounding errors in terms of the overall money I've handed Tesla, and I only use actual Tesla service when there's no other option. Similarly, for many reasons I wouldn't replace it with another Tesla if I had to replace it tomorrow.

But it's a lot more complicated when thinking about whether I should get rid of the one I currently own on principle, and it's something I've gone back and forth with myself about for a good portion of at least the last 18 months, with the last week bringing the angst about this back to the surface in a major way. The car is depreciating like crazy both because of lots of other people unloading theirs for much better options and because the guy in charge has made the brand completely toxic. Looking at the values right now, which likely don't reflect the significantly ~~heil~~ hellish last week or so yet, I could still trade it in for more than I owe on it, but that would mean taking on either a lease or even if I buy something used, a car payment for another number of years, which seems like a bad plan with a kid about to enter college and the new admin speedrunning piloting the economy into the side of a mountain. Selling it also doesn't send a message to Tesla in any real way. So it's down to what random people on the internet with Opinions on such things or people who don't know me well enough to know where I stand on this think of me while I continue driving it. I don't think either of those rate highly enough to cause me to do something different here, other than to put a few stickers on the car that make it a little clearer what I think. I wish I had the luxury of "f--- you money" where I didn't have to be pragmatic about this, especially because the Walter Mitty in me has some ideas of ways to make a clearer statement about the whole situation, but instead, I guess I'll just admit this is a pretty privileged problem to have in the first place and conclude my whining on the internet about it.

Electric yard tools

2022-11-06T12:06:00.000-05:00

There are a lot of good reasons to ditch my gas powered yard tools, chief among them noise, pollution, and general unreliability, especially for the tiny-displacement 2-stroke stuff. I buy 89 octane, add Sta-Bil to every can, and use premix oil that is specifically designed for Ethanol gas, so it's not like I'm just having problems with old gas either.

But my string trimmer and my leaf blower both seem to be fighting each other to get to the point where I'm sick of trying to keep them running and replace them. The leaf blower has already been replaced once under warranty (failed in under 2 years) though this replacement one is on its 6th year, and I haven't started to diagnose why it just quit and decided it didn't want to restart after running for 2 full tanks of gas yesterday. Both are at the point where they won't run without partial choke, meaning the carburetors are getting marginal, and while it is frequently possible to find a cheap replacement carb (they're basically disposable, you don't rebuild them), there's no Zen in the Art of Small Engine Maintenance.

Part of the benefit of the modern battery-powered tool set enabled by the significant performance improvement of Lithium-Ion batteries is that most manufacturers have a whole line of various tools that extend far beyond the typical handheld drills and saws and such that all use the same battery and charger, which means that you typically have more batteries to swap for longer runtimes, and generally a better investment. But after looking at options for a bit this fall, I'm starting to think we're not quite there yet on the larger battery yard tools, at least for my use case.

Here's what I mean in terms of use case:

I have a string trimmer that is one of those power heads with a bunch of attachments, including a brush cutter, a pole saw, a hedge clipper, etc. Rather than start over buying a new set of discrete tools that use the same battery, I'd like to keep using those bits, though the string trimmer attachment is due for replacement. So this narrows down the set of available battery string trimmer power heads to the ones that support the "universal" attachments, which fortunately do exist.

I have a backpack leaf blower, because I have almost an acre, and between my neighbors and me, we have a loooootttttt of trees. Even with a tractor and bag or mulcher to handle some of it, there's a lot of leaves to deal with in areas they can't get to. Also, I need the airflow and the form factor of a backpack model because after using my wired electric one for a good portion of yesterday after the gas one decided it didn't want to run (again! still!) my arms and shoulders have made it clear to me that I don't want to be carrying something handheld around all day like that, especially given the weight in battery any reasonable runtime requires.

Speaking of runtime, there is definitely a need for some regulations/standardization as to how manufacturers talk about their electric tool runtime. Seems like they spend a lot of time touting huge CFM/MPH numbers on their blowers (or cutting speed/power on their trimmers) using the highest speed, but then quoting the reasonable-sounding runtimes based on lowest speed, so it requires research to find third-party reviews.

Until the leaf blower got sick yesterday, I was thinking the string trimmer was going to be my entry point and that I could wait until next fall for the blower. So I'd found a couple of models that support universal attachments and was just starting to look at blower options to decide which one made the most sense.

Dewalt 60v system - nice trimmer, but Dewalt doesn't have a backpack leaf blower, and at $350, pricey.
Ryobi 40v system - more reasonable, and has a backpack blower but I suspect the lower voltage means it will require additional batteries to get decent runtime. It's kind of telling that Ryobi doesn't even list a runtime estimate for their blower, and Home Depot only sells the package with the second battery that is pushing $500.
Greenworks 80v system - same price point as the Dewalt, and the backpack blower is shockingly (pun intended) expensive ($700!). They have a more reasonably priced 60v system but it doesn't do universal attachments.
EGo doesn't have a power head that supports universal attachments.
Husqvarna might have an option but it's hard to verify whether their power head supports universal attachments or just their own, and their 40v system is pretty expensive for what it is.
Milwaukee doesn't have any backpack options and I haven't confirmed whether they have a universal trimmer head. Same deal with Makita.

So I think if I had to replace it tomorrow, I'm probably looking at the Ryobi system. But part of me thinks I need to try to nurse my dinosaur engines a little longer and wait to see if the options improve over the next year or so. Or possibly redirect the money I'd be spending here on a fall lawn service.

Music in the car

2022-10-15T11:33:00.001-04:00

While I did listen to NPR while I was commuting for a long time, I pretty much constantly listen to music in the car. The means to do this in my daily drivers went from juggling CDs for far longer than I care to admit (a 6-disc in-dash changer in several, an in-trunk changer in the 911) to playing stuff from my fairly large MP3 collection, first by burning DVDs of MP3s that the 911 could play on the in-car single disc, and then moving to dumping a bunch of stuff on a thumb drive or SD card, which was something that worked great on my 2010 Ford Flex (not really my daily driver) but has been sorta so-so at best on subsequent cars. Longer discussion about this for the Jeep in the dislikes section of this post and previously in my discussion of the Tesla here.

It's clear that Tesla doesn't really care about supporting USB as an audio source anymore, because all of my complaints about it keep getting worse rather than better, and they really want that USB port and storage device for the dashcam anyway. It's now basically rotted to the point of being unusable due to frequent audio drop-outs, so I've been looking for other alternatives.

I have Amazon Music but there is no native app for that in the Tesla, only for Spotify, Slacker, and Tidal, none of which I use and thus would require a lot of setup work/additional subscriptions, etc. I suspect the lack of Amazon at least has to do with Elon and Jeff's ongoing "rocket measuring" contest, and I'm annoyed by the fact that something so simple is being hampered by a pissing match between two petulant billionaires, but that's life in 2022's Capitalist Technology Wonderland, I guess.

Streaming Amazon Music via Bluetooth on my phone kinda(?) works, in that it will eventually result in music coming out of the car stereo, and I can see what's playing on the screen and skip to the next track with the car controls. But it never starts automatically - it almost always requires opening the app and telling it to play something. It rarely remembers what it was playing even if you've only been out of the car for a couple of hours. There's a widget you can add to the phone's home screen that shows what's playing, but even if it's displaying a song, getting in the car and pressing play on the widget does nothing, and you always end up having to open the app. Plus because I'm on Prime Music, but not unlimited tier, I would either have to pay more to get all of the music I want and then go through and add it all, or fight with the app even more to see if it deals ok with a combination of online music and local files and put a bunch of MP3s on the microSD card in my phone. And given how poorly it seems to manage its primary function, I'm not optimistic about that combination going well. I suspect it'd work ok if I built a bunch of playlists, but what I really like to do is to just point it at the whole collection, tell it to shuffle everything, and skip what I'm not in the mood for.

But in looking for a decent Android MP3 player app so I could bypass that nonsense and hopefully find something that Just Works for playing music, I discovered that Youtube Music (formerly Google Play Music) has retained a feature I forgot it had, which is that you can upload your own music to the cloud and then stream it from the app. I was further pleasantly surprised to learn that they didn't hide that behind their premium subscription service. As I recall, it used to have a fairly low limit to the number of songs you could add, but they've also raised it to 100K songs, so I was able to basically just dump everything I have on there. There are still some limitations on how you use that music (details in the link), but it seemed like a worthwhile experiment before using up all of my spare local storage on the phone and playing with a bunch of different apps. The other tradeoffs is that I'm finding it isn't particularly smart about recognizing songs from metadata so artist and album info is incomplete and inaccurate a lot, and it isn't doing what I thought it was doing and recognizing the song from file info and hashes and adding the Youtube Music source file of the same song to your collection. It's actually uploading all of that data, and playing back your version of the file! So if the original is low-quality, or has artifacts from the CDROM drive skipping when you ripped it, like some of my stuff unfortunately does, those are still present. There's no native Youtube Music app on the Tesla either, and I just recently discovered that while there is one for Android Auto (which I have available in the new head unit in the 911), it doesn't have the section that allows you to access and play stuff from your uploaded library at all. I haven't tested if I can start it from the phone and be able to control it properly via the native app yet. Also, YouTube Music isn't much better at resuming play when you get in the car than Amazon. At least their widget mostly works, but I'm rapidly concluding that this isn't really the solution I'm looking for either.

I feel like this shouldn't be this difficult, given the amount of general computing and audio devices I have to solve this problem, even if my use case is probably a little different than some. I'm sure there will be more to come on this post.

Musings on Water Heaters

2022-03-20T13:35:00.001-04:00

I'm coming up on 10 years in this house. This is my third water heater. The original one failed about 6 years ago by springing a (thankfully small) leak that may have been triggered by a combination of me not knowing that my water is a little acidic if not treated properly (I have a tank of carbonate that has to be replenished as the water dissolves it and it wasn't replenished for the first couple of years I lived here), plus shutting it off for week for vacation and letting everything contract as it cooled. Since it was a matter of needing an emergency replacement so we'd have hot water again, I didn't have a lot of time to evaluate options, and ended up with basically the same thing I had - propane, power-vent, and at least efficient enough that it could exhaust through a PVC pipe rather than a traditional flue, but pretty much the only example of such that the plumber could get their hands on from existing warehouse stock.

I've been periodically looking at options for the eventual replacement that reduced the rate at which I consumed propane, because in addition to its contribution of greenhouse gases, propane is expensive. Not as bad fuel oil (aka diesel), but still significantly more expensive than natural gas. This went from background research project to slightly more urgent when the current tank celebrated the end of its warranty by starting to drool from the bottom late last year.

Some of the options I considered and some thoughts about them:

Tankless - still propane, but notionally more efficient because you're not storing a tank full of water. Tankless hot water heaters deal in the number of degrees that they can heat water at a given flow rate, meaning that things like your water inlet temperatures matter a lot, as well as how you use hot water. I'm on a well, and so my inlet temps can be fairly cold in the wintertime, meaning that I would need something that can handle ~80-90°F temp rise at typical flow rate, and let's just say that my showerheads are "probably" not in their original 2.5gpm configuration, so fairly high BTUs, or I'd need to put 2 units in series. I also have a furnace-mounted humidifier that can run independently of the furnace and uses hot water, which means the demand is long-duration at very low flow rate. This would mean either the flow rate would be too low to trigger the hot water heater at all, meaning that the humidifier would be much less effective because it was using cold water, or it'd run the hot water heater way too often and waste energy even if it's good at throttling back to match flow rate demand. Basically, it's a really good demand for a tank full of already hot water.
Add-on heat pumps (option one, option two)- these are basically a standalone air to water heat pump that you plumb into a circulation loop so that they are adding heat to your existing hot water tank. In my application it's sort of the equivalent to a hybrid heat system like I am using for my main furnace- heat pump when it's efficient, propane when it's not. This is obviously more attractive if you have an existing tank with a fair amount of life left such that it's not a great plan to replace it, but my problem was that the two options I linked to above were the only ones I could find, and they were either discontinued or otherwise unavailable when I would have been looking to do this. In retrospect, I'm glad they were since I ended up having to replace the tank anyway, and a purpose-built heat pump water heater is way better at this than the bolt-on would be.
A desuperheater - This is a secondary heat exchanger that pulls the excess heat out of the refrigerant on a heat pump before it's sent outside. These are pretty common on ground source (aka geothermal) heat pumps, but I found this one that is intended to be added to regular air source systems. I exchanged some email with the company and we jointly concluded it's not a good fit for my setup due to the installation requirements. First, the unit has to be mounted higher than the compressor right near the outdoor unit, and if you want it to run year-round, it has to be somewhere that doesn't freeze, meaning I couldn't mount mine outside. My heat pump outdoor units are on the exact opposite side of the house from my hot water heater, so that means a new plumbing loop, and because the ground level is only a foot or two below the basement ceiling, I'd have to mount it in my living room, instead of in my basement. I asked if I could mount it below the compressor, and apparently that causes problems, so while this may be an interesting option for some folks, it's not for me.
A more efficient storage hot water heater - traditional tank-style, but best possible efficiency.

Condensing gas hot water heaters, where they use a secondary heat exchanger to pull enough heat out of the exhaust that some of it actually condenses, are less common than their furnace counterparts, but are at least available. They're quite expensive, and the increase in efficiency (98%) vs what I had (high-80-something%) felt like diminishing returns.
Heat pump water heaters - these come in two main types: a split system with the heat pump part that mounts in a different location than the storage tank, and all-in-ones that basically just look like a taller electric water heater. The split systems give you additional flexibility in terms of where you source your heat and sink your cooling/dehumidification, along with the noise and power run, and some of them skip the backup heating elements in favor of a more heavily insulated tank and higher capacity heat pump. They can be put outside where the weather goes below freezing, but they're better suited for places where that's not the case, both in terms of effectiveness and in terms of how they keep themselves from freezing up when they're not actively heating your water. My hot water heater closet backs up to my garage, so in theory I could have put a split unit there, but my garage doesn't always stay above freezing either, nor does it have a lot of spare heat in the winter. Since the all-in-one units also have the usual 4kW heating elements as a fall-back, they require the same 30A 240v circuit as a regular electric water heater, which I had to add because I was switching types.

I ended up going with this Rheem Performance Platinum model, or at least the Home Depot equivalent (there are some very minor differences between the Harry Homeowner version and their pro-series that is only available through a plumber/plumbing supply). I went with the HD version because it was in stock, while the pro series one was quoting lead times measured in months. Between the leak and the looming end of the tax year for rebate purposes, I went with expediency. It's considerably taller than my old water heater, and has slightly larger capacity - the old one was 60 gallon, this one is 74, although it is considered an 80-gallon due to the size.

Water heaters have an efficiency measure (UEF) that tells you how much of each unit of energy is going to the actual water heating vs being wasted in exhaust gas, etc. The best gas ones are .90-something, electric are 1, but the number can actually be greater than 100%. In this case, the one I bought is rated at 4, because the electricity to drive the heat pump nets roughly 4x the heat output of running a resistance coil of the same draw. I can't do a direct comparison because I didn't have a traditional electric water heater before, but electricity around here is below national averages and it's definitely an improvement over propane. There are also some asterisks on that efficiency number, because during the heating season, I'm pulling that heat and humidity out of space that I already paid to heat and humidify, albeit via a similarly-efficient heat pump, but the balancing factor is that during cooling season, I'm getting some "free" additional cooling.

My hot water heater closet is already ventilated (louvered door and two wall registers) because of the former unit's combustion air requirement, so my initial installation just had it pulling air from that room, and it worked fine, but probably was not as efficient due to the resulting low temperature of that room.

But both intake and exhaust can be ducted, so very shortly after installation, I took advantage of the fact that my basement is all suspended ceiling and I have a utility room where my network switch and two servers are happily converting electrons to heat 24x7 and set it up to pull air from there instead. Exhaust still stays un-ducted in the water heater closet for simplicity, and because the intake and exhaust shrouds are both sold separately, the maximum acceptable ducting length is cumulative between the two sides, and the exhaust shroud is almost $200. Either way, the water heater is now pulling the warmest air available (that room stays in the neighborhood of 5-10°F warmer than the rest of the basement) and the closest I have to indoor waste heat.

I considered running a ducting loop out to the garage so that it would be partially cooled in the summer, but since that involves some pretty large wall perforations (they recommend 8" duct), and would also require some relay logic to ensure that I don't do this when the garage is below the minimum operating temperature for the heat pump (40°F) I'm not sure how much benefit this would provide unless I at some point stop having as much waste heat in the utility room.

As with many appliances in our Internet of Shite future, There's An App for That. It tells me when the water heater is running, what mode, how much hot water is available, and allows me to manage all of the settings including setting schedules, set temperature, getting cute with geofencing, and keeping track of power usage. So far, according to the usage stats, I'm averaging about 24 kWh of electricity per week, though there are some posts online implying that the power usage meter in this thing is not all that accurate. Using the rule of thumb I'm finding other places of a 3-4 hour runtime per day at 4kW, this seems well under an equivalent electric water heater, and now that the coldest part of the season is behind me, my propane demand drops to zero until next winter, so I'm happy with it. I have not run out of hot water, so it seems to be managing demand pretty well.

Tesla Safety Score is Frustrating

2022-03-19T11:48:00.000-04:00

Lots of digital ink has been spilled about Tesla's Full Self Driving beta, so I won't retread it here, except to say that I was hoping to be able to talk about my experience using it by now, and I can't, because I haven't. I have growing annoyance about the fact that I paid a substantial premium for a set of features I have yet to be able to fully use on my car, nearly 18 months into ownership. I do use Autopilot extensively, and some of its features were only available if you opted for the FSD upgrade, so it's not a completely wasted investment, but it's also been 6+ months since I requested access to the beta without getting it.

What "requesting access to the beta" actually means is that I agreed to let Tesla grade my driving to prove that I'm a safe enough driver to be a good beta tester. It's sort of like one of those insurance company nanny widgets that you plug into the OBDII port to get a discount because you drive fewer miles or more safely than the average driver in your area. The FSD beta was initially opened to drivers with a perfect 100/100 safety score, and supposedly Tesla decrements the minimum acceptable number periodically when they want to let another tranche of people into the beta. I'm seeing things online that they're at 98 or 97 right now. But I still have no FSD beta access, so let's review what this means in real-life driving situations.

Tesla's Safety Score is a daily score that contributes to a 30-day rolling average, which is the figure that Tesla looks at to determine who is a safe enough driver to be eligible for FSD beta. The cynic in me thinks that this is actually Tesla's way of making sure that those with more consistently complex driving environments don't get access to FSD and end up having a bad experience when the limitations of the relatively stupid robot that people are expecting to drive like a human are exposed. Anyway, my safety score tends to be in the 96-98 range. I've managed to get it to 99 periodically, but apparently not for long enough to qualify for the beta. There are 5 categories, and each is graded as green/yellow/red (increases your score/improving this will increase your score/decreases your score) based on your performance against an opaque figure Tesla calls "fleet median". I call it opaque because I don't know if it's the entire Tesla fleet or just those actively trying to qualify for FSD beta but not in the program yet, or if it includes those using FSD, or what geographic area is included - US only vs worldwide, etc. The app says "Median value for the Safety Factor based on the vehicles used to calibrate the safety score" which makes me think maybe it's none of those, and instead a carefully-selected control group of people who are also capable of consistently driving like the EPA range test group - the safest, most conservative few percent of drivers in the easiest traffic environments. Below is each category, and some thoughts about why I am where I am.

Forward Collision Warnings (per 1k mi)

This cares a lot about closing speed vs speed of the vehicle in front of you, and whether you're still holding the accelerator rather than braking to adjust, but it's a bit aggressive. I would be willing to own it if this was a situation where I wasn't paying attention and almost rear-ended someone, but that's not what happens in my case. Almost every one of these dings I've had are times where the warning triggers as I'm reacting to whatever set it off, which is frustrating, because I'm being graded on my reaction time rather than how safely I'm driving. Plus this one often goes hand-in-hand with a ding in the next category, so often it's a double-whammy. Given the amount that I drive, I almost always have one of these in the 30 day history, but usually not more than 1.

