gizmos – Page 2 – A Jaunty Little Blog

September 28, 2015

Nothing But Trouble

Friends,

I wrote this for inclusion in an application package to write for an Apple-centric blog. I haven’t heard back from them, but I thought you might enjoy it. Please also note that it clocks in at 299 words, which seemed important.

Chris, the Time Warner Cable installer arrived early for the appointment yesterday. His detailed tattoos declared his love of mountain biking. His worn and too-large boots showed that he’d been around a while. It was time for me to make the switch from the rural-class DSL recommended by the realtor when I bought the cabin to faster and cheaper cable.

Connections complete, he poked around on his iPad to turn up the service while I poked around on the Mac Mini to see why the network wasn’t coming up. I should at least get a connection to the router, I thought, but Safari protested, “You are not connected to the Internet.” I’ve never used a Netgear modem with this Airport Extreme, but the modem’s lights were all reassuringly green next to the Airport’s ominous orange.

“Oh, you’ve got one of these,” Chris sighed, flipping the Airport around. “I have nothing but trouble with these things.” That can’t be, I thought. Apple stuff just works. After decades of troubleshooting and cussing and fixing PCs and third-party gear, I made an effort to keep my own home network as homogeneous as possible. I need to get actual work done, so only Macs, iOS and Airport will do. I’m all in.

I managed to change the network address settings in Airport Utility and hit Update only moments before Chris took matters into his own hands and pulled the router’s power. “There, that should do it,” he beamed. Green light, connection established, and I was ready to stream the Galaxie 500 deep cuts playlist. If I were a good Apple evangelist, I would’ve told him that the static IP settings weren’t working. Instead, I simply thanked him for his hard work and gave him a positive rating on the survey.

If you have comments, please leave them on your Pinterest or Instagram feeds and I’ll go look for them.

Your pal,

– bob

October 3, 2012

A Hot Rodder’s Lament: Rebel Without An API Edition

A lovely centered picture of a coffee mug.

Friends,

I’ll cede the argument that modern cars are cleaner and more efficient than they’ve ever been. Sure, there have been many marques through our history that have been stingy with a gallon of gas, and some that have produced fewer emissions, but the entire fleet currently on sale beats those outliers by every measure. Why? We asked the robots to help out and they’ve agreed.

Is this a problem? Of course it is. And it isn’t, or at least wouldn’t be, if lawyers weren’t involved. Here’s a short example:

Back in the olden times of a decade or so ago, when you wanted electricity to light a spark plug to cause an explosion in an engine’s cylinder, you’d rely on a spinning top called a distributor.

Through a gear meshed with the camshaft, a shaft spins a piece of metal that makes contact with a post that sends electricity to a wire leading to a spark plug. It’s simple until you start thinking about how an engine in a car is used. As engines speed up and slow down, you want the spark to occur earlier or later, so maybe you add weights to the spinning top that move a plate forward a bit when the engine spins faster. This is lovely and elegant, you think. But you don’t want that advancement to go too far or else the spark comes too soon—even before the cylinder is full of the fuel mixture. Detonation, knocking and other badness ensues. How do you control the advance?

Specially tuned tiny springs.

Hold on, there’s more alchemy. When you mash the gas pedal to the floor (How quaint! More on that in a sec.) in your Curved Dash Oldsmobile, engine vacuum drops and if you send that signal to a vacuum motor attached to that plate, you can further advance the spark timing to catch up.

With me so far? Sucking and springs and centrifugal forces are changing when the spark is happening. Archaic with a capital arc. (I crack myself up sometimes.)

So what’s changed? Sure, computers, but what’s really changed has been the quality and number of sensors in a modern engine. An engine management computer cannot only know vacuum, and engine speed, but also atmospheric temperature and pressure, overall system voltage, throttle position at the throttle pedal, fuel quality, and a lot more.

What this means, simply, is that you can throw away distributors and let the computer tell individual plugs exactly (well, sort of exactly, hold on) when to fire. You put high-tension ignition coils directly on top of the plugs and the computer just turns them on and off. Easy, right? The computer can look at all the inputs, decide what’s going on and how much power is needed, and let ‘er burn.

