A Geek Goes Flying

This wasn’t a very typical weekend, but it wasn’t exactly unusual, so I thought I’d write it up to give a glimpse into what a real world weekend was like with a relatively limited range Solterra. There were other options than the ones I chose (e.g., I could have swung by the office to charge, or found a DCFC station), but these pieces fit together neatly enough. This is with a 2024 Subaru Solterra Limited, and I don’t currently have the option of charging at home. Friday I topped the car off at the office, charging to 100%, so, starting with a range of ~200 miles (temperature highs in the mid-60s, cooler at night, SoCal “winter”). That night, took my houseguests to dinner. Total driving about 11 miles. Didn’t record the State of Charge (“SOC”) because it didn’t matter, but it was probably down maybe 5%. ~190 miles remaining. Saturday morning we got up early and drove to Knott’s Berry Farm (where there are no chargers), probably doing 75+ mph to keep up with traffic. Call it 31 miles, a...

Before taking the plunge with the Solterra, I “auditioned” several battery powered electric vehicles (BEVs or EVs), over long weekends or a week (or more) as rentals. I’ve come a long way since my first Tesla Model 3 rental in ... 2021? I had no idea what the big bulky CCS1 cable was at one DCFC charging station. (That rental came with a J1772 to NACS adapter, but nothing for the bigger DC equipment.) The first day or two I had the Tesla I was trying to charge it at Disneyland (which has ChargePoint J1772 level 2 chargers) and couldn’t figure out why it was only charging to 50% (the car had been limited to that charge level in settings; an easy fix once I figured it out, but when I asked on reddit, the overwhelming response was just “use a SuperCharger, ChargePoint sucks!” – not really helpful...). I’m sure I didn’t know how to read things like kilowatt capability, or grok things like shared chargers splitting available power between two charging cars. I got frustrated dealing w...

A random post on a vintage computer group, and a find while cleaning out a closet, reminded me of a bit of my computing history: Travan tape drives. These were relatively inexpensive back when hard drives and removable media were not, and had (compressed, claimed) capacity more or less sufficient to do a full system backup of the multi-user Linux systems I was running. The drives we used hooked up via the floppy interface; the kernel had built-in support for these ftape mechanisms, but typically required a kernel build. (Spent a lot of time compiling kernels in the mid-90s.) The last one we deployed was an Exabyte Eagle TR-3, with 1600 MB (~1.6 GB) uncompressed capacity (claimed 3200 MB compressed capacity), which, nowdays, is smaller than the smallest thumb drive I have handy, but back then, was the /home directories, email, webpages, etc., for a community of more than a hundred people. (When I left, we’d just upgraded the main server to a software RAID mirroring 2x 10 GB UDMA IDE ha...

Shelf over the Schiit Jotunheim amplifier Bedside. I got a great price on an older Jotunheim (not the Jotunheim 2) with the AK4490 DAC card installed, that I couldn’t pass up. This is for more casual listening; music while reading before bed, maybe the occasional TV show or online lecture series or whatever before bed. (I know I maybe shouldn’t , but, here we are.) But my bedside table is getting a little crowded. At first I put this shelf over the amp, but that put my Belkin charger a bit too high for my iPhone in ___ mode to be effective, so I returned to the well and picked up another 10" square aluminum plate to build another small aluminum shelf to put over the amp. This time I used 4" legs for air flow ( 2/7 x 4 inch Sign Standoff Screws ), since the Schiit is passively cooled and the vents are on the top (the mac mini has a fan and vents out the back, so I wasn’t as worried about leaving space above it). Drill bits to poke holes in the aluminum. It’s a little wobb...

I can now confirm (with my shiny new iPhone 16 Pro in “natural titanium”), hooking up to something like a Schiit Jotunheim amp with an internal AK4490 DAC card via a USB C to USB B cable , is all you need to do to listen to the portable through the beefier amplifier. No “camera kit” or anything else required. iPhone screenshot

My “adult LEGO” projects continue; this time I’m adding hookups to my desk in my office for a modern (Apple Silicon) laptop, KVM-shared with my existing workstation (a heavily optioned and upgraded Late 2012 Mac mini ‡ ). I’m trying to do this kinda on the inexpensive, while still going with quality gear. Here goes. Mac mini USB to KVM (below) Mini DP to KVM USB to APC BE600M1 UPS Ethernet to GS305 (below)  Laptop USB-C to CableMatters Mulitport Adapter (below) CableMatters USB-C Multiport Adapter ($33 less a coupon) USB-C pigtail (about 10") to Laptop USB-C port to Anker Mac Book Pro Charger, 100W USB C ($24 including a 5' cable) USB 2.0 port to KVM DisplayPort to KVM (via a 3' DisplayPort cable ) Ethernet to GS305   KVM ($51 less a 25% coupon) PC1 IN (USB/DisplayPort) from Mac mini PC2 IN (USB/DisplayPort) from Laptop (Multiport Adapter) DP OUT to Dell U2412M display ( matte goodness ) (via a 1.6' DisplayPort cable ) USB 1 to Dell U2412M built-in hub USB 2 to clam...

Using the OpenVPN Connect app on a MacBook, I wasn’t able to connect to my office VPN. Opening the app revealed an error message: Error calling protect() method on socket OpenVPN Connect error message The fix was easy; from Terminal: % sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.openvpn.client.plist