Hard Braking (>0.3g)

Assuming that you're not driving aggressively (accelerating hard and then braking hard) and are trying to drive smoothly, there are two main ways that this gets triggered, and in my opinion both are a bit unfair to use as an indicator of unsafe driving, since in most cases, it's exactly the opposite. Either you're braking hard to adjust for sudden traffic slowdowns, someone who does something you're not expecting, an obstacle in the road, etc. or you're trying to use regen braking/one pedal driving as much as possible and get caught by the fact that (as I discussed in a previous post) the regen braking level is not consistent and have to apply the friction brakes to slow down faster. This doesn't count when Autopilot is active, so there's another incentive to use Autopilot as much as possible.

Aggressive Turning (>0.4g)

These cars have a low center of gravity, so they handle pretty well. Take advantage of that with even slightly spirited driving, and this metric is toast. So if we resign ourselves to having No Fun in the twisties, the other big trigger for this is when you are using Autopilot on secondary roads and it requires intervention - you're more likely to have to provide an aggressive, last-minute steering input to correct for Autopilot failing to turn aggressively enough on its own to properly follow the lane, or misjudging which lane it's supposed to be in as it crosses an intersection, etc. This would be a lot more fair if it didn't include incidents where autopilot was disengaged by the maneuver, but it's clear from my scores that this isn't what happens.

Unsafe Following Distance (appears proportional to speed, but no quantitative metric is given)

This one is most frequently triggered when you're dealing with multi-lane roads and have to get into another lane because you need to turn or exit or pass, or if someone cuts you off. City traffic means aggressive drivers that will take an appropriate following distance as an opening to get in front of you, and the need to occasionally do the same to other drivers to force your way into a given lane. Consistent use of Autopilot helps, but Autopilot tends to be very conservative when dealing with requested lane changes in heavy traffic and so sometimes you have to override it to get where you need to be in time to make the desired maneuver.

Forced Autopilot Disengagements (if you're not holding the wheel for long enough that Autopilot shuts itself off)

This is the only one I've had a perfect score on the entire time, because to trigger this, you have to have been not been applying sufficient pressure to the steering wheel for the better part of 60 seconds, then ignore both a visual and auditory warning. It's not difficult to stay on top of this one, and arguably this is a really good metric to disqualify people from participating in the beta because they're demonstrably not willing to properly supervise the robotic student driver to keep it from doing something stupid or unsafe.

I see some things online indicating that there are ways to game the system. I'm not really interested in doing that, because I'm more interested in seeing whether it's actually possible to qualify in an area full of traffic, aggressive drivers and difficult situations if you don't cheat. Also while it's annoying that I still don't have access, this sort of reminds me of the reasons why I always stayed a release behind current when I had a Mac - there is definitely benefit to letting other people rush in on release day to be the unpaid beta testers and find all the broken stuff that shouldn't have escaped internal testing so that the system sucks less by the time I use it.

Towing with a Tesla

2021-08-08T00:12:00.003-04:00

I mentioned in a previous post that I was likely replacing my Husqvarna riding mower that has the ailing and mostly unserviceable hydrostatic transaxle with my dad's Kubota GR2100, which is far more robust and seems generally better suited for the amount of hills I have in my yard. My dad lives down near Martinsville (about a 4 hour drive from here), and we'd been sort of idly talking about how we might make the handoff.

He has a small trailer that he bought specifically for hauling the aforementioned tractor, and so I had been thinking of maybe borrowing that to save him from having to make the trip. I got the factory towing package when I bought my Model Y, partially because I wanted a receiver hitch for my bike rack but also because it seemed reasonably useful to have another vehicle capable of towing a utility trailer or some similar should the situation call for it. We got as far as checking weights and things and confirming that it was well within the safety margins for the Model Y, but hadn't really planned to make it happen yet. But in the last week, my 100 year old step grandmother was called home, so I found myself in the area on fairly short notice this past Friday. Fortunately my dad had just last week put in an outdoor NEMA 14-30 for me to use for charging, so after the funeral we plugged the car in and set to sorting out the towing situation. Took some digging to find the right combination of receiver hitch/drop, tow ball size, and locking pin, plus the keys to unlock trailer, pins, etc. but we got it all sorted out.

The Model Y's factory hitch has a 7-pin harness including wiring for an add-on trailer brake controller, and a Class III receiver. The Class III is kind of overkill, because the Model Y actually only has a 3500 lb towing capacity, with a 350 lb max tongue weight, which is technically within the limits of a Class II hitch. This does assume 3 passengers, so I suspect you could probably push it beyond that and not exceed the GVWR/GAWR, but I probably wouldn't go north of 4000 lbs even with a trailer with brakes, mostly because I'd be concerned about the rear end squat. As it was, because this doesn't ride particularly high (it's really more of a tall wagon than something with any pretention of being an SUV), I had to use a hitch with basically zero drop, and I was careful to get the meat of the load's weight over the trailer axle to avoid too much on the tongue.

The trailer in question weighs about 1000 lbs, and the tractor is listed at 940, though I suspect that's dry weight, so it's probably around 1000 too, meaning we're at a nice even ton, plus just me in the car, meaning a total rig weight of around 6800 lbs. This trailer doesn't have brakes, but that really wasn't a big deal, because between the regenerative braking and the fact that the Model Y has pretty strong friction brakes, I was never concerned about the stopping ability for the whole rig. I'd want at least some surge brakes if I were hauling another 1000 lbs though.

Prepping for towing

Accessing the hitch involves prying off a plastic cover on the rear fascia with a flat blade screwdriver. My Jeep had a cover, and it had thumb screws. This has plastic friction clips, and let's just say I suspect they probably only survive one or two removals no matter how careful you are. It's not a great design. Once you have the cover off, hopefully with all of the clips intact, you discover that the amount that the hitch is recessed, combined with the relatively small opening means that you're sort of fumbling around to get the hitch pin in place, and probably some longer ones might not fit at all, especially depending on the orientation of the lock. Additionally, the chain ears are way up inside the recess. Smaller hands probably make that easier to manage. Again, this is a case where the people who designed this probably didn't do a lot of towing. The rear camera does make it super simple to line up the ball and tongue. That's not unique to Tesla, but it is really nice to be able to turn on the camera when you're underway to check that part of the trailer. My trailer was fairly short, and about the same width as the car, so the regular mirrors were adequate once I adjusted them a bit, but a longer or wider rig would require towing mirrors, which would add drag and affect range.

Plugging in the trailer harness activates Tow mode, which according to Tesla disables Autopilot, increases the following distance for the adaptive cruise control, and supposedly uses some different logic on the stability control to help manage trailer sway, something I thankfully did not have to test. I understand why they'd disable auto lane change, but I've grown very accustomed to using Autopilot's lane keeping, especially on long trips, and would have liked to be able to use that, especially since there are some times that you really do need to be able to look at the screen for a minute, and having something handle keeping you literally between the ditches is a great help.

Actual Towing

Tow mode has a major thing missing, in that it doesn't adapt the car's baseline range estimates or trip planning algorithm at all. I get that every trailer is different, and the weight, aerodynamics, etc. all affect range differently, but at the very least, they could characterize a generic impact on range from towing and use that. This is an area where it's better to be a little conservative and end up with more range than you thought than dealing with constant range anxiety or worse, actually being stranded because you didn't stay ahead of the aggressive burn rate. Even if there was some way to manually tell the car to assume a certain percentage drop in range when planning the trip and determining needed charging stops, that'd be an improvement. But the car's default range displays were still claiming what is effectively ideal (aka only achievable on the EPA test cycle) range, and calculating charge stops according to Tesla's standard usage projections (which are more real-world accurate than EPA). What you end up having to do is put in your destination, drive for 30+ miles, which is long enough for the energy usage screen to get an average usage with you towing such that it can project your range based on the past 30 miles of historical burn rate, and then you have to compare that with how far the Nav system says you're supposed to be going. When it almost definitely is longer than your available range, you have to find a Supercharger on your route and add it manually. To make matters worse, because you have basically no sense for how much more range you're going to burn, you have to keep checking this periodically to make sure that you still have enough range to make it to the charger you chose, and then once you're at the charger, you have no guidance on how long to charge. I erred on the side of caution and charged back up to almost full, which meant that instead of the normal 15-20 minute stop to gain back 100-150 miles of range, I was looking at closer to 50 minutes, because the charge rate tapers off dramatically as the battery gets above about 80% charge.

Charging while towing a trailer, in addition to being something you'll be doing repeatedly and often, is also a bit challenging, and again seems to be mostly an afterthought rather than something that Tesla tested or consulted with people experienced with towing to work through the logistics. Tesla charge ports are near the driver's side taillight, and because of the large cables involved in carrying 250kW @ hundreds of volts DC, Tesla makes them short and expects you to back into the space to charge. They have started putting at least one pull-in space in, but that's not universal, and it's not always that helpful, i.e. it's not longer than an average space, and it's not pull through, it's just nose-in parking. Only one of the two Supercharger stations I used even had one, and in order to use it, I still had to pull in with my nose well into the adjacent space (blocking a second charger from being used), and my trailer was hanging out into the parking lot, only narrowly avoiding blocking the air compressor, to the annoyance of at least two Sheetz patrons while I was there. Someone pulled into the space in front of me and then left the parking lot, so I couldn't ask them to move, and so in order to get out, I had to back up with the trailer already halfway to jack-knifed. I managed to do it, but it took a good 10 minutes of back and forth. The second charging station had no good options, so I had to drop the trailer elsewhere in the parking lot, charge, then go retrieve it and reattach.

Driving dynamics are fine, and it's a solid tow rig from that perspective. It was stable and predictable as far as handling went. Electric cars have stupid amounts of torque, and Teslas are overpowered, so the car barely noticed that the trailer was back there in terms of moving itself along at typical speed. It just used more juice. The trip is mostly highway, the majority at 60mph posted limit, with a few sections of 55, 65, and one 70, along with drops to 45 at traffic lights. I ran a bit above whatever the limit was, and even on the hills, there was no issue maintaining speed. One thing I did notice is that I didn't get as much regen braking as I would have expected going down hills, because the trailer's weight wasn't enough to overcome the increased drag. The only time I got any significant regen was when I was slowing down, rather than just maintaining speed on a downhill. The adaptive cruise control was surprisingly quick to adapt to the extra weight in terms of slowing the car down when needed.

As I noted, this comes with a harness for an external brake controller, but I'm somewhat curious if you'd get enough control to really take advantage of the dual braking. Specifically - Teslas do regen braking as soon as you take your foot off of the accelerator. The brake pedal actuates the friction brakes directly, without any attempt to try to simulate braking with regen for the first bit of pedal travel before actually applying the friction brakes like many other hybrids and electrics do. Because the regen braking is so aggressive, the brake lights come on as soon as you lift off of the pedal. Assuming that the brake controller keys off of the brake pedal being actuated, the trailer brakes wouldn't be activated unless you need more than regen alone can provide, but you'd have to tweak the sensitivity carefully to ensure that you still are getting as much regen as possible. Seems to me that there's an opportunity to have integrated the trailer brake controller to make the entire system smarter and more efficient, but at this point I don't think Tesla is that invested in making this a full-time tow rig. I'll be curious to see how they do it differently on the Cybertruck, since that has to compete with actual trucks, most of whose manufacturers have spent a lot of time sweating details to make towing easier.

By the Numbers

Here are the details of the trip, in terms of miles traveled, power used, etc.

The trip down was effectively a control, because I didn't have the trailer. That leg, plus a bit of other driving around, was 269.5 miles, used 75 kWh, at an efficiency of 277 Wh/mi. Using standard conversion, this works out to 132 MPGe. The actual trip MPGe was probably a bit higher than that, because that figure included probably 40 minutes of me sitting with the AC on before the funeral, and a couple of "check out how fast this thing accelerates" starts for my dad. I used a combination of home charging and supercharging, so the fuel cost would be somewhere between $9 and $25. (I'm still using the last of my free supercharging, so I have to estimate based on what the going rate is rather than telling you what I actually paid.)

The return trip was more direct. I started at 100% charge. The Model Y has a 75 kWh battery, and I charged to about 95% at both stops, though I didn't actually need that long of a charge at the second stop. I traveled 242.1 miles, which used 141 kWh, at an efficiency of 583 Wh/Mi, or 62.9 MPGe. That would cost between $15.50 and $48 depending on how much was Supercharging.

That was comprised of the following legs:

Ridgeway to Lynchburg: 82.7 mi, 51 kWh, 613 Wh/mi, 59.8 MPGe

Arrived at 24% charge
Indicated range was 70mi, estimated range (based on last 30 miles' average) was 29.

Lynchburg to Madison: 96.1 mi, 57 kWh, 591 Wh/mi, 62 MPGe

Arrived at 17% charge
Indicated range was 84 mi, estimated range was 27.

Madison to Manassas: 63 mi, 34 kWh, 532 Wh/mi, 68.9 MPGe

So the short answer is that you lose about 50% of your rated range, which is probably pretty equivalent to the haircut a petrol-powered vehicle takes to its range while towing, but on account of the reduced capacity, it is both impressive in terms of its efficiency, but also barely adequate in terms of being able to comfortably make it between Superchargers without careful planning. For me, it's nice to know I can do it if I need to, but clearly the sweet spot is short trips where the 100-ish mile max range isn't much of a concern.

Road Trips with a Tesla

2021-07-18T00:22:00.002-04:00

I took a 900+ mile road trip in the first month I had my Tesla Model Y, and I've managed to put 9,000 miles on it despite being in a pandemic lockdown and working almost exclusively from home in the 10 months I've owned the car, so this is by no means the first road trip I've taken, but the last couple I did (Eastern Shore of VA and Johnstown, PA) revealed a couple of things that I hadn't noticed before that I thought I'd discuss.

Road trips in an electric car, even one with nominally 300+ miles of range, still require more planning than their fossil-powered brethren. I knew that going in, and TBH it sorta appeals to my inner tech nerd, but it's definitely not for everyone yet. Highway speeds, especially when the speed limit is 70 like many of the interstates around here, eat into that range, and since Tesla seems to have done a lot of work gaming the EPA test cycle for maximum claimable range, a safe estimate is more like 75% of claimed range, with additional modifiers if it's in a temperature extreme or there are a lot of hills. This isn't inherently a problem, but since you're dependent on chargers that even with some 2700 Supercharger stations and lots of other non-Tesla chargers available, are nowhere near as ubiquitous or convenient as ye olde petrol station.

The car does a fair amount of the work for you, in that you put a destination into the SatNav and if it predicts that you don't have the range to make it to your destination, it automatically chooses a Supercharger on your route, and even tells you how much time you should spend charging to gain enough range to make it to either your destination or the next Supercharger on your route if it's a multi-charge trip. The prediction seems to know something about topography, speed limits, and the like, because I can see obvious kinks on the car's projected energy graph line that correspond to mountain passes and things, and if you run into construction or traffic that slows you down, you often end up with a slight gain in actual range vs projected. Its trip range indicator is pretty accurate on the highway even if the car's primary range indicator on the dash isn't (it uses either ideal conditions or a much less aware average to project range based on percentage of charge remaining). The car will even warn you to stay below a certain speed if it thinks you're at risk of running out of megableems before your destination.

So they're doing a lot to help you manage range anxiety, and my experience overall has been that a restroom and snack/meal stop is plenty long enough to gain back the required charge such that I've rarely felt like I was wasting time compared with my previous road trips. It's especially nice that a lot of Supercharger stations near the highways are collocated with either a Sheetz or a Wawa, rather than a random mall, as that enables the same sort of relatively quick food/bathroom stop as one would make while refueling.

But there are some fundamental flaws in the way this system works right now, or at least bad assumptions that ultimately require you to do a little more planning than just hopping in the car, inputting your destination, and wafting away on a cloud of inconvenienced electrons, confident in both your car's range to never give you up, and the Supercharger network to never let you down.

Tesla assumes that on a trip that stretches your range, you are going to be able to charge at or near your destination, and it doesn't really take into account whether you actually have enough range to make it to an appropriate charger post arrival, especially if it's not a Tesla charger. To complicate matters further, Tesla also appears to have lowered the threshold of acceptable minimum charge at destination both as their range projections improve, and in an attempt to reduce reliance on mid-trip charging (the Supercharger network is getting busier as more Teslas get sold) such that sometimes trips that a year ago would have featured a Supercharger stop now claim to not need it, but you roll into your destination with a projected 13% SOC (which likely translates to actually single-digit%). This is not user-adjustable. This might be ok if the stay is long enough to charge, but depending on where you are, that might mean:

>24 hours charging @ 120v/15A (4 MPH of range added) - normal house current
>12 hours charging @240v/30A (20 MPH of range added) - typical J1772 Level 2 charger/dryer plug
>6 hours charging @240v/60A (41 MPH of range added) - Tesla AC charger (if these are installed at a hotel or somesuch, Tesla refers to these as "destination chargers")
30-60 minutes at a Supercharger (depends on whether it's 150 or 250 kW DC fast charging)
However long you need on the above methods to gain back enough range to reach the closest Supercharger on your return path.
There is also the rapidly-expanding CCS DC fast charger network that supports all the non-Tesla cars. In addition to often being expensive, bordering on usurious for its charge rates if you don't have some sort of deal through your manufacturer, Tesla owners have to buy a $500 adapter to make their car's proprietary plug interface with CCS. I suspect it will be a long time before the CCS network footprint exceeds the Supercharger network by enough to make that a worthwhile investment.

Tesla's in-car SatNav has no ability to do multi-stop trips, or even a toggle to indicate that this will be a round trip. While it shows you projected state of charge for a round trip briefly when you first start the trip, you can't actually get the car to act on that information. The only way to do this is by using Tesla's Trip Planner website and adding the multiple destinations to force it to calculate charge stops without assuming any other charging is happening so that you know what your charge and range situation might actually look like for all of the legs of your planned trip. And then likely you're going to end up manually selecting the appropriate Supercharger along your route as your destination, stopping for whatever amount of time you deem appropriate, then putting in your actual destination once you're done charging. So you lose all of the trip planning aid in the car. And even when the car decides you need a charging stop, it is basically doing the same thing in the background, so what you get is the ETA and remaining distance to your charging stop, with no sense for total trip duration. This seems like a pretty basic set of missing functionality. Maybe they should reallocate a couple of the programmers working on making the car play fart noises and bring the Nav system to parity with Google Maps, circa 5+ years ago?

A couple of other random observations that came from more driving:

I've been able to conclusively prove that even if the Nav system has some idea of speed limits for range projection, Autopilot is deriving the speed limit it uses (you can set it so that it automatically sets the max speed as "speed limit +N MPH", and on some roads it automatically limits Autopilot's set speed to 5 MPH above posted limit) from "reading" the posted signs. I know this because first it misread a sign with a truck-specific speed limit and assumed that it was applicable to all cars, and then after it dropped the speed limit in a construction zone, it didn't raise it again at the posted end of the construction zone - not until there was another posted speed limit sign.

For a system that is supposed to know things like which lane it needs to be in, where to take exits, and to make very specific routing decisions to make semi-autonomous driving credibly safe, or at least defensibly possible, Tesla is absolutely not updating the map data often enough. According to my car, running the very latest generally available software (i.e. I accept software updates within days of them being offered to me), my map data is 2020.48. This apparently rolled out in November, so given that the data was probably aging before they packaged and released it, I'm guessing it's at least 9 months out of date. This explains why the car continues to insist on stopping for traffic lights that have been gone for months on VA-28 near I-66, and why it believed I had gotten off on an exit (and dropped its max speed accordingly) because of changes to the traffic path during ongoing construction on I-66, why it seems to know nothing about some of the other HOT lanes in the area, etc. It may be that part of getting access to FSD (which I don't have yet) includes much more frequent map updates, but it seems like if they have to do it at all, it would be easier to just package that up for everyone.

I still have an overwhelmingly positive impression of the car and the system, and I don't feel like I've made an undue number of tradeoffs by switching to an electric car, and this electric car specifically. But I do think it's worth highlighting these areas where things could definitely improve as we look both at Tesla and the broader transition to electric transportation over the next number of years. I don't know if anyone at Tesla looks for this sort of discussion, or if anyone reading this might be better informed as a result, but I enjoy writing about it, so I'll continue doing these sorts of periodic updates and hopefully some will find them insightful.

