I've gotten a number of requests for an Amazon echo review. I've been meditating on it since. The answer is no. No echo review. I thought briefly about making a parody video for the 'Amazone Marco' -- a squat cylinder that listens to every peep in your house and stands ready to answer 'Polo' whenever it hears the call.
I actually have a use for a whole house listening device. I would pay for a box that listens all night long and uses sophisticated cloud analytics to pinpoint skittering sounds and figure out where the damn mice are living. That device would do me more good than a whole jar of peanut butter.
The reason for my no is that I have already lived the dream and I'm not going back to it. I ran a whole-apartment voice recognition system back in about 1995 on an AMD DX4 120 box. It really sucked.
How can I possibly compare some cruddy open source rig on a twenty year old computer to the marvel of Amazon's echo and the even more marvelous cloud behind it? Easy. I was young then. My powers of self-delusion were at their peak. I believed that the rig I built actually worked. It just failed to understand me _that once_. It failed to be exciting even when armed with the belief that it was working perfectly.
Fast forward twenty years and I'm sure the technology has caught up with my illusion. Has my position changed? It has.
I now have children. I have a hundred frustrating conversations a day with actual English-speaking sentient creatures. They listen to every word they can catch whether meant for them or not and interrupt thought to clarify some point not meant for them. My eldest will soon be able to look things up in Wikipedia for me. I don't think that will be more satisfying that looking it up myself. I love my children. I don't need a new one from Amazon in my living room.
I like the idea of reduced school tuition for Amazon Prime customers though. Maybe they'll work on that next.
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
Thursday, November 6, 2014
malfunction
My BMW i3 spent most of last week at the dealer for warranty work. I picked it up on Halloween. Alas, the spirit of the season snuck into the car and revealed itself only after a 200 mile drive the next day. I got an ugly looking error message just a few miles from my destination.
The car said 'Drivetrain malfunction: continued driving is possible'. This inspires not much confidence. The error went away in the morning and I began my return trip. I got the same ugly message a few miles from home.
The car went back to the dealer early Monday morning and spent the next three days under scrutiny. The verdict? No problem. It won't happen again.
The trip I took pushed the envelope a bit. I barrelled down I-95 until I ran out of battery and then ran another hundred miles down the road running on the 600cc range extending motor. The extender is good for about 70mph steady state on level ground. I pressed about 71 with four people in the car. Error messages aside, it seemed pleasant and unremarkable. I stopped at the Science Museum of Virginia in Richmond and charged for a couple hours on the way home. I'm getting about 4.1 miles per kilowatt hour. That works out to about 138 MPGe. The combined EPA rating for the car is 117 MPGe.
My borrowed ride last week was a 2014 BMW 328. This week I ran around in a MINI Clubman.
I admired the Clubman from the moment it was announced. I kept it on my short list of potential replacement cars for years. It felt almost like a Miata breadvan. I had all the standard complaints about the cheesy switchgear and cheap plastics but the astonishingly bad automatic transmission makes my other complaints seem petty. The small motor was noisy at any point but cruise. I got only 31 mpg on my standard routine.
I said last week that I would not trade the 328 for my i3. I am now sure that I wouldn't buy Clubman either. BMW has built a real goldilocks car in the i3.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the i3 is that I wasn't attracted to it originally for its propeller badge or environmental credentials. I just don't care for automatic transmissions. My wife doesn't care for manual. We have driven separate cars for years but the logistics of non-interchangeable cars were mounting with children. Single speed electrics and Prius-style CVTs represent the compromise space. It's a happy accident that this space includes some of the best cars you can buy today.
The car said 'Drivetrain malfunction: continued driving is possible'. This inspires not much confidence. The error went away in the morning and I began my return trip. I got the same ugly message a few miles from home.
 |
| continued driving _is_ possible Photo courtesy your correspondent |
The car went back to the dealer early Monday morning and spent the next three days under scrutiny. The verdict? No problem. It won't happen again.
The trip I took pushed the envelope a bit. I barrelled down I-95 until I ran out of battery and then ran another hundred miles down the road running on the 600cc range extending motor. The extender is good for about 70mph steady state on level ground. I pressed about 71 with four people in the car. Error messages aside, it seemed pleasant and unremarkable. I stopped at the Science Museum of Virginia in Richmond and charged for a couple hours on the way home. I'm getting about 4.1 miles per kilowatt hour. That works out to about 138 MPGe. The combined EPA rating for the car is 117 MPGe.
My borrowed ride last week was a 2014 BMW 328. This week I ran around in a MINI Clubman.
I admired the Clubman from the moment it was announced. I kept it on my short list of potential replacement cars for years. It felt almost like a Miata breadvan. I had all the standard complaints about the cheesy switchgear and cheap plastics but the astonishingly bad automatic transmission makes my other complaints seem petty. The small motor was noisy at any point but cruise. I got only 31 mpg on my standard routine.
I said last week that I would not trade the 328 for my i3. I am now sure that I wouldn't buy Clubman either. BMW has built a real goldilocks car in the i3.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the i3 is that I wasn't attracted to it originally for its propeller badge or environmental credentials. I just don't care for automatic transmissions. My wife doesn't care for manual. We have driven separate cars for years but the logistics of non-interchangeable cars were mounting with children. Single speed electrics and Prius-style CVTs represent the compromise space. It's a happy accident that this space includes some of the best cars you can buy today.
Friday, October 31, 2014
escape
I wrote recently about troubles offline blogging from my Nexus 7 in its default state. My Nexus 7 has only intermittent mobile connectivity, no personal accounts, and only one app -- a sideloaded Firefox.
That experience led me to put the Nexus back in a drawer. I upgraded my iPads to iOS 8 this week and set out on a now annual journey of discovery to see if any of the list of things that bug me about iOS have been put to bed.
Here are the top three items on the list:
* Ability to control the camera from Javascript: Nope
* Ability to see escape and control key 'keypress' events from Javascript in Mobile Safari: Nope
* Ability in input a square brace from the virtual keyboard without a sticky keyboard mode change: Nope
With these ongoing omissions, it may be time to put iOS in the drawer for a while. My original complaint with the Nexus had nothing to do with its hardware or even the mechanics of the Android operating system. My complaint was about the utility of the device out-of-the-box.
Out came the Nexus. I paired my Apple Wireless Keyboard with the Nexus to see if Firefox or Chrome on Android would give me the control keys I love. They do.
My next steps were to load Fabrice Bellard's awesome jslinux in Firefox on the Nexus, fire up vi, and write this post. I'm in escape heaven.
I'll get the post out by catting it to the special device /dev/clipboard. If this were 1998, I could use IrDA to beam the text directly to my laptop, then edit and publish. Instead, I'll probably have to push the text to some kind of browser-available shared drive on the network and fish it back out with my laptop.
---
In fact, that is exactly what I did. I could have published directly from the Nexus if I were willing to use my blogger credentials on the tablet. My next experiment may be to see if I can pass the text between the tablet and my laptop with bluetooth or NFC. beam.py looks interesting.
Why do I do this? I have a Newton keyboard, a Palm keyboard, a keyboard for my Nokia 770, and keyboards for iOS and Android devices. They were all disappointments. Best Buy has ASUS and Toshiba laptops available for $229. That's cheaper than all iOS devices except the very cheapest iPod touch. It's astonishingly cheap.
