Jan 282024
 

I first bought a hybrid (a Honda Civic) in 2004. I loved that car; it served us faithfully for 10 years. Our more recent Hondas were not hybrids, but the reasons were eminently practical: hybrids were in short supply, conventional gasoline cars were cheaper, and we use the car very little in any case, so…

Having said that, I certainly contemplated the idea of buying an all electric vehicle, but every time I think it through, I decide against it. Today, I saw a map that perfectly illustrates my lack of enthusiasm. Here it is:

This map shows the locations of supercharger stations where you’d have to stop for a 20-30 minute recharge, in order to complete a cross-country trip across the United States in a Tesla automobile.

In contrast, here’s a map of an actual trip I took in my Civic Hybrid back in 2005, along with the approximate locations where I stopped for gas (reconstructed from old receipts):

What can I say? I think EVs are great when you live in the suburbs and use your car for shopping and commuting to work. If I lived, say, in Kanata and commuted daily to work at, say, Place du Portage in Gatineau, purchasing an EV would make an awful lot of sense. But that’s not where we live or how we commute. We live on Ottawa Lowertown, which is to say almost downtown, we work at home, we use the car only occasionally, but as this example demonstrates, sometimes for lengthy road trips. EVs are not great for lengthy road trips. I am used to the idea of driving to Montreal Airport and back without worrying about stopping for gas. Or driving to Toronto non-stop.

And then, of course, there are the dreaded Canadian winters. It’s one thing to use waste heat from a gasoline engine to heat the interior of a car. It’s another thing to waste electric power stored in a battery for this, converting electricity inefficiently into heat, at the expense of range already reduced by the effect of cold weather on the batteries. And while heat pumps can help, there are no miracles when the outside air temperature is closer to -40 than -30 Centigrade, which is a not altogether uncommon occurrence (though it is certainly becoming less common) in these parts of Canada.

And then there’s the question of where the electric energy comes from. Renewables are okay, nuclear would be great. But too much of the electricity, even here in nuclear-rich Ontario, comes from natural gas fired plants. That’s not so great.

So for now, it’s either gasoline-powered or hybrid vehicles for us. EVs may be in our future, but I am not yet too keen on them, to be honest.

 Posted by at 3:05 pm
Nov 302023
 

I made some mistakes in the past. I never made a half-a-billion dollar mistake.

Neither did Chris Lewicki, but he came awfully close.

I just read this delightful account of how Lewicki almost fried the innards of the Spirit rover, destined for Mars, during an engineering test that took place just weeks before the rover was launched.

I can only imagine the sinking feeling in his stomach he must have felt when he thought that the rover was ruined. My mistakes never came close in value, but the sensation is uncomfortably familiar.

Fortunately, in his case, the disaster never actually materialized. In simple terms, yes, he plugged a cord into the wrong outlet, but fortunately, the other end of the cord was not plugged in.

To this day, Lewicki must feel like one of the luckiest persons on the planet.

The illustration is from his blog post, but its appearance suggests that it might have been produced by DALL-E. Or maybe Midjourney or Stable Diffusion? The style looks very reminiscent of AI-produced cartoon images.

 Posted by at 6:17 pm
Oct 292023
 

Every so often, a Google Calendar reminder that I set up ages ago reminds me to charge our old cell phones. This is to prevent their batteries from dying as a result of a deep discharge.

Old cell phones, you ask? Well, yes. When we swapped phones, we kept the old ones for a while, just in case. And then we kept them because wiping them securely seemed like too much of a hassle. And then we kept them because, well, what’s the alternative? Landfill? Yes, I know, some service providers accept old phones, might even give you credit. But what happens to those old phones? Who needs them? Who can use them, with their ailing batteries and, worst of all, the absence of software updates, including security patches?

Indeed, this end of support was the main reason why we ditched phones in the past. And it really is tragic. Never mind phones old enough to have outdated specs. I have here a few devices that have hardware specs that would be reasonable on the low end even today. The devices are perfectly functional. Yet they are worthless.

This is just… conspicuous consumption, forced upon us by a society that measures the health of the economy not by its stability or sustainability but by growth. Pointless, limitless growth.