"Fun" with disposable riding mowers

2021-05-10T17:07:00.001-04:00

I have an acre of property, a lot of which is "lawn". I use the air quotes because it's green and needs to be mowed frequently, though admittedly a significant minority of it is green things other than grass, because I can't bring myself to be the stereotypical Suburban Dad that "takes pride in his lawn", i.e. spends real money on a service to spray chemicals on the lawn to make it more grass, and has a whole lawncare "regimen" that is religiously followed each weekend and season. I throw down some grass seed to fill in bare spots and otherwise hope for the best. I just can't be bothered to pretend that's important, and since I chose to live in an area with no HOA, no one else can force me to. Also, I'm on a well, and I'm certainly not interested in wasting my water keeping the grass I've potentially spent good money cultivating alive during a drought, nor am I keen on doing things to increase how frequently I need to mow it, and a large portion of my back yard is heavily shaded during the summer and heavily covered in leaves during a lot of the fall, so consistent, even grass is problematic at best anyway.

For the first couple of years I owned this house, I managed to convince myself that it was manageable with a self-propelled push mower, out of some mistaken notion of needing the exercise. After a bout with heat stroke, and realizing that I was wasting way too much of my weekend mowing, I decided to get a riding mower. I do not regret this decision, even when considered against the more typical method around here of paying a service to handle it.

My yard is probably 50% hills of varying steepness, some that are something you can mow side-to-side, (though there are some times when you have to shift your weight to the uphill side of the seat) others where you pretty much have to go up and down or diagonally across for fear of rolling the tractor. So I pretty much knew a zero-turn was right out, and I was looking for a traditional riding mower with a locking differential to manage the hills better. About ten-ish years ago, most of the mid-range riding mowers with hydrostatic drive had a pedal for a manual diff lock, but somewhere along the line, that had been replaced with either a lower-end diff that didn't lock (in the really cheap ones), or an auto-locking one in the higher end lawn (not garden) tractors. Pretty much across the board, that auto-locker was a Tuff-Torq K46 hydrostatic transaxle, unless you were stepping up to a garden tractor intended to pull ground-contacting implements. The right combination of price, features, availability, and not being an MTD with a nicer-sounding licensed brand name like 90% of the Cub Cadet, Craftsman, etc. available at the big boxes, plus no-interest financing led me to a Husqvarna YT42DXLS, which Husqvarna specifically claimed was well-suited for hilly applications, and given that it was roughly half again the price of the Lowes Depot variants, I figured more robust and reliable.

Worked great for the first 2.5 years I owned it, until a combination of some still-undetermined issue with a full fuel tank and the fuel/vapor system puking raw fuel into the air cleaner, hot exhaust, and dry leaves led to an engine stall followed by a fire that due to the distance from an available fire extinguisher led to a very melted front end and a total replacement of the engine. Fortunately for me, Husqvarna and Kohler stood by their product and covered what was probably half the cost of the tractor in parts and labor repair work under warranty. I've used it for another 3 years since then, though I do have a fire extinguisher mounted on the fender now. That brings us to last week, where a new problem presented itself. I sometimes mow only a section or two of my yard based on where the grass is long, but this time I did the entire yard at once. Toward the end of my mow, which hits the steepest part right at the end, it got slower and slower and more moan-y going up the hills until finally it would barely move itself under its own power on anything other than flat ground. No slipping belt noise, just the moaning that sounds like a bad power steering pump, which unfortunately means a transaxle issue.

Husqvarna maintains that this transaxle is maintenance-free, i.e. there is no fluid level to maintain, and no standard interval to change the fluid. Tuff-Torq equivocates a bit, as they do sell replacement fluid, and some variants of it do list a maintenance schedule, but after some research, I understand why - this is basically a sealed transmission. It has no drain plug or accessible fill cap, nor a filter. There is a fill cap with a magnet to collect spare bits of transmission out of the fluid, but because the transaxle is typically under the under-seat fuel tank, the only way to drain the fluid is to remove the transaxle completely from the frame, pry off the cap that is now exposed from the top of the case, and turn the transmission upside down to dump out the old fluid, which is usually traditional 10W30 motor oil. You might be able to use a vacuum fluid change system, but access is still going to be an issue, and you're unlikely to get all of the fluid that way. So they're right, it's not exactly consumer serviceable in the way that one might expect a homeowner to change the oil, air filter, spark plugs, etc. Seems too good to be true, but service intervals on lots of stuff have been getting extended and simplified because of higher quality lubricants, better designs etc. so I guess it could be plausible, right?

No, dear reader, our instincts are correct, it is basically too good to be true. The internet is pretty full of sad stories about this transaxle failing exactly like this after a low triple digit number of hours of what should be typical use in a variety of brands and models of riding mower like this. Some get repaired or even replaced under warranty, but I'm well outside my warranty period. Turns out that this transaxle has a bit of a design flaw that a cynical person might look at as a very clever way to make these things cheaper to build, and ultimately more disposable when they fail after some number years of use that is >= the warranty period. Since things expand when they get hot, this transaxle has a breather that will allow fluid to escape instead of pressurizing and blowing out a seal or the fill cap. The act of using it to carry my considerable avoirdupois plus a full tank of fuel up a 25+ degree incline, or across a slightly less severe (15-18 degree) incline for long periods of time, especially in the heat of summer, means that it's probably burping out fluid pretty consistently, that then collects along with the grass and leaf dust as greasy schmutz all over the cooling fins, making the overheating problem worse, which causes more fluid foaming and venting, and basically cooks the transaxle. Those same forums and YouTube videos have hopeful stories about people managing to resuscitate them by swapping the fluid for synthetic 5W-50 (which is what TT sells on their site as replacement fluid) after draining considerably less than the factory fill out of them, cleaning the fins, maybe swapping the drive belt, but also those who did that, had no improvement, and had to crack the case to replace the internal parts that had worn prematurely due to overheat and lack of lubrication. The rebuild kit, if you can find it, appears to be almost $500. The replacement transaxle is closer to $1K. So despite the fact that I have an engine with less than 60 hours on it and a perfectly functional mower deck, I am somewhere between maybe being able to do major surgery to get it functional enough to sell to someone with a flat yard, and selling it as-is to someone who's looking for a donor engine and/or mower deck for a project. I figure that even if I fix it, my yard means that the same problem exists, and I'm basically signing up to tear the thing apart every season or two to change the fluid, plus the existing accelerated wear likely means that the next time this starts happening, it'll be necessary to start throwing expensive parts at it.

I am still waiting to see if I can limp it along to use it for short periods of time before it overheats, or if it is far enough gone that I am going to be back to push mower for a few weeks or what, but the long-term fix is that since my dad has hired a service to tend to his several acres, he is going to sell me his now-idle Kubota GR2100, which is a small (I think 4WD) diesel lawn and garden tractor that is probably much better suited to my terrain and one or two notches up in terms of the heavy-duty vs medium/light duty and prosumer vs residential spectrum compared with my current problem child.

Musings on the swipey dating apps

2021-03-18T21:44:00.000-04:00

Well, after a bit more than a year of blissful ignorance about what the dating apps were doing, I'm back at it, so I thought I'd write a little update to my previous post.

After my generally terrible experience with Tinder and its awful UI that caused me to bail after 3 weeks, I went to Bumble. Turns out I never really discussed it in comparison to Tinder when I used it for a couple of months in the fall of 2019, so briefly:

Bumble is another swipey app, and as I understand it, was formed by a woman who had been in a leadership role at Tinder and parted ways with them due to sexual harassment and other issues, so the "like Tinder, but better" vibe definitely figured in. Bumble had been hands-down the better overall experience, because it addressed 95% of Tinder's counterintuitive UI, the silent failures (it throws up a flag "you're using Bumble offline"), and because it was a newer app and was trying to attract people, less upsell. It also was designed to address what I called brand confusion on Tinder, where it was trying to be both a dating app and a hookup app, because there were categories of things beyond the short bio that you could use as filters, but only if you had populated them, meaning there was incentive to complete that part of the profile. There were also prompts for additional info so that you have more to go on than the pictures and a couple hundred characters of bio. Additionally, there are rules about photos having to contain actual people, so you didn't end up with dating profiles with no actual pictures of the person they were representing. Between this, and the fact that when there's a match, women have to initiate the conversation, they were definitely pitching it as a place for a safer, more useful experience for those wanting to find something more than a hookup, but without the heavy time commitment of building a giant profile to sacrifice to the algorithm gods for the "matching you with science" dating sites. So Bumble had better quality profiles, and the feeling that you were actually getting somewhere faster for the time you invested. And measured by actual success, it worked for me - I matched with someone I was able to chat with long enough to decide we wanted to meet in person, and date for more than a year, during which my Bumble account was happily dormant.

But, after reactivating my account in late January and dusting off the place, I discovered that sometime last year, Bumble instituted a swipe limit, and it's really aggressive - something like 25 yes swipes every 24 hours if you're on their free tier. They still have generally better quality profiles, but you're seeing a lot less of them in a given session, meaning that everyone's match chances are way down, despite lots of new users due to "well, it's a pandemic, how the hell else am I going to meet people?" There are also a lot of efforts to upsell to get better access to various features.

So, I groaned and signed back up for Tinder. Most of my previous complaints are still true, but 6 weeks in, I'm at least more used to the UI now. Tinder has a yes swipe limit too, but it's more like 50, and it resets every 12 hours, so it's a lot less intrusive. I suspect Tinder is still playing some games with what profiles they show you in order to get you to go paid, because I frequently am told that there are no more matches in my area, but there are several that are in their daily "top picks" that may or may not eventually show up in the regular feed, and closing the app and reopening frequently brings several additional profiles. But it seems like when the available profiles drop below a certain threshold, they'll arbitrarily ignore your age range and distance limits, so some subset of what you're getting isn't actually usable. Tinder has also started making it look like you have new messages so that they can show you more ads than the ones that show up in between profiles, and that seems kind of cruel.

But Tinder has a somewhat more fundamental problem that they don't seem interested in actually solving - fake and otherwise garbage profiles that ruin the signal to noise ratio. This is likely Tinder trying to strike a balance between keeping you on the platform longer swiping through garbage so they can show you more ads and keep trying to convince you to pay for the service, and having a reputation as a waste of time/ not worth the effort.

Anecdotally, I'd say that 25-40% of the profiles I'm getting shown are not useful because they're doing some or all of the below:

using generic photos (landscapes, memes, food, etc) instead of pictures of the person they're purportedly representing
leaving the bio completely blank

These first two are especially frustrating because it's a site where you're literally deciding based on a handful of pictures and a few words if you might want to meet someone. I suspect some of this is women who think "well, they're not going to read the profile anyway and they're swiping right on everyone in the hopes of getting a match, so why bother?" but for those of us that aren't, it's just wasting everyone's time and limiting the potential match pool.

advertising their sensual/erotic massage services

and they know they're likely doing something prohibited, because the people generating these accounts do things like post a picture full of text with details about their services and how to contact them with a code word on another platform (usually snap or instagram), or deliberately misspell certain keywords (add spaces, extra letters and numbers etc) to defeat pattern matching.

a catfish to try to get you to sign up for another paid-only dating site (Ashley Madison is still a thing, apparently), their Onlyfans, or some similar paid content site
putting their location as a big US city so that they're shown to people as a local option but actually being based in any number of remote countries, ostensibly wanting to chat to improve their English, but I suspect also hoping for import dating, or another type of catfishing.

I'd been dutifully reporting the more obvious of these, but I suspect this is a fool's errand, and in the last couple of weeks it appears that Tinder either accidentally or intentionally made this harder. It used to be once you reported a profile, you could then swipe left so you wouldn't see it again. Reporting a profile now makes it disappear, but it'll show back up in your options later, so you have to interact with it twice. Similarly, if you match with someone and they play any of these games in private messages, you have to report them before they realize you aren't falling for it and unmatch you, because it's extremely difficult to report someone after they've unmatched.

It is difficult to continue putting time and effort into either of these sites right now due to the lack of success, but it is harder to discern where the frustration about the crappiness of the platform ends, and my own limitations as attractive to the pool of people I'm interested in begins. Either way, I do appear to be getting exactly what I paid for this time around.

Tesla Autopilot update

2021-02-21T11:27:00.000-05:00

I'm coming up on having owned my Tesla Model Y for 5 months, and thought it might be useful to give a little update on my experiences using Autopilot. I use it pretty consistently where I can, with a few exceptions that I'll get into below. Since I don't have the FSD beta yet, that means that it's usually offered whenever there are lines on the road. I've found that it'll be available even on two lane roads without a center double yellow line, as long as there is a line on the edge of the road. So for example, there's a residential street nearby that has a bike lane marked, and thus has nice stripes along the edges but no double-yellow line. That seems to be enough for autopilot.

Right now, if you are on a divided interstate highway and some selected limited access US and State route highways, it'll offer Navigate on Autopilot, which is a slightly more autonomous mode, where if you've set a destination in the nav system, it will recommend, but not execute until you confirm, lane changes to get you into a faster lane when you're overtaking slow traffic, to keep you from clogging the left lane, and to get away from construction cones, as well as to make sure you're in the correct lane when the road divides or you need to take an exit. It will also actually signal and make the exit for you so that you follow the navigation. It's pretty seamless, and the amount of interventions I need to make in this mode are very minimal, though occasionally it is fussing at me to get out of the left lane when I am literally in the process of overtaking a slower vehicle. My only real complaint here is that it is ultra-conservative about speed on cloverleafs, to the point that I always feel like I'm annoying the driver behind me if I leave it to its own devices. But given what I'll say below about how it manages curves elsewhere, that's probably appropriate.

Regular Autopilot is what happens everywhere else. It follows lanes, will change lanes when safe to do so if you signal your intent with a turn signal, it stops at stop signs, traffic lights, and maintains a safe following distance. On 2 lane and some 4 lane roads, the max speed you can set autopilot to use is speed limit + 5MPH. On other 4 lane roads, the logic allows you to set whatever speed you want. There are settings in the system regarding how you want it to manage set speed vs speed limit, so that when you invoke Autopilot, or the speed limit changes, it responds in the same way you'd be when driving. It still will not make turns that are more than just following a curve in the existing lane of travel, so even if you have navigation active, it won't make that right turn at the intersection it just told you to do. As I said initially, it works well for what it is, as long as you remember that it's not autonomous and pay proper attention. Inclement weather is a mixed bag. I was honestly super-impressed with how well it did on a secondary two lane road on a foggy, rainy night where the visibility wasn't great, but the driver is still definitely responsible for managing its safe speed - it doesn't slow down because the wipers are on, or because of temperatures, or whatever. I have also had situations where Autopilot was unavailable due to crud on the front or side sensors when driving in a post-snow melt where that salt and slushy crud all mix to throw a bunch of trash on your car and you use a half-gallon of winshield washer fluid in one drive.

But I now have a better sense for what it does poorly, what confuses it, etc. and that has led to both some situations where I don't use it, and areas where I have to intervene more frequently to keep things literally between the ditches. Here's a list in rough order of increasing severity:

Traffic lights - AP is pretty conservative about lights. Unless it's following a vehicle at close range so it can see that they're proceeding through the intersection, it requires you to tap the stalk or press the accelerator briefly to confirm it's safe to proceed through the green light even though it's clearly recognizing it as a green light. I had hoped this was a matter of teaching the AI, but it hasn't improved at all over time. It will stop for a yellow if it hasn't entered the intersection yet, including if you have already given it permission to proceed because the light was green and now isn't. This all makes sense in terms of safe, conservative driving, so I can't really complain all that much other than to wonder what is different where FSD is concerned.
Flashing lights that aren't normal traffic lights - those warning signs at the side of the road for pedestrian crossings, school zones, etc. usually are yellow and make it think it needs to slow down for what is soon to be red, or per driving rules, slow for a flashing yellow at an intersection to be sure it's safe to proceed. It especially doesn't know what to do with various flashing yellow lights that look and are placed like traffic lights, such as the emergency signal in front of my fire department that has a normal red on top that is only ever lit when the trucks need to exit, and a smaller yellow underneath that is always flashing, or the horizontal flashing lights signifying an intersection that is flashing red in the cross direction. Given the yellow light logic I mentioned above, you're having to forcefully override it with constant pedal application to get it to go past those, and if you're not paying attention, you are going to annoy the driver following you.
shadows on the road - the lovely sun-dappled road from your car commercial occasionally makes Autopilot think there are obstacles in the road. Same for lane changes where a large truck is casting a huge shadow of itself into the open lane between the two of you where you want the car to go. It'll occasionally decide the truck is actually in that lane and refuse to make the lane change until the angle changes and the shadow isn't there. This is usually only a problem when it's a huge contrast difference, like bright, direct sun filtering through tree leaves.
Indistinct lanes - areas where it goes from 2 to 1 or vice versa, lanes without a center line, etc. confuse it occasionally. It can guess where the lane is, but it doesn't always guess right, and in situations where it's 1 lane becoming 2, I have had it kinda dither for a minute before it commits to a lane, and when the lane is not clearly delineated by lines on both sides or is exceptionally wide, such as during a 2 to 1 merge, the car does tend to wander a little trying to decide how to center itself in the lane.
Blind hills - those fun little whoops that make your stomach jump a little and make the car go a little light on the wheels when you take them quickly? Autopilot basically panics when it can't see the road ahead, and the threshold for that is just long enough that it'll be upset before you get to the crest of the hill where it can see again. Usually it just disables itself, but it has panic braked on me at least once. This is generally worse at night.

The above things aren't really unsafe, and are more situations where the system is being understandably conservative, but significantly more conservative than a human would be, so it's more something I mention here as a quirk or limitation in the system. The following are more likely to actually cause an accident if not caught quickly enough, and this is the area where a lot more work is needed before full self driving even as Tesla defines it is going to be a workable thing.

Misaligned intersections - Autopilot sorta guesses where the path through an intersection is, because the alternative would be to shut down due to the lack of any lines on the road to guide it. Reasonable assumption is "continue roughly straight" but often intersections shift slightly, and there are a couple where it has tried to drive into the median because it didn't realize fast enough that the lane shifted almost a full lane-width to the right, and times where it unceremoniously changes lanes in the middle of an intersection because it picks up the wrong lane marker when re-acquiring the lane. Also if you're the first car in an intersection, stopped at a light with cross traffic going past, it will frequently just give up and tell you AP isn't available because it can no longer make a reasonable guess as to the correct path of travel. Intersections with stripes for various turning lane paths sometimes confuse it too, rightly so.
curvy secondary roads - you know the type, those roads that those of us who enjoy spirited driving in a suitable vehicle relish the chance to use without someone in front of us. They're probably posted 35 or 40, but they have plenty of curves, some with those yellow signs suggesting the maximum safe speed is 30, or 25, or even 15. The Model Y actually handles pretty well in spirited driving. It's not my 911, but it can be hustled through those roads safely and enjoyably. The problem is that Autopilot is not capable of managing that sort of road even at speed limit + 5 mph without leading to some potentially scary last-minute interventions. After playing with it for a while, here's the conclusion I've come to: Autopilot is not responding quickly enough to the clues being provided, including the line direction, possible warning signs and even those arrow markers along the side of the road to consistently decelerate to a safe speed that it can manage, nor is it willing to apply aggressive enough steering angle to compensate for maybe carrying too much speed into a turn and getting a little bit of understeer. It has briefly crossed center lines, been close to crossing the outside line and being on the shoulder, and generally not been great at keeping equal distance between the lane markers through turns if more than about 40° of steering angle, or any braking, is required. As a result, I have to do one of two things on roads like this - either I have to manually dial back the max speed at the entrance to a turn it typically botches, or I can only use Autopilot when it is following another vehicle, since they're likely to slow down at the point you'd expect, thus the robot will too in order to maintain following distance.

There are multiple instances of pretty much all of the above concerns where I have wished for the ability to take a more active role in "teaching" the autopilot to do better, whether it's the ability to give it a voice keyword to tell it that the flashing light it thought it needed to stop for isn't a traffic light so it remembers for the future, or to invoke a "watch my path" mode so that it can store some data about appropriate entry and exit speeds and steering angles on secondary roads and gradually build a crowd-sourced knowledge about how to manage them. Even being able to more successfully navigate roads that I drive all of the time by storing some of that locally, and realizing it needs info from a server for a new road would be a huge improvement in the performance in some of these fuzzy areas.

