Silicon Valley Redneck

Modern styling. Cars these days. Yeesh.

Remember "Loonatics", the 2005 Looney Tunes redesign?

(Alas, so many dead links.)

Well... I've been taking note of recent Toyota styling, and I think the same guy who tried to ruin Bugs Bunny is at it again.  Lots of gratuitous angles and spurious fierceness.

Come on, now.  Toyota products do have a reputation as the sort of vehicle you'd want in a dystopian future, but they don't need to look the part.  Better they should look boring and unobtrusive.  After all, they're supposed to be boring and without surprises.  Why not have styling that shouts "This is a totally boring car that you'll keep for 15 years or so because it just works and will never go out of date"?

Oh, well.  They don't seem to have restyled the Tundra yet; wonder if there'll be a year-end sale on the 2019 model.  And there are always used vehicles out there; a well-depreciated 4Runner with the V8 might do nicely - a bit lacking in the latest bells & whistles, but also considerably cheaper than buying new.

Correction:  They have in fact ruined the Tundra; the styling details just don't jump out when such a large vehicle is scaled to a small picture on the computer screen.

So, a used Tundra, 4Runner (with V8), or Sequoia (or maybe even an F-150, if it doesn't have the dodgy engine) is looking more appealing.  Still need serious towing capability, 4-wheel drive, and a back seat.  Apparently the Tacoma has had reliability issues some years.  If buying new, well, the price difference (taking incentives into account) between a Tacoma in the minimal configuration that meets my needs and a Tundra in a one-step-up configuration is not all that much, so if I decide I can live with the new styling and the budget will stand it, a brand-new, massively-overkill Tundra may be the thing.  Or perchance just-the-right Lexus GX470 will turn up on the used market at the right time.  (A used Road Ranger is definitely out, on cost-of-ownership grounds; a used Lexus is basically a used Toyota, so probably OK.)

Now that's just wrong.

Sumdood hollowed out a (defunct?) Osborne 1 and replaced the innards with a RasPi running an emulator, plus an Arduino to translate the keyboard.  (Via Hackaday, via Digi-Key.)

And a color LCD.

Y'know, you can still buy an actual Zilog Z80 chip.  Brand new, like.  For authenticity.  And whatever no-longer-available LSI chips were on the original motherboard could be emulated in small FPGAs.

For an extra challenge, the whole dang motherboard (power and analog bits excluded) could be emulated in a moderate-sized FPGA.  Stick a dinky PCB under it, with voltage regulators and some interfacing, and you've got replacement computer guts.

That, kids, would be a proper project.

Life in the electronic age

Several years ago, my father bought himself a Saab convertible for his Monday-morning commute.  (At the time, he was actually commuting to work a few days a week, now he's down to just Monday mornings.)

Sometime last year, it started draining its battery in less than a week of standby time, so the once-a-week drive was no longer enough, and he keeps it on a trickle charger.

I was over there this morning, and the latest development was: it don't work no more.  Doesn't respond to the (electronic) key.  Everything remains locked (except for the doors, which he hasn't been in the habit of locking).

Hmmm.

Battery voltage is 13.25 while on the charger, dribbling off quite a bit faster than I'd normally expect when the charger is removed, but perhaps good enough.

Has the security computer gotten out of sync with the transponder in the key?  Or has it just temporarily misplaced its mind?  What happens if we disconnect the battery, wait a few minutes, reconnect it, and try again?

Or - happy thought! - surely there's a second key.  Does that work?  He goes off to fetch the spare key.  Voila!  We have a started car.  Now... how to re-introduce the first key, given that we have one-each working key in hand?  Apparently the local Saab dealership is long gone; who else would know how to do this?

Meanwhile, we'd both been trying to figure out how to extricate the metallic backup key (doors only, if memory serves) from the bulky plastic housing of the eKey.  I finally apply enough force to dislodge the one from the key I'm holding (the not-working one).

There's a little notch that looks like it's for prying the housing open, perhaps using the tip of the metallic key.  So I do that.

Oh.

There's a CR2032 coin cell in there.  Key's prolly just got a dead battery is all.

Ya know, in my day ya never hadda worry about your key's battery going dead!

Regarding the pointlessness of Twitter

Every so often, I'll see a link to what seems an interesting thread (conversation, whatever) on Twitter, and click through.

If there are more'n a couple tweets involved, sorting them out gets impossible.

Because, y'see, they're presented in something approximating chronological order, but with no indication of "this tweet is a reply to that tweet specifically."

So, a few entries down, there'll be a message that's a reply of sorts, by @andy... that mentions @betty, @chuck, @doris, and @edward... but it's not clear to whose tweet it's a response, let alone which tweet.  And, depending on which one it's a response to, @andy may have an important point, or he may just be a jackass.

As the thread is presented, ya just don't know.

Then, too, owing to the basic format, very often a standalone tweet will make sense only to someone who happened to be watching the same TV show at the time; the comment lacks any anchor to the outside world.

So, really brief comments, often without context, with the limited character count commonly chewed up by references to other users.

I guess this is the wave of the future, for people with the attention span of

Strange expression reflects lack of comprehension

Spotted on Slashdot, but is came from here:

siren red

?

