The Lance J. Technoweb

So I've been thinking, so I've invented the following: There is a most efficient time to use electricity, and that's when the least efficient power plants are not in operation.  Generally, that's overnight, when demand is low.  At that time, most of the lowest-efficiency power plants are off-line, and only the highest efficiency plants (those that run 24 hours a day) are in operation. In my neck of the woods, I feel that's roughly 1 AM to 5 AM, but there is likely some variability to that based on the details of the local electricity supplier. Given that situation, I figure that there is a best time of day to charge electronic devices, and that's generally very late at night. Therefore, it seems reasonable to put a control (manually or with AI and/or algorithmic decision making) into battery charging devices so that the bulk of their charging is done during the "most efficient" hours.  This time-to-charge feature could use local knowledge of el...

I've needed to do some Mac work lately, so I ended up migrating to an older Mac! This is yet another A1342 MacBook, this time a "late 2009" model.  It's a "Frankenmac" that was partially disassembled when I picked up for free. I'm posting about this Mac because it is VERY sad looking, yet totally usable. First, the good: 8 GB of RAM (upgraded from 2 GB) 1 TB SSD drive (upgraded from 250 GB Hard drive) Runs MacOS High Sierra just great Note that the very cheapest MacBook you can buy new today with matching storage specs costs an incredible $2100... and by design can NEVER be upgraded.  OUCH!  Planned obsolescence in action! Now, the ugly: The LCD enclosure has stress cracks at the hinges (a common issue with these Macs).  It looks like some epoxy was used to prevent the cracks from getting worse. The LCD is wonky, and temporarily freezes if moved the "wrong" way.  It isn't the cable.  I think it's a problem with the LCD...

I have a pair of cycling / spin shoes with "clipless" SPD cleats, but the cleat screws were mangled due to lousy manufacturing. My local shop charges $25 to install cleats.  I don't mind supporting the local shop, but that's ridiculous.  I'll support the local shop with my money when they use expertise and skill, but not for turning less than a handful of 45¢ screws.  And replacement generic screws on Amazon or eBay cost like $10!  Even that is insane.  So I decided that the fastener section of my local hardware store was the solution. The Screws to Buy For SPD Cleats The fastener industry is mature and professional.  They make fantastic products.  Cleat screws are absolutely nothing special. And the local hardware store more than likely carries what I need. That said, it is important to get the right screw.  Using the wrong screw for the given application could cause trouble. In general, in my experience, SPD cycling cleats use the follo...

I was going to buy a new iPhone for myself this year, but I got to thinking... how much does an iPhone depreciate over time? I went to eBay and figured out how much the value of "yesteryear's" unlocked flagship iPhone with a basic memory upgrade falls over time.  For example, we know that a used, unlocked iPhone Z with xx GB of storage has a specific value on the open market.  I plotted the value of all the flagship phones out in order to visualize how much the value of an iPhone decays with time. In short, and very roughly, a new phone's value falls by about a 33% after it's first year, and by about 25% more after it's second year.  After those first two years, phone depreciation seems to smooth out to a fairly steady 10% percent per year. Chart 1: iPhone Depreciation Over Time So the first two years of ownership are the most expensive.  The longer I can hold onto my current iPhone, the fewer "first + second year depreciation events" I...

I've had my SodaStream Jet for years, and once in a while something has gone wrong. Disassembly is the first step to repair.  Start with this article to see how to disassemble the SodaStream, and then once you have that down, scroll through my other articles to see how I repaired specfic SodaStream problems. SodaStream Jet Disassembly Guide Tools Required Flat head screwdriver Phillips head screwdriver 1. Remove the Carbonator.  Duh. 2. Remove the black panel lever The front big black tilt lever needs to be removed first. Removing this panel is tricky, but it isn't impossible. Looking up at the bottom of the black panel, there are two tabs, one on the left and one on the right. These tabs fully secure the panel in place. The trick is to use a flat-head screwdriver under the plastic to gently lever the tabs out of the way.  Note in the pictures how I approach these tabs with my screwdriver.  I usually release the left side first, and then I release ...