I joked with a friend after seeing a Tesla with a Student Driver sticker that given the fairly stupid robot piloting them a lot of the time, probably that should be a factory-installed option. Don't get me wrong, it's still amazing, and I am definitely glad I have it, but objective discussion of where it can be improved is always going to be useful and necessary.

Man rants about phones

2021-02-20T17:31:00.007-05:00

I've been a Sprint customer for 20+ years, partially because I used to work for them, and now mostly because of inertia (generally not having enough issue with them to switch), and still having a few friends that work there and some stock left over from my employee days that make me moderately biased toward their continued success. Now that they've formally been absorbed by T-Mobile, I have been getting emails asking me to come to a store to switch out my SIM to "take advantage of the new combined T-Mobile network", which I did... or at least tried to do, today.

My daughter's LG G7 Fit, which I bought unlocked from woot for cheap, swapped SIMs no problem. My nicer, purchased directly from Sprint, G7 Thinq was declared ineligible for said SIM swap "due to device". After talking to someone with a technical clue in one of the repair stores, it's apparently being blamed on antennas and bands, i.e. Sprint's specified cocktail of bands and CDMA support for their SKU of the G7 apparently makes it not completely compatible with the long-term network/band layout TMO is using. So while my phone isn't exactly going to stop working tomorrow, I am not gaining what is arguably the primary benefit for the merger - better coverage, and quite likely my coverage via the legacy Sprint network will get worse the longer we go post-merger, eventually terminating in a message that I need to upgrade or risk losing service when they want to turn the lights out on the old stuff at (I'm guessing) the 12-18 months post-merger mark. I'm sure TMO doesn't want to keep CDMA around any longer than absolutely necessary, and Verizon has already announced (but delayed, or else it'd already be gone) the sunset of their 3G network too, so the writing is on the wall.

So suddenly I am realizing I'm in the market for a new phone. I looked, and I've owned this for 2.5 years. My typical dwell time per phone is about 2.5-3 years, mostly because I tend to not trash them and I keep using them until there's a real reason to upgrade, so this is maybe a few months early in the upgrade cycle, but not too terrible I guess, since it's been paid off for 6 months.

At this point, I'd be stupid to buy a new phone that isn't 5G, and I still want Android, but I'm finding that this is tweaking a few recurring annoyances in the phone market that might be worth writing about briefly.

There are a few features that I care about on a phone beyond the obvious table stakes that define it as a smartphone. These may not be interesting to anyone but me, and are admittedly somewhat specific to my use case, but either way:

Fingerprint reader

My phone and my laptop both have a reader built in, and now that I have set it up so that 1password and some other apps can use it in addition to basic login/unlock, I would never buy another phone without it. I've actually considered getting an external one for my desktop because I miss it when I'm using that. The dedicated hardware reader on the back side of the phone makes so much sense on account of the way you hold it anyway, so I have a strong preference for that, since that's my muscle memory now. Even before the current phone with the reader, the LG G4 had the power button back there, so I'm going on 5 years of turning on my phone that way.

Software update cadence

This has been a problem for Android since the beginning, because Google didn't have enough market power to exert direct control over updates, and was left beholden to both the device manufacturers and the carriers, both of whom have their own development cycle where they add/update/break their own software and UI skin, and test cycle before they actually release updates to the end user. Google addressed this to some extent by making more and more of the OS carrier and device independent so that more bits could be updated directly via the Play Store, and moving to a monthly security release so they could patch holes in the rest of it in a way that could be deployed more rapidly without the extensive dev and test cycle that comes with a major feature release. My experience is that is still hit and miss, and I'm not sure whether the carrier or the device manufacturer or both is to blame for that. I was getting monthly security updates about quarterly (i.e. 3-ish months behind current) on this phone, but that dried up when the merger closed, so I'm currently stuck on May 2020.

Expandable storage (microSD slot)

No matter how much storage you spring for when you buy the phone, it's probably not going to be enough, especially given the arms race that seems to be happening with camera sensors and their megapixel counts and support for 4K and even 8K video. Granted, with the accelerating transition to cloud services, streaming audio, etc, maybe that's not as important as it was a few years ago, but I'd rather just take advantage of how cheap ridiculous amounts of storage have gotten, slap a microSD chip in my phone (current one is 256GB) and not have to think about storage use, ever, even if I put a large portion of my entire music collection on it, and keep every photo and video I've ever taken with a smartphone, and back up all of my SMS weekly, and, and, and...

Wireless charging support

I have several wireless chargers now. They're not a complete substitute for USB-C charging, but they're useful, and I'd be annoyed if I couldn't charge my phone by setting it in the built-in phone holder in the Tesla.

Headphone jack

I have Bluetooth headphones, and a bluetooth speaker, and a bluetooth adapter to let my phone talk to my home stereo, and even in the old pickup with the aux jack, I got a little bluetooth to aux adapter so a real headphone jack is more of a nice to have anymore, but having the ability to put the big wired over-ear cans on for noise reduction and feed them from my phone is still helpful.

In the US Android market, with basically 3 carriers, there are a few main brands that pretty much everyone considers because they're consistently offered and supported by the big 3 as the flagship devices. There are others that are considered budget offerings, but that's not really my focus, nor is how much "better off" I'd be with an iPhone. This is specifically about the tradeoffs for my options in Android. Pros and cons to switching to Apple is, as Alton Brown says, another show.

Samsung

Samsung makes pretty good hardware, but it is increasingly hamstrung by their insistence on forcing you to use their (usually inferior) versions of apps and features that already come with Android, most notably their voice assistant Bixby, along with their heavy-handed UI reskin of Android. And they're simply not good enough at software to justify this. I can't find the story to link to it, but I remember reading some really impressive horror stories around their development practices that made me pretty leery of ever owning another Samsung device. Between that and the lack of an MicroSD card slot [edited to add 4/5] (apparently this resurfaced briefly on the S20 but is gone again on the 21) and often a headphone jack, I left Samsung behind after the Galaxy S4 and mostly haven't regretted it. Part of why I use Android is that I like the app ecosystem. Google has a good keyboard, voice command features, tap and pay app, photo app, and OS UI. I don't want to have to fight with my device to use those things.

OnePlus

I haven't been paying a lot of attention to OnePlus. Brief glance through shows generally solid hardware, though it depends on the specific phone model whether it has wireless charging, none of them have microSD, and they're mostly using the under-display fingerprint reader. I had hoped they were pure Android as well, but it looks like if they were, they've become infected by the need to "improve" it with their own touches. To be fair, it seems fairly well reviewed, and the 8Pro is a reasonable competitor to the LG V60 from a spec and pricing perspective though it doesn't seem to be offered through TMO as some of the others are.

[Edited to add 4/5] The Oneplus 9 has been released since I wrote this, and initial reviews all say it is a very solid phone, a good flagship offering capable of competing with Samsung, and generally better hardware than the current Pixels, though the above concerns still exist.

Google

Google has their Pixels, and the main selling point for those is that you're getting a pure Android experience. This is about as close to the Apple direct software upgrade cycle as you get in Android, for better or for worse. One assumes that the hardware and software integration means that they work well together and bug escape is minimal, but Google is a pretty siloed company, and seems to be getting increasingly dysfunctional, so I'm not sure how valid that assumption is anymore. Google also gives you access to the newest Android features here first, and their camera/photos app has been doing well competing with Apple for impressive quality in poor conditions. The current gen has a hardware fingerprint reader in the back where I like it, but no provision for external storage unless you count plugging something into the USB-C port. Google assumes that the only thing you needed all that storage for was pictures, and gives you unlimited storage on Google Photos, but at "high quality" which is not original quality. Also, Amazon's included photo storage for Prime members is better as a photo backup solution, as it has no such restrictions. Google really wants you to subscribe to one or more of their services to address this. I'm also sad that they have gone away from the Nexus name, because I enjoyed the hat tip to Blade Runner, but since ultimately I'm going to have to compromise somewhere, I'm considering the Pixel 5 more seriously than I have considered previous Google phones.

I've had 2 LG phones, the G4 and the G7. Been very happy with both, as LG has gotten pretty good about mostly leaving Android stock (my phone has a Google button to invoke Google's assistant), and the hardware was quite good, with one or two exceptions. LG had fairly good speakers in the phone as far as those go, and they also had a real headphone jack with a fairly decent quality DAC such that it could drive a good set of headphones surprisingly well.

The exceptions? As it ages, my fingerprint reader is getting flaky, which is kind of annoying but not bad enough to be an issue yet. Really, the big issue is that LG sucks at software updates. My phone, released in mid-2018, has already been abandoned on Android 9, despite Android 10 coming out roughly a year after the phone's initial release. Some flavors of G7 (looks like Korean and EU versions, and possibly the TMO version) got Android 10, but neither mine nor my daughter's appear to be among the chosen ones. And there are now ~~rumors flying~~ [edited 4/5 to add] confirmations that they might be interested in exiting the phone business entirely, which makes ~~me at least a little leery of~~ buying another LG and potentially ending up with a truly orphaned device [edited 4/5 to add] a complete no op, since they're still coming from the factory with Android 10, despite us being on to Android 11 already. LG has also brought out their own payment app to compete with Google Pay and Samsung Pay, so it seems they're losing the plot on not substituting their own apps again.

Setting all that aside for a moment, LG has a weird collection of what might be considered their flagship devices right now. The V60 is probably the closest analog to the G series, supports 5G and has a microSD slot, but unfortunately has moved to using the under-display (and thus front-mounted) fingerprint reader that apparently doesn't work as consistently as the hardware ones, so it's on the short list, but I'd have to relearn my muscle memory of reaching for the phone and unlocking it with my index finger that is already in the right position on the back of the phone based on how I hold it. But they've also been chasing the gimmicky - they have 2 different varieties of multiscreen phones, the Wing, which has a screen that rotates 90° while leaving the lower half of the vertical screen available for simultaneous use, and a second screen case for the V60, which opens like a book to reveal 2 screens. Moving parts to break, more screens to use battery and get broken, limited case options, and generally thicker to accommodate all of this for questionable benefit. It all seems a bit "shark jumpy" to me in light of the above mentioned rumor.

I don't think this set of wants and needs is that unique to me, but maybe it is. Fortunately I have time to do some more research and not rush to make a decision since my current phone is functional.

Tesla Model Y Purchase Experience

2020-10-26T00:00:00.001-04:00

Buying a Tesla is not like buying a normal car, in a lot of different ways. I figured the purchase itself might be worth a separate post.

I have the benefit of having a quasi-local Tesla dealer, and they have stuff on hand to test drive, and were doing well with the touchless/masked/distanced test drives, so there's not a whole lot to say there. I pre-scheduled the test drives on their website (scheduled both for the same time, and they just asked which car I wanted to start with when I got there). The sales manager I was working with gave the kids both scale models of the Model 3 to take home, which was cool. Also I was amused that because the Jeep was in the shop, I ended up taking the 23 year old beater pickup to the middle of fancy-pants Tyson's Corner. But I digress...

While I could have put my order in at the showroom, I wasn't 100% decided yet, so I told the sales folks that I'd do it online. It's a completely unremarkable process that feels exactly like every other thing you've ever ordered online. You create a Tesla account, and if you have a friend who has a Tesla, you go in via their referral code (here's mine!) so that you both get some perks (we both got 1000 miles of free supercharging) tick a few boxes for the various options you want for your car, enter some information, give them a credit card for the $100 nonrefundable deposit, and you're done. The site said approximately 6 weeks to delivery, but nothing more specific than that.

Worth noting that I did consider a lease, since in a lot of ways this is less like buying a car and more like buying a new phone, in that the technology moves so fast that you're mostly trying to avoid it being obsoleted by the newer, slightly shinier version the minute you get it in your hot little hands. However, Tesla's leases have been a little weird at various points. About 5 years ago, when I was considering buying a Model S, there was no lease program at all. The closest they had was a guaranteed re-purchase price, where at the end of 3 years, you could sell the car back to them at a pre-agreed price. However, unlike a lease, where you're financing the difference between the purchase price and residual value, which makes the payments cheaper, you still had to finance the whole purchase price, eliminating the primary benefit of a lease. They did eventually add a real lease program, but I was no longer in the market for a car by then. The Model 3/Y have a lease option, but when we were discussing it, the sales person said that the lease for Model 3 and Y had an important caveat - you can not buy out the car at the end of the lease. You have to give it back. This is because right now, Tesla believes that they will be at a point when these things start coming back from their leases that they'll want a ready supply of vehicles to make into an autonomous taxi fleet (or perhaps a zipcar style "car as a service" model). Interesting gamble, but ultimately the combination of the equity in my Jeep and favorable financing made a lease unnecessary to get my payments where I wanted them, so I decided not to fool with that just in case I wanted to hang on to this thing longer than 3 years or have equity to trade up at some point.

Once the order is accepted, they take you through some additional steps, including the option to fill out a credit application for their financing, which I did because their offered 2.3% for 72 mo. was as good as anywhere else I could find, the delivery info (who to put on the registration, proof of insurance, where you're taking delivery, etc) and the option to trade in a vehicle.

When the credit application is approved (usually less than 24 hours), then you have the option to lock in the final financing terms. You don't have to do it immediately, but it appears (more on this later) that Tesla doesn't consider the order complete and put you in line for an actual car until you complete this, and that means you have to know how much you want to finance vs what you're paying on delivery. If you're wrangling a trade, this requires some guesswork. I went to the usual "what's my car worth" sites and got an average price and deducted that much from my purchase price to figure out my amount to finance.

The trade-in process is probably the only part of this that may be more trouble than it's worth. Tesla has no used car business, so trades are going directly to the auction, and it's clear they're mostly doing it for convenience. While you can take your vehicle to be evaluated for trade-in value at the dealer, they offer an online version too. I'm not sure if that's a function of trying to reduce contact due to COVID or of the fact that not everyone has a dealer nearby, or just to make it easier, but anyway... You put in your VIN, and they want pictures of each side of the vehicle's exterior, along with a picture of the front seats from the passenger side door, and a picture of the odometer. The first problem is that the picture upload function limits the size to 4MB per picture, which is smaller than the pictures your average smartphone camera produces anymore, and your average person may not know how to reduce the size of their pictures, so Tesla's website really should handle this itself. Second problem is that I was taking pictures in my garage, because it was raining, and couldn't fit the whole car in the picture straight on, so they rejected my pictures. I didn't get email about this, one of their folks called me to tell me, and I mentioned that part of the problem was the size limit, and he gave me an email address to send the updated pictures to, assuring me that he'd associate them with my account, but saying that as of right now, the value on the Jeep was probably around $18K. I'd read that Tesla would match the value from an official Carmax offer, so I mentioned that I'd probably be doing that, and he told me that they've stopped matching Carmax, so if I thought I'd get a better price there, I should deal with them directly. I didn't hear anything further after I emailed him new pictures, so I assumed things were ok. But I got a phone call about 3 weeks later, asking if I could take delivery before the end of the month/quarter and take advantage of an incentive to get another 1000 miles free Supercharging. During this call, the person I was working with (different person than before) revealed that rather than this being a call to tell me my car was ready, because my trade-in evaluation wasn't completed, my order was essentially stalled. I pointed them to the person I had emailed updated pictures to previously, but also told them that it was likely I'd cancel the trade-in completely, but I needed some sort of assurance that they actually had a car ready for me before I got rid of my current vehicle. They couldn't give me a guarantee, but said that they were trying very hard to fulfill all open orders before the end of the quarter. I realized that I didn't really need the Jeep even if the delivery slipped a couple of weeks, so I went to Carmax the following weekend, they offered me $20K, so I sold it to them that day. While I was waiting for Carmax to cut me a check, I went into Tesla's system and cancelled the trade-in, and less than 24 hours later, I got a text asking to schedule my delivery.

TL;DR unless you really have to do trade-in via Tesla, because you can't work out the logistics of selling your current car via another method, you're better off avoiding that part.

Once you've been assigned a vehicle, they contact you to schedule delivery. Before delivery, you have to have proof of insurance uploaded. In some states, they require the actual VIN to be on the policy by then, in VA, I just have to have proof of an active policy, and have it officially on your insurance by the day you drive it home. You also have the option to pay off your balance, so that the day of delivery, you inspect the vehicle, they activate it and associate it with your Tesla account and phone, they put license plates on it, and off you go. Instead of having to muck about with cashier's checks, they support ACH transfers, which is nice.

One other nice little detail about the delivery process - I was in a situation where I didn't have anyone available to drop me off at the Tesla dealer on a Tuesday afternoon when my delivery was scheduled. When Tesla's representative called to confirm delivery time and tell me where to go when I got there, I asked where they wanted me to park my truck since I was going to have to drive it up there, leave it overnight, and then get a ride back to retrieve it the next day. "Oh, you don't have to do that... we'll just set up an Uber to pick you up from your house and bring you to the dealer, if that's ok with you..." So Tesla paid for my ride to the dealer.

I was prepared to find all sorts of fit and finish issues on my initial delivery inspection, because I had seen all of these videos and pictures online of early delivery Model Ys where it was clear they hadn't gotten the bugs worked out of assembly yet, but mine was pleasantly devoid of those. Panel gaps were consistent, and I didn't find any noticeable defects in paint, trim, or fit and finish generally. Six months appears to have made a significant difference in that regard.

So I bought a Tesla Model Y...

2020-10-25T13:50:00.001-04:00

Early in my evaluation, I had all but eliminated the Model Y on specs alone. It seemed too small, and Tesla doesn't publish the typical measurement of cubic footage of storage space with the rear seats up, only the max storage capacity with the seats folded, making the typical apples to apples comparison I'd been using with other vehicles impossible. I even tried asking via Twitter, Tesla's website chat function, and an email, and none got a satisfactory response. If the measurement exists, they don't make it available. In retrospect, I think this is because that would be a misleading figure since there is likely an SAE standard method to calculate that measurement, and you aren't allowed to include things like the front trunk (officially the "frunk") and the underfloor storage, which in the Model Y make a pretty significant difference in its overall capacity. But after watching a few videos online, and seeing how big the additional storage areas were, I decided I needed to give it a better look in person before summarily eliminating it, leading to the trip to the dealer to test drive it. Obviously it's a good thing I did.

The Model Y is definitely smaller than the Jeep Grand Cherokee that it replaces, but between the frunk and the deep well under the cargo area floor, which will swallow a medium sized suitcase with room to spare, I think the seats-up cubic footage for holding stuff is actually about the same. Definitely more space than comparably sized small crossovers like the RAV4.

I have about 1500 miles on the car now, including one ~900 mile road trip, so here are my initial impressions.

Likes:

The sound system is great, among the best I've heard in a car. The seats are comfortable, it has plenty of rear seat room (all 3 of us sat in the back with me (6'4", 35" inseam) sitting behind myself and it was fine, so I expect it'd do well with 5 passengers even on a trip), the acceleration even on the long-range model is indeed grin-inducing, ride quality and handling are both good. I also love the full-glass roof.

The nav system works well, does a great job helping you plan trips including charging stops and projecting range and state of charge. I haven't had a lot of instances where I've been driving in traffic, so I don't know how good it is at rerouting you around traffic like Google Maps does yet. I do miss the integration of notifications about speed traps/cameras, disabled vehicles and accidents that Gmaps provides, along with the ability to contribute those things while you drive.

The use of my phone as a key works way better than I thought it would, to the point that I've gotten really used to not carrying a key and have walked out of the house without keys for my other, key-requiring vehicles. Not having to actively lock or unlock the car is also surprisingly nice. I keep the key card in my wallet as a backup, but haven't needed to use it yet. The inductive charging pad for your phone is also reliable and consistent.

The regenerative braking is aggressive enough that when combined with leaving the default configuration in place that the vehicle will come to and stay at a full stop when you lift off of the accelerator, one pedal driving is possible a lot of the time. It takes some time to get used to and results in some jerkiness at first, but it's in your best interest to get good at it for maximum efficiency. My biggest pet peeve is that it's not consistent, i.e. when the battery is cold or fully charged, the amount of regen braking is reduced, so you can't just learn how/when to lift off of the accelerator to slow down for an intersection smoothly. Autopilot is a lot better at it than I am currently.