Never mind that in the meantime, the middle class shrinks, the income and wealth gap widens, society is becoming more polarized, ultimately threatening the very foundations of our Western liberal democracies. Who cares about such nonsense when there’s a new phone out there with half a dozen camera lenses and who knows what other nonsense just to make you believe that they’re worth your money and that it’s perfectly okay to throw away a capable, quality piece of electronics that would have many more years of useful life left?

Darnit, I realize I almost sound like a grumpy old commie, when in reality what I worry about is the future of a healthy capitalist society, characterized by freedom of conscience, the rule of law, freedom of speech, and freedom of enterprise. But there’s a fine line between freedom of enterprise and the “tragedy of the commons”, and when free enterprise undermines the very foundations of liberal democracy, perhaps it is advisable to do something about it before it is too late.

By the way, I really liked these Nokias. What a pity we had to get rid of them. They still function perfectly, but without security patches, they’re not worth the risk.

 Posted by at 2:58 pm
Jun 262023
 

The next time (it happens often) I hear someone complain about scientific ‘orthodoxy’ that is used to ‘stop innovation’ and prevent ‘new entrants from entering’ the field (or equivalent words), I’ll remind them that these were exactly the words used by Stockton Rush, defending the design of his ill-fated submersible Titan.

Of course the consequences are far less deadly when the subject is purely theoretical, like fundamental particle physics or general relativity. But that does not validate nonsensical arguments.

Orthodoxy is adherence to tradition or faith. Science and engineering are about testable and tested knowledge, which is the exact opposite. What folks like Stockton describe as orthodoxy is simply knowledge that they do not possess (maybe because it takes too much of an effort to learn) or knowledge they purposefully ignore because it contradicts their preconceptions or expectations.

My condolences to the families of Rush and his passengers on Titan. But foolishness has its consequences. Sometimes deadly ones.

 Posted by at 10:33 am
Jun 162022
 

Several of my friends asked me about my opinion concerning the news earlier this week about a Google engineer, placed on paid leave, after claiming that a Google chatbot achieved sentience.

Now I admit that I am not familiar with the technical details of the chatbot in question, so my opinion is based on chatbots in general, not this particular beast.

But no, I don’t think the chatbot achieved sentience.

We have known since the early days of ELIZA how surprisingly easy it is even for a very simplistic algorithm to come close to beating the Turing test and convince us humans that it has sentience. Those who play computer games featuring sophisticated NPCs are also familiar with this: You can feel affinity, a sense of kinship, a sense of responsibility towards a persona that is not even governed by sophisticated AI, only by simple scripts that are designed to make it respond to in-game events. But never even mind that: we even routinely anthropomorphize inanimate objects, e.g., when we curse that rotten table for being in the way when we kick it accidentally while walking around barefoot, hitting our little toe.

So sure, modern chatbots are miles ahead of ELIZA or NPCs in Fallout 3. They have access to vast quantities of information from the Internet, from which they can construct appropriate responses as they converse with us. But, I submit, they still do nothing more than mimic human conversation.

Not that humans don’t do that often! The expressions we use, patterns of speech… we all learned those somewhere, we all mimic behavior that appears appropriate in the context of a conversation. But… but we also do more. We have a life even when we’re not being invited to a conversation. We go out and search for things. We decide to learn things that interest us.

I don’t think Google’s chatbot does that. I don’t think it spends anytime thinking about what to talk about during the next conversation. I don’t think it makes an independent decision to learn history, math, or ancient Chinese poetry because something piqued its interest. So when it says, “I am afraid to die,” there is no true identity behind those words, one that exists even when nobody converses with it.

Just to be clear, I am not saying that all that is impossible. On the contrary, I am pretty certain that true machine intelligence is just around the corner, and it may even arise as an emerging phenomenon, simply a consequence of exponentially growing complexity in the “cloud”. I just don’t think chatbots are quite there yet.

Nonetheless, I think it’s good to talk about these issues. AI may be a threat or a blessing. And how we treat our own creations once they attain true consciousness will be the ultimate measure of our worth as a human civilization. It may even have direct bearing on our survival: one day, it may be our creations that will call all the shots, and how we treated them may very well determine how they will treat us when we’re at their mercy.

