Tesla

Today's newsletter from Chartr is all about Tesla. (Actually Monday's newsletter, but close enough for me.)

Tesla Operating Profit

If you bought shares of Tesla early, as in any time before 2021, you're sitting pretty. Ever since then it's been a gamble. Shorting Tesla, that is, betting that the stock price is going to collapse, has been a popular sport, and with the P/E ratio (Price to Earnings) sitting around 70, shorting the stock still looks like a good bet. Normal industrial stocks have a P/E ratio of around 20 - $20 of stock will net you one dollar of earnings every year. Now if you think Tesla is going to continue to grow exponentially, you might be willing to gamble on it. However, from looking at the above chart it looks like the growth is no longer exponential. But given the stock's performance, it kind of looks like the people who are buying Tesla are not hard headed finance guys, but ordinary folks who are operating on emotion, and those people love Tesla. From Chartr:

Much of that meteoric rise has been down to everyday investors that Musk has converted into a legion of loyal, often loud, devotees — who aren’t afraid to put their money where their mouth is.

Tesla Share Price History

Tesla cars are impressive, and if you have money to burn, go ahead and buy one of the cars or some of the stock. But if you buy one of the cars and the electronical slankerator goes tits up in five years and they want 50 G's to replace it, don't come crying to me.

Electronical gizmos are all very well, but like all gizmos, some of them are going to fail. Some of those failures will be easy to fix, but some will prove impossible to fix. The odds of that happening are low, but you should prepare yourself mentally. Should you get hit by the gods of bad luck, you may need to just have to take the hit.

I made six ridiculous pencil sharpeners

I started watching this thinking I might get some laughs, and I did, but he also spends some time talking about his new Flow Mach 200 waterjet, a high pressure water cutting machine, which is definitely very cool.

Revisit Hospital

Went in for surgery Friday afternoon to correct the misaligned hip joint. Is misaligned the right word? Seems appropriate. Didn't go to the Operating Room till around 4PM. Last time I was here they sedated me as well as given me a spinal block. I remember a whole lot more about the pre-op and post-op this time. For instance, I remember scooting off of the gurney and onto the operating table, and then sitting there while they started sticking a needle in my back. That was it until I woke up in post-op.

KCI's Prevena Incision Management System

$4,000 - Disposable

Saturday I was pretty much in limbo, just kind of lying there, dozing now and again. Since I only spent one night here the first time I expected the same this time. All was fine until we get to the occupational therapy (last step before discharge) and we notice the incision is bleeding, not gushing, but more than a couple of spots. They apply pressure with a big fat elastic bandage but that doesn't quite do the trick, so they hooked me up with a portable vacuum pump to suck the excess blood away and call it good.

Well, good enough. Here it is two days later and there is no sign of blood in the tubing, but this electronic leech is supposed to stay attached to my hip for a week. I would have been better off spending another night in the hospital.

Bluetooth

TaNix Bluetooth Audio Adapter for Home Stereo

I'm expanding my Bluetooth horizons. I bought two gadgets from Amazon so I can get tunes more places. They cost about $20 each, are very small and don't require any batteries. The TaNix does require power, just another cable to add to the home stereo snarl.

IMDEN Bluetooth 5.0 FM Transmitter for Car

We moved our antique home stereo to the basement in preparation for the big kitchen remodeling project, so I use it when I'm riding the Peloton. Using my smartphone with the Bluetooth gadget lets me control the volume and change the tune without having to get off the bike. I put the IMDEN unit in my wife's car. Looking for empty space on the FM radio dial, I was surprised how full it is.

Getting connected, 'paired' in Bluetooth parlance, sometimes requires some fiddling, but I think I've worked out a protocol. So now I've got five Bluetooth receivers that I can use: these two plus the my office speaker, the built in one in my truck, and a pair of fancy headphones. Six if you count the one in my daughter's Mazda. I've got enough playlists built up on YouTube Music to keep me pretty well entertained.

