A Geek Goes Flying

Found this critique of the newer Bosch dishwashers: I can relate. (I recently installed a Bosch dishwasher, replacing one that finally gave up after ~21 years.) And it bugs me. There have been too many instances of companies going out of business and their cloud-reliant “smart” devices becoming useless bricks . I want everything run locally. (I even hacked a smart plug to be just that .) At least there’s an open source implementation of the protocol . Have to look into that. I also, for the record, do not want anything on my car to be enabled by subscription. Just in general, I’m against having anything that has to “phone home” to be useful. I mean, I’ll use streaming services for light casual listening / watching, but anything I care about I obtain at least a non-DRM digital copy (and have backups). Because: Spotify is going to break every Car Thing gadget it ever sold   “Unprecedented” Google Cloud event wipes out customer account and its backups ‘ My whole library is wiped out’:...

I was today years old when I learned about the bulk conversion functionality built into macOS (at least, Sequoia). Select all the .heic files you want to convert, right-click (Ctrl-Click; two finger tap; whatever) and select Quick Actions → Convert Image and then just make ’em JPEG or PNG. Right click and select Convert Image under Quick Actions   Select the format to convert the images to

I still don’t need glasses, apparently (my last aviation medical exam resulted in a third class medical with no corrective lenses restriction; I did the vision test both with and without glasses to see what was what), but I knew my eyes were starting to degrade a bit after almost 5 decades. So before that physical I headed over to Lenscrafters, where my Care Credit card would theoretically let me pay off whatever this was going to cost me over 6 months, no interest. Ray-Ban RX5428 frame The eye exam, apparently, was done through a private contractor operating out of the Lenscrafters store, and they didn’t take CareCredit, so I was $153.46 immediately out of pocket for that. The prescription I got from that exam: My general use prescription from my eye exam Lenscrafters was running a special, half off the lenses. The Ray-Ban RX5428 frame ( 55/17/145 - apparently a “wide” size?) was $147, and lenses with my progressive prescription was $598.34, $299.14 with the discount; total bill (i...

Had company in from Texas, where they’re a wine club member of Graveyard . They wanted to visit the California location, which is in Paso Robles. It’s been a while since I’ve been up that far, and my Lab was craving a beach trip, and so I fired up A Better Route Planner ‡ and it seemed feasible. The original plan is below. But, you know ...  Anyway. Some errands and a lack of EV charging availability at the local public garage had us starting the trip at 89% charge, estimated range 175 miles. We left at 9:22 a.m., instead of 8:45 a.m., because Daylight Saving Time threw off my normal wakeup time and neither of us thought to set an alarm. (No big deal, I built in buffers.) Leg one was a straight shot up the 405 to the 101 to Hendry’s Beach, 98 miles, 1 hour 36 minutes expected travel time. We ended up arriving at 10:56, 1 hour 34 minutes later. Using adaptive cruise control in moving traffic, we averaged about 3.1 m/kWh for that leg, and arrived with 39% State of Charge (SOC) and 7...

Nexus 7 [2012] running CyanogenMod 12.1 (Android 5.1.1) I’ve had this thing for more than a decade. Stopped using it when it updated from Android 4.x to 5.x and became unusably sluggish. At one point, I evidently unlocked it and installed Linux (LineageOS probably) onto it, but that wasn’t really usable on the 7" screen either, so it sat. I tried a couple of times half-heartedly to restore it using the built-in utilities, but never got anywhere and wasn’t honestly that interested, so it sat in a pile ready to be e-waste recycled. (The Fire tablets I’ve picked up over the years are going that route though, except for the one I’ve used semi-regularly with its “waterproof” housing, as they don’t seem to recharge and won’t turn on. Meh. OTOH they were disposable-cheap. But I digress.) I was stuck waiting to be called via remote court this morning (75 minutes) and, inspired by a Facebook conversation I’d had with a friend who’s also a bit of a geek, I decided to see if I could breath s...

NOOKcolor showing Android home screen Holy cow, this thing still works!(?!) Picked up this O.G. Barnes & Noble NOOKcolor ($249) in 2010 (IIRC) when I coudln’t afford an iPad ($499), because “ they” had figured out how to load an unrestricted Android build onto it ( CyanogenMod ; this thing reports it’s running Android version 2.3.7, kernel 2.6.32.9,  CyanogenMod-7.2.0-RC2-encore, on an ARMv7 CPU with 480MB reported RAM... ). This thing has been sitting without a charge for probably a couple of years at least, but a few minutes on its charger and it fired right up. (Compare with a couple of Kindle Fire tablets I had, that are much newer and totally dead, and headed to e-waste recycling.) This was a device designed and shipped when USB charging beyond the 5V 500ma standard was still in its infancy , so it came with a "proprietary" cable that ends in a weirdly long USB Mini B plug that illuminates to show charging state (I don’t recall if it will charge at all on the stan...

From time to time, I hear people repeat the same incorrect information - that there’s a “no fly zone” over Disneyland, or some variation of that. There is not, not exactly. The TFR over the Disneyland Resort Most airspace over the United States can be flown through by almost any aircraft (helicopter, typical small plane, jumbo jet ...). The exceptions are prohibited  airspace, like that over the Capitol, White House, and the Vice President’s residence at the Naval Observatory (which a private pilot like me can never fly through), restricted  airspace, like that surrounding many military bases (which I can often fly through, if outside the hours when that space is restricted, or if I’ve coordinated with air traffic control and the area is not “hot”), and temporary flight restriction  airspace, the rules of which are governed by the issuing Notice to Air Missions (or, now that Trump has revised our newspeak, once again Notice to Airmen; either way, a “NOTAM”). Aviation navi...