Category: Technology

2017 Fiat 500: A 7-year re-review ★★★★★


Click here for high-resolution version.

I well remember how guilty and splurgy I felt when I bought this car seven years ago. Yet it turned out to be one of the best financial decisions I ever made, because it has kept my cost of transportation very low.

The base price was $14,995. The total sticker price plus a destination charge and $250 extra for the ivory seats came to $16,240. But I didn’t pay that much. The dealer gave me a too-good-to-turn-down discount because Americans won’t buy Fiats, and this one had been on the lot for a while. In fact, Fiat stopped selling the Fiat 500 in North America after the 2019 model year.

Americans prove over and over again that they clueless and foolish in pretty much every way. Most people want enormous SUVs. The average price for vehicles sold at present in the U.S. is just under $50,000. The average amount that Americans spend on gasoline each year is more than $2,700. In some states, such as Wyoming, the average is considerably higher — $3,300 a year. Many households have two cars, and 22 percent of American households have three or more cars. Americans don’t like to ask themselves how much they can afford to pay for transportation. Consequently they don’t have much money left over for buying eggs.

I can’t tell you how many times someone sees the Fiat and says, “Fix it again, Tony.” Probably once upon a time Fiats deserved their reputation for not being reliable. But automobile manufacturing is much, much better these days, largely thanks to robotics and much better machining. Most Americans don’t know that the Italians are superb automotive engineers. The Italians also have a flair for style — and fun — in automobile design that seems to have vanished in many places.

In seven years, my Fiat 500 has had to go in for repairs twice. In year four, a speed sensor failed in the front left wheel. Fiat fixed that under warranty. Last year, the service engine light came on with a complaint about the electronic throttle. That turned out to be a known software issue for which Fiat had issued a service bulletin. The dealership reflashed the PCM, which cost me $100. I don’t mind that, because I assume it means that my Fiat now has the latest version of the Fiat software. Other than that, at 42,000 miles, I’ve never had any trouble.

The engine and transmission are silky smooth. In fact the Fiat 500 handles like a sports car. People ask me if I feel safe in such a small car. I feel as safe in the Fiat as I do in any car. I also believe, because I’m a good and careful driver, and because the Fiat is far more maneuverable that heavy vehicles, that I can evade accidents that heavy vehicles would not be able to evade. I have done many quick stops for squirrels, including a few quick stops in which I had to both brake and swerve. The Fiat goes where I point it, stops quickly, and doesn’t threaten to roll over — though a swerving quick stop is always, in any vehicle, a dangerous maneuver.

My average is about 48 miles per gallon. The photo below shows pretty much the maximum mileage the Fiat can achieve. The 70.5 mpg figure is from a 12-mile trip on a flat highway, mostly in fifth gear, at about 50 mph. The mileage rating on its window sticker was 31 city and 38 highway. One would have to be a terrible, terrible driver to get gas mileage that low.

Before the Fiat, I had Mercedes Smart Cars. Trump types were incredibly rude to such a small car. Once, in rural Tennessee, a pickup truck ran me off the road in the Smart Car. Trump types are not as aggressive toward the Fiat as they were to the Smart Car. But when I have a heavy truck or SUV right on my bumper when I’m driving exactly on the speed limit, I pull over as soon as possible and let the idiots pass.

My car looks like a mouse. That does not embarrass me.

The iPhone’s portrait mode


Shot with iPhone 16 in portrait mode, 2x zoom. Click here for high-resolution version.

I think of the iPhone camera as a snapshot camera. But really it has much more potential than that. I take the phone’s camera for granted because most of the time I can just point and shoot and get a decent photo. But getting the shot of the daffodils that I wanted today actually sent me to Google with some questions.

Shooting in “Photo” mode, the background was entirely in focus, even in the interior light. If I were shooting with my Nikon D2X, I would just set a wide aperture, and that would blur the background. The question I asked Google (silly me!) was, how do I set the iPhone f-stop? Google said: You can’t set the f-stop on the iPhone. Use “Portrait” mode instead, and that will blur the background. So that’s what Portrait mode is for!