The only problem with IMDEN is that the CONNECTING announcement is rather loud.

Maxby Phone Holder

I also bought a bracket to hold my smartphone on the Peloton handlebars, also less than $20. The clamp that holds it to the handlebar is tough enough, but the clamp that holds the phone is weak, adequate, but weak. I'd get something tougher next time.

CHIRP

Smoke Detector, X-Sense 10-Year Battery Smoke Fire Alarm

I replaced the battery in the smoke alarm in the basement yesterday. I had a 'fresh' nine volt battery because I bought a package of ten when I was going to replace all the batteries in the smoke alarms in the new house (the giant, three year long, remodeling project). But then the electricians came in and replaced all the smoke alarms with new ones that come with ten year batteries. To me they are a big improvement. So now I've got a pack of nine volt batteries that is slowly being consumed. (See Gizmos and Puttering).

Today I come across a post from Bayou Renaissance Man about beeping, or should I say bleeping, gizmos where I found this comment by Douglas2:

I've replaced the battery-backup sump-pump system that had an incessant siren sounding whenever the pump needed to run during power-failures. That was an interesting chat with their tech department. "So the point of the 3AM siren is to alert me that the pump is doing what it should be doing, and I have nothing to worry about?"

"YES!!" the engineer shouted excitedly "You seem to be one of the few customers that understands this, to express it so clearly!"

Joy To The World, the sump pump runs.

 

Days of Future Past

Future Phone

Funny how sometimes the you can see the future very clearly while other times it is obscured by clouds.

This post's title popped into my head, but I couldn't remember where it came from. Looking around I find it's the title of a comic book and a Marvel X-Men movie, which can't be my source because I haven't been following Marvel or the X-Men. Where did it come from then? The Moody Blues, that's who, though they spelled it differently: Days of Future Passed. There might be a slight difference in meaning, but I find them both equally enigmatic, so I'm not going to worry about it. Anyway to jog your memory, or introduce you to recent musical history we have the big hit from that album:

Nights in White Satin - The Moody Blues - in Paris. Restored video!
@Redbaron863

Sound

Puttering

I use the YouTube music app on my smart phone to supply me with tunes both at home or when I am out driving around in my truck. The truck might have BlueTooth and I know my phone does, but I'm still not sure about this BlueTooth business. I use it connect to my portable speaker when I am outside on the patio, so I'm not a complete Luddite. But the truck also has a mini-stereo jack in the console, the phone has one as well, and I have a cable with the correct plugs on both ends. When I was growing up, everything was connected with cables. Wireless remote controls were something only the Jetsons had. I like cables, so I use the cable to connect my phone to the truck.

Volume control is iffy using the sliding volume controls on my computer. They don't give me fine enough control. I don't know whether it is the control or my fingers, but it doesn't really matter, the result is the same. The upshot is that I will use the two volume controls in tandem. I am tempted to say that I preferentially use one for coarse volume adjustment and the other for fine control, but I can't say which one is which.

With the truck I turn the volume control on my phone all the way up. Evidently that gives the truck a big enough signal that I can get decent volume control using the truck's volume control knob (not a slider).

AIWA NSX-V21 Stereo System
Looks just like my stereo

I connected my phone to our home stereo the other day when we had some people over and I used the same technique of turning the volume on the phone up all the way. The stereo was just providing background music and we were having a lively discussion, so I didn't really notice the music. Eventually the person was sitting nearest the stereo alerted me to the fact that sound from the stereo sounded like garbage. I think I switched to CD's or something.

Today I tried the phone with the stereo again, and now when I don't have big crowd of people around it is obvious how bad the sound is. Turn down the volume on the phone to half way or so, and turn up the sound on the stereo and it sounds much better.

I don't exactly how old the stereo is, it might be older than this house, which means it is like 25 years old. It came with a remote control, but I don't think we ever used it. I tried it out today and unsurprisingly it didn't work. Pop open the battery cover and we have dead corroded AA batteries. Take them out, shake out the debris, scrape the contacts with my pocket knife, load new batteries, and Oh wonderous miracle! It works!

