What I learned about managing catalytic converter theft: OEM vs aftermarket vs universal

The catalytic converter on my much loved 2010 Kia Sedona van was stolen. (I think there are two and the rear converter was removed. I'm not a car guy.) It's an every day thing around here.

This is what I learned about this problem.

1. Manufacturers only stock OEM converters for 10y post model date. So there's no OEM solution.
2. The normal option to an OEM converter is a "bolt-on" aftermarket product. This is typically installed by a service garage or muffler shop. In Nov 2022 there are none available for the Kia Sedona and many other vehicles. It's a national shortage.

There are three remaining options:

1. A "straight pipe": This is illegal but in our fallen times nobody seems to care. (Mad Max didn't even have a muffler.) Done by some muffler shops and by guys working out of their home. Oxygen sensor is a common issue, there are probably others. Not so good for the environment, but neither is replacing the vehicle.
2. A "universal catalytic converter". Insurance companies will send customers to a muffler shop that will install (weld I think) a "universal converter". These are not a perfect match to the vehicle so they may cause performance issues and trigger a check engine light. For this reason service shops avoid them in normal times. That "we don't go there" rule can cause some bad advice in post-apocalyptic times.
3. Sell or junk the vehicle and pay $50,000 for a new van. If sell then the buyer does one of the above.

Our garage mechanic didn't mention the "universal catalytic converter" option because "they don't do that". Sadly he hadn't updated his algorithm to deal with the national shortage. Now we have a new mechanic (He did apologize for his error, but hd didn't think to offer a retention incentive. I think he'll give better advice in the future.)

If you do replace a catalytic converter it may, of course, be stolen again. Consider a weld-on cage so thieves choose a neighboring vehicle instead. Or a straight pipe so they don't bother. It's handy to have a junk car when parking in unsecured lots in metro Minneapolis St Paul.

[Political aside: property crime will elect the GOP in America. Don't get fooled into thinking that only violent crime rates matter.]

Personal note - Google Scholar discovers something I maybe wrote and forgot long ago

Funny personal note.

While testing Google Scholar's new features I ended up creating a profile based on my (limited) academic publications.

It turned up one from 1981.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar…

The SURFEQL/MINEQL Manual.

I remember doing SURFEQL FORTRAN code for my friend Jim Young around 1980-81 as a Caltech undergrad (at the time Jim was a grad student and my boss). I imagine I might have written something at the time, but maybe Jim wrote the manual and put my name on it. I have absolutely no memory of this.

What a weird echo.

Elenco SnapCircuits 500 block layout

I have bought things for my children that I dreamt of as a child — but were out of my parent's price range.

Shockingly, my children have not always appreciated these gifts. For example — I think the Elenco Snap Circuits Pro 500 is a brilliant toy. I tried it on all 3 kids and was 0 for 3. No interest whatsoever.

Years later I needed to find a good home for it — but the parts had been scattered in a storage bin. Even though the components are in perfect shape the box had been water damaged by a minor basement flood and the “block layout” guide was unreadable. I tried to find one online but came up empty — though in writing this I discovered Elenco had it online all along. Happily I had a photo I’d taken and I found nothing was missing. I even have a candidate victim child to give the unused kit to.

Today, since I couldn’t find a photo on the web and Google couldn’t find the dang block layout, here’s one for anyone searching for it. (Assuming, of course, that Google indexes this page. It doesn’t index this kind of content anywhere near as well as it once did. Not coincidentally, once Google would have found that layout.)

I bought the extra books too!

and here’s the box …

Escape from the Wheel of Time

I finished ‘A Memory of Light’. And the thirteen Wheel of Time volumes before that. I feel like I’ve been released from Compulsion.

It’s not high art. Some of it was a slog and not every thread was accounted for. The twists and retcons reminded me of long run comic book sagas. It can entertain though. Jordan turned a single volume book into a trilogy and then into a monster — and he more or less held it together. That’s worthy of a prize, or, in his case, a fortune.

Jordan died after book 11 and Brandon Sanderson wrote books 12-14 from notes and imagination. I thought there were some odd word choices in his first chapters, but either he settled in or I got used to his style. It was fun that three of the heroic characters were writers; I don’t think any villains were.

