Technology – Page 12 – Into the Woods

A new Verizon tower: major big deal

The top of the tower

When someone puts new communications infrastructure in a data-poor rural place like northern Stokes County, it’s a big deal. Verizon is finishing up a new tower in the Lawsonville area, and it’s exciting for the folks around here.

When cellular towers started popping up in the countryside 10 and 15 years ago, I scorned them for their ugliness. Now I overlook the ugliness, because in rural places where we’ll probably never see fiber optic or cable, wireless services are our best hope. Those of you who live in places with good celluar coverage don’t need to care about where the towers are, but here in the sticks we need to know.

My present Internet connection draws on a Verizon tower about 4 miles away. I have a directional antenna in my attic that is aimed at that tower. The antenna plugs into a Verizon “air card,” and the air card plugs into a WIFI router. On a good day, I can get speeds of 1.25 Mbps down, enough to stream a Netflix or Hulu movie on the Apple TV. At other times, the connection is slower, around .75 Mbps down. This is much, much better than it used to be, after Verizon bought Alltel and continued to expand its rural coverage. But that is pathetically slow by urban or international standards, and it also costs more than much faster service in urban areas.

The new Verizon tower is about 15 miles away over the crooked roads we have in these parts. Yesterday I went out on a mission to have a look at the new tower and record its latitude and longitude, so that I can calculate its actual distance and make a guess about whether the new tower will help me get faster Internet. I also hoped to catch some engineers at work so that I could annoy them with questions. I’ll also make this into a little tutorial on how to find your nearest tower and calculate its precise distance from you.

First of all, you have to know where the towers are and which carrier the towers belong to. It may not be easy to get this information. Here in northern Stokes, the easiest way to track new towers is to follow the meetings of the county commissioners. Permits for new towers are always on their agenda. At last Monday’s meeting of the commissioners, it was mentioned that the new Verizon tower is expected to “light up” in a couple of weeks. If you don’t have local political intel on where the towers are, you often can identify them by searching the Antenna Search database. That database may not always be up to date, but it’s a start.

Then you drive to the tower and use your iPhone or a GPS device to record the latitude and longitude of the tower. The coordinates of the new Verizon tower at Lawsonville are longitude 80.223695 west, and latitude 36.496175 north.

A word about the notation used for latitude and longitude: There are two ways of doing this. There is a decimal format, which I used above and which your GPS device probably uses by default; and there is the traditional format that uses degrees, minutes, and seconds. You must always be aware which notation is being used and convert between them if necessary. There is a calculator here for doing this conversion. The Lawsonville tower’s coordinates, converted to traditional notation, are longitude 80 degrees west, 13 minutes, 25.302 seconds; latitude 36 degrees north, 29 minutes, 46.23 seconds. This can be represented as -80° 13′ 25.302″, +36° 29′ 46.23″.

Once you have the coordinates for the tower, get the coordinates for your home. For convenience, record the locations in both decimal and traditional notation. Now you can use a calculator to derive the distance and the direction (also called the azimuth) between the two points. Here is a link to the FCC’s calculator. The FCC kindly puts these calculators on line because calculations like this are often done in radio work. Use the FM-type calculation, since we’re talking about FM radio. (Digital brats still wet behind the ears like to quarrel with me and say that cell phones are not radios — they’re phones. Digital brats also like to deny that there is anything analog in the process. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s radio, and radio is always and forever analog, even when carrying signals that are digitally modulated. Digital brats like to think that radio is obsolete. They are laughably wrong. Their digital lifestyles are dependent on radio.)

When I did these calculations for the new Verizon tower, I found that it is 7.6 miles from me. That’s a good bit closer than I had expected, and it’s probably close enough to improve my Internet and cell-phone coverage, even though there’s a second Verizon tower about 4 miles away. One nice thing about Verizon’s CDMA technology is that a single device such as a smartphone can actually pull from more than one tower to increase its data bandwidth. I am not absolutely certain that this is true of Verizon’s new LTE 4G technology, but the engineer I spoke with yesterday up at the tower seems to think it’s also true of LTE 4G.

Speaking of LTE 4G, Verizon continues to say that their rollout of LTE 4G nationwide will be complete by the middle of 2013. The engineers I spoke with yesterday said that the LTE 4G cabinets for the new tower have been ordered but that they have not yet been received or installed.

There is no fiber optic connection to the new tower — it’s too remote, just as I am too remote for fiber or cable or even DSL. For “back haul” of the data, the engineers tell me that a microwave link will be used to another Verizon tower that does have a fiber connection. The other end of the microwave link is almost certainly the Verizon tower that is 4 miles from my place (on Mission Road), since that tower does have a fiber optic connection to “back haul” the data to urban civilization.