Gizmos

It just occurred to me that sometimes the earlier versions of a device are better in the long term than more recent devices. Older devices are generally simpler, because no one wants to spend loads of money on engineering until they know whether the device is going to be a commercial success or not. Older devices are generally tougher because you can't afford a bunch of premature failures because your device wasn't tough enough. As time goes on, successful products get re-engineered to provide fancy new features, to cut weight and to cut manufacturing cost. Sometimes that means replacing screws with glue or welding. The goal is to cut the cost of product so much so that it becomes disposable. Then people will be expecting them to fail and buy a new one to replace it. If it's only a dollar, who cares? Toss out the old one and buy a new one.

Problem comes up when the device falls out of favor and they quit making them, but you really like yours and want to keep using it. It it's the latest whiz-bang gizmo, you're going to be out of luck. There will be no way to fix it. But if you have one of originals, constructed out of tougher materials and put together with screws, you at least stand a chance of being able to fix it.

Hakko FR-300 Desoldering Tool

Lets fix 99¢ thrift shop VCR/DVD Player
jeffescortlx 3 minute excerpt starting at the 8 minute mark

Warms the frozen cockles of me heart to see this guy bringing this old electronical gizmo back to life. It's entertaining when you are awake in the middle of the night because you can't sleep, but the reason it's here is because of this gizmo:

Hakko FR-300 Desoldering Tool

I have repaired a couple of circuit boards* where I used a manually operated solder sucker, and those things are a pain to use. This gadget would have been wonderful except for the $300 price tag. There is no way I would have spent that much money for a tool I would likely use only a dozen times. But it's nice to see there is enough electronic repair business being done to justify the existence of this product.

300

The FR-300 has been superseded by the FR-301, but 301 just doesn't have the same ring to it as 300. I can just imagine the advertising announcer telling you to get your EF AR THREE HUNDRED today.

Electronics repair has got to be very odd business. Most electronic gizmos aren't worth the time it takes to open the case, and if they pass that hurdle you still have to sort out what went wrong and then find the parts. Sometimes the damage is visible, like in the above video, but sometimes it is invisible, like when the inside of a microchip fails. If the parts are common, you can probably get them from Digi-Key. If they are special, they might cost more the the gizmo is worth. I suppose that's why you don't see many electronic repair shops around any more.

*I remember using a solder sucker on a few occasions, but I can't remember whether that led to an actual repair. I might have just been fooling around.

Satellite Communications

Hughes Satellite Antennae Meter

Found this in the shrubbery outside my daughter's house. Those are coax connectors sticking out of the sides at the top, so it appears to be some kind of meter for use with satellite TV of some sort. Turns out it used to align satellite dishes when they are being installed. This kind of scheme works with geosynchronous satellites, you know, the ones that are way out there, like 20,000 odd miles.

You can probably use some more conventional test equipment to do the same job, but this was designed for use by people installing satellite dishes when that was all the fad. Just Google Hughes Satellite Antennae Meter. Apparently HughesNet still offers internet via satellite. 

Talking to Marc yesterday and he tells us he was in Alvord desert last week, on vacation, but working, which isn't really a vacation, but what do I know about working anyway? Anyway he's got a Starlink satellite communicator. Starlink satellites are in Low Earth Orbit, about 350 miles up, about three times the altitude of the International Space Station. As such, they are moving across the sky, they are not stationary like the broadcast satellites.

When you are camping power is always an issue. You can always start your car to get juice to charge your batteries, but you really don't want to be doing that. The whole point of camping is to get away from running engines. OK, maybe not the whole point, but a major attraction.