Game of Thrones, which I abandoned after a particularly misogynistic volume, is clearly an heir to WOT. I read that there will be a WOT inspired TV series — that will require a bit of editing.

I can’t exactly recommend WOT, but if you get sucked in the ride isn’t all bad. Most libraries will have it and there are many used volumes floating around, so you don’t have to buy every volume new. I bought about 5 and borrowed the rest from a friend and the library.

A change to my publishing streams

These are the last days of app.net. It ends in 3 days. App.net has been good to me. Great tools, smart and interesting people, RSS integration (albeit grudgingly at first) and the best communication/conversation platform I’ve worked with. App.net was what Twitter should have been. It has made clear how badly Twitter has failed.

These are, surprisingly, also the end times for Maciej’s Pinboard as a publishing platform. I have 33,236 pins there, and something is broken. Neither pinner.app or pushpin.app are able to connect and download the streams. From what Maciej has written in the past I may have passed some throttling limit. I’m using Pinboard in ways he did not intend — and the iOS apps don’t scale either. 

So I need to make some changes. Gordon’s Notes and Tech will stay on Blogger for now — it’s been surprisingly robust and trouble free for many years. It helps that there’s an exit strategy to WordPress if Google kills it, but as best I can tell Google is going to keep Blogger limping along.

My DreamHost wordpress microblog has mirrored my pinboard stream for years. I’m going to see if there’s a way to make it a true microblog publishing platform. I’m not sure how to do that, in particular it’s not obvious how I can conveniently post via Reeder.app. It will take me a while to work that out.

In the meantime there are several app.net spinoffs in the work. I’m tracking several of these as much as my time allows - especially pnut.io (@jgordon) and 10centuries (@jgordon). March 2017 is a heck of a month for me so things have gone slowly.

Uncertain times! For now if you follow kateva.org/sh you’ll see what I’m up to, no matter how the process evolves.

Americans like television commercials ... and other quick notes

I’ve eliminated every other possibility. The unlikely remnant is that Americans who watch television secretly like television commercials. Why else would my Samsung TV ship with a OTA (antenna input) USB record feature that’s disabled for the US market?

Yes, patents and legal annihilation, but if there were demand they would be overcome.

I miss my VCR.

In other news the best thing I ever bought my 94yo father is his LTE iPad. All it does is show family photos and enable our weekly FaceTime calls. He doesn’t do anything with it, an aide manages call answering and his nurses know to tap on the iCloud based slideshow. During the calls we talk, but I also do an iPhone narrated visit of home, office, mountain bike trail, etc. Gerbils, dog, bicycles, tools, whatever. Fifteen to twenty minutes once a week and he loves it.

Lastly, I’m still doing the exercise gig, despite being a zillion years old and enjoying a slow-mo familial auto-immune arthritis. Over 3 years now. You too can manage weight without harsh diets; you just need to do an insane amount of exercise.

Life tip: photograph or photo-scan cards and special correspondence

A few years back, around the time the iPhone camera became very good at close photography, I began to photograph Father's Day cards and the like.

Later, when products like “Scanner Pro.app” made it very easy to create PDFs that went to Google Drive, I began to phone-scan correspondence I wanted to keep.

I store the PDFs on my computer. The photos go into my photo library and become a part of our screensaver slideshows. Most of the originals go to recycling.

It would have been great to save more of my mother's correspondence this way, but that would take time travel. We didn't have the tech back then.

It's a good idea.

Managing the TBs of videos and photos the kids produce

The kids generate a lot of images and video. Some of it I want to keep, other material is of temporary interest (instagram shares mostly), a lot of it is accumulated because, for them, storage is free. Meanwhile we’re overflowing our backup capacity — I just bought an 8TB Synology to replace a defective Time Capsule (4TB RAID 1)

The new policy is I put the media into dated folders on the server share. I quickly review my daughter’s images for things to add to our family archive (in Aperture, and, yes, I hate Apple). The kids have until the date on the folders to review the images for anything they want to keep. After that date I delete them.