I think I keep trying to turn cheap and underpowered gadgets into computers because it still seems familiar. It reminds me of my own path through the 8-bit era. I would probably give it up if I had ever had a Coleco Adam or one of the other ersatz computers actually fashioned from game machines.
I worry that tablets give us a view on the future of the rest of consumer computing. Apple's indifference to my escape key today on iOS could become the Mac view in not too long. Fewer people would notice the difference than noticed the lack of a floppy on the original iMac.
The Macintosh itself didn't have an escape key and wouldn't get one until Apple unified keyboards across the Mac and Apple II product lines in about 1987. Escape wandered off some Mac keyboards in 1990 but found its way into the revered Apple Extended Keyboard. Escape has stayed with Macs ever since.
 |
| Macintosh Plus Extended Keyboard Photo Courtesy MagicTom |
The cosmos is telling me something. It's telling me to ditch vi or it's telling me to build my own keyboards. I just can't tell which.
(a javascript keyboard tester is here)
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
anonymous
Reograph is a gadget philosophy blog. In the doing of it, I have learned something known to the philosophers of antiquity -- that philosophy is at least 5% fiction.
I blog anonymously as a conceit. The fiction here at reograph is mostly at the margin to let me preserve my private dream that anonymity is possible. Many readers already know me personally but here is the big reveal for the rest of you. I'm the one person on Earth who has owned a Fiat X1/9, a BMW 318ti, and a BMW i3. That's me. That's my unique first world identifier.
The information above is practically equivalent to my Social Security number and so this next disclosure is probably redundant: I moved back to Washington, DC not too long ago. I have a bunch of posts on deck that either reveal this indirectly or simply don't make sense without this tidbit.
In fact, the BMW i3 itself makes sense for me only because I now have a lot of city driving.
I bought my i3 from BMW of Annapolis. It was fine. Go buy yours there. I popped into the dealer yesterday to pick up a refund check for sales tax paid, but not owed (to DC). While I was there, I mentioned some minor complaint about some small detail and I was vectored instantly to service to get it sorted. Awesome. Once my car was 'booked' -- like a perp on a random procedural crime drama -- the small matter of outstanding recalls came up.
My car had two minor sounding recalls outstanding. One had no description available in English. In German, the recall was named by a single VIN-sized word. How important could a single word recall really be?
Here's a thing about new car models. They're all a little bit broken. This is OK. The fine folks at your dealer, like the fine folks at your manufacturer, are all a little concerned that this reality will influence your perception of the car, the dealer, and the brand.
That's part of why the dealer will call you and invite you back for a free reception, or a free detailing, or offer to place a fresher flower in your on-dash bud vase some time during your ownership experience. This is one of the reasons that oil service is included with many new cars. Silent recalls and TSBs get addressed without you ever being aware.
I recall ignoring these calls (from a different dealer) fifteen years ago with my first BMW. I didn't understand that what the service department really needed was fifteen minutes alone with the car. The battery died not long after a spurned call from the dealer inviting me to an emergency detailing session. When I complained that a battery failure was certainly a warranty failure on a year old car, they told me that the warranty was void because the necessary service hadn't been performed on the battery.
If you're under fifty, you might not recall that batteries used to require a periodic top-up with water. By 1998, BMW had somehow not adopted the maintenance free batteries in widespread use everywhere else. Little BMW elves had been topping up my battery with water and taking care of a dozen other little details whenever I turned up at the dealer for complimentary tire valve cap rotation.
When the dealer calls you to suggest that their service department might be the ideal viewing location for an upcoming solar eclipse, just go.
My i3 is still in the service department today. At last report, the car is getting a complimentary wash, detail, charge, and almost complete disassembly of the front end to replace a fuel tank pressure sensor. I hope to be reunited with it sometime tomorrow. The good news is that the entire i3 front end contains only a handful of parts.
While I wait for the safe return of my electro-chariot, I'm getting my rounds done with a new 328 loaner from the dealer. The 328 stickers for just about what I paid for the i3. It's meant to seem much more luxurious. It's meant to seem much faster. It is definitely much larger. I love the i3. I would not buy this 328.
The 328 has 'Efficient Dynamics' written on the window and as a bitmap graphic on the instrument cluster. Efficient Dynamics, as realized here, means that the engine stops and starts disconcertingly. This impression should worry BMW -- because I have also been driving a Prius for ten years that starts and stops automatically in a completely happy and concerting way.
The 328 has no sense of power steering with the engine shut off. If the engine shuts off in the middle of parallel parking -- as happened to me today -- the wheel is dead until the car figures out that you are trying to turn the wheel. The gas motor eventually spools up and power assisted steering is again available. The automatic start-up seems barely faster and less intrusive than cranking a car manually by turning the key. By this definition, almost all of my old cars developed an EfficientDynamics stalling disorder at some point in their life. My X1/9 would sometimes EfficientDynamic right in the middle of left hand turns across traffic. Dynamic!
Prius automatic engine start works in a totally different way. In the Prius, a large electric motor gets the car going immediately and _also_ spins the crank on the gas motor. The gas motor can pitch in by adding fuel and spark whenever it gets around to it.
I love cars. I love technology. I love the environment. I love the smell of gas at a racetrack. If you love even two of these, then don't bother with feeble start/stop technologies that are not also coupled with electric power steering, electric air conditioning, and at least a modest electric traction motor and battery. A hybrid with all of these things will still have less added complexity than the complexity of the 328's start/stop rig plus its turbocharger. For all its E.D., the 328 is turning in combined mileage in the low twenties on a circuit where the i3 manages almost a hundred and twenty (MPGe), my 2004 Prius whips out 45, and my astonishingly inefficient BMW 325 wagon turned in 24.
If you love those things but you simply must have a rear wheel drive BMW with a gas engine, get an i3 with range extender, a new i8, a three series hybrid, or the forthcoming X5 plug in. If you're in DC, the folks at BMW of Annapolis seemed to me much more well versed in the new electric models. On a pre-purchase trip to a different area dealer, a salesman incorrectly identified which end of the car held the range extending gas motor.
I blog anonymously as a conceit. The fiction here at reograph is mostly at the margin to let me preserve my private dream that anonymity is possible. Many readers already know me personally but here is the big reveal for the rest of you. I'm the one person on Earth who has owned a Fiat X1/9, a BMW 318ti, and a BMW i3. That's me. That's my unique first world identifier.
The information above is practically equivalent to my Social Security number and so this next disclosure is probably redundant: I moved back to Washington, DC not too long ago. I have a bunch of posts on deck that either reveal this indirectly or simply don't make sense without this tidbit.
In fact, the BMW i3 itself makes sense for me only because I now have a lot of city driving.
I bought my i3 from BMW of Annapolis. It was fine. Go buy yours there. I popped into the dealer yesterday to pick up a refund check for sales tax paid, but not owed (to DC). While I was there, I mentioned some minor complaint about some small detail and I was vectored instantly to service to get it sorted. Awesome. Once my car was 'booked' -- like a perp on a random procedural crime drama -- the small matter of outstanding recalls came up.
My car had two minor sounding recalls outstanding. One had no description available in English. In German, the recall was named by a single VIN-sized word. How important could a single word recall really be?