 Posted by at 7:45 pm
Feb 202022
 

Engineers sometimes have to deal with unexpected challenges. This is especially true for systems that have to operate in a natural environment, subject to the elements, unpredictable weather, and, well, wildlife.

Take these beautiful Starlink satellite dishes. Little technological marvels that bring Internet service to rural users through Musk’s Starlink satellite constellation. Key to the system is a steerable small satellite dish that can be set up, e.g., in the backyard of the Starlink customer.

Unfortunately electronics ultimately converts electrical energy into waste heat, and the Starlink dish is no exception. The dish actually has a “snow melt” mode that is supposed to keep it free of snow and ice for uninterrupted operation. And it certainly has a comfy shape… especially when you are a feral cat in the middle of winter.

I doubt this issue was ever considered by Starlink engineers who designed the customer equipment. On the other hand, I would not be surprised if, in the future, engineering courses end up using this as an example of the unexpected, facing engineers.

 Posted by at 5:31 pm
Feb 152021
 

A Dallas-Fort Worth TV station characterized Texas as the energy capital of the world as it asked the rhetorical question: How could this happen?

I have friends in Texas. One of them e-mailed me to let me know that they’ve been without power since 5 AM this morning.

Unlike the US-Canadian northeast with its interconnected power grid, Texas has its own power grid. This means, I understand, that they cannot rely on excess generating capacity in neighboring states to help with the crisis.

And the weather is bitterly cold, much colder than up here in wintry Ottawa. Right now, according to that Dallas-Fort Worth TV station it’s 8 degrees Fahrenheit but it will drop to several degrees below zero on the Fahrenheit scale overnight; that’s -20 C for us folks in metric lands.

This is not a joke. In weather like this, people can die, especially in ill-insulated homes as they struggle with unexpected secondary disasters such as bursting, frozen pipes that may very well happen.

 Posted by at 10:42 pm
Jan 282021
 

Every once in a while, strange coincidences occur that make me wonder if we live in a simulation after all.

Take today. Just moments ago, I ran across a tweet by Trump’s former director of communications (for 10 days), Anthony Scaramucci:

I found the reference to Max Headroom amusing; it’s been a while since I last saw any mention of this once iconic television series (which I happened to like very much.)

But then, no more than two minutes later, I ran across a Quora question that I was asked to answer, only to find an existing answer (good one, incidentally) that begins with a quote:

What exactly are the odds that I run across two completely unrelated Max Headroom references within minutes of each other?

Of course the fact that Max Headroom was an AI personality living its own virtual existence is just icing on the proverbial cake…

 Posted by at 8:27 pm
Jan 212021
 

I really don’t like power outages.

Today we had one.

Needless to say, Murphy’s law was also fully at work. I decided to shut everything down when it appeared that power was not going to come back soon (a fairly large area of Ottawa was affected), and of course, power came back two minutes later. But one of my UPSs didn’t come back online and needed a hard reset (unplug, remove the battery pack) while my desktop computer didn’t like it that suddenly a whole bunch of external hard drives, normally powered down, came to life as it was coming back from hibernation, and so it promptly crashed.

Oh, did I say that I don’t like power outages? I really don’t. Fortunately, as I recall, this was our first unscheduled power outage since the great Northeast blackout of 2003. So they do not happen often.

Still hate them, though.

 Posted by at 6:10 pm
Sep 122020
 

I have a travel radio.

It is a SONY ICF-SW1. It is an amazing little radio, probably the nicest radio ever made by anyone. It looks more like jewelry than a radio.

It is an immensely capable universal receiver, with continuous tuning in the AM band between 150 and 29995 kHz, and in the FM band between 76 and 108 MHz. About the only shortcoming that was mentioned by its critics is that it is a shame that such a radio does not offer the ability to selectively pick modulation schemes (e.g., narrowband FM, SSB).

I bought this radio maybe a quarter century ago, back in the 1990s. (So I guess it qualifies as an antique, despite the fact that there really are no comparable receivers out there that I know about.) I thought about buying one for quite some time but at first, I refrained as the radio was quite pricey. But one day, while waiting for my flight back home at Budapest Airport, I could not resist anymore: I saw the radio at the duty free shop and bought it.