I wonder what others do with this torrent of media. I suspect it just gets lost. There is a reason Apple gave up on Aperture — the entire market for amateur photo (much less video) management seems to be dying. Reminds me of the passing of personal finance software.

Paul Theroux's 1976 visit to Santa Ana, El Salvador - repeat on 2015 Google Street View

Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express was published in 1979. Today it’s as much historical document as travel guide. Part of that history is experiencing the semi-conscious neocolonial attitudes of 1970s Theroux, though that’s probably his personality as much as the times.

There’s a lot he disdains, but he liked Santa Ana El Salvador. At one point he claims it wasn’t on his map; for him it was a pleasant surprise.

Today you can retrace his journey with very limited version of Google Street View. You can’t navigate in the usual Street View way, but you can visit the primary plaza and you can browse user contributed images.

I wonder how long it will be for Santa Ana to go full Street View. On the one hand it’s amazing what’s there now, but it’s noteworthy that Santa Ana is still a bit mysterious.

Alpha (the better twitter) on app.net 1 year post-death, is like this...

Alpha (the better twitter) on app.net, 1 year post-death, is like this (xkcd: Undocumented Feature  by Randall Munroe, used with permission):

I’ve read we have 1,200 active members now.

One day I’ll write a post about life in a highly transient technology environment and what this might mean. Maybe I’ll just quote Vernor Vinge.

The NYT web site is becoming unreadable on my iPhone

I subscribe to the NYT so I can go from a Feed rendered in Reeder 2.0 on my i6 to the articles rendered in mobile WedKit. I’ve gotten used to hitting an interstitial ad on initial page view, a quick back and forth clears that. (Don’t try to hit the close button, doesn’t work.) I’ve even gotten used to hitting the ‘continue’ button they’ve embedded to make things even more painful.

Today, however, articles are so infested with interlaced ads, and so slow to render, that I’m getting to the end of the road. I sent a message via the NYT subscriber web contact form:

It is increasingly hard to read the NYT on a mobile device. My iPhone is very slow to display pages, it may be related to changes made to embed more advertising.

The articles are also now broken up by ads and harder to read.

I'm really losing patience. The next step is to give up my subscription, maybe try The Economist instead.

Somebody there needs a slap on the head.

Negotiation 2014: A compilation of state of the art techniques

Henry Alford wrote an entertaining essay on holiday dinner peacemaking tips. I enjoyed the essay, but I also appreciated the inventory of techniques.

Here’s the excerpted techniques, for the context check out the original: (emphases mine, comments in [])

Crisis Negotiators Give Thanksgiving Tips - Henry Alford - NYTimes.com

… “People want to be heard. They want the attention.”

…  “Repeating what the other person says, we call that paraphrasing. ‘So what you’re telling me is that the F.B.I. screwed you over by doing this and that,’ and then you repeat back to him what he said. Also, emotional labeling: ‘You sound like you were hurt by that.’ ‘You sound like it must have been really annoying.’ Little verbal encouragements: ‘Unh-huh,’ ‘Mm-hmm.’ A nod of the head to let them know you’re there.”

…  instead … acknowledge his presenting emotion … address the underlying emotion with appreciation …

…  unsolicited apology…

… “Say you’re sorry when you’re not sorry,” … [You have to make this seem a genuine effort, so that even the apology is not believable to motivation and effort are.]

… Try to find ways to acknowledge what they’re saying without agreeing or disagreeing with it.”..

… Tone is king here: subtle vocal inflections can impart either “I disagree, let’s move on,” or “I disagree, let’s turn this into ‘The Jerry Springer Show.’ …

… “Instead of lying, we call it minimizing. You try to get people to think that a situation isn’t so bad, you break it down for them so they see that it isn’t the end of the world, that maybe they don’t need to make such a big deal of it. We try to reframe things rather than flat-out lie….

… “A negotiator almost always has a co-negotiator, someone who’s listening and taking notes,” she said. “Someone who says, ‘He mentioned Mom three times now, probably Mom is at the heart of the issue.’ Maybe enlist someone to be your co-negotiator.”