Here's a thing about new car models. They're all a little bit broken. This is OK. The fine folks at your dealer, like the fine folks at your manufacturer, are all a little concerned that this reality will influence your perception of the car, the dealer, and the brand.
That's part of why the dealer will call you and invite you back for a free reception, or a free detailing, or offer to place a fresher flower in your on-dash bud vase some time during your ownership experience. This is one of the reasons that oil service is included with many new cars. Silent recalls and TSBs get addressed without you ever being aware.
I recall ignoring these calls (from a different dealer) fifteen years ago with my first BMW. I didn't understand that what the service department really needed was fifteen minutes alone with the car. The battery died not long after a spurned call from the dealer inviting me to an emergency detailing session. When I complained that a battery failure was certainly a warranty failure on a year old car, they told me that the warranty was void because the necessary service hadn't been performed on the battery.
If you're under fifty, you might not recall that batteries used to require a periodic top-up with water. By 1998, BMW had somehow not adopted the maintenance free batteries in widespread use everywhere else. Little BMW elves had been topping up my battery with water and taking care of a dozen other little details whenever I turned up at the dealer for complimentary tire valve cap rotation.
When the dealer calls you to suggest that their service department might be the ideal viewing location for an upcoming solar eclipse, just go.
My i3 is still in the service department today. At last report, the car is getting a complimentary wash, detail, charge, and almost complete disassembly of the front end to replace a fuel tank pressure sensor. I hope to be reunited with it sometime tomorrow. The good news is that the entire i3 front end contains only a handful of parts.
While I wait for the safe return of my electro-chariot, I'm getting my rounds done with a new 328 loaner from the dealer. The 328 stickers for just about what I paid for the i3. It's meant to seem much more luxurious. It's meant to seem much faster. It is definitely much larger. I love the i3. I would not buy this 328.
The 328 has 'Efficient Dynamics' written on the window and as a bitmap graphic on the instrument cluster. Efficient Dynamics, as realized here, means that the engine stops and starts disconcertingly. This impression should worry BMW -- because I have also been driving a Prius for ten years that starts and stops automatically in a completely happy and concerting way.
The 328 has no sense of power steering with the engine shut off. If the engine shuts off in the middle of parallel parking -- as happened to me today -- the wheel is dead until the car figures out that you are trying to turn the wheel. The gas motor eventually spools up and power assisted steering is again available. The automatic start-up seems barely faster and less intrusive than cranking a car manually by turning the key. By this definition, almost all of my old cars developed an EfficientDynamics stalling disorder at some point in their life. My X1/9 would sometimes EfficientDynamic right in the middle of left hand turns across traffic. Dynamic!
Prius automatic engine start works in a totally different way. In the Prius, a large electric motor gets the car going immediately and _also_ spins the crank on the gas motor. The gas motor can pitch in by adding fuel and spark whenever it gets around to it.
I love cars. I love technology. I love the environment. I love the smell of gas at a racetrack. If you love even two of these, then don't bother with feeble start/stop technologies that are not also coupled with electric power steering, electric air conditioning, and at least a modest electric traction motor and battery. A hybrid with all of these things will still have less added complexity than the complexity of the 328's start/stop rig plus its turbocharger. For all its E.D., the 328 is turning in combined mileage in the low twenties on a circuit where the i3 manages almost a hundred and twenty (MPGe), my 2004 Prius whips out 45, and my astonishingly inefficient BMW 325 wagon turned in 24.
If you love those things but you simply must have a rear wheel drive BMW with a gas engine, get an i3 with range extender, a new i8, a three series hybrid, or the forthcoming X5 plug in. If you're in DC, the folks at BMW of Annapolis seemed to me much more well versed in the new electric models. On a pre-purchase trip to a different area dealer, a salesman incorrectly identified which end of the car held the range extending gas motor.
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
data on sale
I wrote about cord cutting two months ago. I ditched my DSL in favor of a tethered LTE iPad for my entire domestic connectivity. I got 30 GB of data from Verizon for $225 -- a marginal increase of $155 over my previous cell phone bill.
I found soon after that 30GB wasn't quite enough. I went to 40 GB for $300, and even then a bit past. This was starting to look like real money. My gamble was that data prices would tumble in just the way that my DSL price never did. The gamble paid off yesterday when I took advantage of a data sale at Verizon. My plan is now for 60 GB for $225. I could have kept 40 GB for $150.
At that price, LTE would have matched my previous DSL price point with better speed and a modest constraint on my usage. At 60 GB, I live unconstrained. Dropping data prices are a reality. The new question is whether they will fall faster than my usage grows. I wager they will.
I found soon after that 30GB wasn't quite enough. I went to 40 GB for $300, and even then a bit past. This was starting to look like real money. My gamble was that data prices would tumble in just the way that my DSL price never did. The gamble paid off yesterday when I took advantage of a data sale at Verizon. My plan is now for 60 GB for $225. I could have kept 40 GB for $150.
At that price, LTE would have matched my previous DSL price point with better speed and a modest constraint on my usage. At 60 GB, I live unconstrained. Dropping data prices are a reality. The new question is whether they will fall faster than my usage grows. I wager they will.
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
charged
I'm on a train in England. My bags are packed for home. My gadgets are charged. I have been fed. Reograph time.
It is always difficult for me to do any computing in England without thinking of the hardware of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That machine functioned not only as imagined Wikipedia but also as Ford Prefect's reporter's notebook for 15 disconnected years on Earth. Even today, the model 100 might be more fit for that purpose than a stock tablet.
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
neue neue klasse
I recently bought a new BMW i3. Some thoughts:
BMW introduced the 1500 sedan in the fall of 1962. This was the first of the 'Neue Klasse' cars, and the first of a line from which most modern BMW cars can trace their lineage. 1500 begat 1600, 1800, and 2000 cars. These sedans, in turn, begat the BMW 5 series cars. The 1600 also begat the 1602 and 2002 cars that became the BMW 3 series.
Of all the Neue Klasse cars, none stand out more in popular automotive mythology than the 2002. That car may be the one that established BMW as a sporting line in the mind of the American driver. It spawned performance versions, the 2002tii and 2002 Turbo, that are the grandparents of BMW's storied M3.
I think my grandfather drove a BMW 1600 until the rear of the car rusted away. I have owned a couple of Neue Klasse descendants myself. In 1998, I ordered a 318ti 'Sport Package' with a full length folding canvas sunroof. This turned out to be an especially rare configuration. The 'M sport' models differed from more proletariat models mostly by the addition of a badge labeled 'M' on the side.
I loved that car. It came to the US market in 1995 as the first BMW hatchback coupe in 21 years. Its grandfather was the BMW 1802 Touring -- a Neue Klasse car. Chronic sunroof leaks in the rare canvas roof ('rare', 'canvas', and 'roof' in once sentence are a recipe for dampness, by the way) fed a mold invasion. The car was so great that I drove it even when it gave me a damp bum from wet seats. I gave it away ten years later when my first child was born.
I have missed that car since. I flew to Cleveland last year to buy a used BMW wagon to replace a Miata. Wonderful car. I was so nostalgic for hatch-backed BMW motoring fun that I overlooked the obvious. Cleveland cars rust. My wagon has superficial body rust that does not bother me. It also has extensive rear suspension rust that make some simple, now necessary, repairs expensive.