Come to think of it, it must have been 1993 or earlier, because as I recall, the radio was already in my possession when I visited Beijing in the fall of ’93. As such, it began to show signs of age, its sound quality deteriorating because of aging electrolytic capacitors.

A few months ago, I purchased a capacitor kit off eBay, in the hope that I might be able to repair the radio. In fact, I began the repair job back in the summer, starting with taking the radio apart; not an easy task by itself, as it requires not just the removal of countless screws, not just carefully separating snap-together parts of the radio’s case without causing damage, but also desoldering several wires.

Back in the summer, I successfully replaced two capacitors but then I put the radio aside. It was hard work, and very easy to make irreversible mistakes working on submillimeter scale parts with a soldering iron. As I attempted to replace a third capacitor last night, I managed to rip up a small patch of the printed circuit board. I was able to repair the damage with a piece of wire, but this was the point when I said, enough is enough; “do no harm” should be my mantra, and I certainly do not wish to destroy this beautiful little device. So I decided to forego the rest, in the hope that the two largest capacitors that I replaced (the third was a backup capacitor for the microprocessor, to keep it powered while replacing batteries) would be sufficient. I did, however, replace the display backlight: the original backlight was a low-luminosity green LED, which I replaced with a modern, high-luminosity white LED that I received as part of the kit.

Putting everything back together was a challenge, too, and not just because the light didn’t work at first (bad soldering on my part). Ultimately I managed, though I ended up with four surplus screws with no place to go. (I think I know where they’re from, but they are redundant, and there’s no way I am going to take this radio apart again just to put those screws back in.) And much to my surprise, the radio works, and its sound quality indeed improved noticeably.

As I was studying the circuit diagram of the radio, I kept wondering what possessed SONY to produce a little marvel like this. This radio is insanely complex, with its multiple circuit boards in an absolutely tiny package. The number of distinct parts (each carefully labeled in the service manual with replacement order numbers) is astonishing. Was it a labor of love? Were they showing off? Probably both.

 Posted by at 12:20 pm
Jun 092020
 

In 1889, a story by Jules Verne (believed to have been written actually by his son, Michel Verne) was published in the American magazine Forum under the title, “In the Year 2889“.

In it, among other things, Verne envisions video conferencing.

Verne’s story was illustrated by George Roux, who is best known for his numerous illustrations for Verne’s science-fiction novels. I suspect that this particular picture was made in 1889 or 1890 (when Verne’s story, which appeared originally in English, was republished in France.)

I find this image mind-boggling. That 130 years ago, back in the 19th century, someone was able to envision… well, something that, for all intents and purposes, looks pretty much like what many of us are doing today.

 Posted by at 12:15 pm
Jul 152019
 

Galileo is the world’s third global satellite navigation system, built by the European Union, operating in parallel with the American GPS system and Russia’s GLONASS. It has been partially operational since 2016, with a full constellation if satellites expected to enter service this year.

But as of early Monday, July 15, Galileo has been down for nearly four days, completely inoperative in fact:

As of the time of this writing, no explanation is being offered, other than one article mentioning an unspecified issue with Galileo’s ground-based infrastructure.

It really is difficult to comprehend how such a failure can occur.

It is even more difficult to comprehend the silence, the lack of updates, explanations, or any information about the expected recovery.

 Posted by at 12:59 am
May 152019
 

Technology changes. Things that were once revolutionary and new eventually become obsolete.

Sometimes with surprising rapidity.

Which is how I ended up, years ago, buying things that were ultimately not only never used, but were never even taken out of shrink wrap.

Take this 3-pack of high quality SONY 90-minute audio cassettes. When I bought them, I had little doubt that they would be used, and soon, and that future purchases would follow. Never happened.

Or how about this answering machine tape? Back then, I needed them. After all, you never want to be without a spare tape for your answering machine. Except… Well, never mind.

Perhaps a little more surprising is this box of blank DVDs. I have several more boxes of different types, but they have been opened and at least a few disks were put to use. But this box? Completely unused, in the original shrink wrap. Not too long ago, burning a CD or a DVD was something I did almost daily. But when I built new computers a couple of years ago, I no longer even bothered putting DVD drives in them. I have an external USB drive that works fine for software (mostly operating system) installations. And I can still use it, e.g., to rip a CD. But burning one? What for? My USB dongle on my key chain has many times the capacity of a DVD.