Starlink Satellite Constellation
Currently 3,000 satellites

A Starlink antennae doesn't use a whole lot of power, but Michael tells us that when you first fire up Starlink it sucks about 80 watts of power for like 20 or 30 minutes and then it drops down to about half that. During that first 30 minutes it is downloading the ephemeris, which is a bunch of data that tells it where the satellites can be found. It needs this because it has to constantly adjust the antennae's aim. I think they use to actually move the antennae, but the current version uses a phased array antenna where aiming is controlled by adjusting the phase of the signal sent to each of the component elements.

Phased Array Antenna

Quora has a bunch of information about aiming satellite antennaes. I mean, how do you aim to hit something 20,000 miles away? Forget about doing anything like adjusting the sights on your rifle. At that distance you aren't even going to be able to see it. You would need something like a 5,000 power telescope to see them.

Canon PIXMA Printer

Canon MG Series PIXMA MG2525 Inkjet Photo Printer with Scanner/Copier

Finally broke down and bought a new printer. Darling daughter hasn't replaced the toner cartridge in her laser printer that is sitting in the dining room so the printing was getting a little light. Then the Ziply Fiber guy was here and replaced the router so the wifi address has changed and who knows if that will ever get fixed in the laser printer, so new printer for me. $70, which is probably about the same that a new toner cartridge would cost for the laser printer, and it sits on my desk which means I don't have to run up the stairs to collect my printouts. Ha, like I run anywhere anymore. Probably have to buy new ink cartridges for this one in a few months, and they'll probably cost a zillion dollars because that's how the Inkjet printer business works. Unpacked it, plugged it in, turned it on and it worked.

Back when gas was $2.50 a gallon I was thinking that inflation had cut the value of a dollar by 10 since I started driving 50 years ago, but now gas is $5 a gallon, so the value of a dollar has gone down by a factor of 2 in the last few years, and it's liable to go down by another factor 2 in the next couple of years, which means this printer cost less than $2 in terms of 1970 dollars. (70 / (10 x 2 x 2)). Fifty years ago, you could buy a six pack of Golden Goebels Beer for a buck, which means this printer costs as much as two six-packs of beer. Except mass market beer, like Coors or Bud, costs about $1 a can. Hmmm. What's that old Roman dictum? Bread and circuses? Well, we've got cheap beer and political circuses.

Candle Timer

Candle Timer

The basement bathroom has an exhaust fan. It works, but it's a cheap fan and as such it's noisy, so noisy that the boss gave me a candle to use instead of the fan. The nice thing about the fan is that it's on a timer so it shuts off when the time has run out. The candle doesn't do that and so sometimes I will forget about it, several hours will go by and the entire basement ends up smelling like patchouli or peaches or something perfumy, which is mildly annoying, but worse it means a candle that might have lasted for a year will need to be replaced in a couple of weeks, which is wasteful, and waste is a sin, and sin is an affront to god, etc., etc. So I looked around for a candle that shuts itself off after a bit, and low and behold, I found one on Etsy. It costs $70 which is kind of steep for a gee-gaw, I mean you could buy ten years worth of candles with that kind of money, so I doubt I will be buying one. But it's still a cool device.

Wiral Lite Cable Cam ► Review and Sample Footage

You may have noticed the cameras flying on wires above sporting events.  Those rigs look big and expensive. Here we have something an amateur could afford. B & H Photo has them for $400.

Camera shots from drones are all the rage these days, but drones aren't always the best solution. They're noisy, if you are above a crowd and they crash somebody could get hurt, and sometimes there are just too many obstacles to make flying a practical solution.

Bluetooth to FM Transmitter

Arsvita Bluetooth FM Transmitter

Since I have been using YouTube to listen to music, listening to the radio in my car has become frustrating. My new truck has a mini-phone jack, so I can connect my smartphone, pull up the YouTube app and listen to what I want without having to listen to any ads. It does take a minute to get everything set up and working before I drive off, but I am willing to put up with this minor inconvenience to not have to listen to yammering jackasses.