I believe the term you're looking for is "fire-engine red".

Yer basic red-fire-engine siren is not so much red, more chrome-plated, innit?*

And I find no evidence that classical sirens were in any way red, despite being experts in luring men to their doom, which is after all the subject at hand**.

(Yeah, in today's usage a rotating red or red/blue light is called a "siren" on account of sitting atop a classic police car.  But, back in the day, those who drove such cars knew the difference between "lights" and "siren", didn't they?)

 

* I'd post a link to an image, but Google's image search has had a makeover and now puts things in categories, and I haven't yet figured out how to break out of the categories and just rummage.

** And now that I've chased this curious bit of language, I won't bother examining the substance of the assertion, except to note that my reactions seem to be rather different.  Chronotypes may be involved.

Silicon progress strikes again

Got a fiddly little task, more or less easily done in discrete components, but using an AVR is probably cheaper and smaller, and almost certainly more energy efficient*.

So I look up the cheapest AVR that'll serve the purpose, in context.  $1.11 in onesies.

Then I look at other options.  Motorola Freescale has something for 95¢ in onesies.  With a 48 MHz, 32-bit core (ARM Cortex M0), despite which it's rated for a 5.5V supply (as well as much lower voltages, of course).  And: it's got enough additional built-in doodads that I can probably eliminate a couple of other chips, and get 'er done with just the MCU, some FETs and diodes, and passives that I'd need regardless.  Maybe also a decently accurate voltage reference if it turns out the on-chip reference's 1.7% tolerance isn't good enough.

So I set out to do something absurdly simple, and end up basically using a VAX to turn the lights on and off and manage a couple of switching voltage regulators.  (Actual VAXen had a lot more memory, as well as things like disks and paged memory management, but the CPUs weren't this fast, and I don't think any of them had PWM controllers and sub-10µW sleep modes.)

It's not a gotta-be-done-this-week project; if it were, I'd use an AVR, which is a known quantity.  I just ordered a $13 eval board for the 95¢ MCU so's I can see how it programs.

 

* Not that I'm going all Green, but this thing runs on a battery, so having very low idle power consumption is a bona fide application requirement, and I'm trying to avoid use of a real mechanical power switch, because Awkward and Fragile (in this particular context, where a mad-scientist-style Great Big Knife Switch simply isn't an option).

Still more trouble ahead

Not so much for me, but for the younger generation.

See here: the employment scene is moving to short gigs, piecework, and the like, and away from nice predictable incomes from steady corporate jobs.

Add this to the concerns I mentioned here, and factor in the easy-debt economy that's grown up since the 1980s.  What do we have?

A generation or two conditioned to the Industrial Age steady-job paradigm, carrying a heavy debt load (college loans, credit cards, E-Z Credit on that new car), facing the old reality of irregular cash flow.

Kinda makes it hard to keep up the payments, huh?

I've basically been living in the gig economy since the 80s (when I started working for a small consulting company with irregular cash flow), except for summer 2000 through summer 2004 when I had that job in Corporateland, so I'm used to this sort of thing.

For those who adjusted their lifestyles to the good times, and have never lived in the unpredictable world of small business, it's a likely disaster.  And for those institutions that have been lending them all that money?

Aaah, don't worry about the institutions.  They'll get bailed out.  Again.  And bailouts are good for the economy, right?

Ah, how the teen years have changed.

Brought on by this, and something related that I read last week - ah, here it is.

I never had a real job as a teenager, though some of my friends did.  I did yard work for various friends of the family, and made pretty decent money at it.  My parents were providing me with all the necessities, but if I wanted one of those newfangled HP scientific pocket calculators?  Had to work for it.

Helped develop the consultant's work ethic: you're here to do what the client wants done.  There's no job description to say that a given task is not in it.  Life's like that in the small-business world, too: your business card may say Senior Engineer as befits your fancy degree, but some days your job is furniture mover or drain unclogger.

Seems there's no room for that sort of thing in the modern lifestyle.

And... I went to high school in Palo Alto.  Back in those days, it wasn't a total gazillionaire enclave, but the population was largely well-to-do, professional-class families.

Senior year of high school, only a few of my friends had cars, and those were beaters: hand-me-downs from family, or bought well-used.

More recently: a friend of mine was living in a prosperous (but nowhere near Palo Alto level) area during the first .com bubble, and had kids in high school.  All their classmates who were old enough to drive had cars.  Brand-new beemers.  And, when they inevitably wrecked them?  No problem; they'd get newer shinier replacement beemers.  The friend couldn't afford this sort of extravagance, and was apparently regarded as a bad parent for failing to provide her offspring with fashionable luxury transportation.

Yes, it's much nicer to be prosperous than to be poor... but social pressure to overspend is destructive, and modern professional-class attitudes toward manual labor are decidedly unhelpful.  (And if the plumber is such an ignorant lout, let's see you fix your own plumbing!)  Then there's the "spending is better than mending" attitude, which may make economic sense (comparative advantage and all that) but leaves the new generation helpless if something breaks down and there’s no repairman handy (or no money to hire a repairman).