This blurring of the background is very important in photography. It’s called “bokeh,” and one of the ways lenses are rated is on the quality of their bokeh. With portraits, of course, though the background may be very important, one wants only the face in focus. And that’s true not just with portraits but with any photo in which the photographer wants only the subject of the photo to be in focus, with everything else blurred just to the right degree.

As an experiment, I tried to shoot the daffodil photo above with my Nikon D2X. I found that it could not be done without a better lens than the light-hungry 28-85mm lens that I normally use, plus some extra lighting, and/or a tripod. The interior light was just too dim for the lens, though the aperture was wide open.

It seems I shoot daffodil portraits pretty much every year. Here are a couple of others.


Shot with an iPhone 12, March 3, 2024. Not in portrait mode, 1x zoom. Click here for high-resolution version.


Shot with Mamyia RB67, 250mm lens, with tripod, Kodak film, March 10, 2018. That clearly was a better daffodil year than this year, after a cold winter.

RSS feeds are more important than ever


Click here for high-resolution version

Substack is now an important part of my routine. Paul Krugman is on Substack now, as well as The Contrarian, started by Jennifer Rubin and Norm Ornstein. And of course Ken is there. No doubt there will be more people I will follow on Substack, as news sites such as the New York Times and the Washington Post become increasingly obedient to the Trump regime. Paul Krugman posted today, at the Contrarian, about why he left the New York Times.

However, even one Substack subscription, whether paid or free, becomes a pain in the neck. The default way of getting new articles is having them mailed to you. That quickly causes a lot of spamlike clutter and disorganization. The Contrarian obviously got a lot of complaints about that, because today they announced that they would send only two emails a day, morning and evening.

But there’s a better way than email, and that’s to use an RSS reader. RSS has been around for years. It stands for “really simple syndication.” It’s an app that runs on your computer (or phone). It checks every 10 minutes or so for new posts from all your “subscriptions.” Everything is all in one place. For Mac, I use NetNewsWire, which is free, reliable, and open source. There are RSS apps for Windows, of course. Just Google for some suggestions and try them out.

This blog has an RSS feed. It’s at https://acornabbey.com/blog/?feed=rss2. Note that, to comment, or to read comments, you’d still need to visit the blog the usual way.

As I have said here before, the mainstream media’s reporting on politics can no longer be trusted, especially their coverage of the Trump administration. What we need to do now is follow the largest possible set of specialists with no conflicts of interest and no intention of trying to write for “both sides.” They are historians, such as Heather Cox Richardson; economists, such as Paul Krugman; and principled journalists, such as Jennifer Rubin. I still check many newspapers every day, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, but I am wary of their political reporting. I’ve also noticed that the “conservative” commentary at the Times and the Post has become increasingly extreme, indistinguishable from the stuff in the Wall Street Journal and the Times of London.

Most publications have RSS feeds. I’ve learned, though, to use RSS only for a few high-value feeds. If there are too many RSS feeds, then it becomes just another source of clutter.

At least we’re smarter than they are


A dragon descends on Oxford. Image by ChatGPT.

Ezra Klein has a must-read piece in the New York Times this morning: Now Is the Time of Monsters. (You can read this link without a subscription to the Times.)

Klein lists the monsters:

1. Authoritarian resurgence

2. AI and technological upheaval

3. Climate crisis

4. Demographic shifts

As Klein writes, “Any one of these challenges would be plenty on its own. Together they augur a new and frightening era.”

I should hasten to say, as Klein also does, that demographic shifts in the form of falling birth rates don’t scare me. That’s mainly a right-wing goblin, and I suspect that it’s only falling birth rates for white people that matters to them. I think I would merge Monster No. 4 into Monster No. 1 — the racism of authoritarians.

I’m also not as worried as some people are about AI’s taking over the world and making the human mind obsolete. But again I think there is a connection to Monster No. 1: Authoritarians will find all sorts of ways to use artificial intelligence as a tool to keep the rest of us down — ever better lies and disinformation, for example. To me, Monsters No. 1 and No. 3 are the biggies, with Monster No. 3 amplified by the authoritarian denial of climate change because of the money and power they get from an oil economy that oligarchs own and control.