I sprung for the full self driving option, meaning I get all of the available autopilot stuff. I was already familiar with the basic adaptive cruise control, and it works pretty much the same way as the one in my Jeep did, with the exception of addressing one of my main annoyances - it doesn't auto cancel after 2 seconds of being stopped. Instead, it relies on you either pressing the accelerator or the stalk to tell it that it's ok to proceed after it has stopped for traffic control. I don't know how much of the automatically stopping for traffic lights and stop signs is part of the full self driving package and thus unavailable with adaptive cruise if you don't get that feature, but it works pretty well. You can definitely tell that you're training the AI as it asks you to positively confirm that it's safe to proceed when it detects a green light and it's not following another vehicle, but it's a pretty intuitive system.

I've been using actual autopilot a fair amount, both on the highway and on secondary roads. Pretty much anywhere with lane markings is fair game. It's pretty good at following the road, even on ramps and curves, though it's definitely conservative about the speeds it chooses - everywhere but divided highway, you're limited to a max of 5mph over the speed limit with autosteer engaged, and it is probably doing 7-10mph below what I'd do if I were driving it on a cloverleaf or tight curve so occasionally you annoy the drivers behind you with overly conservative driving. Automatic lane changes (you signal, it changes when it's safe to do so) work really well about 90% of the time. It makes driving easier because you are less actively involved in the constant corrections to keep the car in its lane and following the road as well as maintaining safe following distance, but it definitely is not something you can have drive while you do something else. The system is far from perfect/infallible, and the emphasis definitely should be on the "semi" part of semi-autonomous. As impressive as even this level of autonomy is, the robot is still pretty stupid, and it requires your attention. I have incidents nearly every trip of phantom braking (braking for something it shouldn't) and because it doesn't support turns at intersections and stuff yet, even when the nav system is active, I have to turn it off and go manual multiple times on an average trip. I'm averaging a steering intervention (where the car starts to go on the wrong path) about once every 2-3 trips, but so far most of them have been fairly obvious as to why the car got confused. Let's just say that I understand completely why there have been autopilot-involved accidents where autopilot does the wrong thing at the worst possible time and the driver isn't paying enough attention to intervene. It's still a net positive and I think it's worth the premium Tesla charges for it, but like I said above, you can tell you're helping to train an AI, and you should go into it cautiously.

Dislikes:

Phone integration is about 5 years behind its competition (Bluetooth only, no Android Auto or Carplay). In addition to playing BT audio and doing phone calls, it will read you text messages and allow you to respond, but the dictation response is too aggressive at assuming that you're done speaking if you pause even briefly, meaning you end up retrying responses more than I typically do with Google's assistant/voice to text. Similarly, it doesn't let you use those features for any other messaging platform like Whatsapp, FB messenger, or Slack, meaning you're still dinking with your phone interact with messages more often than I'd like. The entertainment system also is a little dodgy when it comes to playing stuff off of USB - no support for WMA files at all, occasionally fails to recognize the USB drive (I had to reboot the system the first time I plugged in the drive before it actually scanned it for music), and resume play seems a little inconsistent. Typically, as soon as you open the door to the car, it starts playing back the song you were listening to when you left the car, at a reduced volume until you close the door, which is a nice touch. But about half or more of the time, it does nothing, and I have to finger drag to resize the audio controls at the bottom of the screen to full size, press the USB button on screen, then go to the song list and actually choose a song to get it to start playing again, i.e. pressing the play button or skip forward doesn't do anything useful, almost like it forgot what it was doing last time. It has a Spotify app, but most people have said it's not that great of a UI compared with the phone app. I'd really like a native Amazon music app so that I had better control over what I'm playing on my phone. I suspect anyone that uses iTunes or Youtube Music would want similar.

Homelink integration for garage door openers is an added-cost dealer installed option. At this price range, that shouldn't be the case.

The headlights are great, but the automatic settings for turning them on, as well as enabling the high beams are too aggressive and I'd really like a setting to control those thresholds, which is typical in most cars with auto lights. I feel like the car spends a lot of time basically flashing the high beams because it turns them on and off too aggressively in response to traffic, and there's no setting to tell it to be less aggressive in enabling them so that it can be less aggressive in disabling them when it's done so before it should have.

Rear visibility through the back glass and rearview mirror is not great, though the rearview camera can be turned on at any time, which helps to compensate. I miss the photochromic auto dimming side mirrors that I had on the Jeep, but at least the rearview mirror still does that.

I don't love the single central screen vs a more normal instrument panel in front of the driver, nor the complete lack of any hard buttons for any controls (even the rear seat heaters and the glovebox release can only be activated from the screen), but I will say that Tesla has done something really intuitive in the way that they use the steering wheel controls to avoid needing separate controls for adjusting mirrors and steering tilt/telescope. And they took a page from BMW and the turn signal stalk always returns to center immediately, so you don't have the tactile indicator that the turn signal is active, which is a little annoying, but I understand why given the interaction with Autopilot.

Also I think all the stock wheel options for this particular vehicle are ugly compared with the ones available for the Model 3, but learned that the standard ones are actually nice multispoke alloys with a plastic wheel cover, and I think they look better without the covers, so getting what's underneath painted might be the short-term solution.

Range:

Tesla claims 315 miles of range, which thanks to a recent software update to improve the efficiency of the climate system and motors has just been bumped to 325. This is the EPA test cycle, which means it's the ultimate in conservative, efficient driving, including unrealistic highway speeds, so I knew it was overly optimistic. My first road trip tells me that real world range is more like 75% of that figure, assuming no modifications to my driving style (I set the speed at ~8mph over the posted limit on the highway). Mountainous terrain and cold or hot weather affect it negatively, and traffic that reduces the speed, along with temperate weather that doesn't require the compressor to keep the cabin comfortable affect it positively. Starting from near 100% charge, I needed 2 20-30 min charging stops to do the 450 miles on the way down, including some mountains and 45 degree weather, but was able to do it in one 35 minute stop on the way back when the weather was much nicer and there were a few spots of traffic to moderate the speeds.

Charging

I bought a Tesla charger for home and ran a 60A circuit. Required a lot of heavy gauge wire since my electrical panel is on the exact opposite side of the house from my garage, but total investment for the charger and installation is well under $1000, some of which is tax-deductible. It happily charges at an indicated 48A, meaning I can charge from basically empty in under 12 hours. The car comes with an adapter to let you use any standard J1772 electric car charger to connect to Tesla's proprietary charging plug so you can use non-Tesla charging infrastructure. It also comes with with a portable charger with a regular NEMA 5-15 plug, but let me be clear here: charging at <15 Amps at 120V with a standard wall outlet is basically not worth it. It's really only useful in an emergency to give you a few miles of range to make it to a real charger, or to keep the car from losing charge when it's sitting outside on a cold night. It will take well more than 24 hours to charge the car that way, so I strongly recommend springing for the adapter set that lets you plug your portable charger into a range of other plugs, including the higher amperage 120V stuff like 5-20 as well as all of the various amperages and configurations of 240V dryer/RV/stove/welder plugs. I figure those will come in handy while visiting family and friends, either borrowing a dryer plug or having them drop a higher amperage outlet in/near the garage or driveway rather than installing a full charger.

Superchargers are Tesla's proprietary version of the DC fast charger (CCS, CHAdeMO, etc) and they are definitely a lot faster than AC charging. The work Tesla has been putting into getting their charger network bootstrapped is obvious, and makes owning a car like this and taking roadtrips much more feasible than if you're trying to string together a trip using only AC chargers, because it makes a multi-hour charging stop into a 20 minute one. It does require a change in mentality over the way you'd typically take a road trip, in that instead of filling up, driving until near empty, and filling up again, you end up stopping to charge for long enough to get to a certain percentage so that you have the range to get to the next supercharger in the line, and you might be stopping to charge before the battery is empty. This is where the trip planner in the nav system is super handy. Due to the way that the charge rate ramps down to preserve the battery once you get above 80% charge, you typically are not charging the battery completely full at every stop unless you really need the range - it is diminishing returns and significantly increases your charge time vs charging for 20 min and planning for a second charger stop. This means that on average, when you stop to charge especially if you're traveling with multiple people, by the time you all use the bathroom and get some food, the car is about ready to proceed. Worth noting that all of the Superchargers I used on the road trip I mentioned above were the first-gen models that top out at 150kW. The gen 2 superchargers and the Model Y's max charge rate are both 250kW and thus the charging stops will get shorter as those get upgraded.

Once my promotional free supercharging miles are used up, I pay $0.26/kWh to charge, which is definitely more than baseline electrical rate, but given the speed of these chargers, it's not an unreasonable convenience charge, and still works out to significantly less per trip than a comparable amount of gasoline or diesel. The Model Y has a 75 kWh battery, so even a full charge comes out to under $20, and the typical, since you're neither running it to 0% nor charging it to 100%, means it's more like $15 a charge. Even assuming more like 200 miles of range, that is still more than the 6-7 gallons of gasoline that buys would net you, so the costs are good.

I'm happy with my purchase so far. It's not without its tradeoffs, but it's worth a solid look if the combination of price range and vehicle size might fit your needs.

If this writeup helped you and you don't have any other friends with Teslas that you want to hook up, I'd be thrilled for you to use my referral code when you buy yours. It gives us both some rewards.

Replacing the Jeep: The candidates

2020-10-21T10:57:00.000-04:00

To save time, I'll just point you at the previous post I made about how I look at car shopping. There are spreadsheets of specs, and lots of test drives and reading analysis and reviews. It's a whole big thing, because I'm a huge. nerd, and a huge. car nerd.

Anyway, the goal for my Jeep Grand Cherokee replacement was something that got similar or better fuel economy, had similar interior space, both in terms of passengers and seats-up cargo capacity, still AWD, with adaptive cruise and its safety friends, preferably with a class 2 receiver hitch for my existing bike rack, and not so expensive that even after the trade-in my payments were going to be unpleasant. Diesels were Right Out this time around, which meant that to get the fuel economy I was looking for, I was looking at hybrids, mostly plug-in, as well as all-electrics. Here's the shortlist, along with why they were eliminated. A lot of the eliminations were based on published specs. The paper elimination was more aggressive than I might have been in past years because I definitely went to look at or test drive fewer options than normal due to COVID-19. Basically I only went to the Toyota and Tesla dealers, hence more words about those options.

Plug-in hybrids:

BMW x5 45e (and 40e) - 40e was fairly limited electric-only range, not a lot of them available, would have needed to go CPO. 45e was brand new and 70K.

Volvo XC60 T8 - similarly pricey, limited electric-only range, smaller than the Jeep

Ford Escape Hybrid - newly available, FWD only, probably also too small but I didn't bother checking once I saw it was FWD. I know the Explorer is also available as a hybrid, but the improvement in fuel economy didn't seem that impressive, or it wasn't going to be available, I can't remember which.

Porsche Cayenne hybrid/Audi Q5 hybrid - expensive, smaller than the Jeep, not great electric-only range

Rav4 Prime - I really wanted to like this, because apparently it's pretty quick, basically the closest Toyota gets to "performance" hybrid. The Rav has grown in this most recent generation, but not enough to compete with the Jeep. It feels like a size M, while the Jeep was a size L, and the Highlander felt borderline XL. Also the Rav wasn't actually going to be available in the Plugin Hybrid this year.

Hybrids:

Acura MDX - marginal improvement to fuel economy over non-hybrid, couldn't get the really gorgeous blue color because it was it is only available on the A-Spec, which is a sporty package you can't get with the hybrid drivetrain "because (Acura) reasons". If I'm dropping that kind of coin on a car, I damn well better be able to get the color I want.

Toyota Highlander - all new and significantly better fuel economy for 2020, albeit still not plug-in. Really nice. However, rear seat headroom is not great because of the moonroof and rear AC system impeding. I'm tall, but it's all in my legs, and when I'm sitting in the second row, my head still brushes the headliner, and there's an AC vent about 1.5" away from my forehead. I have a number of friends with a taller torso than me that would have to slouch back there. The panoramic roof helps by eliminating the space they need to put the moonroof when it's open and moving the AC vents, but is only available on the Platinum edition, which is $50K, and that makes it so you can only get it as a 7 passenger (2 captain's chairs in second row). Since the third row isn't really great for adults, I ended up being sorta ambivalent about the car as an option, it seems too large in ways that aren't helpful for my specific use case, and too small in others. I will say that the full-width and high resolution LCD screen hiding in the rearview mirror to replace the regular mirror with a live rear video feed to compensate for the relatively poor rearview is very cool.

Lexus RX450h - less cargo space than the Jeep, so-so fuel economy (the age of the underlying platform is showing, and it's due for the same powertrain refresh they gave the Highlander, or even a one-up to a plug-in version)

Electrics:

Audi E-Tron - smaller than the Jeep, expensive, unimpressive range

Jaguar iPace - see above

Ford Mach-E - smaller than the Jeep, not actually released yet.

Mercedes has delayed both their plugin-hybrid and all-electric midsize SUV until next year sometime, so those were never in the running.

Side note about range: I was aiming for something that had a claimed range that makes it possible to visit a couple of family members in one charge, meaning somewhere around 300 miles. I realize EPA range is not real world range, and that Tesla's had several years to learn both things that actually improve their range, and also how to game the system to make their range look better on paper, while most others are brand new for the year. This means that other automakers range figures are a bit of an unknown. It's entirely possible that their unimpressive range figures are much closer to real-world range rather than EPA theoretical, but it seemed like a bad idea to start with something that had a claimed range lower than my target in case their estimates proved similarly optimistic by comparison.

Pretty rapidly, I got to a point where mostly I was trying to decide whether I had to drop the money on a Tesla Model X, or if the Model Y would be big enough for me, so I went to the Tesla dealer to test drive both back to back, thus I have a slightly more in-depth review, some of which is lifted from FB posts I made about it at the time.

Tesla Model X

The Model X is definitely larger than the Model Y, which translates to a bit of additional width in the cargo area and slightly more front-to-back depth, but it really doesn't feel like a huge difference in terms of seats-up storage compared to the Model Y. It's also noticeably larger than my Jeep.

Likes:

I drove a performance version, and even without Ludicrous mode engaged, the acceleration is literally breathtaking. Sort of like those linear-induction roller coasters, or what I imagine being launched from the catapult of an aircraft carrier is like. Quoth Ned: "this is never gonna get old!" Unlike the Model Y, the turn signal stalk behaves like every other normal car on the planet, and there's a proper instrument panel in front of the driver. It has a normal-ish key fob instead of using bluetooth to your phone, which makes the security weenie in me a little nervous.

Dislikes:

A few things show this as a previous generation design when compared with the Y, like the additional stalks for the steering wheel adjustments and dedicated controls for the mirror adjustments, lack of an induction charging pad for your phone, etc. Tesla doesn't really do model year changes like most automakers, rather preferring to improve things inline as soon as they can, but you get the sense that this platform is due for a more extensive refresh based on what they learned on the Model 3 and Y beyond what they might do as an inline change for new models, such that buying one of these right now is like buying the previous generation iPhone after they announce the brand new sexy, only without the price cut on the old one that inevitably follows. However, despite this being available for enough years that a good number are available used, the combination of a fairly tight used market and the way they are holding their value means you're not getting that much of a discount even used. And further in the cars are now technology vein, you're setting yourself even further back on the curve in terms of available tech vs current state of the art, as well as potential battery aging, and that seems like a bad plan in this price range.

There are a lot of things that feel too cute by half or "your engineers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should". The doors (all of them) qualify - they're all automatic, including the driver's door opening and closing itself when you walk up to the vehicle with the key, and put your foot on the brake respectively (which admittedly you can disable). Of course I can't discuss the Model X without mentioning those gull-wing doors, which are definitely a cool look, but most of the reviews I've seen say they're pretty impractical when it comes to execution. The doors' "handles" are all buttons, and it's not immediately obvious where you press to get them to open, and even if you disable the automatic stuff, they're still soft-close, and that amount of technology for technology's sake seems prone to failure. The glass layout is different too, in that there is this giant spaceship windshield that goes way up over the heads of the front seat passengers, but as a result it has really useless sun visors, and the back passengers just get little portholes over the doors instead of the uninterrupted view that the Model Y has. The Model X is $20-25K more expensive than the Y, and that nets you more space and about 35 miles of additional range, which makes it a tough sell, especially given the price range that puts it in. I think the only way the X makes sense is if you're actually looking for a 7 passenger electric car.

Tesla Model Y

Since this is ultimately what I ended up buying, it gets the most in-depth review.

but, as Alton Brown says... That's another show. ;-)

2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee EcoDiesel long-term review

2020-10-20T19:15:00.001-04:00

I bought a 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee EcoDiesel in the summer of 2017. Drove it for a total of 3 years, approximately 40K miles, and just sold it last month. What follows is a review that I wrote after the first year and updated after having forgotten about it before I posted it, because this is going to end up being several posts, about getting and then getting rid of this, and what I replaced it with and what I think of that.

After my divorce, I found myself with 2 vehicles that were not particularly practical for day to day kid taxi and definitely not for long trips with lots of stuff, i.e. they both had back seats, but not something I'd expect the kids to use for multiple hours, and neither was exactly practical for taking lots of stuff on a trip, so I realized that I was going to have to find some sort of crossover/SUV type thing. I probably could have made due about 90% of the time with a wagon or a cute-ute, but I figured if I was getting one, especially since I was getting ready to take the trip within a month or so, I'd want something that was capable of carrying kids, bikes, and all the stuff I normally drag with me to the beach, and my original plan had been to sell the pickup, thus wanting something that could tow a trailer to carry the stuff I'd otherwise have stuck in the bed of the truck. Hybrid SUV/crossovers were a little limited, and those available were either tiny or didn't really gain much in terms of fuel economy, so I concluded I wanted a diesel, and my budget meant used, so I was basically cross-shopping the Jeep Grand Cherokee and the BMW X5d. After a string of fairly unreliable used German cars, anecdotal evidence from others, and being of the general opinion that BMW only designs cars to survive the lease period, I decided that I would try my luck with the Jeep to gain better reliability. I aimed for the 2015 because I'd heard horror stories of first-year teething issues, but generally the reviews were much better for the '15s.

I bought the Summit, specifically because I wanted the Adaptive Cruise Control, Collision Warning, etc. It’s possible to get those on lower trim packages, but fairly uncommon. Found one with about 34,000 miles on it in Arkansas, I'm suspecting a former Wal-Mart exec vehicle or someone who did traveling sales in the general vicinity due to the high miles for its age.

Likes:

The seats are comfortable, and the creature comforts are good. I can sit behind myself without feeling too cramped - a feat that was not possible in previous generations of the GC (late 90s/early 2000s), there are plenty of USB and 12V power outlets, seat heaters and steering wheel heater, etc. and a seat cooler, which is impressively useful.

This trim level gets the up level Harmon/Kardon sound system, which has a great sound, including passing the “vibrate the rearview mirror” test (First track on Outkast’s Speakerboxx) that I have been using for every car sound system since the album came out, probably better than any other vehicle I’ve owned. I like the HD radio a lot too.

The fuel economy is nothing short of amazing for a vehicle of this size and capability. My baselines are my 97 Tacoma 5-spd V6 (part-time 4WD), and my 07 911 Turbo (AWD). Both car and truck got about the same ~18 mpg on my former commute before I transitioned to full-time WFH (27 miles one way, mix of secondary and 55mph speed limit highway). The truck hasn’t been on too many highway trips, but the best it ever gets is low 20s. The 911 can get up into the 26-27 range on the highway if I’m behaving myself, and its main benefit is that the slippery shape and tall gearing means that fuel economy doesn’t fall off as rapidly toward the top end of prudent highway speed.

The Jeep averages 24mpg on my commute, and as long as the highway speed limit is 65mph or less, it’ll break 30mpg. When speeds start getting into the 75+ range because of 70mph speed limits, it’ll be more like 27-28 too. But this is a vehicle that will hold 5 people and a whole bunch of stuff, and is capable of towing more than 7000 lbs.