… “In the crisis-negotiation world, we call it a third-party intermediary,” …

… Track II diplomacy, which means that outside the arena of a formal negotiation, another set of actors from society come together to talk and build confidence and trust…

All shades of manipulation on a spectrum of deception. All valuable.

We are older than the universe

There are seven billion humans alive now, each the star of the show.

In a decade we will, collectively, gather 60-70 billion years of experience. The universe, by comparison, is a mere 13.8 billion years old.

Our collective memory is much greater than the age of the universe.

Puny universe.

Why geezers hit the gym (warning - for mature audiences only)

Today's CrossFit workout was open 14.2. With low weights and bands I sort of got through part of the 3rd round. The world record is over 21 rounds - without accommodations of course.

I don't think I'm gonna win the CrossFit games. Worse, at my age, the future trend is not positive.

So why do we newly-old folk do this kind of thing? 

I can only speak for Emily and me - and Judith Warner I suppose. We know the mean "ideal" human lifespan is about 88, and we know that the 2-3 years preceding death are often very difficult. A few years ago I figured, based on my current age and health and family history, that 85 was a pretty good target. 

A target, not a goal. A goal is something to exceed, a target is something to hit. Hitting that target, adjusted downwards over time by illness and chance, is my plan for dying well like my dog rather than badly like most Americans.

When I hit that target I won't be doing chest-to-bar, or overhead squat, or even running. Years before I'll have dropped out of CrossFit. Maybe I'll still be walking, swimming, and shuffling xc skies on artificial snow. The trick, which I'm working on, is figuring out how to die about then. Maybe I'll celebrate my 85th with some base jumping.

That's about 30 years from now, and 30 years doesn't feel very long at all. It's gonna go fast.

Which is why we do crazy stuff now -- because that door is closing. It's the way we play the great game.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: Nasty, brutal, short - the life of most humans (2007) Paleolithic times.

After the Smart TV debacle: what we really want

Years after everyone else, I reluctantly retired our 25yo SONY Trinitron CRT and it's (free, subsidized) A/D converter box and naively bought a Samsung Smart TV (Wirecutter, you are dead to me.)

The crapware infested box and usability were bad enough, but an app.net thread on intrusive ads overlayed on an Apple TV input brought the full horror home.

My Samsung experience, and the strange death of rabbit ear (OTA, "over the air") media recording in America [1] made me think more about what kind of TV we really want. I think it would be a set of modules like this:

• Plain display with simple speakers, single HDMI input, no tuner, no remote.
• Separate Tuner/DVR and switch control. 4-5 HDMI in, single HDMI out, digital audio and analog audio out, speaker connections, antenna connections.
• Apple TV

I can imagine some permutations, but I think this is the right setup. Given the subsidies that support Smart TV prices [2] the way to build that today is to buy a Smart TV, don't connect it to the network, set the input to HDMI 1 and hide the remote. Then buy something like the (overpriced) $250 Channel Master DVR+ and an Apple TV.

Sure, Samsung could change their Smart TV so an internet connection was essential, but they won't. There aren't enough geek customers to bother with the customer complaints; we will get subsidized by Smart TV's victims.

- fn -

[1] After a 5-7 year hiatus solutions for recording OTA digital broadasts are reemerging -- albeit at $250 price points instead of the $80 one would expect given parts costs. Why is this? I think some mixture of bad patent law, DMCA, and probably illegal conspiracy and price fixing between cable companies and content owners.

[2] Revenue comes from the things that the Smart TV delivers.

Silver bear snow scoop: The Net is still good

When we lived in Michigan's Upper Peninsula snow scoops were sold at the local hardware store. Snow scoops is how snow was moved before snow blowers; they're still great for moving snow where blowers don't work. Or aren't wanted.

Our scoop lasted 20 years, but it finally split along a seam. This distressed #3; snow scoops are essential for creating a solid back yard mound for dog and child play. Alas, we couldn't find any in the Twin Cities. Not enough snow I guess.

Once we'd have been stuck, but Google found a supplier - Silver Bear Manufacturing of scenic Atlantic Mine Michigan -- just a bit southwest of Houghton MIchigan -- where they had 105" of snow in 2004. Oops, that was in one month of 2004. Last winter they had 225" of snow. Yeah, about 20 feet.