Out with the old, in with the new. My long experience with these Neue Klasse cars and their descendants is probably over. It ended, strangely, with the purchase of another new BMW.
I recently bought a new BMW i3 electric car. This car shares essentially nothing but a badge with the rest of the BMW cars on the show floor today. It is a marvel. Alien though it appears, it too has ancestors in the BMW family tree.
Before the Neue Klasse was Neue, The BMW 700 coupe was the new new thing. The 700 was a small, rear-engined car that helped pull BMW out of a financial crisis and put it on the path to the introduction of the Neue Klasse. 700-series cars continued in production until they were replaced by the affordable '02' series of Neue Klasse coupes.
The 700 was BMW's first monocoque car. It would be BMW's last rear-engined car for almost 50 years. It would be BMW's last car with a motorcycle-derived engine for the same period. Some argue that BMW exited the economy car market when 700 sales ended. I can't argue with that.
I will argue a more outlandish thing. I think BMW has just reentered the economy car market with a car that is a direct spiritual descendant of the BMW 700. The new i3 is the first mass produced BMW with a totally new chassis -- aluminum and carbon fibre reinforced plastic -- since the monocoque 700. The new i3, in the range extended form I bought, also features a motorcycle engine in the rear just like the 700.
The i3 clearly differs from the 700. It's an electric car that looks like a spaceship. The BMW 700 was remarkable for making a motorcycle-engined car look surprisingly normal. The 700 was an economy car and the i3 starts at 42 thousand dollars. I think there is a marvelous economy car hiding behind that luxury price tag.
For many buyers, ten thousand dollars of that price tag will come off the top as federal, state, and local tax incentives. A 42 thousand dollar car becomes a 32 thousand dollar car. From there, a substantial economy will come from very low operating costs. My BMW wagon generated a monthly gas bill of $250. My Prius would shred that bill into a $125 charge. The i3 will turn it into perhaps $60 in electricity and a few bucks in gas.
The gas bill is nice, but the i3 offers a battery only about as large as the battery in the much cheaper Nissan Leaf. How is the BMW car the economy choice at a ten thousand dollar premium over the Leaf?
It isn't today. I would have to be smoking the finest grade first-world hemp upholstery (which the i3 features, by the way) to claim otherwise. It appears that no expense has been spared in the design of the car. The carbon fiber body is remarkable. Here's another remarkable tidbit missed in most of the road tests -- the radio on the base car has an 'iDrive' menu with one screen for 'tone'. Treble, bass, and balance. That's it. Not even the fade control present on my 1983 Mercury Lynx. Why no fade? I think there aren't even rear speakers! The rear doors don't lock or even have external door handles. Rear windows don't open either.
There is no elaborate ducting to move conditioned air to the rear passengers. Instead, the low profile seats work together with the flat cabin floor to let air circulate from just a few registers.
I truly admire BMW's principled restraint here. The base i3 lacks many little geegaws that are standard even on low end econoboxes. Unlike those cars, it features a spacious rear seat and comfort for four adults. Every gadget present is lightweight, energy efficient, or especially meaningful in an electric car.
There is a brilliant twenty thousand dollar car waiting to emerge from this car when it next molts. I get some push back from self-styled BMW purists on this point. Some seem threatened by the idea of a cheap BMW. I heard it all when I owned the 318ti -- BMW's last car in the U.S. available for less than twenty thousand dollars. I disagree. The 2002 was an inexpensive car. Here's how Car and Driver summarized that ride in 1968:
I can't summon better language to describe the new BMW i3. The 2002 used 114 horsepower to wind a two thousand pound car around a mountain the way a yoyo ascends its string. The i3 uses 170-hp/184 ft-lb AC motor to spin its twenty eight hundred pounds just the same way. The two cars share a bolt upright seating position, an airy greenhouse, and the same power to weight ratio. The i3 has better brakes and better tires. Fifty years of material science has conjured a revolution there that rivals the miracle of a 22 kWh lithium ion battery pack. Remarkably, the i3 has the lower center of gravity.
The 2002 listed for $2850 in '68. That target was just twenty bucks above the average new car price. Fast forward to 2014 and the base i3 -- with tax credits -- stickers for only hundreds dollars above the 2013 average new vehicle price of 32 thousand dollars.
The problem with that happy equivalence is that an average new car is unaffordable for average Americans. The other problem is that gas doesn't cost 1968's 34 cents a gallon. I think that BMW can kill two birds with one stone. The i3 lays a technological framework for an excellent and affordable car priced in the twenties. Its efficient drivetrain can deliver energy bills straight out of the sixties.
I am enjoying my new front row seat. It's upright with great, tall windows all around. I may not be able to see in every direction, but the past and the future look pretty clear from here.
BMW introduced the 1500 sedan in the fall of 1962. This was the first of the 'Neue Klasse' cars, and the first of a line from which most modern BMW cars can trace their lineage. 1500 begat 1600, 1800, and 2000 cars. These sedans, in turn, begat the BMW 5 series cars. The 1600 also begat the 1602 and 2002 cars that became the BMW 3 series.
Of all the Neue Klasse cars, none stand out more in popular automotive mythology than the 2002. That car may be the one that established BMW as a sporting line in the mind of the American driver. It spawned performance versions, the 2002tii and 2002 Turbo, that are the grandparents of BMW's storied M3.
I think my grandfather drove a BMW 1600 until the rear of the car rusted away. I have owned a couple of Neue Klasse descendants myself. In 1998, I ordered a 318ti 'Sport Package' with a full length folding canvas sunroof. This turned out to be an especially rare configuration. The 'M sport' models differed from more proletariat models mostly by the addition of a badge labeled 'M' on the side.
I loved that car. It came to the US market in 1995 as the first BMW hatchback coupe in 21 years. Its grandfather was the BMW 1802 Touring -- a Neue Klasse car. Chronic sunroof leaks in the rare canvas roof ('rare', 'canvas', and 'roof' in once sentence are a recipe for dampness, by the way) fed a mold invasion. The car was so great that I drove it even when it gave me a damp bum from wet seats. I gave it away ten years later when my first child was born.
I have missed that car since. I flew to Cleveland last year to buy a used BMW wagon to replace a Miata. Wonderful car. I was so nostalgic for hatch-backed BMW motoring fun that I overlooked the obvious. Cleveland cars rust. My wagon has superficial body rust that does not bother me. It also has extensive rear suspension rust that make some simple, now necessary, repairs expensive.
Out with the old, in with the new. My long experience with these Neue Klasse cars and their descendants is probably over. It ended, strangely, with the purchase of another new BMW.
I recently bought a new BMW i3 electric car. This car shares essentially nothing but a badge with the rest of the BMW cars on the show floor today. It is a marvel. Alien though it appears, it too has ancestors in the BMW family tree.
Before the Neue Klasse was Neue, The BMW 700 coupe was the new new thing. The 700 was a small, rear-engined car that helped pull BMW out of a financial crisis and put it on the path to the introduction of the Neue Klasse. 700-series cars continued in production until they were replaced by the affordable '02' series of Neue Klasse coupes.
The 700 was BMW's first monocoque car. It would be BMW's last rear-engined car for almost 50 years. It would be BMW's last car with a motorcycle-derived engine for the same period. Some argue that BMW exited the economy car market when 700 sales ended. I can't argue with that.