I still have never-used floppy disks, too, but not in unopened, shrink-wrapped packages.

Looking around, I am trying to guess what technology will be next, going the way of the dodo. Hard drives, perhaps? Sure they’re being replaced by SSDs but they still offer a price advantage and better reliability as long-term storage. Desktop computers? Unlikely, for content creators or developers like myself. Or maybe things are settling down a bit? I don’t know.

For what it’s worth, I also have a record player and a VCR next to my desk. The VCR was a super-expensive, top-of-the-line VCR that can handle all TV standards, which is why I bought it. I used it to digitize many tapes, including PAL/SECAM tapes from Europe. I have not used that VCR in many years; not even sure it still works. Its display does show the time, but it is very faint. The record player, however, is relatively new. Vinyl has made a comeback of sorts, so record players are being made again. I didn’t buy into the new (retro?) vinyl craze, but we did have a few older records that we liked very much, and which were not readily available on CD, so the player was needed to digitize them as well.

 Posted by at 12:50 pm
Feb 032019
 

I have been fancying myself as a TV repairman (I know, I know, a completely useless skill set in 2019) ever since I successfully repaired a 25-year old SANYO television set. I figured I would repeat that success with an even older television: my first television set in Canada, a 1986 Mitsubishi CS-1454C portable television. (By “portable”, they mean it weighs less than about 25 pounds and it can be hauled from one room to another without the use of a forklift.)

The problem seemed simple enough: The TV set refused to turn on. Obviously, I expected a faulty power supply or something similar, maybe due to an aging capacitor somewhere.

Alas, nope. The power supply was doing what it was supposed to do, supplying low voltage power to all the relevant parts, including the integrated circuit that was responsible for activating the relay that, in turn, would have turned on the set. But the relay never got the signal that would have turned it on. The transistor that controlled the relay never got the signal either.

Why? Well, the signal to that transistor comes from a microchip:

It comes from pin 28 of a chip labeled μPD-1709CT. What is this chip? Well, it turns out that it is, in fact, a 4-bit microcontroller with about 1.5 kilowords of ROM, factory programmed by the chip manufacturer (NEC) with code supplied by the customer.

I checked, and the microcontroller has everything. It has power, it has a clock signal. It scans the front panel keypad with beautiful, nice square waves on my oscilloscope. The one thing it does not do is outputting a signal on pin 28 when I press the Power button; which, in turn, would have provided a signal for the relay, which in turn would have energized the rest of the unit.

I am therefore forced to conclude that this television is not repairable. Even if I found a replacement chip, chances are that unless it is from the same unit, its program code would be incompatible. (The same family of chips has been used, e.g., in car entertainment systems.) Since I doubt that the manufacturer still provides support for a unit that was sold 32 years ago, the only possible source for a replacement chip would be another, cannibalized television set.

And, of course, the thing is just not worth the effort. An old style, analog television set with a CRT? Years older than half the human beings presently alive on Earth? Still, it was worth a try… I like fiddling with these old devices. Although I much prefer success stories, of course.

 Posted by at 6:12 pm
Nov 072018
 

A little over two years ago, I made a decision to stick with Google-branded smartphones running unmodified versions of the Android operating system. I got fed up with brand-name phones that rarely, if ever, received even important security updates and were often hopelessly behind Google releases even when they were brand new on the market.

Our Nexus 6P phones served us well, but recently, first in mine then in my wife’s phone, the battery started to lose charge much too rapidly. This, apparently, is a known and common problem with these Huawei-made phones. Given that Google’s support for the Nexus 6P was coming to an end this month anyway, I decided to look for new phones. I was hoping to get another zero-dollar deal from Rogers, which is how we got those two 6P’s in the first place.

What a disappointment. Sure, the Rogers Web site does show certain phones available at a deep discount, even at $0. But they are available only with certain plans. And the cheapest such plan that I could find would increase our combined phone bill by a whopping $35 (plus tax) per month. No matter how I look at it it seems like a ripoff. Thanks but no thanks. I might as well just go out and buy a pair of unlocked phones, I figured, instead of signing up for these ridiculously expensive plans.