Can we develop maybe a new pride in traditional middle-class values?  Things like living within our means, knowing how to fix our own stuff and when to call the repairman (and when, as a last resort, to buy a replacement), saving for a rainy day, and trying to make things that little bit better for the next generation?

Or are we stuck with having it all right now, racking up big debts, and counting on a bailout?

Additional: Comes to mind a sci-fi quote.  No, not "specialization is for insects", though that'n makes sense here too.  It's this, from Niven's "A Relic of the Empire":

Did the Jinxian know how to live poor?  Mann shuddered.  The old memories came back only rarely; but when they came, they hurt.

You have to learn not to buy luxuries before you've bought necessities.  You can starve learning which is which.  Necessities are food and a place to sleep, shoes and pants.  Luxuries are tobacco, restaurants, fine shirts, throwing away a ruined meal while you're learning to cook, quitting a job you don't like.  A union is a necessity.  Boosterspice is a luxury.

And more, interspersed with the ongoing storyline.

Seems to me we're on about the second generation of "middle-class" people who are effectively brought up rich, and have no idea how to live poor or even working-class.

Me, I was brought up frugal-middle-class.  (My parents have gotten fairly rich, between the frugality and my father's investments that he bought instead of a fancier house, bass boat, and all those other fripperies.  By fairly rich, I mean: the investments pay enough in dividends for them to live comfortably on, with a couple of slightly-upscale vacations a year, nice clothes, a new car every decade, and, lately, some improvements to the house and garden.)  I've had good times and bad, but, between the frugal conditioning and such financial reserves as I've managed to retain (mainly derived from the leftovers from my college trust fund, which turned out to be far more than I needed for college), I've managed to make it through the occasional bad year without burning through everything.

Now, if I'd treated the reserve funds as ready cash... I would have lost the mansion and the Lamborghini at the first downturn.  As it was, I had no problem keeping the crackerbox and the old Jeep when paychecks got irregular back in the 90s, and at various times since, though my lifestyle has gotten decidedly down-market.  (Because lifestyle upgrades need to be supported by cash flow, darn it!  Reserve money is for emergencies.)

But the ones who are brought up to believe in the Beemer Fairy?  What'll they do when the hard times come?

(Hint: these aren't the hard times.  These are moderately difficult times.  Things can get a lot worse.)

A suggestion for big-media web developers

Ya know how those "link" things that point to individual articles get wrapped in "<a href=" tags?

That makes them clickable, just all by itself.  There's no need to add a Javascript "onclick" thing to enable clickability.

I've seen this on the mobile version of the Washington Post site (as seen from my workstation; for some reason, the WaPo site thinks I'm on my cellphone and helpfully redirects me), and just now on NYmag.

This is most notably unhelpful to those of us who have multi-button mice (yeah, I know, all you big-media elite types have one-button mice and just can't imagine anything different) sometimes like to use middle-click, or right-click and one of the context-menu options, to open a link in this thing we call "a new tab", leaving the original article undisturbed, because maybe there's another link we might want to explore after this one.

Having any click on the link, with any button, commence loading the new content in the current tab is decidedly unfriendly.

No website for old engineers

Got this project that's been using a Raspberry Pi Model B... and for the next stage it looks like we want to go to the B+, for reduced power consumption, more USB ports, and that kind of stuff.

I want specs for the critter, so I know what I'm dealing with.

The Raspy Pi Foundation's website is... unhelpful.  Takes some poking around to find the product page (there not being a "Products" tab), and actual specs for it are nowhere to be found.

I found some documentation via Lady Ada and SparkFun.  Not much, but at least somewhat helpful.

But... no hardware spec document.  No schematic.  There's a fragmentary schematic showing approximately what's connected to the various connectors, but it's missing some important details, like the identity of the new switching regulator chip they designed in.  (I'm interested in the maximum input voltage it'll accept, and also whether the +5V rail goes anywhere other than the regulator and the expansion header.  Exceeding 5V would, at minimum, require removing the TVS diode.  Oh: I guess it must go to the USB subsystem, no?  So it's gotta be right around 5V.)

And, getting back to the website: it appears to have been designed by the marketing department, for children.  Or by children, for a marketing department.  One or the other.  Lotsa happy-shiny, and little readily-found substance.

Oh, well.  I pretty much extracted what I needed.

Pro-tip: If you're designing a little multi-purpose computer module, and it has USB, and it has an expansion header... bring out a USB port on the doggone expansion header!  I'll probably be designing a piggyback board for this, and it'll need to transfer data, and the most convenient way to handle the data transfer (especially without messing with the system configuration) is via USB... but that means running a cable to the dang connector cluster.

An Observation regarding Door-Knobs

So there's this new trend to replace stodgy old round doorknobs with modern lever-style door handles.  Supposed to make it easier for those with limited grip strength to open doors, or some such.

The humble doorknob  has a definite advantage, though.  I mean, apart from being resistant to those of limited grip strength, such as cats.

You can hang a do-not-disturb sign on a doorknob, and it will stay put.

Can't say as much for these newfangled things.  Got no sign retention worth mentioning.