Most all of us use electricity.  When is the best time to use it? Many people get this wrong.  They mistakenly conclude that using electricity during daylight hours is the best time to use electricity because that is when solar panels are delivering the most pure, clean solar energy.   That's a bad conclusion. During the day is when high electrical loads result in the dirtiest and least efficient electricity plants coming on-line. Why do power companies run these dirty and inefficient power plants?  Because of YOUR customer demand!  You can reduce this demand by minimizing your power use during the peak hours of 3 PM - 9 PM. The greenest time to use electricity is when the fewest inefficient, dirty electrical generation plants are in operation.  By minimizing your electricity use during the day, the dirtier power plants will produce less power, reducing their negative impact.  During low demand times (late night and weekends), onl...

Apple had a grand event in October 2018, and these are my take-aways: Lightning is going away. The newest iPads no longer have a Lightning connector.  Instead, the new iPads sport a standards-based USB-C connector.  Additionally, the new Apple Pencil no longer has a Lightning connector. I suspect that no new Apple devices will have a lightning connector. Goodbye, Lightning.  You were great in 2014, but USB-C made you redundant. Mac Growth has Stopped ... by design. Mac sales are more profitable than ever, but Apple has significantly slowed down the release of new Macs.  At one time models were updated every 8 months on average, but now Mac models are sold for several years without updates.  Furthermore, Apple has stopped selling machines built and priced for secondary school students. Although Apple continues to be within the top five PC manufacturers, Mac sales are declining compared to the competition. And with fewer sales, fewer developers will ...

Once again it is Dustbuster repair time.  This time I needed to fix a very noisy Dustbuster motor. I use my Dustbuster a lot  - at least three times per day - and so it is a good bet that my Dustbuster is used over 1000 times per year.  My Dustbuster likely has many times more usage than the average dustbuster. Even though these little machines are quite affordable, when mine started to act a little wonky, I decided that it was to my advantage to fix it.  I don't want to buy a new one every couple years.  I want to maximize it's mileage. The last time I had an issue, my Dustbuster's power switch became unreliable.  It was an easy fix with an inexpensive replacement part.  But this time the electric motor started to make an awful noise at startup.  I guess a few years of fine dust found its way into the motor bearings. My goal is to see if it is possible/reasonable to lubricate the Dustbuster's bearings.  So here we go! Re-lubricati...

I wanted to install a CarPlay compatible head unit into my good old Lexus ES330, but I didn't want to spend a lot of money. So forget it, right? No way! I bought the Jensen VX5228 on discount for under $180 , and I couldn't be more pleased. The Jensen is a standard "Double DIN" sized head unit, which means that it can be adapted to fit into a whole lot of modern cars. I have an older Lexus ES330, and so fitting it required a few extra Lexus-ish parts, but in the end it looks great and works like a champ. Here's what I needed for my 2002-2006 Lexus ES300 or ES330: The Jensen VX5228 or other 2-DIN CarPlay unit A ES300/330 Faceplate for a double-DIN radio The TYTO-01 Amplifier adapter for the Lexus/JBL Amplifier System A panel mount USB connector Common tools The process was pretty simple, and it can work with basically any modern double-DIN radio. Workbench Prep On the workbench, I performed the following steps Connect the TYTO-01 wire harness to the...

We've all seen a Lightning cable that has started to fall apart.  They get used every day, and after enough tugs and yanks on your iPhone, they start to fray. I've seen a lot of these frayed cables, so I've started to fix them before they break with heat shrink tube.  I get my heat shrink on Amazon, like this handy and inexpensive pack.   I prefer the heat shrink tubes without internal glue - it has higher flexibility and a smaller outside diameter once shrunk. Heat Shrink Tubing on an Old, Frayed Lightning Cable In the photo here, you'll see that I slid on a 1.25 inch length of heat shrink over the lighting connector, and then shrunk it into place.  I chose a diameter that just barely fits over the lightning connector.  In all, it took about 60 seconds to perform this repair. Warning: the white plastic of the lightning cable has a pretty low melting point.  It seems to start to melt at about 125°C (or about 250°F), which is the same temperatur...