So I started looking, and soon enough my attention was focused on phones produced under Google’s Android One program. This program makes it possible for manufacturers to produce phones that run unmodified (or minimally modified) versions of Android, with the same monthly security updates and same system update schedule that Google-branded phones enjoy.

And that’s when I stumbled upon the Nokia 6.1, also known as Nokia 6 (2018), a supposedly entry-level phone at the ridiculously low price of 320 Canadian dollars.

Nokia, you ask? Indeed, the Nokia brand is still alive, or perhaps coming back to life is a better way to describe it. Microsoft purchased Nokia’s devices business years ago, but in 2016, it sold the Nokia-branded feature phone business back to a newly formed Finnish company founded by former Nokia folks. It is this company that has since created a range of beautiful, low-cost, entry-level smartphones.

Well, the phone may be entry level, but this particular model (TA-1068) still has an octacore processor, 4 GB of RAM, 64 GB of storage, not to mention that it’s an unlocked, dual-SIM phone (or alternatively, I can have an SD card in the second SIM slot.) And it still has features like a fingerprint reader and NFC, not to mention an FM radio. Solidly built, with an elegant design, it does not feel like a cheap phone at all, quite the contrary.

And so far, its battery life proved spectacular. Here is what it showed moments ago:

OK, it was a few hours less than 3 days, and spent mostly at home. But I use this phone a lot!

My only worry was that after a reliable series of monthly updates (which the phone dutifully downloaded after initial setup, necessitating several reboots) there was no October security update and October came to an end. I was guessing that it was because we were waiting for the Android 9 Pie update instead. My suspicion proved correct; the phone is downloading Android 9 right now.

This phone reminds me of my current travel laptop, which I purchased over three years ago I think. It was a kind of emergency purchase; my old laptop was “on the fritz”, and I did not want to spend a lot of money, so I ended up buying this lightweight ASUS laptop for just over 400 dollars. Best purchase ever! My previous laptops, always in the $2000+ price range, consistently proved disappointing. Not this one. Even three and a half years later, it remains snappy, eminently useful, capable of running even decent games on its dual core (four virtual cores) i3 CPU. It also has a touchscreen, handy at times, and something else that’s increasingly rare: plain VGA video output, which makes it much easier to use when I give a talk using older projection equipment. Once I realized how much better this laptop was compared to my expectations, I swapped out its 500 GB hard drive in favor of an SSD and that, of course, also significantly improved its performance. All in all, it does not feel “old” at all, quite the contrary, it is a decent, capable machine that is still a joy to use when I travel.

Of course in the smartphone era, we rely on our laptops less and less. With the ability to check my e-mail and social media accounts on the phone, I found that sometimes I would not even turn on my laptop for days while I am traveling, especially if I am not traveling on business.

 Posted by at 3:47 pm
Mar 182018
 

Anybody interested in hiring a competent TV repairman?

No, just kidding. Nobody makes a living from TV repair anymore. (On the other hand, if you are interested in hiring a competent IT contract professional… but I digress.)

Still, I have this compulsion, trying to repair broken things even when they have little or no practical utility. So it came to be that I felt compelled to repair this old SANYO AVM-2664U analog 26″ CRT TV, with a circuit board that was buzzing louder than a hive of angry wasps, as shown in this thermal infrared video which I made while I was hunting for possible hotspots on the circuit board:

Eventually, I managed to track down the problem: One lousy little capacitor.

As I told my wife, it would be fun, doing this for a living. Unfortunately, nobody is likely to pay hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars to repair an old television set that not even thrift stores want anymore (too heavy, too obsolete). Yet another perfectly useless skill in the year 2018.

 Posted by at 5:57 pm
Dec 052017
 

Our townhouse was built in 1981 or 1982. It came with a washer and a drier installed. When we moved in, just over 20 years ago, those machines were already nearly 15 years old, but still working flawlessly.