I will argue a more outlandish thing. I think BMW has just reentered the economy car market with a car that is a direct spiritual descendant of the BMW 700. The new i3 is the first mass produced BMW with a totally new chassis -- aluminum and carbon fibre reinforced plastic -- since the monocoque 700. The new i3, in the range extended form I bought, also features a motorcycle engine in the rear just like the 700.
The i3 clearly differs from the 700. It's an electric car that looks like a spaceship. The BMW 700 was remarkable for making a motorcycle-engined car look surprisingly normal. The 700 was an economy car and the i3 starts at 42 thousand dollars. I think there is a marvelous economy car hiding behind that luxury price tag.
For many buyers, ten thousand dollars of that price tag will come off the top as federal, state, and local tax incentives. A 42 thousand dollar car becomes a 32 thousand dollar car. From there, a substantial economy will come from very low operating costs. My BMW wagon generated a monthly gas bill of $250. My Prius would shred that bill into a $125 charge. The i3 will turn it into perhaps $60 in electricity and a few bucks in gas.
The gas bill is nice, but the i3 offers a battery only about as large as the battery in the much cheaper Nissan Leaf. How is the BMW car the economy choice at a ten thousand dollar premium over the Leaf?
It isn't today. I would have to be smoking the finest grade first-world hemp upholstery (which the i3 features, by the way) to claim otherwise. It appears that no expense has been spared in the design of the car. The carbon fiber body is remarkable. Here's another remarkable tidbit missed in most of the road tests -- the radio on the base car has an 'iDrive' menu with one screen for 'tone'. Treble, bass, and balance. That's it. Not even the fade control present on my 1983 Mercury Lynx. Why no fade? I think there aren't even rear speakers! The rear doors don't lock or even have external door handles. Rear windows don't open either.
There is no elaborate ducting to move conditioned air to the rear passengers. Instead, the low profile seats work together with the flat cabin floor to let air circulate from just a few registers.
I truly admire BMW's principled restraint here. The base i3 lacks many little geegaws that are standard even on low end econoboxes. Unlike those cars, it features a spacious rear seat and comfort for four adults. Every gadget present is lightweight, energy efficient, or especially meaningful in an electric car.
There is a brilliant twenty thousand dollar car waiting to emerge from this car when it next molts. I get some push back from self-styled BMW purists on this point. Some seem threatened by the idea of a cheap BMW. I heard it all when I owned the 318ti -- BMW's last car in the U.S. available for less than twenty thousand dollars. I disagree. The 2002 was an inexpensive car. Here's how Car and Driver summarized that ride in 1968:
"To my way of thinking, the 2002 is one of modern civilization's all-time best ways to get somewhere sitting down. It grabs you. You sit in magnificently-adjustable seats with great, tall windows all around you. You are comfortable and you can see in every direction. You start it. Willing and un-lumpy is how it feels. No rough idle, no zappy noises to indicate that the task you propose might be anything more than child's play for all those 114 Bavarian superhorses."
-- from Car and Driver's 1968 review of the BMW 2002
I can't summon better language to describe the new BMW i3. The 2002 used 114 horsepower to wind a two thousand pound car around a mountain the way a yoyo ascends its string. The i3 uses 170-hp/184 ft-lb AC motor to spin its twenty eight hundred pounds just the same way. The two cars share a bolt upright seating position, an airy greenhouse, and the same power to weight ratio. The i3 has better brakes and better tires. Fifty years of material science has conjured a revolution there that rivals the miracle of a 22 kWh lithium ion battery pack. Remarkably, the i3 has the lower center of gravity.
The 2002 listed for $2850 in '68. That target was just twenty bucks above the average new car price. Fast forward to 2014 and the base i3 -- with tax credits -- stickers for only hundreds dollars above the 2013 average new vehicle price of 32 thousand dollars.
The problem with that happy equivalence is that an average new car is unaffordable for average Americans. The other problem is that gas doesn't cost 1968's 34 cents a gallon. I think that BMW can kill two birds with one stone. The i3 lays a technological framework for an excellent and affordable car priced in the twenties. Its efficient drivetrain can deliver energy bills straight out of the sixties.
I am enjoying my new front row seat. It's upright with great, tall windows all around. I may not be able to see in every direction, but the past and the future look pretty clear from here.
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
unwired
In the beginning there was the modem. Then came ISDN. Then came DSL. That progression captures my landline data technology from about 1985 to last month.
My mobile data technology has been through many more iterations. Analog PCMCIA modems with AMPS phones in the early 1990s. 9600 baud digital data with GSM in 1996. 19.2k baud IP with CDPD. On to Richochet. Back to 56k data with GPRS, then EDGE. I took a step away from GSM with the CDMA Novatel MiFi 2200, then a step back to GSM with a T-Mobile UMTS phone, then another step away from GSM with a CDMA iPhone 4S on Verizon, then a step back towards GSM with an iPad with LTE, and now an iPhone 5S, on Verizon.
My mobile speed went from 2.4 kbps to 30 Mbps in 20 years. My landline speed went from 300bps to 6Mbps in 30 years. A factor of a ten thousand in twenty years for mobile -- and only twenty thousand in thirty years for landline. The wireless performance trend line is spanking the wired line here at my house.
Of course, performance is not the only parameter worth considering. Reliability has also set wireless and wired apart. Reliability drove me away from DSL last month and into the embrace of Verizon Wireless as my sole ISP. My DSL reliability was never better than the reliability of the low quality, vulnerable, DSL modem of the month. I owned a string of modems and all required more reboots than my iPhone.
Reliability is the reason I moved from T-Mobile's US network to Verizon's much slower CDMA network in the iPhone 4S era. I was in Maryland for the 2011 East Coast earthquake and I got a front row seat for what is possibly the best dress rehearsal for a natural disaster or terrorist attack. Verizon Wireless did just fine. The wireless carriers rebounded quickly from 2012's 'Sandy' attack, though Verizon earned scorn from many for its decision to abandon copper service lines on New York's Fire Island.
Price per megabyte is not there yet for mobile. I now pay Verizon $225 a month for 30GB. DSL cost me $90 for unmetered access. Before this, though, I paid Verizon $70 for 4GB that my wife and I used little of on our phones. My marginal additional cost for using Verizon for the home connection is $155.
A premium today, certainly, but my cellular data bill has been falling over time. My DSL bill was about the same for ten years.
Cellular disrupting landline is an old story. Classic "Innovator's Dilemma" stuff. The upstart technology finds a customer that values a new attribute of the challenger -- mobility in this case -- and uses that revenue to grow the technology until it can displace the incumbent.
In my case, the thing I value isn't mobility. I value never needing to schedule an appointment for the Verizon wireless guy to visit my house. I can solve essentially any problem with a visit to the mall instead of waiting for a guy to show up at my house. Even the trickiest problem could be solved by cruising over to the other end of the mall and talking to the AT&T guy instead. At the time of writing, AT&T was offering 30GB for the same price as Verizon.
On the day I went to the mall to replace DSL with cellular, Verizon was not my first stop. I first popped into the T-Mobile shop to get a modern MiFi and an unlimited plan. T-Mobile reps told me that I couldn't tether on an unlimited plan. I understand. I moved on.