In 2006, Apple released the 13 inch white plastic MacBook.  It wasn't nearly as great looking as the MacBook Pro, but it had a decent CPU and had a lot of built-in capabilities not seen in many other entry level laptops.  It was nearly as powerful as the MacBook Pro, and was really only missing the rarely used FireWire port. And then what happened??? 2006: Plastic MacBook (A1181) is released.  Apple sells a ton of them. 2008: Surprise! A new Aluminum MacBook (A1278) appears.  Is plastic dead??? 2008: Surprise!  Plastic MacBook continues (A1181), likely due to the price tag of the A1278. 2009: Surprise! That fancy Aluminum MacBook is renamed the "MacBook Pro" (A1278). 2009: Surprise! A new Plastic MacBook is released (A1342).  It is capable and affordable. 2009: The MacBook Air is released.  It is expensive and under-powered, but great looking. 2010: The MacBook Air gets more powerful and more affordable every year, and then... 2012: The plast...

Roomba definitely has the biggest name in robots, but there are a lot of great looking competitors out there.  So why get a Roomba? Because robot vacuum cleaners have a lot of moving parts.  And moving parts need to be maintained. The beauty of Roomba and iRobot is that spare parts are readily and inexpensively available.  Sure, there are consumables available for every robot out there.  But new wheels and motors?  How about upgraded parts?  iRobot is unique in that there is the expectation that you can affordably keep an old Roomba going forever.  Everyone else?  Not so much. My Roomba gets a lot of use, and it's 7 years old.  I've upgraded the entire cleaning head assembly - which includes the primary gearbox and brush motors and dust bin.  I've also repaired a failed power jack.  Other machines would likely already be disposed of. But my Roomba keeps on going.  I suspect that it will last as long as I need it to....

Time Machine is Apple's backup solution.  It's the best backup in the business, but it needs to be updated. Time Machine is amazing because it is by far more effective than any other backup solution.  You attach a backup drive to your computer, and your Mac asks you if you want to back up.  Say yes, and the backup happens. Time Machine does full disk backup.  It backs up periodically and automatically. You can step back in time to recover old versions of stuff.  It smartly ignores files that don't need to be backed up (like /tmp and /proc and whatever).  It automatically manages backup disks.  TimeMachine has configuration options, but they're simple and straightforward - perfect for anyone except perhaps the data center backup pro who has spent countless hours developing an optimal backup strategy. The backup industry has not responded to Time Machine.  It focuses on "every feature under the sun", with countless options and capabilities....

My primary backup service, CrashPlan, decided to drop home backup services to focus on other things.  So now I'm left with an old home IT problem: how to deal with backup. I take care of a full fleet of family Macs that are scattered around.  Crashplan helped me make sure those Macs were backed up.  I liked CrashPlan because it was easy, automatic, and reliable.  Now I have to start all over again. The biggest problem with backup is where to stick the copied data.  I'm a big fan of remote storage, in case of a fire, flood, or other disaster that impacts more than just the local hard drive.  So I'm going with S3-compatible storage services, which is an efficient way to move and store a lot of data remotely. There are many S3 storage providers out there at a whole bunch of different price points.  At first I was planning to use a commercial provider, but I've decided to give it a shot using my own SE solution to save some money.  My own soluti...