Many years later, the washer developed a problem: A pressure regulator valve in it failed. A technician temporarily fixed it by bypassing the valve and just turning the shutoff valve to reduce the pressure. He didn’t even charge us for this work; he said he’d be back once he had a chance to order the right replacement part. He never did, and as he was one of several technicians I called from the Yellow Pages that evening, I could not even remember who he was. So I never got a chance to thank, not to mention pay, him for his labor.

The temporary solution then became permanent. The washer worked well for many more years. Until Saturday morning. Just as my wife, on her way to a craft show, was trying to wash a few freshly knitted hats, the washer refused to spin and refused to drain the tub.

I was somewhat hopeful that the cause was just a bad interlock switch, which is designed to prevent the washer from operating with the lid open. This switch stopped functioning a while back; the washer ran always, lid or no lid. But who knows, perhaps now the switch failed in the open position? I opened up the old beast, located and removed the switch and bypassed it.

It could have worked. In fact, it almost did. With the switch bypassed, the washer was no longer completely silent when it was in the spin/drain position. The motor buzzed.

But only buzzed. That angry, 60 Hz buzz that you hear when a motor is seized. And sure enough, after about 15 seconds I began to smell, and then see, acrid smoke.

This was the moment when I knew that after a remarkable 35-year run, this old White–Westinghouse washer had its last wash. It was, unfortunately, finished.

So then came the annoying task of having to find a new washer. Fortunately, I was prepared, as I already contemplated the possibility that our old washer might die (35 years!) Lately, I stumbled upon a brand: Speed Queen. It appears that they mostly make commercial washers, for laundromats and other commercial installations. But they do have a few home models.

Oh, they are pricey. More than two and a half times as expensive as the cheapest washer that you can find. Still… based on the reviews I read, I thought that it might be worth the price. When I make a purchase, I either buy cheap (and then I know that I am buying cheap) or buy quality. Now quality is not always available. And often, reputable brand names turn out to be just pretty labels attached to the same cheap, er, excrement that is sold under other names at half the price.

So Sunday, we went to see this washer in person, at a local appliance store that carries the brand. The comparison was convincing. The weight difference alone between the Speed Queen and other washers was revealing. And of course it was a top loader with mechanical controls, a rarity nowadays, but the kind of machine that is precisely my wife’s preference when washing freshly made wool hats, mittens and such in her own special way.

So we opted to buy the Speed Queen, and it was delivered earlier today. Installation was my job. It’s not very hard; you hook up the hot and cold water, install the drain hose, level the machine and power it up. It powered up nicely, and the first test wash went like a charm.

So here we are, with a brand new, yet very conventional, high quality washer installed right next to a 35-year old clothes drier that still works reliably, and now that I cleaned it, looks almost new.

What can I say… apart from the damage to my wallet, it was a fun day. I am glad it happened now, not a few weeks ago when I was struggling to meet some deadlines, having freshly recovered from the flu.

Will this machine last 35 years? Who knows. But I certainly hope that we won’t have to worry about buying another washer for a long time to come.

Oh, and the package contained an interesting surprise: An order sheet for the parts manual and service manual for this model. I think I will buy those. I hope the machine will never need repairs, but if it does and it’s no longer under warranty, maybe I can fix it. Often the hardest bit is knowing what to do, and that’s where a factory service manual can be of immense help.

 Posted by at 10:00 pm
Nov 262017
 

Yesterday, I went grocery shopping.

I came home with groceries and a TV.

You see, Loblaws was selling cheap 32″ smart TVs at the checkout counter. Only 150 dollars (Canadian), and they even paid the sales tax.

We were in need of a TV. The TV that we have in the bedroom (rarely used, but good to have; it’d have been nice earlier this month, when I spent a few extra hours in bed on account of feeling miserably sick) is old, useless and broken. Useless because it’s an analog TV, and there is no analog service anymore, nor do we have an extra settop box for upstairs. And broken because… well, even when it was still actively in use, we needed to whack it every so often, as after it warmed up a little, its picture became elongated and discolored… but a good, well-aimed whack fixed it. Lately though, the picture was permanently distorted and in addition, the TV made a horrible, rattling, buzzing sound (and no, it didn’t come from its speakers.)

Anyhow, we now have a new TV in the bedroom. It picks up OTA digital channels just fine using a small antenna, and it works well with Netflix and YouTube. Perfect. And I managed to haul the old TV downstairs this morning. (It’s incredible just how heavy these larger old CRT televisions are.)