When I lose sleep over Monster No. 1, the greatest comfort comes from knowing that no one is alone. The smartest people in the world see what’s happening. It’s the smartest and best people in the world up against the richest and meanest, with the richest and meanest having persuaded the poorest and dumbest that they’re on their side.

Yes, the people who are developing AI’s must be very smart, but they are more like idiots savant interested mainly in the technology and the money.

As for the MAGA crowd — Trump, his appointees, the Christian nationalists, the brownshirts, the right-wing radicals, Trump voters — they are all as dumb as rocks. We’ve got to outsmart them.

Klein offers no solutions. He only describes the monsters. As the smartest and best people in the world try to figure out how to deal with the dumbest, the meanest, and the richest, it occurred to me to wonder if Monster No. 2 — artificial intelligence — might have some useful advice.

Using ChatGPT’s “o1” engine, which is supposed to be better at reasoning than “o4,” I asked a question:

I am going to paste in an essay from this morning’s New York Times written by Ezra Klein. The headline is “Now is the time of monsters.” He lists several existential problems that the world faces today. Please analyze this piece with an eye toward philosophy and psychology. These problems are collective problems. But the question I would like for you to answer is, given these collective problems, what can an individual do not only to help, but also to preserve individual stability in a time of rapid change and chaos. These ideas need to align with my personal politics and philosophy. I am am a progressive. I would like to live in a world shaped by John Rawls’ “justice as fairness.”

The link below is the AI’s response. Most of it, I think, is what any nice and well-mannered intelligence would say. It contains very generalized ideas; there is no brilliant strategy that no one has thought of before. I do like the point about “narrative reframing,” though: “Successful social transformations often begin in the imagination, with bold visions that inspire people to action.”

If AI’s are capable of imagination and “bold visions,” I haven’t yet figured out what questions to ask. But I do think that, as smart people, we should be learning how to use AI’s, and we should keep abreast of their development. The Wikipedia article on ChatGPT says that the man who exploded a truck in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas used ChatGPT to help plan it.

Can AI’s help us plan the resistance?

Ezra Klein: Now Is the Time of Monsters

ChatGPT’s response

Airtags: Yes!

Apple’s Airtags aren’t very expensive. But probably the best way to justify their cost is their ability to track your luggage when flying. Yesterday’s updates of Apple’s operating systems introduced a new feature — the ability to share Airtag information with airlines, because Airtag owners usually know more about where their luggage is than the airlines do.

The Washington Post recently had a piece on how potentially helpful this is, given that airlines (yikes!) lose, damage, or delay 270,000 pieces of luggage each month.

For my recent trip to Scotland, I used two Airtags, one in my checked suitcase and one in my carry-on. My flight from Raleigh-Durham to Heathrow was delayed by 14 hours. The plane (a packed Boeing 777-200) had already been loaded and was ready to push back from the terminal when the pilot informed the irritable passengers that a mechanical problem was going to take hours to fix and that the plane “isn’t going anywhere tonight.” Everyone had to “deplane.” Most of us spent the night in the terminal, though some passengers made arrangements for other flights. For the luggage, this caused chaos. All the luggage was unloaded from the plane, and we were told to pick up our luggage at one of the carousels and re-check it the following morning if we chose to say on the delayed flight.

As the plane was loaded again, 14 hours late, I could see on my iPhone that my checked suitcase was on the plane, or “near me,” as the FindMy app says. The Airtags were useful again on the my train trip from Raleigh to Greensboro as I was returning home. Usually I would not check any baggage on a train, but I had arrived at the train station early and wanted to be rid of the big suitcase so that I could go out and scout for lunch. I would never have known that my suitcase went to Greensboro on an earlier train if the Airtags hadn’t told me.

Speaking of delayed and canceled flights, I bought trip insurance through American Airlines when I booked the ticket to London. The delayed flight meant that I missed my train from London to Scotland and had to spend the night in London. Using my iPhone, I hastily changed the train ticket and booked a hotel in London. I filed a claim on the travel insurance for reimbursement for the $149 that the London hotel cost. The insurance paid my claim in less than 48 hours!