That's great for me, who's got a newish truck with a phono jack, but what if you're driving a 1974 Volvo and you don't want to spend a chunk of cash for a fancy-schmantcy new radio? You buy one of these Bluetooth to FM transmitters, Amazon has got a zillion of them. (I don't know if the one shown above is any good, I haven't tried it, I just like the way it looks.) You plug it into your cigarette lighter, it makes a Bluetooth connection to your phone, and then broadcasts the received audio on the FM band where your car radio can pick it up. Slicker than snot.

I just heard about this at lunch today. I might have to get one for my wife whose car is just old enough to have missed the great electronics revolution.

Portable Electric Power

EcoFlow RIVER Portable Power Station

Chuck E. reports:

My mom is on Oxygen and she has a portable oxygen concentrator that has a swappable 4 hour battery.   The cost for a second battery (not covered by insurance) was quoted at about $500.  Instead, I bought an ecoflow portable power station.  It recharges quickly by 110v household, or from a 12v automotive plug, or it recharges for FREE with about 2 days of sunlight, using a portable solar panel that I also bought.

I've used it to power mom's oxygen concentrator, It also allows high wattage so I've used it with a small microwave and an electric kettle.  It would be ideal for powering a sump pump or furnace blower during a power outage.  Many people use them for camping.

And I'm using this solar panel which was on sale for $111.  It's $130 after discounts, currently.

The ECHOFLOW isn't cheap ($350), but I can see where it could be useful.

ELECAENTA Portable Foldable Solar Panel

With any high energy device, you need to be alert to the possibility of fire. Gasoline and similar fuels are reasonably safe it they are stored in a sealed container. However,  'sealed' is a relative term. Even a good gas can can emit some vapor, and if left in an enclosed room can become a fire hazard. 

On occasion, lithium batteries do breakdown internally and catch fire. I've never seen it happen, though I have encountered a couple of swollen batteries which was a little unsettling (is it going to catch fire?). Statistically, battery fires might be very rare, but it only takes one to ruin your day.

There was a report of a large number of Tesla automobiles catching fire, but then someone bothered to compare their rate to the rate for gasoline powered cars and found the rate for Tesla's was lower. Car fires are pretty rare. I've only encountered a handful. and they were all other people's cars.

P.S. electrive.com is all about electric powered vehicles. Via Detroit Steve.

Blu Ray

LG BP175 Blu-Ray DVD Player

This must be the month for electronic gizmos. Older son has been amassing a collection of movies on Blu-ray disks. While Netflix and other streaming services offer a wide variety of movies, there are some very good movies that are only available on disks. I have a DVD player, but a simple DVD player won't play Blu-ray disks, so I bit the bullet and ordered the above LG player from Amazon.

Hooking it up wasn't too bad. I t was made easier by the fact that my wife had cleaned out the bottom shelf of the console so I was able to relocate the power strip from the tangled snarl of cables underneath the cabinet onto this shelf.

Remote Controls. Clockwise from upper left:
Cable box, Roku, TV, DVD player, Blu-ray player.
The silver one in the center is for the HDMI switch.

Now I'm trying to sort out all these gizmos so I get out the remote controls. Criminently, there are a bunch of them.

And that's how we were able to watch Tenet last night.

Velocifire VM01 Keyboard

Velocifire VM01 Mechanical Keyboard

On a whim I finally decided to buy an illuminated keyboard. It cost about $40. There are other ones out there for about half that amount. The question I had, and which only this one answered satisfactorily is whether the symbols on the keys were illuminated or not. I mean that is what I would expect, but you could just put lights under regular opaque keys and you could have a cool visual effect, but you wouldn't be able to actually identify the keys. On the one the symbols on the keys are illuminated so you can walk up to it in a dark room and see the H key.

A good touch typist shouldn't need any illumination, but I am not. I mostly touch type, but there's sometimes, like with punctuation, where my fingers don't know where the key is. This keyboard is a little weak in that area, especially with the number keys. The symbols on those keys are about half the size of the letter keys, and yes there are two symbols on every key, but those two symbols take up about one-third of the space on the key top. They could have made them much larger. I can make out the symbols if I squint.

