long term

The UN IPCC estimated recently that there are about ten years left to avert a major climate catastrophe. That's twice as long as I have now owned my 2014 BMW i3 electric car. With that in mind, here begins the long-term review:

I bought an early i3 in 2014 and wrote a contemporary review. At the time, I thought it was a great 25 thousand dollar car looking for a way to break out of its introductory 50 thousand dollar pricing. I think I was about half right. The price never did fall but BMW steadily increased the range with denser batteries at the same price.

In short, the car works. It does all the things it could be expected to do and it solves the problems it could have been expected to solve. It's an extrapolation of my experience with a 2004 Prius. That car is still running on its original battery with no hybrid-specific maintenance in 200000 miles.

The i3 does not solve the problems that it cannot solve. It is several feet shorter than the car it replaced but not usefully narrower. It is, therefore, never in traffic. It is the traffic. It has cameras and computers that let it parallel park itself but it does not solve the problem that parking is killing cities.

The way to think about the i3 is not as an electric car. It's an interurban car. Its electric motor, battery pack, carbon fiber frame, and thermoplastic body panels just solve a bunch of packaging and noise problems. The interurban car builders at the end of the 19th century came to similar conclusions about electric, though they built for rails.

The plastic interurban family car pod is a retro-futuristic vision. Our pod goes to Annapolis or Baltimore and back, cities served by original electric DC interurban railways, but not Frederick or Richmond without a charge or use of the gas range extending motor.

This is the part where I might say that the electric drive train is low maintenance. That's true, though the on-board charger did melt once under warranty and was replaced with no trouble. One of the little strings that holds up the rear parcel shelf broke. The enormous lightweight windshields crack easily and few shops want to hear about replacing a windshield in a carbon fiber car. Of all the fragile and moving pieces that make up a car, the drivetrain is just a part. The fact that the i3 has no CD player, rear speakers, or operable rear windows will probably color my perceptions of its reliability just as much as its electric drivetrain.

In the long term, a set of four tires for the car costs a cargo bike. Electricity works. What doesn't work is cars. If you are shopping for a replacement car, consider eliminating that car. If you need to buy yourself a couple of years to figure that all out, consider a used BMW i3.

twiti

In the months that followed the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012, I thought about something concrete I could do for gun control. Local politicans here in DC have passed about as much legislation as we can manage post-Heller. Some local pols have worried aloud about the menace of 3D-printed guns. I worried that this fear will manifest itself not in bans on gun possession independent of provenance but in restrictions on hobby fabrication equipment.

On 10 July 2019 -- less than a month before Connor Betts murdered 9 and injured dozens in Dayton with his rifle and drum magazine, a litter activist found this retail packaging for a cheap Glock-compatible drum magazine in a DC street can.

Please, people, do not put your household trash in public cans pic.twitter.com/kITBTD58Qs

— Julie Lawson (@srfrjulie) July 10, 2019

Whatever the specter of homemade 3D-printed guns was going to be, FedEx seems prepared to deliver something wilder.

I woke up thinking that the answer is ban self-loading firearms. A year ago, I would have packaged that up into one or two-hundred-odd characters and said so on twitter. Today, after the President of the United States blamed mental illness, video games, and online hate for the massacres in Toledo and El Paso, I thought the better first step was to quit twitter.

I have lots of other ideas that could have been packaged into little twitter message confections but it's all obvious. The concrete thing you can do is vote and you can't do that on twitter.

martin luther style

My latest hundred or so dollars to Apple for developer signing certificates has finished evaporating and the apps on my kids' ipads are now non-functional. The answer, obviously, is the one Steve Jobs gave while still in corporeal form: web apps. Alas, you can't be a prophet in your own house, your own town, or perhaps even the whole state of California where good web apps are concerned.

I used to use Cordova to bridge the gap and I still admire the framework mightily. Most of my apps were essentially only a manifest (and Apple's private key) away from happy functioning on my kids' machines. The latter point proves sticker than the former.

I've gone all Martin Luther and nailed my complaints to the wall. My biggest complaints about audio in web apps is that backgrounding and sleep are broken after more than ten years even for trusted apps pinned to the home page. OK. iPads now permanently mounted to the walls. They're on forever. They never sleep and they never multitask. They run a full screen web page. If the Apple ecosystem hasn't improved in ten years, there seems little hope now. This post is instead about two great devices that make this ecosystem go.

The first is the Redpark combo gigabit ethernet / charge over lightning / PoE box. My iPads are delightfully WiFi-free and always charged. The box fits in a 2-gang wall box behind the iPad. It just works like magic. Apple should be ashamed that they do not sell this box. Seriously.

The second is the iPad 'Windfall' wall mount from Heckler Design. You wouldn't guess that there are many different ways to fold sheet metal into a tablet mount. There apparently are. Just as there are a surprising number of ways to build an essentially all-glass tablet and have most of them suck, so it is with tablet mounts. The Windfall delights. The iPad mounts easily. The mount includes enough space for a POE adapter to be tucked inside for flush installs. The wall-mounted back bracket is drilled with the typical VESA holes and also for the holes on a 2-gang wall box, which is how mine are mounted.

In a more perfect device union, the Redpark box might have some GPIO and support WebUSB in addition to Ethernet, but it is hard to imagine such a box winning Apple's seal of approval. If Apple were the kind of firm likely to support the kind of user empowerment represented by WebUSB, I probably wouldn't need to nail iPads to the wall in the first place.

A Heckler mount and a Redpark adapter together cost more than some nice Android tablets, some refurbished iPads, and some dedicated PoE-enabled industrial touch screens on clearance. They made sense for me since I already had the iPads and the actual iPad user experience with full-screen Safari seems unbeatable for less than very silly money. If these iPads die prematurely from running non-stop then I'll probably replace them with more of the same.