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.
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