I don't want unlimited. I want a reasonable monthly bill and no surprises. Verizon has been very good about managing my surprise. I started first with a 20GB plan. A Netflix binge put me a few gigabytes over my limit. Verizon's usage monitoring warned me at 75%, at 90%, and the end, and after every additional gigabyte. I responded 'YES' to one of the messages and upgraded my plan to 30GB with a text message. No surprises.
One welcome surprise has been the revolution in overage charges. I remember days when overages were measured, and billed, by the kilobyte at absurd penalty rates. Today, a gigabyte of overage costs only double the base plan rate. An hour of Netflix overage at 1 GB/hr works out to $.25/min. That's cheaper than the typical $.40/min voice minute overage rate that still exists on some carriers.
One other surprise has been my change in behavior. I no longer moderate my data usage while out. It's now the same data from the same plan when I'm at home. I no longer bother with with free WiFi in public. I no longer regard the ugly black phone wires that slink from my house to a street pole as a necessary evil.
I wonder which wire I can cut next.
My mobile data technology has been through many more iterations. Analog PCMCIA modems with AMPS phones in the early 1990s. 9600 baud digital data with GSM in 1996. 19.2k baud IP with CDPD. On to Richochet. Back to 56k data with GPRS, then EDGE. I took a step away from GSM with the CDMA Novatel MiFi 2200, then a step back to GSM with a T-Mobile UMTS phone, then another step away from GSM with a CDMA iPhone 4S on Verizon, then a step back towards GSM with an iPad with LTE, and now an iPhone 5S, on Verizon.
My mobile speed went from 2.4 kbps to 30 Mbps in 20 years. My landline speed went from 300bps to 6Mbps in 30 years. A factor of a ten thousand in twenty years for mobile -- and only twenty thousand in thirty years for landline. The wireless performance trend line is spanking the wired line here at my house.
Of course, performance is not the only parameter worth considering. Reliability has also set wireless and wired apart. Reliability drove me away from DSL last month and into the embrace of Verizon Wireless as my sole ISP. My DSL reliability was never better than the reliability of the low quality, vulnerable, DSL modem of the month. I owned a string of modems and all required more reboots than my iPhone.
Reliability is the reason I moved from T-Mobile's US network to Verizon's much slower CDMA network in the iPhone 4S era. I was in Maryland for the 2011 East Coast earthquake and I got a front row seat for what is possibly the best dress rehearsal for a natural disaster or terrorist attack. Verizon Wireless did just fine. The wireless carriers rebounded quickly from 2012's 'Sandy' attack, though Verizon earned scorn from many for its decision to abandon copper service lines on New York's Fire Island.
Price per megabyte is not there yet for mobile. I now pay Verizon $225 a month for 30GB. DSL cost me $90 for unmetered access. Before this, though, I paid Verizon $70 for 4GB that my wife and I used little of on our phones. My marginal additional cost for using Verizon for the home connection is $155.
A premium today, certainly, but my cellular data bill has been falling over time. My DSL bill was about the same for ten years.
Cellular disrupting landline is an old story. Classic "Innovator's Dilemma" stuff. The upstart technology finds a customer that values a new attribute of the challenger -- mobility in this case -- and uses that revenue to grow the technology until it can displace the incumbent.
In my case, the thing I value isn't mobility. I value never needing to schedule an appointment for the Verizon wireless guy to visit my house. I can solve essentially any problem with a visit to the mall instead of waiting for a guy to show up at my house. Even the trickiest problem could be solved by cruising over to the other end of the mall and talking to the AT&T guy instead. At the time of writing, AT&T was offering 30GB for the same price as Verizon.
On the day I went to the mall to replace DSL with cellular, Verizon was not my first stop. I first popped into the T-Mobile shop to get a modern MiFi and an unlimited plan. T-Mobile reps told me that I couldn't tether on an unlimited plan. I understand. I moved on.
I don't want unlimited. I want a reasonable monthly bill and no surprises. Verizon has been very good about managing my surprise. I started first with a 20GB plan. A Netflix binge put me a few gigabytes over my limit. Verizon's usage monitoring warned me at 75%, at 90%, and the end, and after every additional gigabyte. I responded 'YES' to one of the messages and upgraded my plan to 30GB with a text message. No surprises.
One welcome surprise has been the revolution in overage charges. I remember days when overages were measured, and billed, by the kilobyte at absurd penalty rates. Today, a gigabyte of overage costs only double the base plan rate. An hour of Netflix overage at 1 GB/hr works out to $.25/min. That's cheaper than the typical $.40/min voice minute overage rate that still exists on some carriers.
One other surprise has been my change in behavior. I no longer moderate my data usage while out. It's now the same data from the same plan when I'm at home. I no longer bother with with free WiFi in public. I no longer regard the ugly black phone wires that slink from my house to a street pole as a necessary evil.
I wonder which wire I can cut next.
Thursday, July 31, 2014
logo
I recently inherited some technical books from a close friend. Among them was Seymour Papert's 'Mindstorms' -- a book about the history of the logo language. I recalled with fondness my own experiences with logo in the heydey of the great 8 bit age.
I built a little one for my daughter. It is here.
try:
do 20 [ fd 20 rt 18 ]
to star [ do 5 [ fd 70 rt 144 ] ]
do 5 [ star pu fd 90 pd ]
It will grow as she outgrows its limits. I do not know if I will be able to keep up.
(update 7 Aug 2014)
this logo now generates GPGL cameo output with the 'cameo' command
It will grow as she outgrows its limits. I do not know if I will be able to keep up.
(update 7 Aug 2014)
this logo now generates GPGL cameo output with the 'cameo' command
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
mutually assured destruction
I have a large and growing collection of e-waste. One special neighborhood in this zip code of waste is reserved just for dead or dying gadgets that hold my personal information. The pile grows because I don't have good protocols for scrubbing this junk before it heads out the door for its date with an acid bath, a makeshift furnace attended by orphans, or an identity theft gang in Southeast Asia. They don't ask which you prefer at the ewaste drop-off.
My hard drives usually get destroyed. A wifi router might get its settings wiped. I have a harder time with things that seem like they ought to be useful. I recently had four Macs that fit this bill. All worked but none really made any sense as a computer. All were 'modern' Intel Macs though two were 32-bit-only Core Duos. MagSafe plugs were fraying. Batteries shot. Fluorescent backlights dim.
All these Macs had hard drives that are tedious at best to remove for erasure or destruction. Fortunately, all also had FireWire and all supported Apple's fabulous Target Disk Mode. Hold 'T' at power on and the Mac exports its internal drives to another Mac over FireWire as if they were external disks. I used one of the Macs to wipe the drives of the other three. I installed a clean Mac OS on one of the wiped machines and turned it around to wipe the fourth.
This cyclic graph of destruction was not simply for show. While these Macs all had FireWire, none of my present Mac laptops do. These machines would have to wipe themselves. The arrangement sounds cumbersome but the outcome was ideal. I was able to recycle these machines as working computers rather than as pure waste.
This cyclic graph of destruction was not simply for show. While these Macs all had FireWire, none of my present Mac laptops do. These machines would have to wipe themselves. The arrangement sounds cumbersome but the outcome was ideal. I was able to recycle these machines as working computers rather than as pure waste.