The Boeing 777-200 being loaded at Heathrow for the flight to Raleigh-Durham

Home automation and smart thermostats

Several years ago, when I first set up Apple Home, I saw it as one of those useless things that nerds do only for the entertainment of playing with gadgets. But I’ve changed my mind. It’s convenient, and it greatly adds to one’s security and peace of mind.

A few months ago, I replaced my two 15-year-old thermostats with smart thermostats. I anguished over the cost — about $650 — but I soon realized that I’d made a good decision. The heat pump works much better now. Temperatures in the house stay at the exact level at which the thermostats are set, rather than wavering two or even three degrees higher or lower that the thermostat’s setting. The new thermostats are much better at knowing when to use the heat pump’s electrical coils when it’s so cold outside that the compressor is inefficient.

But, best of all, I can see what’s happening at home when I’m away from home. On my recent trip to Scotland, I was away from home into early December. There were several nights when the temperature was as low as 18F, cold enough to freeze water pipes in an unheated house. Using the Apple Home app on my iPhone, I could see the temperature upstairs and downstairs in the house and confirm that the heating system was keeping temperatures above the 50F setting.

I have several electric heaters, the type that look like small radiators, both upstairs and downstairs. I can turn them on and off from anywhere. If I leave home and forget to turn them off, then Apple Home turns them off for me, with a trigger called “when the last person leaves home.” It’s also nice to have Apple Home turns some lights on when WIFI sees that my iPhone has arrived in the driveway, with the trigger “when anyone arrives home.” Some things are on timers. Apple Home turns on some lights in the morning and makes sure that certain things are turned off at bedtime.

The WIFI light bulbs and WIFI switches that work with Apple Home aren’t all that expensive. And of course the Apple Home system is a built-in part of the Apple ecosystem. To make it work, one needs an Apple device that is always at home and always plugged in — either an Apple TV or an Apple HomePod.

WYSIWYG with old daisy wheel printers


A 1985 IBM Wheelwriter 5 with the printer option. Click here for high-resolution version

I apologize to regular readers for this nerd post of limited interest. Many of the hits on this blog come from Google, from people who have run a search on one of the many subjects I’ve written about over the past 17 years. This post is meant as a service to “the typewriter community,” since I am a typewriter collector and my career was in computers and publishing.

Today I am shocked, and ashamed, at how quickly we nerds gave up our typewriters back in the 1980s and quickly adopted the new phenomenon of “word processing.” Now I’m sentimental about what we had back then. We need not only to keep the old machines alive, but also to preserve the knowledge of how to use the old machines.

A few typewriters were made that bridged the world between typewriters and computers. They had a keyboard, of course, and could be used as typewriters. But they also had a computer interface (generally a Centronics parallel port) so that they could be connected to a computer and used as a printer. Most IBM Wheelwriters did not have the printer interface. They are said to be rare. But if you can get your hands on one, they are marvelous machines. Mine is a Wheelwriter 5 made in 1985. The “printer option” for the Wheelwriter 5 consisted of two computer boards that connected to the typewriter’s main board with a ribbon cable. To house the two extra boards, an extension for the case was provided that clipped onto the back of the typewriter. Other versions of the printer option on later models of the Wheelwriter had the printer option more or less built in. Some even came with LCD displays or hardware for connecting the typewriter to an external keyboard and monitor.

The first thing to know about these beasts in that they are (rather obviously) ASCII printers. When Postscript and laser printers came along, ASCII printers including ASCII dot-matrix printers were quickly displaced. These days, printers have drivers that explain the printer’s capabilities to the computers they’re attached to. For ASCII printers, you won’t find any drivers, because: You don’t need a driver! The goal is a simple one — to send ASCII down the wire to the printer. But most computers these days have forgotten how to do that.

I am not a Microsoft Windows person. There are ways to make the old ASCII printers work with Windows, but I’m afraid I can’t help with Windows. However, the job is easy with Linux computers and Macintoshes, because Linux computers and Macintoshes are Unix boxes that still come with all the old text-handling utilities such as “vi,” “nroff,” and “lpr.” Other classic text-handling utilities, such as the Emacs editor, are easily available.