Couple that economy with a 23+ gallon tank, and the vehicle has a considerably larger range than its passengers do on long trips. I on more than one occasion got in the thing, drove 600+ miles on one tank, including a stint of 6 hours nonstop once and a personal best of 642 miles on a single tank with an indicated 65 miles of remaining range.

The powertrain is excellent, I rarely feel like it’s too slow even when I need to accelerate briskly, and it only noticeably sounds/feels like a diesel at startup (brief delay after pressing the start button on cold mornings while the glow plugs fire), when you’re outside of the vehicle or driving with the windows down, especially just off of idle and you get a little bit of “canal boat” clatter. I do wish that it had an auto stop/start, but I understand that comes in later model years.

The transmission is smooth, but busy given the 8 speeds. It is possible to confuse it at speeds just off of idle, because it likes to start in 2nd gear unless you have come to a full stop for a few seconds, and if you’re on an incline or something, the combination of the eco mode dampening throttle response, minor turbo lag, and the transmission being up a gear means that you might respond by dipping into the throttle too aggressively and trigger a downshift to first. It also resolutely refuses to actually take the engine to indicated redline, even in manual mode. Not that this necessarily matters in a diesel anyway, but it always feels like it’s short-shifting below the already diesel-typical 4500rpm redline under hard acceleration.

Snow traction is good - I drove back from Pittsburgh through the PA and WV mountains on 79, US-19, and I-77 in ~4-5” of snow, though I do note that the dedicated snow mode on the transmission resets every time you shut off the engine, meaning that you have to re-select it. Cold weather performance is also good - it’s a little sluggish on cold start when the weather is in the teens or below, and sounds a lot more like a diesel until it warms up, but it always fires right up. I did use an anti-gelling additive pretty religiously when the weather was in the single digits, which I’m sure helps, and having remote start in that kind of weather is also great.

The safety tech and ancillary automatic features are borderline amazing in terms of how well they actually work. The adaptive cruise control works extremely well in both heavy and light traffic, and I’m a convert. I will never buy another vehicle without it, and I have been telling other people the same thing - it is absolutely worth getting it if the option is available. I used it daily in both highway and city driving, in all sorts of conditions. It recognizes motorcycles, trailers, etc, and is very good at maintaining exactly the distance I’ve set, which is adjustable, and the combination of sensors it uses doesn’t set off the radar detector (when traveling outside of VA, of course). It's even smart enough to hold off on accelerating if it My only complaints are that it is not as smooth as a human driver, because it doesn’t “see” as far, so it will continue accelerating and then stab the brakes to match traffic speed in cases where I would have seen that there was traffic ahead and just coasted or gently braked. It also sometimes (not always) accelerates away from a stop much more slowly than I would and I have to override it to get the turbo spun up. Lastly, while it will bring the vehicle to a full stop and resume moving again if traffic is creeping along, it has a timer that cancels the cruise control after just 2 seconds of sitting stopped behind another vehicle. This is too aggressive and should be adjustable, because the amount of times I have to manually resume from a stop would drop significantly if I could set that timeout to 4 or 5 seconds.

The blind spot warning is a lot more unobtrusive than a lot of the ones I’ve seen, in that while it throws up the blind spot warning in the mirror, the audio alerts mostly leave you alone unless you have your turn signal on and it detects something directly in your blind spot. I guess if you don’t routinely use turn signals this might limit its effectiveness somewhat, but this is not a problem for me, and it’s less likely to be disabled because it doesn’t bleat at you every time you drift slightly over a line without your turn signal on. The only false positives I’ve gotten is when I am in a 2-lane turning lane, because it thinks that I’m going to be turning into the path of the cars in the adjacent turning lane, even though I’m not since the lane continues in parallel. The cross-traffic alert (warns you of a vehicle crossing your path if you’re backing out of a parking space) works very well - it often sees stuff before I do.

There is also an automated high beam system, and the best praise I can give is that the first few times I used it, every time I would be reaching for the stalk to turn my high beams on or off, it had already done it. It gets confused by lights at the roadside that look like headlights, but otherwise works quite well.

Meh:

Collision warning is a mixed bag. It has definitely saved my bacon once or twice, but it also is more prone to false alarms due to differences in closing speeds and in situations where you are going around a turning vehicle, and since it makes a loud beep and pulses the brakes, the false alarms are occasionally bothersome, especially when the adaptive cruise control is engaged and someone cuts you off, because the two systems are clearly not talking to one another - the adaptive cruise is slowing the vehicle down just fine, yet the collision warning is still screaming at you. But ultimately it's not bothersome enough to defeat the system.

There’s air suspension, which has several offroad settings to help the Jeep hike up its skirts when terrain requires it, and drops the front end by an inch or two when at highway speeds (Aero mode), plus a setting that drops the car down for ease of entry when parked. I have no doubt that the adjustable ride height improves the on-road performance without compromising off-road and heavily loaded performance. Minor complaints: Aero mode can’t be engaged manually like the other suspension settings can be. Putting the car in Sport mode enables Aero all the time, but it also disables Eco mode (makes the transmission upshift sooner and remaps the throttle response to a more conservative profile). There is a setting that has the car automatically drop to the park height when you put it in park, and then raise to drive height when you exceed 10mph, but I’ve discovered two problems with that feature that outweigh the benefit of making it easier for the kids to get in and out of the car - the reduced height of the rear hatch makes me bump my head on it when loading and unloading, and if you don’t park carefully, the car drops itself down onto parking barriers and curbs such that it’s possible to catch the bumper on those things and damage the under tray. If it raised immediately after you started the vehicle, it’d at least avoid the latter problem. Also, the higher than normal settings make the suspension really crashy over bumps and stuff, I think because it increases the pressure in the suspension and thus reduces the dampening effect of the shocks.

Dislikes:

The infotainment system is supposed to be basically state of the art, and as good as it sounds, I find it extremely frustrating. The Nav uses XM Travel Link to get traffic and other info to assist in routing, but I discovered when pitting it against the nav on my phone that it’s not nearly as smart about avoiding traffic as Google Maps. I’m guessing that it only avoids major backups, rather than Google’s typical which is to reroute you if it can save you more than 5 minutes. And generally, XM Travel link isn’t worth the subscription fee ($10/mo) once you get beyond the free period.

The phone integration is good (it can read me text messages, do canned responses, call audio quality is good), but it occasionally fails to automatically pair with my phone, and has completely lost its pairing (no paired phones in the list) at least once in the first few months that I owned it. It’s supposed to have a data connection that can act as a Wifi hotspot, but the pricing is such that I’ve never seriously considered it as an option ($9.99/Day, $19.99/Week, $49.99/Month for unlimited data). I also haven’t messed much with the app integration (Pandora, Spotify, etc) because it seems like this is kind of an afterthought. It also won't let me dictate a response to a text message without signing up for some additional services, so I end up using Google on the phone anyway.

I have two major complaints with this system. The first is the details of the user interface that make it clear that they just didn’t think through their execution quite long enough. For example - when playing any audio source, it has the usual displays on the main screen, including some of the RDS info (what song is playing, etc). But the secondary screen that you can call up on the center of the gauge cluster doesn’t carry any of that info - all it says is the frequency of what station you’re tuned to, or that you’re listening to Aux, SD card, USB, Bluetooth, etc. The secondary display is effectively useless because it doesn’t provide enough info to allow you to avoid having to look at the main display. Even on the main display, when it is playing something off of a user storage device, if the song name or artist name is longer than the number of characters it wants to display, it just truncates it, instead of scrolling. These are noticeable to me because previous vehicles had these details right, so FCA really has no excuse.

But that is a minor annoyance compared to the last issue - how it handles user files. For a number of years, I have had a big thumb drive full of MP3s that served as the primary music source. A large portion of my music collection was dumped on it, it stayed in the car all the time, and I just pressed shuffle and went about my business. But where most cars have no trouble with this, including my 2010 Microsoft based Ford, 20-30GB of MP3s (around 4000 files according to the system) totally confounds this fancy system. It doesn’t support UFS-formatted drives, meaning that the vast majority of drives are going to have to be reformatted to FAT32 before they are recognized by the system at all. But after that, it doesn’t seem to possess the memory or processing horsepower to manage the task of indexing and playing music. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t maintain a nonvolatile index of the files that it can access quickly at boot, nor does it keep track of what it has already played. It remembers what song it was playing when you shut it off, but when you start the car, there’s a significant delay before it actually resumes playing that song (with 25GB of music it’s taking 1-2 minutes), and another 30-60 seconds once the song starts before it actually has finished indexing everything such that you could even skip to the next song. Shuffle maintains no state about what it has already played. The Ford system built a shuffle order when you initially pressed it, and worked its way through that list until the end or you turned off shuffle or added new songs, where this one starts a new shuffle with the currently playing song as track 1 in the list, meaning that you hear some songs very frequently, others almost never unless you’re on a long trip with multiple hours where you don’t turn the car off. It is nearly impossible to select a specific artist/album/song to play, because the system is too slow to populate the list. 1-2 minutes to build the list after you press the button, and then if you go into a specific subdirectory and then navigate back to the full list, you’re waiting for it to build the list again. Voice control mostly works if you know exactly what you want to play, but getting back to shuffling all songs has the standard delay. I’ve tried more than one USB drive as well as switching to an SD card (it has a dedicated SD slot) in the hopes that this was due to the speed of my thumb drive, but nothing helps. It’s just a poor execution with insufficient testing.

The parking sensors are a little dumb, in that they alert me of an object in front of me despite the transmission being in reverse, and vice versa. A better execution would be to have the lights on the display tell you that it’s detecting an obstacle, but mute the beeps. Otherwise, you can’t always discern whether you need to pay attention to the beeping, which reduces its effectiveness as a warning system.

Reliability

Ok, so this seems like a pretty good trucklet, why'd you get rid of it? Well, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I'm not certain the BMW would have been the less reliable choice anymore. First, FCA got caught cheating on emissions, and I got a settlement payment and an extension of the entire diesel emissions system warranty for the price of a couple of software updates. Mostly a good thing. Generally, it was dead reliable for about the first 18 months I owned it.
But...at about the 2 year mark, it started randomly throwing check engine lights, and then clearing them right about the time I'd think to myself "you know, I probably need to get that looked at..." And finally, mid-summer it freaked out a lot worse, I got a "service electronic throttle control" message and it went into a limp mode, where you basically only get about 30% throttle at most. The dealer tried to blame the air filter that was recently changed, charged me a diagnostic fee, and sent me on my way, only to have the problem return. Total tally of trips through the dealer before they actually found and fixed the problem: 3, over the course of 1500 miles. That one, the one where they replaced the exhaust particulate filter sensor and a boost pressure/MAF sensor, and the one where they actually found the root cause, which was a split hose in the intercooler. Due to the combination of low parts availability, and the fact that my Jeep dealer had exactly 1 diesel mechanic, who was clearly a Cummins guy, this was the first stint where they had my Jeep for something approaching 30 days, including while I was supposed to be on vacation. I'll spare you the rant about the terrible Dodge Journey they gave me as a loaner.
After all of that, it kept throwing CELs periodically, and I'd take it in, and they'd blame the fuel filter, or dirty injectors. It calmed down a little bit when I swapped the fuel filter and ran 2 tanks of fuel injector cleaner through it, but earlier this year it was starting to do it again fairly regularly.
Then, on Fathers' Day this year, it was hard to start. I thought maybe the nearly 5 year old battery had just died, and so I threw it on the charger for a bit and tried again later. Eventually got it started after rather a lot of cranking, and took it on a test drive to get the battery charged. Noticed a lot of white smoke, decided I should turn around, and before I could get it all the way home, it was overheating. Had to have it towed to the dealer on suspicion of a blown head gasket, and they diagnosed it as a cracked EGR cooler that was sucking coolant into the intake. This was apparently on some major back order such that they had the thing for a month after initially telling me they might not get the parts until September (!!). They test drive it after repair, it throws a code that requires replacement of a glow plug, another couple of days delay. Then I get it back, I have it for less than 24 hours, and it throws a "service DEF system" alert and another CEL. They did get it repaired in time for me to take it to the beach, and it behaves itself for a change, but there was definitely some stress about whether that would be true or not.
My original plan had been to keep it until the end of the extended warranty (another 2 years/30K miles) and then probably sell it, with the assumption that I'd have a number of good hybrid or electric options available to replace it with. But after realizing that I no longer trusted it not to strand me somewhere while on a trip or have some failure that Jeep either couldn't diagnose right the first try, or couldn't find parts to repair in a timely manner meaning I'd lose use of it for multiple weeks, it simply wasn't worth it anymore. If this hadn't been outside the statute of limitations for VA's Lemon Law, I would have had a good case for them to buy it back from me, as it met all of the other criteria. And then right around the time when I'm starting to seriously wonder whether I should replace it, FCA announces another recall that could result in a no-start condition, and that was sort of the final nail in the coffin for it. To the point that I actually dubbed it the "NecroDiesel".
I think the reality is that the added complexity necessary to make a small diesel clean and efficient simply makes it unreliable and difficult to troubleshoot, so since I was coming up on 75K miles, I figured it'd be better to get out from under it while it still held some value. I bought it for about $35K, got a $2500 settlement from FCA for being bad at diesel, sold it to Carmax 3 years and 40K miles later for $20K, so not a bad depreciation, all told.
I ended up keeping the pickup, so I never did use the tow hitch for anything more than a bike rack, and while the Grand Cherokee itself is a pretty good vehicle, I'd never recommend the diesel they're using in these to anyone.

Dragging the Car Stereo into the 21st Century

2020-09-07T13:31:00.002-04:00

I have a 2007 911 Turbo (997.1) that had the factory sound system in it until about 2 weeks ago. The factory system (called PCM2.1) was pretty much obsolete when it came from the factory, as it came as follows:

Non-touch LCD screen with auxiliary settings for the car, slot-loading CD/DVD drive, AM/FM radio, travel band, and phone

Phone included an old GSM SIM slot, but was never activated for the US market cars at all
In-dash drive could read data CDs and DVDs and play MP3s, so you could get a whopping 4.5GB of MP3 files if you were willing to swap disks around.

Auxiliary controls on the steering wheel

The phone controls did nothing because the phone wasn't active, so all you really had was volume/mute, and a way to move through the menus without twisting the other knob on the dash. Since Porsche charged extra for the steering wheel with the controls if you ticked that box on your order, I think I would have been kinda pissed at them had they sold me the car as new with several of the buttons being wholly useless, but I digress...

DVD-based satellite navigation system mounted in the trunk (remember the bad old days of needing to periodically drop several hundred dollars to buy a new DVD for your SATNAV so that it knew where the new roads were?)
6-disc CD changer, also mounted in the trunk
Bose speakers, subwoofer, and amplifier (mounted in the trunk)
The widgets in the trunk all connected via MOST (basically TosLink-style multimode fiber using visible light LEDs) along with a power, etc connector.

So, no Bluetooth, no aux input, almost useless steering wheel controls, and completely useless SatNAV, plus the two main knobs were starting to develop that weird, sticky feeling that older rubberized plastics suffer from. It kinda sucked. And apparently there were ways to have a bluetooth unit that replaced your CD changer to supply audio that way, but it didn't tie into the mic in the car and so wouldn't have worked as a real solution.

I've had a general sense for what I wanted to do for 2 or 3 years, namely swap to a modern head unit with MP3 and Bluetooth, but hopefully keep as much of the factory audio (speakers, amp, steering wheel controls) as possible, but couldn't justify the cost. What really sealed the deal for me was that during my various adventures in owning a Jeep with an Italian made diesel engine that unfortunately perpetuates the stereotype for unreliability that plagues Italian-made cars (which is another blog post all on its own...) my service loaners let me see how Android Auto works with a modern head unit. That made it more and more obvious how much the sound system in the Porsche really didn't fit with how I use my phone and listen to music in the car. So I finally ordered everything.

Al and Ed's Autosound/Del Ray Customs did all the hard work of figuring out all of the bits I'd need to make all of this stuff work:

Crux SWRBM57 to make the steering wheel controls talk to the new head unit
NAVTV MOST HUR - converts the analog audio to digital to send to the Bose amp
Pioneer NEX 4600
Backup camera
custom wiring harness to make everything plug and play

It's not exactly perfect. You lose fader control due to the fact that the MOST box apparently doesn't implement the right protocol to tell the Bose amp what to do like the original PCM did, it just pretends to be the original head unit enough to get it to accept a stereo audio signal. I had to run a new mic and GPS antenna instead of using the ones that I know are already in the car. The latter was especially annoying since I specifically bought a head unit without standalone GPS navigation because I knew I would be using Google Maps on my phone via Android Auto, but there is literally no way to manually set the date and time, it insists on using GPS to do it. Pioneer also seems to have removed the ability to put a custom background image on the startup splash screen so I can't make it show a Porsche logo when it comes on, and the radio reception is a little dodgy, even after I had to jumper a broken wire in the premade harness leading to the FM amp power lead. Also there seems to be some vague flakiness with Android Auto, even with brand new USB-C cables, where my phone will sometimes spontaneously reboot when the car shuts off, so I'm suspecting there may be some subsequent updates to phone, head unit, or both to resolve this. Android Auto units are just now sprouting the ability to do this wirelessly via an in-unit WiFi connection, which this NEX supports but the version of Android on my phone doesn't support that yet.

There are plenty of how-tos on the in-dash part, which honestly if it weren't for the troubleshooting the radio, would have been done in about 4 hours total. However, part of this overall job for me is to pull the CD changer and DVD SATNAV that are now taking up precious cargo space and being generally dead weight in the front of my car, and there were a lot fewer instructions on that part. I cruised around on a lot of forum posts before I got complete enough info to feel comfortable tackling this, so I thought it might be useful to summarize it here.

The plastic shrouds over both systems are friction fit, and you have to wedge a putty knife or trim tool between the floor of the car and the bottom of each to give you some leverage, and each comes straight up and off of the clips it's attached to. You may also want to pull the fuse feeding the stereo or disconnect your battery while doing this. I managed to somehow blow the fuse while disconnecting this stuff and then couldn't figure out why my radio wouldn't come on even with the MOST bypass in place.

The CD changer has a bracket with 3 10mm nuts, one in the front, which is visible as soon as you pull the cover off, and two in the back, hidden behind the carpet...and the damn Bose amp. In other words, you will have to remove the Bose amp temporarily to get at those two screws. There is a metal clip at the top that you use a screwdriver to pry upward, and then the amp slides out of its slot. CD changer has a power connector and a MOST connector, both of which have clips to press to get them out. Then you reinstall the amp by sliding it back down into place and using 2 screwdrivers to pry both sides of the clip back up so that it clicks down over the amp again.

The DVD drive for the SATNAV is to the right of the Bose amp. It has a power connection, a MOST connection, and a GPS antenna. I never could get the clip pressed on the GPS antenna and ended up breaking the little plastic locking clip to get it loose because it's totally blind up under the bottom of the DVD bracket and you don't have enough slack to remove the DVD without disconnecting it. There are two little pink levers you have to press on the sides of the drive up near the DVD slot to actually slide it out of the bracket, and then the bracket itself has 3 metal clips that get pried upward to release it from the bulkhead.

You need two of these female MOST loopback plugs, because MOST is a ring, and disconnecting either will break the ring and you won't have audio anymore.

This will leave you with a carpet that doesn't cover the entire trunk floor, because it had a cutout for the CD changer and amp/DVD areas, and one area of bare metal where the DVD drive's bracket was. I don't care all that much so I'm not ordering the alternate carpet, and the only way to address the metal is by replacing the entire back plastic trim, which I don't think is worth the $250 it looks like it costs. However, I am ordering the alternate cover that fits over just the Bose amp, so that it gets some protection from stuff in the trunk and the elements and such, while still giving me back the space to use for cargo. The part number is 997.551.108 and it's called a booster cover. I don't know if that's because of a dodgy German translation of "amplifier" or if in some versions of the 997 there is actually a brake booster in there or something, but it took some head scratching looking at the parts diagrams to confirm that was the correct part.