I wanted to upgrade the firmware of my EasyN WiFi camera.  I just like to keep my firmware up to date.  I am sure it is a security sieve no matter what firmware I have on it. Of course, the EasyN web site is apparently dead.  EasyN was just a brand slapped on many devices.  So I went to another brand that looked like it once sold the same camera - Foscam.  And their lame, broken, and apparently deprecated web site seemed to offer firmware that might be compatible. In general, these anonymously made cheap internet devices are an unholy mixture of cheap manufacturing and abysmal, dangerously insecure software with no promises of any kind of quality.  Still, they have been extraordinarily inexpensive. The manufacturers would sell a lot more cameras if they merely open-sourced the entire software side of it.  But I digress. So Internet lore told me that I could jam the Foscam firmware on this thing, as long as the middle two numbers of the version n...

I buy a lot of computer parts to support my hobby of repairing computers.  I buy several hundred items a year, enough that I need to keep track of each order and shipment to ensure that it makes it to me.  Otherwise I forget. Given the 100+ shipments this year, this is what I've found: All items "lost in the mail" are due to bad US-based eBay seller practices.  Items get lost due to lousy label printing and poor label attachment.  These items have all eventually showed up, but it is definitely the seller's fault, and not the shippers. For domestic shipping, USPS is the most reliable and predictable.  UPS Ground and FedEx Smartpost are very slow. FedEx Smartpost uses ground trucks to move items thousands of miles, and then they hand it to USPS for delivery.   I guess it is cheap. Items from overseas (mostly China) normally makes it to me within 3 weeks, but it can be as quick as 7 days, or take as long as 8 weeks.  So I can't bank on tim...

I watched the Keynote. My overall rating: iOS: A+ effort! tvOS: D.   Very little new here.  Where is the out-of-the-box innovation? Watch: B-.  It's good, despite killing off the 1st generation watch. MacOS: F.   Clearly an afterthought, and kills off a bunch of good Macs too. Other: F.   Absolutely nothing new in the decaying Apple ecosystem. Here are my detailed thoughts iOS 12 iOS 12 retains support for iPhone 5S.  This is important.  Instead of throwing these excellent devices into the Security Trash bin, iOS 12 lets the 5S remain in secure, active service for another year.   Furthermore, these devices are fully considered for performance improvements. iOS 12 is a very bold move by Apple, and shows that iOS has taken on more "green" principles, and that it supports the ecosystem used by its customers. Compare this to iOS 11, where Apple completely abandoned the relatively new and capable iPhone 5 and 5C, making them a dange...

I spend tens of thousands of dollars a year.  I spend it on all sorts of things to live my life - on my house, my car, healthcare, food, clothing, energy, and so forth. Much of the money I spend immediately goes away to some distant corporation - a quick glance at my credit card statement shows that 90%+ of my spending goes far, far away.  Sure, a portion of it might stay local.  But the majority of it certainly does not. Instead, maybe its better to try to get more of my money to stick around town a little longer.  Imagine spending $20,000 to buy a new car.  The vast majority of that money goes away to some international corporation owned primarily by foreign investors.  Instead, maybe it's better for me to give $1,000 to my local mechanic to fix my car.  Then he can spend that money on his family... local folks who need to live their life. Imagine spending $2,500 a year on household energy.  Instead of giving 100% of that money to OPEC an...

I did it again.  I cut my building's lighting electric usage by yet another third. Now I'm using a light-sensing photocell to automatically switch lights on and off in my building.  These lights used to be on 24x365.  Now the lights switch off when there is adequate ambient light. It would seem that a photocell would save about 50% in lighting costs, as the average 24 hour period is about 50% daylight.  But it isn't that simple:  For safety reasons, I want the lights to come on before it gets dark, and I want the lights to turn off after it gets bright out side.  Furthermore, not every day is loaded with full sunshine.  After chugging through the numbers, I pessimistically calculate the my lights will be on about 65% of the time. When I started this lighting efficiency effort, I was already considered efficient: I was using CFL bulbs in all my fixtures. Yet I was still able to reduce my lighting costs by about 85%. Further savings are g...