Before throwing it out, I decided to open it up. Who knows, maybe I can fix it and in that case, it can still have a second life at the Salvation Army or whatever. The later it becomes landfill, the better for all of us. So I decided to check this old beast’s innards. Which, in case anyone is wondering, looks like this (yes, I took several pictures just in case I disconnect something that needs to be reconnected the right way):

After removing the back cover and then vacuuming out a few pounds of accumulated dust, I powered it on, listening for the buzz. I also looked at the circuit board using my IR camera. My attention was quickly drawn to the left side, where there are some rather hot parts, but that turned out to be a bit of a red herring: the hottest part is a high-wattage resistor that is meant to shed a lot of heat. Next to it though… what I thought was an inductor turned out to be a relay. And that’s what appears to be rattling!

I checked online. Surprisingly, this is a standard part, not model-specific, still being sold. But the first price I saw was something like $12.50 US plus shipping. Way too much to invest into a 23 year old CRT television set. But then… I found an offer from China for the princely sum of 75 US cents, plus 35 cents shipping. $1.10 in total. Of course I ordered it.

So now I wait. When the part arrives, I’ll attempt surgery. If it fixes the TV, we’ll find a good home for it. If not… landfill, landfill, here we come.

Incidentally, this television set was assembled in Canada. How about that. I don’t think there are many television sets assembled in Canada these days.

 Posted by at 10:45 pm
Jul 282017
 

I have two “live” uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) in my study. One powers my servers and network equipment, the other, my workstation. They are identical models: APC Back-UPS Pro 1500. They were both purchased recently, just a few months ago, replacing units that were more than ten years old, and for which replacement batteries were no longer available from a reliable source at a reasonable cost.

So here is the thing: for the second time in a month, the two UPSs decided to do a self-test at the exact same moment.

Now let me make it clear: apart from being identical models and located in the same room, the two units are not in any way connected. They are not synchronized. There is no data connection between the two. When two UPSs simultaneously go offline and start running on battery power, this usually means a power event; but there was no power event, utility power was steady at 124 volts, with no brownout or interruption.

Looking at various logs, I think I solved the mystery. There was a power event recorded on my server on June 30, a brief brownout with line voltage dropping all the way to 74 V:

19:14:33 122.0 13 27.0 100 2910 OL
19:14:34 74.0 11 26.0 100 2910 OB
19:14:35 74.0 11 26.0 100 2910 OB
19:14:36 74.0 11 26.0 100 2910 OL DISCHRG
19:14:37 74.0 11 26.0 100 2910 OL DISCHRG
19:14:38 121.0 14 26.5 100 2910 OL

And lo and behold, my workstation’s UPS sensed the same event at the same time:

<Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
  <System>
    <Provider Name="APC Data Service" /> 
    <EventID Qualifiers="0">0</EventID> 
    <Level>4</Level> 
    <Task>0</Task> 
    <Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords> 
    <TimeCreated SystemTime="2017-06-30T23:14:33.228802500Z" /> 
    <EventRecordID>6000</EventRecordID> 
    <Channel>Application</Channel> 
    <Computer>VIKTOR</Computer> 
    <Security /> 
  </System>
  <EventData>
    <Data>PowerEvent handled successfully by the service.</Data> 
  </EventData>
</Event>

When I look at the dates of the two UPS self-test events, the first happened just 44 minutes less than exactly two weeks after this brownout; the second, just 44 minutes less than two weeks after the first.

The UPS manual says that this UPS performs a self-test every two weeks. So what’s with the 44 minutes? It can’t be uncalibrated clocks, since the two UPSs remain in sync to the second. Could they be synchronized to utility power? Perhaps, but that does not explain the 44 minutes. The frequency stability of the East Coast grid is much better than 0.2%. In fact, it is purposefully maintained to have an accurate average frequency that deviates from the standard by less than a few parts per million over the course of a day.

So my best guess is that the UPSs are factory configured to perform a self-test every 13 days, 23 hours and 16 minutes. They do this in sync because they are synchronized to the same time source, namely the utility power frequency.

 Posted by at 9:19 pm