The backup camera wire goes along the passenger side door sill trim and into the back seat, and there is a panel below the back window that you pull off to access a hole that has a grommet that goes into the engine compartment, to another grommet that goes through the body to the hole the right taillight assembly sits in, which will let you fish it through an opening in the bumper to get to the license plate light hole. Apparently the way to do this is to go from the back using a 48" heavy duty zip tie covered in WD-40, and then tape the wire to it once it surfaces in the interior to pull the wire back through. I have poked around but haven't attempted this exact method yet. There are videos, but they aren't especially clear on the method for fishing the wire as much as the path, so I was unsuccessful on my first attempt and asked for clarification, resulting in the above.

All in all, I ended up with a much better system, and something in the neighborhood of a 13 pound weight loss, some new space in the trunk, and maybe if I get lucky I can unload some or all of the old system on eBay to defray the cost of the new one, though I can't see much use for going to the trouble of replacing a faulty part in an otherwise obsolete system rather than simply using it as an excuse to upgrade.

Computer Hardware Juggling for fun (but not profit)

2019-12-18T22:54:00.001-05:00

Any self-respecting computer nerd has a pile of various castoff bits of computer hardware and cables, saved because "you never know when you might need it for something..."

This a story from mine.

First, backstory:
In late 2008, I built my mom a budget computer (bought motherboard, cpu, memory, etc. and assembled it myself). It originally went into an old full ATX case that itself was something I had on hand from when I built my then girlfriend, now ex-wife a computer in college.
In 2010, I built my first file server from an old computer I got from my in-laws.
In 2011, I bought my current PC and did another round of hand-me-down shuffling, resulting in the innards from my mom's computer going into a smaller case, with a reused hard drive so as to upgrade from XP to 7 (during which I discovered that Windows 7 doesn't care if you move a functional hard drive with the OS already installed on it to a completely different system) and my frankenserver (now using a newer CPU/Motherboard/RAM from my recently retired desktop) went into the full ATX case, for which I had to use some spare fans from my pile to make enough airflow to get it happy.
In 2013, frankenserver died (capacitors on the motherboard) and I bought an actual new server for it, and stripped the old one for parts, including a lot of fans and cabling for such.
One of those fans and a heatsink from an abandoned PCI card (fakeraid or GigE, don't remember which) was pressed into service to keep my ODroid cool when it became clear it couldn't deal with ambient cooling inside its case at full load. A 12v 30MM fan is a lot less annoying when you're only driving it with +5vDC off of the GPIO pins of a Pi clone.
A couple of years ago, my mom replaced her computer, and so the old one came back to me. I realized that as old as it was, it was a better CPU and more memory than the (castoff) Atom netbooks the kids had been playing with, so I grabbed the old SSD out of the netbook (running windows 10) and slapped it into that to make them a desktop. It's still impressive to me that Windows 10 is perfectly content to run on what was fairly low-end hardware 12 years ago, and how much of a difference an SSD makes in terms of day to day performance on a box like that. But there was basically no driver for the ancient on-board Nvidia chipset and Java wouldn't recognize graphics, so I needed a different video card. A friend from work gave me an AMD Radeon R9 200 he wasn't using, that made Minecraft work, but was seriously bottlenecked by the CPU, PCIe 1.0, and probably wasting a lot of power in the process.

That brings us to today. The kids have been complaining about the slowness of the current box in terms of its ability to do more than play Minecraft and Youtube, and it was getting laggy even for that, so I decided part of their Christmas gift this year would be an upgrade. Bought myself a new PC with intent to hand them my old one, with the graphics card from the old box. I went from a 2nd-gen Intel i7 to a 9th gen, but because it was a Cyber Monday door buster there was no configuring it, and I elected to not pay Dell's premium for a different box with more memory and a relatively small SSD, so I ended up with only 8GB of RAM and a 1TB spinning rust drive + 16GB of Optane (aka tiny, fast NVME SSD as cache). Got the computer Friday, booted it, realized that I'm utterly spoiled by the SSD in my current machine, because it felt slower than the current, much older box, ordered an SSD and the other 8GB of RAM the same day. Side note: 1TB Samsung Evo 860 is flirting with $100, which boggles my mind.

Meanwhile, the 11 year old box that's aging out of my fleet found a new home, so I grabbed a video card (Nvidia Geforce 9500 GS) I'd rescued from another actually, for real dead (fried CPU) box my ex-father-in-law gave me and set to getting that working, since it's still lightyears ahead of the onboard video. Many bluescreens were the result. Unsurprisingly, Windows gets a little cranky when you yank an AMD video card and install an Nvidia without first uninstalling all the AMD software and drivers. Finally got drivers and such wrangled, which involved safe mode in Windows, and was still getting bluescreens, albeit less frequently. Discover that the fan in the video card seemed to not be spinning, figured maybe bluescreens were because of overheating. Rummaged in my pile-o-parts for a fan and rigged something up to serve as a card fan. I'm simultaneously proud and ashamed to admit it involved zip ties and an 80mm fan. Happened to have a cable on hand to split the single case fan power terminal to drive both fans. Finally got the box happy after a complete reset (what Win10 now calls a clean install) of Windows and a video driver update.

SSD and memory for the new box arrived first thing Sunday, so I set to installing it so that I could clone the existing drive over. Turns out that Dell got cute with their power supply and there are no SATA power cables from the power supply itself. There are two 6-pin female PCIe connectors on the motherboard labeled for SATA power, and only one is being used. The optical drive has some other connector (it looks like they used a slimline), so I couldn't steal that, meaning that I had to temporarily use a SATA splitter I had on hand to power both drives long enough to clone them. Long term plan is to move the 1TB disk to the kids' box to replace the 400GB drive that is original to the computer, but I need to hang onto it long enough to confirm that the new Dell doesn't have any sudden hardware failures and need to be sent back, so it'll sit for a bit first. Protip: If you have a box with Optane, make sure to disable it before you go cloning the hard drive. If you don't, the Optane disk will disappear when you swap to the new drive, and you'll have to swap back, disable Optane, then swap again so you can re-enable.

Now for moving the Radeon to the kids' new box. I had forgotten that the Radeon needs 2 6-pin PCIe power cables to run. In the last box, that required a Molex to 6-pin adapter because the power supply only had one. I figured I'd just move that over. Except... in this box, (with apologies to Ghostbusters) there is no Molex, only SATA. I have Molex to SATA power cables in the pile-o-parts from my old frankenserver, but they're for powering SATA devices off of Molex, not the other way around, so wrong gender. So I had to wait on a SATA to 6-pin adapter (the opposite of what I would have needed above), which fortunately was $6 and ships free one day from everyone's favorite rainforest retailer. Also convenient that I had a SATA power splitter/extension on hand, as there aren't that many SATA cables in the right place for this. Fast forward a bit, cable arrives. Install card, plug everything in, and... nothing. Powers up, but won't boot. I figure maybe the OEM Dell power supply, which tends to be sized for exactly what it leaves the factory with and little margin for upgrades, is too anemic, and got to swapping it for the 500W power supply in the box that's aging out, since it no longer needs anything that burly. Which conveniently means I now have plenty of Molex to power the video card and didn't need that cable after all, so into the spares bin it goes. That one also has very few SATA power and lots of Molex, so in go the Molex to SATA power adapters. And the old box's IDE/Molex CD-RW gets swapped for a SATA one so that I don't have to worry about powering Molex stuff with the SATA-only power supply from the Dell (which is incidentally now in a Gateway-branded case).
Power supplies juggled, power up... still nothing. Argh. Research and picking a few friends' brains leads me to discover that I'm doubly on the wrong side of the transition between legacy BIOS and UEFI. I have a computer with legacy BIOS that is dependent on a very specific video mode in order to boot, and a video card that requires UEFI and does not support the required mode. Nevermind the fact that the same card worked in a legacy-BIOS MSI motherboard that is 3 years older. Dell cheaped out on compatibility in some way, and Gigabyte cheaped out on their card being dual-mode, unlike some other variants of that AMD card. So I put the call out on BookFace for assistance and effectively raided someone else's spare parts bin for another video card (GTX 660) and tried again, and that worked just fine, other than being a very tight fit between the back of the case and the hard drive cage.

My son (10) is on a kick watching Linus Tech Tips on youtube, and was asking me why I didn't just build my new PC from parts like they do. My answer was that for what I need, I usually can't touch the price and convenience of "Dude, you're gettin' a Dell!" -- and also this exact hardware integration debacle, while an interesting challenge, ate an awful lot of my time that I'd frankly rather pay someone else to deal with at this point in my life. But I'll happily help him build his next PC if that's something he wants to do together.

Tinder is terrible, but not for the reason you think

2019-09-27T00:31:00.000-04:00

I'm ~2 years post divorce. That's not for sympathy, in this context, that only serves to set up the fact that I recently decided that I should start taking some sort of action to get back into dating. Since it's been two decades since I last was in the dating pool, I'm basically starting over from scratch, and honestly, dating as an adult in a major city is almost completely different from the closely packed social scene that is college anyway. So, Tinder seemed like as good a place as any to start. Low commitment in terms of the effort to put together a profile and get to a point where you can potentially meet people (i.e. no huge questionnaire), and I figured it would be ok if I had some missteps where I am awkward, and "not looking for anything serious right now" would be ok, as would something more.

Turns out, the idea might still be right, but the platform is really, really not. I went from signing up to deleting my account in 3 weeks.

While there are other reasons related to the actual framework it provides for human interaction that make Tinder terrible for exactly the reasons you might think, the primary reason I left is that Tinder, the app itself, is awful, and it leads to a terrible user experience. And as the geek I am, I thought there might be some value in writing that up, even though it means having to admit to any readers (all...both of you?) that I was using Tinder in the first place.
I come away from this experience feeling like I've wasted a pretty phenomenal amount of time in the last 3 weeks or so, and wanting to bail on the app that quickly is probably the opposite of what Tinder is going for, since they make their money by showing you ads and getting you to pay for additional tiers of service. Here's a few brief points about why:

Navigation and interaction: Pretty much everyone is familiar with Tinder's basic UI at this point as it's entered pop culture - swipe left for no, right for yes. You can also press a heart button or an X if you prefer. But there's a bunch of other stuff overloaded on that basic interaction that makes it counter-intuitive and frustrating.

On the main screen (the one that each new profile defaults to), which is just the picture, work/education, and distance, you can tap on the left or right side of the screen to go back and forth between the pictures, swiping left and right is no and yes for the profile itself, and swiping up is a super-like. Based on the number of people who make a point to note that super-likes are always an accident in their bio, that last bit is something that confuses nearly everyone, and seems to have no actual value for its intended purpose. Want to scroll down a bit to read the rest of the bio that happens to be truncated on this screen? Don't swipe up like you do everywhere else, oops congratulations you just super-liked that person, and there's no way to undo it unless you want to upgrade to a paid tier.
In the detailed profile where you can actually see what they've written in their bio, swipe left and right scrolls between the pictures, and swipe up/down scrolls the screen just like every other app on the planet. But here, you cannot swipe right/left for yes/no on the profile, only use the buttons. So you have two completely different modes of interaction, that you are rapidly switching between and must keep that context handy as you switch. What could possibly go wrong?

Upsells - Tinder really, really wants you to pay for service, and they are busily making the free tier less and less attractive. The problem is that in the process, they're making their platform less attractive and reducing the perceived value of upgrading. Tinder already feels a bit like a ghost town for a number of different reasons, and limiting access just makes that feel worse because it takes longer for matches to surface. Add in effectively accentuating the bad UI so that they can sell you features that compensate for it like undos, and it becomes pretty disillusioning.
Silent failures. Ever get lost, and realize that you've gone in a circle because you start recognizing landmarks? No fewer than six times (aka, at least twice a week), I had the same thing happen on Tinder. "I recognize that girl - I already swiped {left/right} on her." Turns out for reasons that I can't be bothered to troubleshoot, Tinder doesn't always register your swipes, even though the app moves on to the next person as if it did, rather than throwing any sort of error. And it's fairly common, because there's an entry in the FAQ about it that suggests switching from WiFi to cellular data or vice versa, or logging out and logging back in to your account, which means they can't be bothered to troubleshoot it either, but clearly there's some serious fragility in the way that they deal with network connectivity issues. The latter fixed it for me, but since there's no way to know that it is broken, you don't know that you need to do something to fix it. You can swipe and swipe and swipe and swipe, and your only clue there might be an issue is that you start seeing repeats, or you realize that you haven't hit your yes quota (common belief is you get about 50 right swipes per day as a guy) in the typical amount of time. How's it feel to literally waste an hour swiping when you're already wondering about the usefulness of the app and platform due to low numbers of matches for time spent?
Brand confusion: Tinder has two different types of people on it - those still using it as a way to find no-strings hookups, and those using it as a more traditional dating app to meet people for something more serious. Those two types are at complete cross purposes as far as the interaction with the platform.

Tinder only lets you filter your candidates on age range and distance from you. But it does not indicate whether people matching your distance range are there temporarily. It also has a paid feature called "passport" that allows a user to change their location and get a head start on finding matches wherever they're going to be soon. But this means that people who have limited the location so that they only see local people get a bunch of profiles for people who don't live anywhere near them, and that fact may or may not be obvious from the profile, meaning you have to watch carefully for the "nn miles away" to be higher than expected, or to notice that the "lives in" location doesn't sound familiar, or or catch a keyword in the bio. Miss it, and you may "waste" one of your limited daily right swipes on someone who is nowhere near you.
The inability to identify and filter which type of Tinder user you are means that everyone tries to filter by saying things in their bio, which still gets ignored, and leads to a situation where (as far as I can tell) women get inundated with messages from the wrong type of guy, and the resulting noise means they don't see messages from users that they might actually be interested in.

Opaque algorithm - no one really has any idea how Tinder decides what profiles to show you in what order. One would hope that perhaps it would show you profiles that have already liked you, followed by profiles that have been active recently, so that you're not seeing a bunch of people who have mostly abandoned their profiles or only check them once every 2 weeks and increase the chances of both matches and the subsequent chat interaction between matches. But I think that's probably optimistic and not really backed up by my experiences on the platform and their efforts to sell you access to those that liked you. There also seems to be no weighting given to completeness of profile, so you constantly see profiles that have no bio, only one picture or images that even a very rudimentary image processor could tell is not a person, super low-quality images, or repeated images. An app that lives and dies by the visual doesn't seem to put much effort into that aspect of things.

I'll readily admit that some of this might be that I was somehow fundamentally "doin' it wrong" on Tinder, and that was more to blame for the fact that after 3 weeks of being on the site daily, I had 3 matches to show for it, 1 of which unmatched me a day after I messaged, the other two never responded to my initial message. I get it; I'm a 41 year old divorcee with 2 kids on an app for twentysomethings, but I think I would have been more willing to tolerate the issues with the app if it led to some level of success. Because it didn't, it just added insult to injury.

Engineers and complexity, a cautionary tale

2019-07-14T23:24:00.001-04:00

This is a story about overly complex engineering, subsection: German, sub-subsection: sports cars.

As they eventually do, the battery died in my 911 (997.1) sometime in the last couple of weeks. Not just too weak to start the car - stone dead, no interior lights, nichts. I've had the car for >5 years, and I suspect the battery wasn't new when I got it, so it was due, and the car was in my garage, so it's not like it stranded me or anything. But there's still the matter of the battery replacement to deal with. And that, my friends, is a funny story.

As you may be aware, the 911 is a rear-engine vehicle, but the battery is still up front, in the "frunk".

The battery is under that Porsche logo near the windshield washers

Because it's a trunk, and not a hood, it has an electric release, so that it can be opened via a button on the key from outside of the car in addition to the switch in the driver's door sill.

Betcha you can guess where this is going... Surely the brilliant engineering minds at Porsche wouldn't leave you with no way open the trunk to access a dead battery? Of course not, but being Germans, and fans of both demonstrating their own engineering prowess and overly complex solutions to relatively simple problems, Porsche forgoes the Occam's Razor solution of an auxiliary cable-actuated release somewhere in the car. Well, that's not entirely true - there's apparently one for if you're really stuck, like if the electric release actuator fails, but it requires jacking up the car (remember, jack and wrench are in the trunk you can't get into), and removing the left front wheel and inner fender liner. Also there is an electric release for the engine cover hatch, so there's no point in putting an auxiliary set of terminals back there for jump starting the way some cars with the battery in a weird location have. I suppose in theory you could try to backfeed through one of the cigarette lighters, but those have fairly weak fuses (I've blown them more than once using the factory-supplied 12V air compressor for longer than a few minutes, so I'm not sure.

No, Porsche has an "ingenious solution" to this problem. And there is a procedure which must be followed, that you are completely familiar with because you've carefully read and understood your entire operator's manual, ja?

Owners Manual

Assuming that you are starting with a locked car:

Manually unlock the driver's door with the key.
Locate and remove the access cover for the fuse panel in the driver's footwell. (No interior lights means it's going to be dark under the dash, have fun with that.)
Locate a red plastic bit with a picture of a car with the hood up in the upper right corner of the fuse panel (i.e. the part furthest away from the door). It will be pushed in far enough that you can't actually grab it with your fingers, so use the small metal tool attached to the back of the fuse panel cover to catch and pull this plastic bit so that it sticks out of the fuse panel.
Source a set of jumper cables and what Porsche's manual refers to as a "donor battery". Yes, it can be attached to another vehicle, but the manual has pictures of it just being a spare battery you happen to have lying around.
Connect the positive jumper cable to the now-exposed metal contacts on the red bit in the fuse panel.
Connect the negative jumper cable to the door latch. Note that because you opened the car without disarming the alarm via the keyless entry, the alarm will immediately sound. So you're going to be rooting around under the dashboard of a Porsche, while the alarm goes off. Nope, not trying to steal the car, honest!
Pressing the trunk release button on the key will disable and silence the alarm, and open the trunk, after which you can disconnect the cables and access the battery as needed.

Other important notes: This does not provide enough power to jump start the car, nor will it run anything else in the electrical system. It is only to power the modules that run the keyless entry RF receiver and the trunk actuator. I know this because I tried 3 or 4 times to open the trunk via the switch right next to me in the driver's door sill, which does not work. Additionally, the ignition switch in these cars is all electronic. When you turn the key to any position, it returns to the original position once you release it, so there is a mechanical catch that keeps you from removing the key when the ignition is on. When the battery is dead, it fails closed, so if you insert the key and turn it without realizing the battery is dead like I did today, it latches on your key but does not have any power to release, meaning your key is now stuck in the ignition (though it did release my key when I applied power to the terminals for the third time). When the key is in the ignition, the buttons on the key don't seem to work, so I had to go get my other key to actually open the trunk.

That red bit hiding under the 404 on the top right is what you're looking for

So now we have access to the battery, but there's still some fun to be had. The battery is in the very center of the car, and the ~~hood~~ trunk opens toward the windshield, meaning that even with the hood open, there's not a lot of clearance near where the battery is.

still a long reach from the side

Faced with several equally bad options for how to remove the 53 lb (~25 kg) battery by myself, I ended up standing in the trunk, still bent over to avoid smacking my head against the hood, but much closer to the battery and thus with a much shorter lever length than if I'd tried to do it from either side or the front of the car. I ended up basically deadlifting it like a kettlebell since it had a set of handles in the center. Installation is, as Chiltons is fond of saying, the reverse of removal, and thus equally awkward. I'm also not sure that there is any particularly easy way to do this as a team lift either. A friend joked that there's probably some $3000 Porsche tool to make this process easier. It's a wonder I didn't hurt my back.

If there's any moral to this story, it's a cautionary tale on dismissing the simplest solution, and it's based on some experiences I've had troubleshooting networking and computer issues, where my predecessors or vendors were enamored with solutions that were too cute by half because it showed how smart they were, and basically failed the 2AM test*, or violated the principle of least astonishment, or both.

*The 2AM test is a test of complexity and ease of understanding: simply, whether you, as someone who didn't design it originally, can figure out the problem and fix it when it wakes you up out of a good dream at 2AM because it's broken.