To get an old ASCII printer to work on a Linux computer or Macintosh, you need some basic knowledge that I can’t get into here. You’ll need to do some Googling and learning if the tools and concepts are new to you. For example, to attach an ASCII printer to a Linux computer or Macintosh, you’ll need a USB to Centronics parallel adapter cable. You’ll use Cups, the built-in print spooler, to set up the printer as a “raw” printer. “Raw” means that Cups sends plain ASCII down the wire without using a driver. You need to know your way around in terminal windows.

I’m an old hand at “vi” and “nroff,” because once upon a time that’s what we used for writing, editing, and formatting text. Another popular editor was Emacs. Emacs has a learning curve even steeper than that of “vi.” But to use Emacs with a daisywheel printer, you don’t have to know everything about Emacs. You only need to know enough to use Emacs for writing and editing English text.

Some of the early text utilities with graphical interfaces are still around and no doubt can still provide a WYSIWIG experience with a daisywheel printer. (WYSIWIG means “what you see is what you get.”) For example, George R.R. Martin is notorious for continuing to use WordStar on DOS! But you’ll have a harder time finding WordStar, or a working DOS computer, than you’ll have finding an IBM Wheelwriter with the printer option. So Emacs is the easiest way to go.

I’m sorry that I can’t get into the how-to’s here. It’s all pretty complicated, and Googling will lead you to articles on how to use Emacs, how to use Cups, etc. My purpose is only to show that it can be done and to encourage you to do it if you have a daisywheel printer, an ASCII dot-matrix printer, or a hybrid typewriter-printer such as a Wheelwriter in your collection.

About the IBM Wheelwriters

Typewriter collectors disdain machines such as the IBM Wheelwriters because Wheelwriters are not purely mechanical machines. Rather, there is a computer inside the typewriter that controls the typewriter’s moving parts. So-called electronic typewriters are far simpler — mechanically, anyway — than mechanical typewriters. Just as the IBM Selectric was the ultimate in mechanical typewriters, the IBM Wheelwriter is the ultimate in electronic typewriters. The Wheelwriters are heavy beasts, made for commercial use. The Wheelwriter keyboards are superb. The keyboards are identical to the IBM Model M keyboards, which IBM made for IBM computers starting in 1985. People cherish these keyboards today and pay high prices for them. If you are a good typist, then the best keyboards ever made are the keyboards on the IBM Selectric typewriters, the Model M keyboards for IBM computers, and the keyboards on the Wheelwriter typewriters. Like most of the Selectric typewriters, the Wheelwriters have a correcting function — a sticky tape that lifts letters off the paper if you made a mistake. The Wheelwriters (depending on the model) also have memories (for such things as form letters) and spell check. The daisy wheel itself lifts out, and an assortment of type styles and font sizes were available, as well as support for dozens of languages.

I love my IBM Selectrics, but the Wheelwriters also are lovable machines. They have a kind of robot personality, because, unlike typewriters, they have a brain inside.


⬆︎ This is Emacs running in a terminal window in Mac OS.


⬆︎ A letter from John Steinbeck to Robert Wallsten reproduced on a Wheelwriter using a proportional typeface. Wallsten was a screenwriter for “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”

A personal AI road map for the present


Chat GPT: Please make a lifelike image of a stray cat walking along a street in Edinburgh, near Waverley station and the Walter Scott monument.

Ready or not, artificial intelligence is going to become a part of your life. Where we are now with AI reminds me of where we were in the 1980s with the internet. There were early adopters (like me), but eventually everybody was going to have it.

First, a disclaimer. I have been an Apple groupie for 35 going on 40 years. Thus I lean toward Apple products and discount (and even disdain) competing offerings from, say, Microsoft or Google. I also know next to nothing about Android devices, though I do have a Android phone that I keep as a kind of emergency backup for my Apple iPhone. So, Apple.

In the months since AI became the next big thing, I have been in exploratory mode — not spending much money but trying out AI’s to try to get a feel for what they’re good for and where they’re going. With the release last week of Apple’s new versions of Mac OS (version 15, Sequoia) and iOS (version 18), we have a pretty good idea of what Apple is going to do. Apple is going to have its own AI called Apple Intelligence, and Apple is going to partner with Chat GPT. Thus, for me, the course into AI adoption for the present is pretty clear — use the AI features built into Apple’s new operating systems, and combine that with a subscription to Chat GPT (which has a free version as well as a more advanced version for individuals that costs $20 a month).