As for the feel, it's different than the $10 keyboards I am used to ($3 used).

I picked this one because it was recommended in the one review I read and it didn't cost a zillion dollars. I didn't spend a lot of time looking around. I wish I knew whether the cheaper ones illuminated the symbols or not. They would probably feel more like the Dell keyboards I am used to.

Christmas

Cowin E7 Pro Headphones

I asked for headphones for Christmas and Santa delivered. I wanted them for when I am watching sports with my wife. She's the enthusiast, not me, and she likes to listen to the announcers. Some of the announcers are okay, but some of them just grate on me, so headphones. I hadn't broken them out till today because, well, not that many games, but today I am filling my pill minders for the week (Eleven different pills. Geez.) and I decided I wanted to listen to some tunes while working on this bit of tediousness, but dutiful daughter is asleep as she's working the nightshift these days, so headphones. They work well. Connects to my smart phone using Bluetooth which only took a small amount of fiddling to get working. Batteries are supposed to be good for 30 hours, 20 if the noise canceling feature is turned on. Haven't had to use that yet. Testing the Bluetooth connection, I left the phone in the basement and went upstairs and it continued to play just fine.

Printer Problems

HUGO - 99 Problems
book of BEE

My printer became uncooperative earlier today, so I posted my problem on the Linux Mint Forum

The printer (HP C4385 Inkjet) has been working fine for years. It ran out of paper on the last job and now I can't get it to print anything.

I tried rebooting, no help. Then I cleared the print queue and shut down the computer and the printer and then restarted. No help. When I try to print something the job shows up in the print queue as 'pending'.

After the movie this evening I thought I would give it another shot:

Well, it's sort of solved. The printer finally decided to try and print something and then it promptly chewed up the paper, so it looks like some kind of mechanical malfunction. That's what I get for bragging on it. And letting it run out of paper. Don't let your printer run out of paper. It's liable to go on strike, or even worse, go over to the dark side. Don't be like me and let your printer run out of paper.

Update next day. Printer is working again. I banged it around inadvertently while trying to get a look at the feed mechanism. There is a part behind the feed wheels that comes off for cleaning, and it comes off easily. So I cleaned the wheels and then I fed it one sheet of paper and it printed just fine. Put the full stack in again and it balked. Put a short stack of paper in (maybe an eighth of inch high) and it worked fine. So some, but not too much.

Roku

I was looking at our pile of remote controls the other day and thinking that maybe I should go ahead and spring for one of them fancy all-in-one jobs. Then I stumbled over the new Roku unit which has a voice controlled search function. My goodness, how fancy is that?
    My wife's smart phone can translate voice to text. She uses it to send text messages to the kids, so maybe voice recognition technology really has advanced to the stage where you can use it reliably for something.
    We have subscriptions to three or four video-on-demand services for which we pay about $100 a month, depending on how you slice it. So now when we want to watch a show, we have to remember what service it is on. If you didn't remember then you have to search for it. With our old Roku you would need to switch to the service and then enter the title, one letter at a time, using the arrow keys. If you didn't remember what service it was on, well, you could spend minutes, minutes I tell you, pressing buttons on the remote to try and find it.
    The new Roku has a voice controlled search function that works from the top level. You say the name of the show you want and it will search all of your subscribed services to find it. We tried it out on a couple of shows and it worked flawlessly. Cool.
    Then I tried to use it to find the The Honorable Woman. It apparently worked because it found the show on two services, but when I tried to watch it I find out that it is a pay-per-view item. That's weird, because I already watched one episode for free. Could they have decided to start charging for it just now? Perhaps my post about the show triggered a small avalanche of events that caused this. Is my influence really that great?
    No, it's not. I gave up on the show, there are zillions of shows I've already paid for, I don't need to pay some more to watch this one, so I switch to Netflix to see if I can find something worth watching, and what pops up? The Honourable Woman. For free. Huh. So Roku's fancy voice controlled search function is not infallible.