(That's Lake Superior on either side of this peninsula).

Silver Bear has a charmingly ancient web site. I paid my $78 and the 22" snow scoop showed up a few days later. It's so solid it makes our 20yo scoop look like a child's toy. Of course the bolt holes didn't quite line up -- that's how I knew it was authentic. Nothing a bit of screwdrive hole stretching and hammer banging couldn't fix. This thing is definitely from the UP.

Here it is ready for action. Let it snow.

Is this AT&T rate change minute expiration a new dirty trick?

We use about 1,000 minutes a month on our AT&T mobile family plan. So our use is halfway between their 700 ($48) and 1,400 minute plans ($64).

To avoid overage fees we do the 1,400 min plan, and we now have 1,200 rollover minutes. So I thought I could drop back to the 700 min plan for a while and use them up.

Not so fast ...

On the one hand, I hate AT&T. On the other, I kind of respect the purity of their evil. The rollover minutes are pretty useless, but they were probably a competitive advantage once.

So is this minute expiration policy a new dirty trick, or is it one of their old ones?

Does Edge Gel reduce the lifespan of disposable razors?

I tried searching on this, but couldn't find anything - even in shaveblog.com. So, for what it's worth, here's one article.

I've used Edge Gel for some time. During that time it seemed my disposable razor lifespan was reduced, but I didn't make the connection. Recently they increased the 'Aloe' component and my razor lifespan dropped down to a few days; I assume the shorter lifespan is related to the Aloe.

Then I found using plain soap (not too elegant :-), or cleaning the gunky gel from the razor with a toothpick, significantly increased razor lifespan.

Edge is made by Energizer Holdings, who also sell Schick and Wilkinson razors. So they don't have much incentive to increase razor lifespan. I suspect most customers don't care either way, but it will be interesting to see if I get any comments on this blog post. (I expect Gel's SEO operatives to bury it pretty deeply though :-).

For my part I'm going to go back to a brush and Williams Mug Shaving Soap. They seemed to be disappearing years ago, but I gather they're fashionable now. I expect that will save me enough to buy a coffee or two, and cut my waste output a bit.

PS. Researching this topic led me to a Wirecutter article on The Best Razors. I don't have the patience to do the Merkur thing, and I'm too cheap for the Gillette ProGlide, so I think I'll stick with the cheap Bic dual blades.

Preparing for the inevitable - Google Docs for the "Not available" letter

Yes, it happens. We die. Short of death, we can be lost in the wilderness, imprisoned by whackos, captured by space aliens, comatose, or gone.

This has always been inconvenient for those left behind, but in the digital age it's a particularly inconvenient. We don't use biometric authentication yet, but user names, passwords and the locations of things are bad enough. (Imagine when we do biometrics...). 

So how does one communicate this key information 'from the other side'? What method is most likely to work? Where should the information be stored and how should it be shared?

After playing around with a few options I've settled on a basic Google Doc that is shared with my wife [2], my brother, our executor, and several relatives and friends. We all use Google, and I assume access to a shared document will survive my demise. As a document of course it's simple to print a paper or PDF version that can go with our will. The paper version will include the URL of the shared Google Doc and directions on how to access it -- the paper version is a backup. This isn't a legally binding document but it's advisory so it's good to know the "source of truth" and it's handy to be able to see all prior versions and edits over time.

As a shared document it's somewhat private, but potentially public. It won't hold any truly confidential information.

Since it's a Google Doc there will be a synchronized copy on my Google Drive; a copy whose name, at least, is Spotlight indexed. The information is fairly robust -- anything that would take out all copies of the documents for all users would probably make my estate irrelevant.

Lastly, but not leastly [1], it's easy for me to edit. So I can put together an outline and gradually fill in the bits as I think of them. Odds are I'll get thirty years to work on it.

But you never know.

Here's the current outline, I'm sure it will expand.