I just replaced a K4221 Photocell with a new one. The old photo cell failed in the "on" position, which is actually a great failure mode - I use the photocell to control indoor and outdoor lighting, and for safety reasons its important that it works.  So the lights being stuck "on" is a decent failure mode. But the photocell was stuck on for, um, many years.  I didn't really notice that there was a photocell, and was just accepting that the lights were on 24x365. Now with the photocell, my lights will be on roughly 16 hours a day. That saves a third off of my lighting bill.  In the scheme of things it will only save me a couple hundred bucks, but hey, rather I get it than OPEC. My photocell has a tough job.  It is to turn on necessary indoor and outdoor lighting when it starts to get dark outside.  But the challenge is that the photocell is positioned so it receives a lot of artificial light from the urban street, and it is unreasonably complex for me to...

This article is my roster of good and bad product moves by Apple.  I only mention things that I think are important. Feel free to let me know your opinion and I will consider it. 2018 [Bad] Apple has dropped its excellent "Airport" WiFi router line, and tells customers to buy other vendors' junk. Apple promotes the WiFi marketing gimmick called "mesh". The pundits that promote mesh are either profiteering, or idiots. [Bad] Apple completely fails to make headway making the Apple TV an awesome, must-have device.  It is shackled by how Apple lets developers use the OS.  Instead it is sold as a glorified Homekit hub integrated with a $30 Roku.  Why the fuck doesn't Apple get the excellent Apple TV hardware to play an important role in home WiFi?  Idiocy.   [Good] Apple updates the "entry level" iPad without increasing its price.  The new iPad even retains the useful "legacy" headphone port, which has really only evaporated from the i...

My friend was low on space on his MacBook Air, and he was always complaining about it. This is how I upgraded his MacBook Air from 128 GB of internal storage to 500 GB. Upgraded SSD Drive in my MacBook Air The MacBook in question is a 2012 MacBook Air, the small 11 inch model.  It is a great laptop, and at the time of purchase he thought he'd only need 128 GB of storage.  Then he had a baby, and the number of baby pictures grew and grew.  Soon he was out of space. Apple normally wants you to buy a new laptop in this situation, or sign up to a special iCloud subscription.  But there is a solution! Stuff needed for the upgrade: There are some basic items I needed to upgrade this MacBook Air.  Fortunately these items are inexpensive!  A tech-oriented person might even have a few in their cabinet already, but if not, then no big deal. M.2 SATA style SSD. The heart of this upgrade is a new SSD.  But only a few SSDs will fit in a 2012 MacB...

SodaStream 60L "Carbonator" CO2 cylinders have a specific weight when empty, plus about 410 or so grams for the CO2 they should have when they're "full".  A little while ago I went to buy a replacement Carbonator from my local hardware store. The dealer pulled a new Carbonator out of the box and sensed it was lighter than usual.  He put the "light" Carbonator in the "empty" pile and sold me a different one.  At that moment I concluded that it would be smart of me to weigh both new and empty SodaStream carbonators.  Here are the results. Weighing a SodaStream Carbonator - for both Science and Consumer Protection.       The dealer told me that sometimes the carbonators leak after they leave the SodaStream filling facility.  That means there could be an opportunity for customers like me to get ripped off! The SodaStream cylinders I buy claim to have a net product weight of 410 grams - and that means that a full Soda Stream Carbonator shou...

I repair A1342 MacBooks, and so I know them quite well.  They can be wonderful machines, even in 2018.  Here is my advice for the diagnosis and repair of the A1342 series of machines. Brief Overview The A1342 is the only polycarbonate Unibody MacBook.  There are two revisions: late 2009, and mid-2010.  These revisions have interchangeable parts.   The only significant difference is the CPU clock speed.  The machine's general design (and performance) is very similar to the 2010 MacBook Pro. A1342 manufacturing was discontinued in early 2012. No-Start / Totally Dead Machine This is almost always due to liquid ingress through the keyboard.  Often times water will kill the keyboard, but everything else will be just fine.  The best way to check it out is to remove the back cover and try to start the machine by briefly shorting the jumper pads with a pair of steel tweezers.  When shorted for about 1 second, the fan should spin up and the ...