I would be even happier if these Macs, and all phones, tablets, and computers, came with a 'donate me' mode in firmware that could give me some assurance that the device has been actually wiped. An article chosen at random from the Google suggests that these machines might take on average 4000 MJ of energy each to make. A million watt hours. Twenty thousand hours at 50 watts. I don't expect any of my old machines, or phones, could forestall the production of their replacement if re-used. I would still like the best shot at it. Perhaps future revisions of the 'Energy Star' program could include mandates designed to simplify responsible reuse.
Thursday, July 17, 2014
big ass brother
In November I wrote a three part review of the Haiku fan from Big Ass Fans. I love the fan, but I had some complaints about the clumsy remote and the dim lamp. That review ends with:
The folks at Big Ass have now come to the same conclusion. They have a new model out with 'SenseME' technology. What is SenseME? It looks like a module that replaces the lame lamp with the equivalent of a Nest thermostat.
I have a guess that the fan motherboard is unchanged and that the SenseME module plugs into the same header as the RF remote receiver.
SenseME is still in pre-launch. I wonder if they will work out some kind of revenue split with users over the monetization of your home occupancy data. Maybe they will just knock a hundred dollars of the list price up front. Maybe they'll find it easier to just keep the money.
In any case, I have two suggestions for Big Ass. The first is to go license "See Me, Feel Me" from The Who for your SenseME campaign. The second is to take a moment and consider a brand pivot. This could be the moment to transition away from fans and become Big Ass Brother. Why not just admit up front what we all suspect about the current connected home insanity? Your existing brand concept slaps a folksy, colloquial label on a plain fact -- big fans. Let's do the same thing for the Internet of Things that Spy on You (IoTtSoY). Big Ass Brother.
If Nest can solve the user interface challenge of configuring a wifi smoke detector on your ceiling, then it must be possible for a ceiling fan.
The folks at Big Ass have now come to the same conclusion. They have a new model out with 'SenseME' technology. What is SenseME? It looks like a module that replaces the lame lamp with the equivalent of a Nest thermostat.
I have a guess that the fan motherboard is unchanged and that the SenseME module plugs into the same header as the RF remote receiver.
SenseME is still in pre-launch. I wonder if they will work out some kind of revenue split with users over the monetization of your home occupancy data. Maybe they will just knock a hundred dollars of the list price up front. Maybe they'll find it easier to just keep the money.
In any case, I have two suggestions for Big Ass. The first is to go license "See Me, Feel Me" from The Who for your SenseME campaign. The second is to take a moment and consider a brand pivot. This could be the moment to transition away from fans and become Big Ass Brother. Why not just admit up front what we all suspect about the current connected home insanity? Your existing brand concept slaps a folksy, colloquial label on a plain fact -- big fans. Let's do the same thing for the Internet of Things that Spy on You (IoTtSoY). Big Ass Brother.
Monday, May 12, 2014
stokked
I'm trying to give away as much baby stuff as I can. This ritual is a common one in our culture. The traditional purpose is to ward off future offspring though it often induces just the opposite effect.
I was sure that only this stroller would do for my hypothetical future children. When my wife and I went stroller shopping, years later, we first had to track down this crazy Norwegian stroller. We had no idea of its name. That was easy. A Google search for 'crazy stroller' turned up the answer on the first page.
My weekend's task was to unload our Stokke Xplory stroller on a worthy family. I failed. I relaxed my standards of worthiness somewhat and still failed. Worthy now meant just that someone possessed $125 dollars and the ability to send me an email. Sad. The folks on the neighborhood listserv don't know what they are missing.
I picked the stroller years before I knew I would be a father. My wife and I saw the Stokke in a showcase of Norwegian design in Washington's Union Station. Norway used to erect a Christmas tree in Union Station as part of a comprehensive annual gratitude package for the people of the United States. I think we got the tree for being an early country to recognize Norway's independence from Sweden. The tree was certainly the highlight of the display for most. I favored the train display. In the early aughts, I preferred the display of Norwegian design most of all.
That display featured the most outlandish baby stroller I had ever seen. It looked at first like a golf cart with an attached infant seat. The seat could slide up and down the central aluminum spine. It could also turn to face forward or back. The stroller suggested a life free from dirty restaurant high chairs, splashes, and barricades that might block the view of a child.
 |
| Golf Cart Image courtesy Golden Eagle Golf |
 |
| Stokke Xplory Photo courtesy your correspondent |
I was sure that only this stroller would do for my hypothetical future children. When my wife and I went stroller shopping, years later, we first had to track down this crazy Norwegian stroller. We had no idea of its name. That was easy. A Google search for 'crazy stroller' turned up the answer on the first page.
The second challenge came only when we learned that the stroller was about a thousand bucks. I've bought cars that cost less. The golf cart pictured above goes for about a hundred bucks. In the pantheon of expensive hobbies, babies rate above golf. They may even rate above sailing.
I decided that the idea of a kilobuck stroller was insane. I decided that the Stokke folks must be a similarly insane tribe of designers and artists and engineers. I rationalized the purchase as if I were
subsidizing public art through the installation of this small and portable kinetic sculpture.
Despite my poor luck with shifting the thing this weekend, I have come here to praise the Xplory, not to bury it. This stroller was amazing in ways I could not have previously imagined. I wanted to share some of those ways with you before the memory fades completely.
Let me get some of the downsides out of the way before I move on to the praise bit. The stroller is heavy. It is difficult to fold. When stored most compactly, it is split into two bulky pieces. I was unable to check it for air travel without using a large and expensive stroller body bag. A plastic lever broke. The storage was nearly useless. The cup holder was a literal afterthought. The brake can be difficult to operate. The seat is difficult to flip from front to rear facing without taking off the foot rest. People will constantly stop you on the street to ask about it.
A happy Xplory owner will probably live in a walkable city and walk with it. I lived in Washington at the time and it was perfect for me and my kids. I probably put a thousand walking miles on it. It was a delight to push from Capitol Hill to Georgetown on a nice day.
The trait that defines the Xplory is its stiffness. Stiffness is what lets you take long strides without banging your foot into a nightmare of accordioned folding bits. Stiffness is what lets you pick the whole thing up, including child, and carry it up stairs (EDITOR'S NOTE: NEVER DO THIS). Stiffness is
what enables off-axis thrust and navigation.
Off-axis thrust and navigation? These are not things I remember reading about in baby guides. Here's what it means in sailing terms: Most strollers are comfortable in only one point of sail -- running downwind with an adult directly behind pushing on both handles. The Stokke works fine with a single hand on the tiller. Not only that, the Stokke works fine in a broad reach with a hand anywhere on the large handle bar. The stiffness of the stroller and the height of the seat, when upright and facing forward, let the Stokke perform even in a beam reach.
I spent most of my time with it actually walking next to it and carrying it along with a hand on the child restraint bar. It was amazing to be able to talk to my children in the stroller while we were both facing forward. We walked hundreds of miles this way. I almost never used the vinyl rain cocoon thingy bundled with the stroller. Instead, I just walked along side it and shared my umbrella with comfort. I also found it pretty easy to push an infant in the Stokke and a toddler on a Kettler tricycle at the same time. This miracle helped me to get my youngest onto a bike much earlier than I otherwise would have been able to manage.