The engineers I spoke with yesterday were hard at work, finishing up the job of installing equipment on the new tower. Two or three guys were actually up on the tower, working on the antennas. Other guys were working in the equipment shack and even doing landscaping work. I’m glad I drove the Jeep yesterday rather than the Smart car. The tower is up a steep hill on a ridge, on an access road newly cut. Verizon has done an outstanding job of doing erosion control on the new road and around the tower site.

It’s nice to see Verizon spending money here, since I’ve spent so much money with them in the last four years.

Verizon plans to make money, of course with the new tower and the LTE 4G rollout. In rural areas which have been converted to LTE 4G, Verizon is offering a new service called “HomeFusion.” It will be pricey but fast. As I have learned, you can’t get decent Internet over wireless out in the sticks without a good antenna, properly placed. The Verizon HomeFusion service will include professionally installed outdoor antennas.

My data bill is now my highest bill — higher than my health insurance, higher than my county taxes, twice as high as my energy bill. Out here on the fringes of the digital world, there’s no other way.

There are three guys up there.

I believe the tower is 199 feet high.

The equipment shack

Erosion control

The new tower is in the background, left of center

iPad readers

This week, a Sony Reader app for iPad was released. That’s now four major readers available on the iPad that I know of — Apple’s iBooks, Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s Reader, and Barnes & Noble’s Nook.

Sony did it right and makes it possible to download all the books you’ve previously bought to the new iPad app. I was an early adopter of the Sony Reader (more than five years ago), so I had bought quite a few books. All those books now reside on my iPad.

I’ve not yet tried the Nook app, because I don’t yet have an account at Barnes & Noble. I’ll probably open an account, though, because it’s nice to have as many options as possible when buying books.

Books take up a relatively small amount of storage space, so it’s great to be able to carry so many books around with you. It’s also nice that the books are searchable. If you remember something from a book you’ve previously read that you want to look up, it’s easy.

The process of getting older classics into digital format is continuing. I’m finding that many science fiction classics from the 1980s and older are now showing up in Kindle editions. There are often lots of typos, however. It’s clear that the books were scanned and run through an OCR system with very little proofing. Some classics still haven’t made it to digital, though. A few weeks ago I was unable to find anything at all by Daphne du Maurier.

Regulatory capture

Americans pay four times more than the French for Internet and cell phone service

The last time I posted on how Americans are being ripped off on the cost of Internet and cellular service, the U.S. ranked around 11th, as I recall, on Internet speed. Now we’re 29th and still falling. As the article says, this is because of regulatory capture. It’s just one of the ways we all pay for the fact that our Congress has been bought.

If Americans only knew anything about the rest of the world. But they don’t.

Technology arrives slowly in the sticks

The iPhone line outside the Verizon store at Madison-Mayodan, 7:45 a.m.

I bought an iPhone 5 today. But there’s a story there.

For the past four years, I’ve used a cell phone that weighs 10 pounds. This is because, when I first came here to live in the woods, nothing else would work. A powerful phone with a real antenna was required to get a signal. At the time, Alltel was the best option in local cellular service. Two years ago, Verizon bought Alltel. Things have been slowly improving after a new Verizon tower came on line about three miles away. Then finally a fiber optic cable was brought in to that tower, and things got even better. Those of you who live in populated places have no idea what rural people go through to get decent cell phone service, not to mention broadband Internet.

I had no choice but to retire the 10-pound Motorola digital bag phone. Verizon sent me a letter saying that all the old Alltel devices would no longer be supported after the first of the year. The timing coincided nicely with the release of the iPhone 5. I was the second person in line this morning at the Verizon store at Madison-Mayodan. I had guessed that there would not be an insanely long line at a rural Verizon store, and I was right. The nice guys inside even opened half an hour early at 8 a.m., which was the official release time for the iPhone 5 on the East Coast.

Here at the abbey, my Verizon signal strength fluctuates from one to three bars. However, I’ll mainly use the iPhone when I’m out and about, so the middling signal I get at home is not a big deal.

The iPhone 5 is cute as a bug. Did you know that the release of the iPhone 5 will actually cause a noticeable boost in our slow economy? By some calculations, the billions of dollars generated by the iPhone will add a .33 point boost to this year’s GDP growth.

My awesome bag phone, now to be retired to the attic

Your future: 54.5 miles per gallon

Yesterday, the Obama administration made it official. The new target for gasoline mileage for 2025 is 54.5 miles per gallon. Though the usual stark-raving-mad lunatics in Congress are deeply offended by something so sensible and call the new rules “burdensome” (among other things), the auto industry stopped fighting and cooperated. They’re on board. Why?