But it’s not that easy.

For instance, you could theoretically make more power with more spark advance over a longer period of time, but the implications are many. For instance, if your, ahem, 285 horsepower engine could make 305 horsepower or more with a simple software change from the manufacturer, will your insurance rates go up? Is that too hot for the engine block over time, increasing warranty repair costs? When the home mechanic could change a couple springs and gain power, the manufacturers aren’t on the hook.

Here’s where this gets weird.

Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs, if you will) don’t release the code that drives engine management computers. Some don’t even release service manuals to the public. What this means is that backyard mechanics, hot rodders, and aftermarket equipment manufacturers are left to make educated guesses about how the engines in the vehicles they’ve purchased actually work. What signals come from where to make which thing work the way it does? After all, your gas pedal isn’t connected to the engine anymore. It’s just another sensor, but this one measures the angle of your ankle to represent how fast you think you want to go. If I want to make a widget that adjusts the power my engine produces and make an incorrect guess at how this affects all of the other systems, I guess this makes me that much more liable for my error, but wouldn’t it be much better if I got it right the first time? More later…

Your pal,

– bob

September 24, 2012

I’ve Got A Headache

A lovely centered picture of a rollercoaster.

Friends,

I really will get back to the science and the future and whatnot, but please allow a moment for this public service announcement:

When you go to Knott’s Berry Farm to have a lot of fun with people whose company you enjoy and you’d like to not be a wet blanket, I strongly recommend that you not ride the Boomerang. It will beat your brains out. First, I’m too tall and didn’t fit in the seat. Second, because I didn’t fit, I had to sit up too high which moved my head above the cushions on the restraint hoop. Third, riders pull 5.2 g^* going forward AND in reverse. Fourth, I have an ungainly and too large head with not enough strength in my neck to keep this melon from bouncing around at 5.2 g. Fifth, this really isn’t anybody’s fault but my own.

Also, I had something to write here, but I can remember what it might’ve been.

Your pal,

– bob

^* The unit of measure for g-force is styled with a lowercase g. Uppercase G is for the gravitational constant. You’re welcome!

August 7, 2012

The Most Joyous Night

A lovely centered picture of a lovely landing.

Friends,

I’m woozy. I stayed up way past my bed time to watch NASA drop the most expensive compact car on a planet 140 million miles away and I’m still trying to wrap my head around the feat. The landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars represents the triumph of screwy ideas that help me feel better about the dumb crap we all cook up every day…

Okay, so you’re going to enter orbit with a pie plate on top of a saucer that you need to steer. How about putting a bunch of weights on one end, then spinning the thing around so the wobbly end shifts from side to side, like a wakeboard on the atmosphere?
Rockets are cool and everything, but we’ve gotta slow down. I know! How about the biggest damn parachute ever?
Man, that heat shield is still pretty hot. Too hot for cameras, but we need to see the ground. Blow the bottom off with explosives and let the rover look at stuff!
Crap! Still too fast! Now how about some rockets? Throw the whole pie tin away and fly the rover with a rocket pack on its back!
Rockets? They’re gonna leave an awful lot of mess around. How about dropping the rover from the rockets on cables? (And by the way, I will be peppering my daily speech with, “initiating Sky Crane maneuver” from now on.)
Rover’s on the ground, so that’s nice, but won’t the rocket pack crash down on the thing? Nope! We’re going to sever the cables with explosives! Then we’re going to crash the rocket pack over there. Where? Oh, you know, over there. Safely over there.

And there you have it. Exquisite madness to gently drop a ton of car on another planet. I believe it was Archimedes who said, “Give me a lever long enough and I can move a mountain, give me a big box of explosives and I’ll put a robot on Mars.” Here’s to the lunatics at JPL for a job well done.

Your pal,

– bob

P.S. Next, let’s talk about the implications for us here on this planet if Curiosity finds life on that other planet. Should be fun!