• Metadata: Title, author, last revised.
• About: Describes use, includes URL on Google.[3]
• Passwords and Combinations: Where my 1Password archive is and how to get to it -- including the location of a backup copy of the global password (paper). Where I keep the simple household combinations.
• Backups: Where my backups are (office and home) in case of need.
• Money: Where the money is. This is most important if both Emily and I are taken out by an errant meteoroid.
• Domains: I own about a dozen domain names. Some are worth money, some provide access to digital content the kids might want.
• Photo archive: How to get the family pictures.
• Media archive: Probably not a top priority, but no reason the tunes should go.
• Kateva: Dogs don't get into wills, but executors look for advice on canine provisions. I suppose I'll say something about the gerbil too.
• What goes to which kid: This is the dangerous part. Who gets the Family domain? Who gets the wedding ring? (Ok, the last one is easy, we have only 1 daughter.) It is something I need to do though.
• Dispensing of "John Gordon" (not my TrueName) - including the blogs.

[1] That really should be a word.

[2] Once it's setup I'll make her 'owner' and I'll keep edit privileges. Helps with survivorship. She can do the same for me of course.

[3] Almost impossible to type. Since the data isn't super-secure I used Google's URL shortening service to create something one could read off a paper version and type in a browser.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: You're 50 now. It's time to start plan 0. 7/2012 - it's a cheery time of life :-).

Update:

As I worked on this my outline grew. I also realized, with mild horror, that if the server were lost or destroyed my estate would need the passwords to my encrypted offsite backups. "Best" security practices are hell on an Estate. For example -- Google two factor. What if my phone is gone too?!

Supporting sports teams - what I do now

Over the past ten years I've been the manager for a variety of hockey and baseball teams. Along the way I've tried a variety of technologies to try and support the teams, including blogs, wikis, traditional web sites and the like.

I've gradually settled on a handful of overlapping technologies that seem to work well for a diverse audience using Facebook and Google services.

Here's what I use now:

Communication - Gmail and Facebook both

Gmail

I prefer Gmail because of ease of access at work, home and on my phone.

I manually build a group of correspondents; this typically takes a few weeks to get right but then changes little over the course of a season.

I have one structured email for each team I support; I use the last email sent as template for the next. I use a large font and ample white space - not least because I'm 50+ myself. I use a consistent footer with links to a Google Docs team page, Photo album (if any), Team Calendar, and Facebook Page.

The primary limit to email is personal/work access issues and the global problems many people have with email in 2013. Many subscribers do not use email at home, and some do not have work access.

Facebook Team Page

I use Facebook because that's where our people are -- both athletes and families. They don't do blogs, they may have limited email access, but most use Facebook in one way or another [1]. Facebook Pages are always Public, and so web accessible for non-members -- albeit with an obnoxious popup pushing Facebook. Many athletes get SMS notices with Page activity, so it can be a quick way to notify of weather cancellations and the like.

I create a Facebook Page for each team. The UI for managing these pages is awkward and confusing, but by now I'm familiar with it. It takes me about ten minutes to setup a Page.

I copy paste emails into Page status updates, it takes only a minute or so to do that.

It's awkward to associate persistent links with a Facebook Page, but if you play around a bit you can make them show in the Page header; that's where I put links to our Team Page and Calendar.

Reference Page - Google Docs

I've recently started using a Google Doc "Team Page" with basic reference information including a simplified roster (no private information). There's no authentication, I share it using the "secret" URL but typically these pages get indexed one way or another.

Google Docs is easy to update and produces documents suitable for print or web access. It is the current version of the "personal web page".

Roster - Google Spreadsheet

I maintain the team roster in Google's Spreadsheet. Access requires authentication as this can contain private information including email and phone numbers.

Calendar - Google Calendar

I setup a Google Calendar for each team. I don't know of any alternatives. My family subscribes to the team calendar on our phones and devices, but most simply view it online.

Photo sharing - Picasa vs. Facebook

Historically I've shared using Google Picasa web albums and emailing the "secret" URL. I don't think these albums get a lot of access however, which is disappointing since the photos are not trivial to prepare. I liked the idea of full resolution downloads but in ten years I doubt more than twenty images have been downloaded.

I've recently started experimenting with Facebook's improved Albums and these seem to get much more team traffic.

I don't put any namers or other identifying information into shared albums -- just the images.

[1] They don't do G+ either, but then nobody does.