Making images with an AI is a lot of fun. But, to me, it’s texts that really matter. The $20-a-month version of Chat GPT allows you to upload and analyze texts, though it’s not clear to me how long Chat GPT retains those texts. We won’t know until next month, when Apple releases new versions of its OS’s, what Apple’s capabilities with texts will be. However, it seems to be that Apple’s AI will read everything on your computer, including all your emails, and will know about you everything that can be learned about you from what’s on your Apple computer and your iPhone. I’m good with that, because Apple is making firm promises about privacy.

To be ready for what’s coming with Apple AI, you may need to upgrade your hardware. But that gets complicated, because sometimes AI’s run “on device,” and sometimes they run “in the cloud,” with queries uploaded to servers somewhere over the internet, and the responses downloaded to you, which means that you can use AI’s without having the newest Apple hardware.

Given that AI is in your future, your decisions really are about what you want to use it for and how much you’ll have to pay for it.

Low tech to the rescue

My heat pump (which also is a cooling system) had been working perfectly for fifteen years. It chose to stop running on a hot Saturday afternoon when the outdoor temperature was 88F. The temperature inside the house slowly rose to a miserable 89F.

When critical systems in a house fail, the perversity principle requires that they fail on a weekend, when the kind of businesses you need are closed (though they might make an emergency call for a hefty additional fee). Lucky for me, my nearest neighbor is retired from the heating and cooling business, and he came to take a look.

His diagnosis, in which he says he is 90 percent confident, is that an electrical relay on the air handler has failed. That’s a relatively minor thing, and if we can acquire a new relay on Monday then the fix won’t take long.

Two rooms in the house have ceiling fans, which help. But my upstairs office does not. I went up into the attic and fetched an oscillating fan that had been used in the downstairs bedroom before I had a ceiling fan installed in that room. I had forgotten how amazing fans can be!

I well remember what it was like growing up in the South in the 1950s, when some businesses had air conditioning but pretty much nobody had it in their homes or cars. It was fans that made life in the South bearable before the age of air conditioning. Architecture and landscaping were important, too. It’s why houses of that era had big front porches and shade trees.

Here in the American South, heat pumps have been common for decades. Almost everyone has a heat pump and has some understanding of how they work. In a climate that doesn’t get too cold, heat pumps are an efficient source of heat. The heat pump’s true magic, though, is that it’s reversible. It can pump heat into the house from outdoors, or it can pump heat out of the house. There is a limit to a heat pump’s efficiency, though. When heating, a heat pump can raise the temperature of the outside air only about 50 degrees F. So, if it’s 20F outdoors, a heat pump will have to rely on assistance from electrical heating coils, which are not efficient.

I have seen a good many stories lately about how efforts to introduce heat pumps in the U.K. aren’t going very well. A friend recently returned from a visit to a Scottish island, where a local had complained about the cost of operating a newly installed heat pump — £2,000 for one winter’s worth of heat. My guess would be that the problem is not so much the heat pump as a drafty and poorly insulated house. Here in American South, people who live in older houses often use heat pumps for cooling but still use gas or oil for heating.

The sound of the fan, and the start of the Democratic National Convention tomorrow, have stirred up clear memories of the summer of 1960, sitting in my grandmother’s living room with the sound of her large floor-model oscillating fan and watching the party conventions on television. In 1960, John F. Kennedy was running against Richard Nixon.

Correction: Upon reflection, I realized that my summer memory had to have been from 1960 rather than 1956, and I have edited the paragraph above accordingly.

I’m also remembering the importance of ice for living in the South before the days of air conditioning. My grandmother was fond of Pepsi. Pepsi over ice was regular thing with my grandmother, especially in summer. At home we drank far less Pepsi and far more iced tea. There was always iced tea in the refrigerator, and there was always ice in the freezer.

Normally, now, I don’t use much ice, even in the summer. But one of the first things I did after the air conditioning stopped yesterday was to turn on the icemaker.