Partly, no doubt, it’s because anyone who has two clues to rub together (that would exclude most of the U.S. Congress) knows that the era of cheap gasoline is ending. People probably will be delighted, come 2025, to be able to buy cars that get that kind of mileage.

Does that mean that everyone will be driving tiny cars? Not necessarily. Automobile engineers have lots of tricks up their sleeves that they haven’t used yet, including better fuel injection systems, better turbochargers, and more efficient transmissions. They also have more than 10 years to develop new technologies. They’ll find ways to make vehicles lighter, including greater use of aluminum and technologies borrowed from aircraft design that make components light but strong. You can be sure that engineers also will continue to build safer cars, because automakers already compete on safety. The automobile industry is a truly competitive industry, so automakers will compete to design cars that are safer, more fuel-frugal, and not tiny. Yes, the cars will cost more. But the savings in gasoline will more than offset the increased cost.

The reason the Obama administration gives for the new rules is very sensible: to reduce dependence on foreign oil, and to cut vehicle emissions in half. But they (and the automobile industry as well) know more than they tell us, and I believe they know that gasoline will be much more expensive in 2025. Car manufacturers are nowhere near stupid enough to be caught with nothing but gas-guzzlers to sell if people can’t afford the gas for them. Only right-wing shills for the oil and fracking industry are that stupid.

Would the oil companies like to catch us with a fleet of gas-guzzlers in an era of $8 gas? You bet they would. By agreeing to the new standards, automakers are protecting their industry and their future profits, at the expense (heehee) of the oil companies. Because I love cars and hate oil companies, I say that’s a darned good lick. Anyone who sees it otherwise is getting money from the Koch brothers or someone similar.

By the way, on a recent fill-up, the Smart car hit 53.6 miles per gallon — not quite enough to meet the 2025 standard, but I’m not complaining. The weather has been cooler, and I’ve used the air conditioner less. That has increased the mileage. I’m also finding that the brand of gasoline makes a difference. I’ll have more on that after I’ve collected more data.

Automobile safety

NASA Multimedia Gallery, released for public use

When I was a child in the 1950s, cars were incredibly unsafe. No one had ever seen a safe car, and people were only just beginning to imagine safe cars. It was very common in those days to hear of fatal wrecks, and all too often those wrecks involved someone you knew. It was during the 1950s that some people began to imagine safer cars. For example, take a look at this article from Popular Science from 1955.

The steady improvement of automobile safety over the decades is a great example of a cooperative effort by government and corporations. Some corporations at first resisted building safer cars. They didn’t think there was a market for it. They were wrong, of course, and eventually automobile manufacturers started to engineer for greater safety. In 1968, government regulators started requiring shoulder belts and collapsible steering columns. In 1969, head restraints were required. Whiplash injuries were very common before head restraints.

The integration of computers into automobile control systems opened up new possibilites. Anti-lock brake systems are a good example. Though much of the anti-lock brake system is hydraulic, it relies on a digital controller. The most amazing system yet, though, is the electronic stability control system. This system monitors the wheel speed, the direction in which the steering wheel is pointed (to understand the driver’s intentions), and a “yaw” sensor, which determines the direction the car is actually headed. If the car is sliding sideways, for example, the yaw sensor would allow the control computer to know it. By comparing the actual trajectory of the car with what the driver says he wants (as revealed by the steering wheel), then the system can use the brakes (each wheel independently) and the throttle to make the car go where the driver wants it to go.

Last night, driving home from Winston-Salem, I experienced one of these systems for the first time. It felt like a miracle. I was traveling at about 45 miles per hour on a dark country road. Suddenly a deer jumped out in front me from some heavy vegetation on the right side of the road. I hit the brakes, hard. Without anti-lock brakes, I’d have heard squalling tires, and, depending on the conditions, I might or might not have been able to steer the car. Instead, I heard a rapid “clicking” sound from all the brakes, and I felt a pulsing in the brake pedal. There were no squealing tires. The car just … stopped, and it continued in a straight line until it stopped. I figure that I missed the deer by about 10 feet. Without anti-lock brakes, I’m sure I would have hit it.

That quick stop did not engage the electronic stability system. If I’d had to swerve to miss the deer, the stability system might have been activated. The worst case scenario is when some sort of obstacle in front of you requires that you brake, steer sharply in one direction, then sharply back in the other direction. It causes a kind of inertial whiplash, and this is exactly what causes an SUV to flip and roll over. If you’ve ever been in this situation, the feeling is sickening. I had it happen once, 10 or so years ago on a freeway in California. I strongly felt my Jeep Wrangler wanting to roll over. It didn’t happen, either because I deftly used the steering to reduce the inertial force that was sending me up onto two wheels (try steering then!), or I wasn’t going quite fast enough to roll.