Adventures in non-Raspberry flavored cheap SoC boards

2019-06-14T17:59:00.002-04:00

I was recently looking for a replacement for my old Odroid C1, which was serving as my local DNS server, but has basically become orphaned, because all of the Linux distributions I’m aware of for it, including Hardkernel’s official ones, are based on Debian Jesse, which is rapidly approaching EOL and already has had some of its package repos deprecated so updates are thin and the writing appears to be on the wall. My preferred distro was dietpi, but after cruising their forums a little, I found one where they said “we would roll a Stretch based image, but the one guy who has a C1 can’t find it” which made me realize that depending on that is setting myself up for failure at some point in the future anyway. Plus the maintainers of dietpi have irritated me twice now by first forcing an upgrade between versions via wipe and reimage about a year ago, and then inducing some bug that breaks my networking every time I do an upgrade in-place via their update mechanism (likely because they weren’t actively regression testing with my specific flavor of OS and hardware) which has resulted in me being stuck on the current version unless I do a clean install (again) because the upgrade now also fails due to the aforementioned expired repos.

A regular, current-gen Raspberry Pi is sort of the default answer here, because none of these support issues are a concern, but the fact that there is still no 64-bit version of Raspbian for the ARM64 (v8 and later) based machines, and the answers on most other pi-friendly distros sound a little too much like “compile your own” for my taste, I went looking at alternatives. Stumbled across the Atomic Pi not too long ago. Same basic price point as a Pi, but with a quad core Intel Atom and real (not USB2) Ethernet, plus built-in eMMC storage for the OS. Seems like pretty good news.

The slightly less good news is that it’s a different form factor than a Pi, so this isn’t exactly a direct drop-in alternative for whatever pi-based project you were planning.

Atomic Pi as shipped, with a RPi 2 in a case for size comparison

It’s also simultaneously more and less novice-friendly. More, in that it comes preloaded with an OS (Ubuntu 18.04 desktop) such that plugging it in will produce a functional computer right away without needing to buy storage and burn an image onto it. Less, because… well, about that whole “plug it in” part:

It has no typical onboard power interface. No micro-USB, no DC barrel connector. You need to feed it regulated 5vDC @3A, so in theory you could wire up something to use a micro-USB or USB-C wall wart charger but you’d have to include the right bits to convince the charger that it shouldn’t default to the 500mA that is USB’s failsafe output for things it can’t negotiate charge rates with. The options available are to buy and use the full breakout board, which has a molex (old-style hard drive power) connector on it, or the mini breakout board, which only exists to serve as a physical adapter to connect to the GPIO socket so you can plug in a DC barrel connector. The first seems less than optimal unless you already have a spare computer power supply laying around, and it’s not likely to be very efficient as a means to power something that small. Maybe if you want to power multiple Atomic Pis with one bench power supply that makes more sense. Otherwise I suppose maybe they expect you to just use a spare connector from another nearby computer and be ok with the dependency on the other machine? Or you can do what I did, and buy a set of jumper wires with male to male dupont connectors and a wall wart that includes a barrel connector with screw terminals. The instructions tell you to use 2 pins for each of positive and negative to ensure you don’t overdo the current draw on the tiny wiring.

Atomic Pi with dupont connectors and barrel connector for power

Also there is a serial port, but it requires wiring to a UART on the board unless you buy the full breakout board. https://www.digital-loggers.com/api_faqs.html#SerialPassword

The only case options I’m aware of are in the form of something you need to 3D print yourself, and because of the dupont pins, which connect on the bottom and stick straight out a good ½” from there, it has to hang off the edge of whatever it’s sitting on, so I suspect even the case design the manufacturer is providing will require modification. Haven’t spent the time yet to investigate this since it’s going to live in my utility room and doesn’t really need a case at the moment anyway.

close-up of dupont connectors on bottom

Initial boot does look for PXE, both IPv4 and IPv6, so I suspect the best bet is to bootstrap it headlessly is via PXE and push config to it directly.

Initial access if you’re not doing PXE requires keyboard and mouse (and there’s only one USB port, so you need a hub too) and HDMI. Login splash screen defaults to user atomicpi, but the password is unique per device, so you can’t just figure out what IP it got in DHCP and ssh directly in. The password is displayed in a box next to the login. Type it in and you get presented with typical Ubuntu desktop.

The instructions they supply don’t tell you to write the password down, but you really want to if you want to do anything that requires sudo. I had to log out and back in to get it. It’s apparently stored in a file somewhere, but I can’t remember which one (It triggered a “hey what should I do” prompt in apt-get upgrade because it wanted to overwrite the file with the stock maintainer’s version for some package. Also I was having trouble doing anything in the GUI that required sudo auth, because it kept asking for root, and wouldn’t accept the atomicpi user’s password, nor would it let you change the user it was authenticating. Sudo worked just fine with the atomicpi user's password from CLI.

The preinstalled version of Ubuntu has docker running by default, but didn’t have traceroute, dnsutils, or fail2ban preinstalled, so part of your hardening includes throwing the necessary switches to disable docker if you’re not using it for your application. Since this is Ubuntu desktop and not server, it's also missing netplan, the new hotness for configuring IPs, meaning you're still (for now) editing /etc/network/interfaces like you'd expect to, and I threw the necessary switch to tell linux not to rename eth0 to something stupid.

Also I am starting to suspect that it doesn’t like having the HDMI cable unplugged and replugged, because while temps were fine and it has been otherwise stable, I have managed to get it to lock completely up on me twice when trying to switch back to the desktop by switching HDMI cables on the back of my monitor that only has one HDMI input.

Network performance:

Iperf3 shows 770mbps throughput between local servers on the same LAN, so the GE is pretty stout for a SoC system like this, though I was expecting a little closer to linerate than that.

Disk performance:

pi@rpi3b+:~ $ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/mmcblk0 (technically a Samsung Evo 32G microSD MB-ME32GA/AM, claimed 95MB/s)

/dev/mmcblk0:

Timing cached reads: 1408 MB in 2.00 seconds = 704.05 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 68 MB in 3.02 seconds = 22.48 MB/sec

atomicpi@atomicpi:~$ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/mmcblk0

(built-in eMMC)
/dev/mmcblk0:

Timing cached reads: 2116 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1059.33 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 466 MB in 3.01 seconds = 154.90 MB/sec

Temperature:

With all 4 cores at 100% the temp hovers at 57-59°C on each core using only ambient air cooling via the heatsink at typical room temp (72°F).

Amusingly, putting the device under an exhaust fan from another (fairly lightly loaded) device such that there’s warmer than room temperature air moving across the very large heat sink drops the temps under load by almost 15°C. Appears that there’s a good bit of cooling capacity available if you wanted to put this in a slightly less temperature controlled environment without it throttling, especially if you’re willing to add a fan, though there are no mounts on the heatsink for a fan, so chances are you'd have to design the case with that in mind.

My typical CPU benchmark is the distributed.net client, running rc5. Been running it on various computers since I was in college, so I have lots of comparisons available.

The rate on this box is 15.09 Mkeys/sec. Intel is being weird about TDP and quoting “SDP”, but it appears like TDP might be 4W, which appears to mean that it’s roughly equivalent in raw numeric horsepower to a 14 year old AMD, but at less than 1/10th the power draw.

By comparison, here are some other boxes in the fleet:

ODroid C1 Amlogic S805 quad core, ca 2015, 8.6 Mkeys/sec (32 bit mode)
Pi3b+ (Cortex-A53 quad core), 9.4 Mkeys/sec (32 bit mode)

Pi4b (Cortex-A72 quad core), 11 Mkeys/sec (32 bit mode)
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800, 2 core ca. 2005, 110W TDP, 17 Mkeys/sec
Nvidia Geforce 9500, ca 2008, 50W TDP, 20 Mkeys/sec
Intel i7-2600 4 core + HT, ca 2011, 95W TDP, 44 Mkeys/sec
Intel i7-8750 6 core + HT, 45W TDP 303 Mkeys/sec
Intel i7-9600 8 core, no HT, 65W TDP, 87 Mkeys/sec
Intel UHD Graphics 630, 96 Mkeys/sec - yes, Intel has implemented OpenCL on their on-chip GPU such that it can now run the client and this is a simultaneous number with the above i7.
Nvidia GTX 660, 130W TDP, ca. 2012, 450 Mkeys/sec
Nvidia GTX 1050Ti, 75W TDP, ca. 2016, 1.6 Gkeys/sec
AMD R9 270, 150W TDP, ca. 2013, 2 Gkeys/sec (!!)

LED Retrofit for Lightolier Recessed Cans

2016-09-03T19:37:00.003-04:00

My house has lots of recessed lighting (30+ cans). I replaced the halogens with CFLs when we moved in, but as those are starting to wear out, I wanted to transition to LED for many reasons, most notably, the instant-on is a real improvement over the CFLs. (When CFLs are upside-down like they are in a recessed can, the mercury collects near the top of the bulb and takes longer to vaporize since it's so much further from the anode and cathode).
They sell a number of different recessed LED retrofit kits that are intended to replace the existing trim around the bulb for a cleaner look. However, most of these are intended for use with the most common style of recessed light where the metal trim is a two-piece setup, and you remove the bottom part of the trim that forms the clean meeting with the rough drywall hole, and the rest of the socket stays up in the hole. (Example) Thus most of the retrofit kits have spring-loaded arms intended to catch on the rough can behind the trim, and typically have a loose wire connected to the E26 bit that threads into the socket to provide power, but not actually support the weight of the LED and driver.

As you may be able to guess since I'm writing this post, my recessed lights are different, and this style really won't work. I have Lightolier Lytecasters, which have a socket that connects directly to the reflector, which is all one piece and friction fits into the ceiling to form the external trim. This is the 1170, with an 1103 socket.

I was pretty sure that I had no option other than the regular screw-in LED bulbs (they look exactly like the BR30s they replace), but when I tried those, I had mixed success. The reason for this is that LEDs do generate some heat, and in a recessed ceiling fixture, the heat pools up near the socket, which happens to also be near the driver circuitry that converts AC to DC. Overheating the driver circuit is the most common cause of premature LED failure (all it takes is one questionable solder joint on the circuit board), and I just had one die the other day. The retrofit bulbs seem to be a little more resistant to that problem because they're in direct contact with the metal of the can, so the entire fixture becomes a heat sink.

A co-worker handed me a set of Cree CR6 retrofits that he had sitting in storage (wrong color temperature), and because the socket is part of the bulb still, I was cautiously optimistic.

I stumbled across this and this that implied it should work, so I confirmed that they do, and I thought that it might be useful to document it briefly.

You have to remove the internal plastic trim piece to make room for the bulb. It twists and pulls out.

It isn't a perfect fit, even with the plastic trim piece removed, because the metal spring ears that hold the socket and the canister together hit the top of the bulb, near the grey ridged part. I ended up using some pliers to bend the ears of the spring out so that they didn't contact the bulb anymore. Top shots are before, bottom are after. It may be necessary to fiddle a bit with the interaction between the socket and the can to get the bulb flush with the can, but it should be doable, and these bulbs almost completely cover the can's trim.

I now have 5 of these installed, and they seem happy, though time will be the only way to see if they last longer. There is also a smaller housing (1071) that is installed in some of the places in my house. The 1071 doesn't have the internal trim to remove like the 1170 and is only a little larger than a standard BR30. I don't think that the CR6s will fit in those without clipping off the metal legs, but may try a different form of retrofit the next time I have a CFL fail.

Sandbridge and other Beaches

2014-07-19T09:45:00.001-04:00

The family and I recently got back from a week at the Beach, and since we went somewhere new this year it occurred to me that I now have some potentially useful comparison between different beaches that we've visited.

This was our first trip to Sandbridge. We've gone to Avalon (Jersey Shore) in the past, and most recently we've been going to Ocean Isle, NC.

Avalon, Stone Harbor, etc. is similar in terms of drive time (it's about 5 hours away the way we go), and has the benefit of being able to take the Cape May-Lewes Ferry and the Chesapeake Bay bridge to minimize the amount of driving on 95 and in NJ, but it's expensive (and a little snooty) due to the fact that it's easily reachable by those from the NYC metro and it's less crazy than Wildwood. It also requires you to buy beach tags for each person (basically a daily/weekly direct beach access tax), and the water tends to be fairly cold. The proximity to Wildwood's boardwalk is nice, and everyone should visit Wildwood at least once. Between the old 50's-style motels along the beach and the real-deal boardwalk and the people watching, it's so awesomely... Jersey. It's also fairly close to Atlantic City, if gambling is your thing. It's also close to a lot of great restaurants, especially good family-owned Italian, etc. and a lot of stuff is in walking distance, which is nice. My wife reminded me that the car watching can be pretty interesting too. Our last visit here was in 2006. My wife's family used to go here fairly often because they have family in the area, but in 06 we were able to visit here and Ocean Isle back to back (wife's first visit to Ocean Isle) and she decided she liked Ocean Isle way better, convinced her family to join us there the next time we went to the beach, especially once she found that we could get a similarly sized place on first or second row at Ocean Isle for what it costs to get a place 4 blocks from the beach in Avalon.

Ocean Isle is a little spit of land on the southern tip of NC between the Intra-Coastal Waterway and the Atlantic Ocean, and the beach faces almost due South. It's great if you like laid-back, mostly residential beach (few or no resorts) and mainly go to the beach to hang out on the beach, rather than do other things. Not to say that there aren't things around to do, it just involves a 10-15 minute drive back inland or about 30 minutes to North Myrtle Beach. However, that means you have to be ok with cooking at the house most nights, because there aren't a lot of restaurant options close-by. It is North Carolina though, so it's possible to get fresh shrimp and good BBQ! The ICW is also large enough here to do boating, tubing, and waterskiing. My stepmom's family has been going here for a long time, and I first visited in college. We've been back I think 4 or 5 times total, most recently in 2011. Ocean Isle is 6+ hours away depending on how bad things are on 95, so it's definitely a hike, but I think it's worth the drive as an alternative to the Outer Banks.

This year, we ended up at the Sanctuary, which is the only big Condo/Resort unit on Sandbridge, VA, which is about 30 minutes south of Virginia Beach proper, and usually considered Virginia's Outer Banks.
We chose Sandbridge this time because we were a little late in looking for a place and there wasn't a lot available at Ocean Isle, and since a good portion of our usual beach crew (my dad and stepmom, the sisters) weren't available and therefore there would be fewer people to share the cooking duties, we wanted to see if we could find a place that was closer to us and with a few more restaurants nearby. At least, that was the thought. On the good side, Sandbridge is a lot like Ocean Isle, laid-back, mostly residential, with nice beaches and warm water, and the condo was nice. The kids made good use of the pool when they weren't on the beach, and there were grills available in the common area. On the bad side, Sandbridge has even less nearby than Ocean Isle due to the meandering route that one must take to get back toward VA Beach, meaning that you're going to be driving at least 20 minutes to get to most restaurants, shopping, etc. There is one pretty decent local restaurant called Sandbridge Island Restaurant, Raw Bar and Pizza that we unfortunately didn't discover until our last night, but we were all pretty underwhelmed by the restaurant across from our Condo, Baja.
It also appears that a lot of the true oceanfront places at Sandbridge are fairly small. It seems like a lot of the older places haven't been razed and replaced with houses 3x the size (yet) like they have in a lot of beach communities, so there's lots of cute old cottages and lofts that might be ok for one small family or a couple, but the route that we usually take of getting a single house that is big enough for 4-5 couples plus several kids doesn't appear to be an option unless we're willing to be a bit of a walk from the beach since the larger ocean front places are exacting a premium due to the demand vs. the limited supply.

Also, we went up to Virginia Beach one night in order to check out the "boardwalk"... For folks who know what a real boardwalk is like and were expecting something like Atlantic City, Ocean City, or Wildwood, this was a major disappointment. VA Beach's "boardwalk" is basically just a concrete walkway between the hotels and their affiliated restaurants along the beach. No boards on this walk, no taffy shop, no junk shops, no fried food, not even much in the way of people watching. I will say that Chicho's, the dive bar pizza place a couple of streets back from the beach that we found when everyone was starting to get hangry, had amazing pizza.

Travel time: On the way down, we left later than we probably should have (10:30AM) because I wasn't exactly sure how long it would take, and we couldn't check in to the place until 3pm. Including a stop at Sonic for lunch at my daughter's suggestion, we didn't get there until closer to 5pm, so without stops, this was a 6 hour trip. We probably could have cut 45-60 min off of this by getting on 95 in Dumfries instead of Woodbridge and by leaving earlier and having a plan of what to do to kill time if we got there before we were allowed to check in, but it's not really a headline that Saturday beach traffic sucks. On the way back, we timed it about perfectly, left at 9am, and with one stop, did it in just over 4 hours.
I'm thinking that next time I will take a page from a co-worker, and find a hotel to stay at on Friday night so that we can drive down Friday instead of Saturday to avoid the traffic.

Thoughts on Android 4.1 Jellybean on Tablets

2012-10-21T14:42:00.000-04:00

Not too long ago, we got a tablet, an Asus Transformer Infinity. Initially it was loaded with Android 4.0, but there was an upgrade waiting from Asus to 4.1, so we didn't use 4.0 very long.
This isn't a review of the tablet itself, but rather some things I've discovered about 4.1 and how it works on tablets that I'm not exactly thrilled with.

Flash: Technically, as of 4.1, Android no longer supports Flash. However, since we downloaded and installed it before we upgraded to 4.1, it's still on the tablet. Chrome won't load any flash anymore, but the built-in Android Browser will...sorta. Honestly, I think the decision to drop support for flash was premature. I think flash is a crap program, and a security hole, and a resource hog, but there are simply too many websites that still rely on it for fundamental functions. Part of the reason I didn't want an iPad is the lack of support for flash that makes trying to use the web on a tablet a frustrating experience. We bought this tablet as a replacement for a dead laptop, and the lack of flash support means that we are still reliant on a PC for some websites. Saying, "well, websites shouldn't use flash, they should use HTML5" just doesn't solve the problem.

Chrome: In addition to the Chrome/flash thing, mobile Chrome has one major problem- it sends the same user agent string whether it is on a mobile phone or on a tablet. Therefore, some sites insist on redirecting you to the mobile optimized site, despite the fact that the tablet has higher resolution (1920x1080) than either my desktop PC or my laptop. Chrome has a menu item called "request desktop site" but it is site specific rather than a default option, and some sites ignore it and still send you to the mobile site, so I think perhaps they need two different user agent strings to differentiate, or the ability to change to a different user agent string like you can with Dolphin. It'd also be nice if Chrome supported the same plugins that it does on the desktop so that you truly has the same experience on both platforms.

Apps: I imagine this is a common problem with apps whether iOS or Android, but a lot of apps aren't properly optimized for the resolution and capabilities of a tablet. The Facebook app is almost useless because the layout is so mobile-optimized, but since you can get to the desktop version, that's not a huge loss.

Keyboard: The Jellybean keyboard on a tablet is a good bit different than on a phone. (I've been using the Ice Cream Sandwich keyboard on my phone for a while, so I'm not doing a direct comparison...) The keys don't pop out to register touch, and the keys are larger, more like a real keyboard, at least in landscape mode. It takes up about half of the screen in landscape, and touch-typing actually isn't impossible once you get used to the weird hovering hand position you have to use. Two main things that make touch-typing difficult: The first is that the space bar is a bit narrow. Specifically, android has a notification/menu area at the bottom of the screen, but it is blank in the area just below the space bar, and so you end up pressing the blank area instead of the space bar if you aren't careful with your thumb placement. The second is that it's not a full qwerty keyboard so you end up inadvertently pressing the enter or backspace key or shift key with your pinky. Additionally, there isn't a dedicated row of numbers nor do they retain the ability to long-press on the top row to get a number without switching to the number/symbol keyboard, which makes entering passwords sort of laborious. In portrait mode, the keyboard takes up about a third of the screen, layout is the same, just smaller keys better suited for thumb typing. It bothers me that they didn't include a split keyboard option for either orientation, because I think that'd be a nice option to have for quick typing in landscape. The auto correct and predictive text work well, but I've noticed that the keyboard is laggy at times, and I think it's due to the overhead of the prediction engine. If a Tegra quad-core can't handle it, it's not really ready for primetime.

For the most part, I like the UI, these are just the little nits I've noticed that I hope they fix in the next version.