June 27, 2012

Download This!

A lovely centered picture of a copyrighted icon thingy.

Friends,

If you enjoy podcasts, hate having to sync with a wire before you head out the door, and have an Apple iOS device, get Podcasts from the iTunes App Store. Browse episode lists and stream your selections on the fly. Stop cussing the wire.

And here’s a fun tip: start a podcast, then tap on the album art to expose a reel-to-reel deck with additional controls. Skeuomorphic!

I’m almost excited enough about this app to use it!

Almost.

– bob

June 19, 2012

We’re Cutting The Cable To A Satellite!

A lovely centered picture with a map of not much.

Friends,

I’ve been threatening to get rid of the absurd fees charged by my satellite television programming provider for a very long time now. Some event, though, has cropped up to stand in the way. Think Beijing Olympics. Think Superbowl. Think college football.

Now, with not much going on, I’m back on the idea of getting rid of this dumb standard definition box, so I’m researching antenna options for over the air broadcasts for some sort of connectivity. At this point, you might think that I’m a fool for trying to pick up local broadcast television and you may be exactly right since local news is roundly the worst. For instance, we had three wildfires raging around my bucolic alpine haven yesterday, but the lead on all of the Los Angeles news stations was about a guy who drowned in his pool and reactions from the public and G-list celebrities to this fellow’s passing, but I digress.

When the Federal Communications Commission decided that analog broadcasts needed to die in favor of digital, they assured us that the broadcast signal strength and reach wouldn’t be affected. Click this link to go to their signal map site and put our Zip Code, 92549, into the search box. (SPOILER: zero results)

So no amount of antenna with no amount of amplification will receive absolutely no stations whatsoever, according to the new map. I used to get a half dozen analog stations.

Can I get season 5 of The Bachelorette online?

Asking for a friend.

– bob

June 12, 2012

Apple Widget Day!

A lovely centered picture about high technology.

Friends,

Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference keynote was today and things were announced! What sort of things? Operating systems and updates to other things. This is the glorious time of year when tech reporters working for wire services and television network news breathlessly try to explain these things to the general buying public who may not understand what it means or they may just get it completely wrong. This also means that I’ll be asked, by people at work, what this means to them.

It happens every year in the exact same way, but this year I was too busy to watch the keynote myself. I may not have answers because of this and my inquisitors will be disappointed.

Maybe I should make stuff up.

“If you upgrade to Mountain Ocelot, you’ll be able to tell Siri to emit a high-pitched squeal that will kill the slugs in your garden—if you buy the special Thunderbolt speakers…”

Your suggestions for made-up Apple tech are always welcome.

– bob

June 20, 2011

Pollen: The Photo Series That Killed My Camera

It's like it's going fast, or something.

Friends,

I haven’t driven the teensy tiny racecar in a few days and it has sat outside waiting for another trip to the Festival of Dirt. Also during this lovely springtime period, the local forest has been blowing its bits all over the neighborhood to encourage the propagation of little forests. You can tell which cars carry locals, for instance, by the greenish-yellow pollen dusting their windows and wherever any amount of crud has accumulated. Crud is my middle name since I don’t wash the cars very regularly (there’s only a finite amount of water up here, you know) and the pollen adhesion has taken on patterns formed by weeks old grime that I found kinda interesting.

I liked this shot for the swoop under the mirror. It’s almost like nature is dusting for prints of when I was speeding. Not that I would ever do that of course, but the forest is perfectly within its rights to investigate a hunch.

Then there’s the hood. Either the aerodynamics over the hood are nuts or this is completely random and makes no sense whatsoever. I’ll take both.

Then I was attacked by a swarm of mosquitos that came from nowhere down in the driveway, which prompted my frenzied swatting. The front of the lens of my camera flew off, as did some of the little shutter vanes and when I turned the camera off, the lens jammed and now it won’t restart. This stinks. Especially considering that my favorite camera holiday on the Fourth of next month is rapidly approaching. Cross your fingers that Canon can finish the repair in a week, like they say they can.

Your pal,

– bob