The stroller's stiffness comes in part from design and in part from quality. It should see service for at least a decade without difficulty. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of parting with the stroller is that I do not expect it to see out its entire useful life. In our part of the country, safety concerns over previously owned baby items make some only slightly more valuable second hand than radioactive waste. Even charities, perhaps especially charities, want nothing to do with most of what I have. I understand.
I understand that it can be difficult to reach unregistered owners with recall notices. I understand it can be difficult for new owners to discover the recall history for a gadget that may not have all its papers in order. I understand that new and ever better product safety regimes are difficult or impossible to apply to a product made years earlier. I still wonder if we have gone too far.
My children's car seats and boosters all have a use-by date. The old BMW wagon in which the seats are installed does not. The Stokke could have BPA or some other unfashionable substance buried somewhere it it. I got a whiff of the vinyl rain cover and guessed that it would not make a good chew toy. Could the stroller somehow be worse than a new Maclaren from China? I don't know.
I think the organic food folks might be able to help. We're expected to believe that baby stuff is up to snuff because it has a bunch of compliance marks on it. Organic folk also know to look for a special mark on their stuffs but they also know that each mushroom is traceable back to an actual farm. Even the inputs to that farm may be traceable back a few degrees.
If we can bother to make individual pieces of fruit traceable from 'farm to fork', perhaps it is not such a stretch to imagine the same for strollers, clothes, and toys. Organic foods labelled with the HarvestMark system can be traced by consumers prior to purchase directly from their telephones. Traceability could make it much easier to reason about the safety of a product later in its life. How much could it add to the cost of a thousand dollar stroller?
On the downside, we might be confronted with more than we really want to know about where our products come from and what they are made of.
I decided that the idea of a kilobuck stroller was insane. I decided that the Stokke folks must be a similarly insane tribe of designers and artists and engineers. I rationalized the purchase as if I were
subsidizing public art through the installation of this small and portable kinetic sculpture.
Despite my poor luck with shifting the thing this weekend, I have come here to praise the Xplory, not to bury it. This stroller was amazing in ways I could not have previously imagined. I wanted to share some of those ways with you before the memory fades completely.
Let me get some of the downsides out of the way before I move on to the praise bit. The stroller is heavy. It is difficult to fold. When stored most compactly, it is split into two bulky pieces. I was unable to check it for air travel without using a large and expensive stroller body bag. A plastic lever broke. The storage was nearly useless. The cup holder was a literal afterthought. The brake can be difficult to operate. The seat is difficult to flip from front to rear facing without taking off the foot rest. People will constantly stop you on the street to ask about it.
A happy Xplory owner will probably live in a walkable city and walk with it. I lived in Washington at the time and it was perfect for me and my kids. I probably put a thousand walking miles on it. It was a delight to push from Capitol Hill to Georgetown on a nice day.
The trait that defines the Xplory is its stiffness. Stiffness is what lets you take long strides without banging your foot into a nightmare of accordioned folding bits. Stiffness is what lets you pick the whole thing up, including child, and carry it up stairs (EDITOR'S NOTE: NEVER DO THIS). Stiffness is
what enables off-axis thrust and navigation.
 |
| Wheel wear on a non-stiff stroller Image courtesy a unsatisfied Maclaren owner on Yelp |
Off-axis thrust and navigation? These are not things I remember reading about in baby guides. Here's what it means in sailing terms: Most strollers are comfortable in only one point of sail -- running downwind with an adult directly behind pushing on both handles. The Stokke works fine with a single hand on the tiller. Not only that, the Stokke works fine in a broad reach with a hand anywhere on the large handle bar. The stiffness of the stroller and the height of the seat, when upright and facing forward, let the Stokke perform even in a beam reach.
I spent most of my time with it actually walking next to it and carrying it along with a hand on the child restraint bar. It was amazing to be able to talk to my children in the stroller while we were both facing forward. We walked hundreds of miles this way. I almost never used the vinyl rain cocoon thingy bundled with the stroller. Instead, I just walked along side it and shared my umbrella with comfort. I also found it pretty easy to push an infant in the Stokke and a toddler on a Kettler tricycle at the same time. This miracle helped me to get my youngest onto a bike much earlier than I otherwise would have been able to manage.
The stroller's stiffness comes in part from design and in part from quality. It should see service for at least a decade without difficulty. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of parting with the stroller is that I do not expect it to see out its entire useful life. In our part of the country, safety concerns over previously owned baby items make some only slightly more valuable second hand than radioactive waste. Even charities, perhaps especially charities, want nothing to do with most of what I have. I understand.
I understand that it can be difficult to reach unregistered owners with recall notices. I understand it can be difficult for new owners to discover the recall history for a gadget that may not have all its papers in order. I understand that new and ever better product safety regimes are difficult or impossible to apply to a product made years earlier. I still wonder if we have gone too far.
My children's car seats and boosters all have a use-by date. The old BMW wagon in which the seats are installed does not. The Stokke could have BPA or some other unfashionable substance buried somewhere it it. I got a whiff of the vinyl rain cover and guessed that it would not make a good chew toy. Could the stroller somehow be worse than a new Maclaren from China? I don't know.
I think the organic food folks might be able to help. We're expected to believe that baby stuff is up to snuff because it has a bunch of compliance marks on it. Organic folk also know to look for a special mark on their stuffs but they also know that each mushroom is traceable back to an actual farm. Even the inputs to that farm may be traceable back a few degrees.
If we can bother to make individual pieces of fruit traceable from 'farm to fork', perhaps it is not such a stretch to imagine the same for strollers, clothes, and toys. Organic foods labelled with the HarvestMark system can be traced by consumers prior to purchase directly from their telephones. Traceability could make it much easier to reason about the safety of a product later in its life. How much could it add to the cost of a thousand dollar stroller?
On the downside, we might be confronted with more than we really want to know about where our products come from and what they are made of.
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I can't spare the phone for reography this morning. I need it for train updates and electronic boarding passes and even a phone call if everything else goes wrong. I can't use the camera for reography. This tablet doesn't really have a role in my day to day life. I didn't even realize it was in my bag until last night.
I bought the tablet to play with HTML5 media APIs in Chrome and Firefox. I leave it stock and use only those apps. I load nothing else and I use no personal accounts. On this trip, the tablet is essentially disconnected. My phone's hotspot feature disappeared when I bought the wrong local SIM.
In the plus column, Quickoffice does rotate from portrait to landscape. Moses' tablets didn't. In the minus column, the landscape interface is apalling. The keyboard takes up a lot of space. Fine.
Quickoffice trashes an astonishing fraction of the balance with a pointless and unwelcome interface ribbon. Above my editing slit now is a giant blue 'W' to remind me that I'm editing a document and not a spreadsheet. The name of the document is up there. It probably takes up as much space as the letter 'Q' on the keyboard and isn't quite as useful. Below the name are 25 characters telling me that my document is not saved. Next comes an enormous swath of empty space. Then a picture of a 3.5" floppy diskette. I'm old enough to read that rune but I don't know who else is. Then come mystery buttons. Those runes elude me. I suspect at least one to be a booby trap.
Photo courtesy your correspondent
I never had a Tandy 100 portable. I didn't see one on the museum shelves but I saw a number of similarly elegant portables from the era. I have nothing but respect for the nexus tablet hardware, but I wonder if it would be put to a better use emulating the model 100 than running Quickoffice. The nexus tablet is simply not ready for battle as it comes out of the box.