I consider myself a good driver. My reaction to the deer last night was so fast that I wasn’t even conscious of why I’d hit the brakes until the deer was almost across the road. I’ve never had an accident in more than 45 years of driving. But in a close call, one wants all the help one can get.

My 2001 Jeep Wrangler has air bags, but 2001 was a little early for digital systems, at least in the Jeep Wrangler. I have greatly desired a car with the new digital systems, and that was part of my decision to get a Smart car. The Smart car is the least expensive car you can get that has those systems … not to mention eight air bags.

It took only six weeks of driving the new car for the anti-lock brakes to pay off. With luck, I’ll never get into a situation in which I need electronic stability control. But it’s good to know it’s there.

Let’s hear it for those automotive safety engineers.

Microsoft's obituary

Above: the best OS Microsoft ever wrote

Microsoft is dead. Vanity Fair has written its obituary. I’ll have a link to its obituary a little later in this post.

I actually can remember a time when I did not hate Microsoft. It was 1983, when I bought a TRS-80 Model 100 portable computer. Microsoft wrote the Model 100’s operating system. It was pretty good. But that was 1983, and the Model 100 was a pretty simple little device.

Since 1983, at home and in my job as editorial systems director for three different newspapers, I’ve used computers running on many different operating systems — AT&T’s System 5 Unix, DEC PDP-11, Tandem, Linux, Sun Solaris (the most highly evolved Unix, in my opinion), and of course lots of Macintoshes. I never touched a Windows box unless I had no choice. Not only were Microsoft operating systems primitive, but they were designed to promote Microsoft’s monopoly, to force you to do things Microsoft’s way. Windows 95 even refused to support the emerging TCP/IP standard (which now runs the Internet), because Microsoft — always fighting standards — hoped to kill TCP/IP and replace it with something from Microsoft. Microsoft did not innovate. They simply tried to extend their monopoly and to force people and corporations to upgrade to the next version of Microsoft’s crap. Sure, some people loved Microsoft. But that was because they’d never known anything else, and because they’d bought a bit of Microsoft stock.

No monopoly lasts for forever. Sooner or later it was inevitable that someone would bury Microsoft. The big moment was in May 2010, when Apple’s market capitalization exceeded Microsoft’s. Microsoft is now a zombie, stumbling around stupidly until the day comes when its head is finally smashed.

But zombie or not, we do now have its obituary, in the August issue of Vanity Fair. It’s a must read for anyone who wants to dance on Microsoft’s grave. Don’t miss some of the comments by the Microsoft apologists, who still can’t believe that Microsoft has lost and still don’t understand why, since they’ve never known anything but Microsoft.

Steve Ballmer had a great deal to do with the death of Microsoft, mainly because he’s not a technology person but rather a salesman, aggressive to the point of evil. The Vanity Fair piece reports on an outburst by Ballmer when Ballmer learned that a Microsoft employee was going to Google:

He threw a chair against the wall. “Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy!” Ballmer yelled, according to the court document. “I’m going to fucking bury that guy! I have done it before and I will do it again. I’m going to fucking kill Google.”

That is a very succinct distillation of Microsoft’s business strategy — use its monopoly power to kill the competition. Microsoft software was that very attitude converted to code.

Contrast this quote from the late Steve Jobs, who created Apple and made Apple the enormous company that it is today:

Most interesting, however, is that Jobs put the ultimate blame on Bill Gates: “They were never as ambitious product-wise as they should have been. Bill likes to portray himself as a man of the product, but he’s really not. He’s a businessperson. Winning business was more important than making great products. Microsoft never had the humanities and liberal arts in its DNA.”

There you have it — a CEO talking about the humanities and the liberal arts as the key to success in business and technology. That’s worth meditating on. And let’s also hope that, now that Steve Jobs is dead, Apple never forgets.

Smart? Or Smug?

Just over a month ago I did a terrible, consumerist thing. I leased a 2013 Smart car ForTwo. I can’t say that I feel remorse — I believe it was a good decision. But I do admit to a certain amount of guilt, especially at taking on a lease after having lived debt-free for so many years.

Here is how I justified the cost of leasing a Smart car:

1. Smart cars aren’t selling very well, so Smart is offering good terms on a lease: $1,299 due at signing and $99 a month. The actual numbers will be a little higher because of certain local costs, but I found my local Mercedes dealership to be very honest and very easy to deal with. (Smart cars are made by Mercedes and are sold at Mercedes dealerships.)

2. Even though I drive only about 6,000 miles a year, the savings on gas between my Jeep Wrangler and the Smart car is about $50 a month — almost half the monthly cost of the lease.

3. The Smart car has an air conditioner, and my Jeep doesn’t. The Smart car also is much quieter and more comfortable to ride in.

4. I intend to make my Jeep last for the rest of my life. I bought it new in 2001 and paid cash for it. It has 69,000 miles on it and has never given me a bit of trouble. It’s well-maintained and has had nothing but the finest synthetic oils in its engine and drive train. I’ll have no trouble making it last for the rest of my life as long as I keep the miles off of it. I haven’t started the Jeep in a month — something I really need to do soon, to keep it charged up and such.

5. The Smart car has safety systems that my 2001 Jeep does not have, including anti-lock brakes, a stability control system, and lots of air bags. I would not want to be in a head-on collision in any vehicle, but I believe the Smart car is as safe as any small car.

6. Maintenance avoidance. The Smart car is under warranty, and the Jeep will be driven only when I need it as a beast of burden, or in bad weather. So my costs for car maintenance for the next three years should be very, very low.

Before I review the Smart car

Before I leased the Smart car, I read lots of reviews. I also read a lot of what Smart car owners have written in on-line forums. The owners are mostly sensible, and their experience so far is in accord with mine. However, the reviews of the Smart car have been mostly — and often grossly — unfair. So first we need to explore why that is the case.

Why the Smart car reviews are unfair

Americans are completely insane when it comes to cars, petroleum, and highways. I mean this not as a rhetorical flourish, I literally mean it. Americans are insane. Anyone should be able to perceive this insanity merely by driving for five minutes on a Los Angeles freeway. But Americans have so normalized the insanity of their attitudes toward cars, highways, and driving, and the insanity is so universal, they they are unable to perceive it. It just seems normal. People who review cars are just as insane as everyone else, probably more so in many cases.

Americans also considers cheap gasoline to be an entitlement. If the price of gasoline rises as much as 50 cents a gallon, there is a risk of political crisis. The insane, unconscious assumption is that Washington’s main job is to keep the cheap gasoline flowing. Americans show some interest in fuel-efficient cars if the price of gasoline is high, but they forget it completely when the price of gasoline goes back to its expected range.

As for reviewer insanity, if a Smart car reviewer complains that the Smart car lacks the power to avoid slowing down on a steep hill, what does that reveal? It reveals that, to Americans, it’s an entitlement to ride in vehicles that can whisk whale-size drivers and their whale-size passengers (if any) up steep hills at 70 mph without slowing down. The power required to do that, and the huge amount of energy it takes, is seen as normal. It is not normal. It’s insane.

If a Smart car reviewer complains that the transmission in the Smart car is sometimes “rough” when it shifts, what does that mean? It means that, to an American, it’s an entitlement to take steep hills at 70 mph and feel absolutely nothing when the transmission downshifts, so that the sugar water in their super-size cup doesn’t show the slightest sign of sloshing onto their XXL T-shirt. That is not normal. It’s insane.

In short, Americans, and American car reviewers, don’t understand the Smart car and what it’s engineered for. They just don’t get it, and that’s why Smart car sales in the U.S. have been poor after the initial excitement when American importing began. It takes a European — or a sane American, of which there are far too few — to understand a Smart car.

You also can find car forums in which lovers of gas-guzzlers express absolute contempt for the Smart car, just as they express absolute contempt for hybrids such as the Prius. They think such vehicles are ridiculous, and they think that only smugness can explain why anyone would buy such a car. They see a Smart car or a hybrid as an expression of self-righteousness on the part of the owner. That is typical of Americans, to think that one’s car is a form of self-expression. But it isn’t a form of self-expression at all. It’s just a large purchase, and it ought to be based primarily on one’s needs and how the vehicle will be used. Few Americans are willing to sacrifice anything for the sake of the environment. I am. But getting good gas mileage is not a sacrifice, it’s a savings. The issue of smugness is just another facet of Americans’ insanity. How dare anyone not participate in their excess? How dare anyone draw their attention to the environmental consequences of their massive consumption by appearing on the roadway in something small? They say my Smart car makes me smug? Well I say their Lincoln Navigator makes them insane.

The average American uses more than twice as much total energy as the average person in Great Britain, more than five times as much as the average Mexican, and more than 25 times as much as the average person in India. That is insane. Anyone who cannot grasp the insanity of that will not understand the Smart car.

Some reviewers have had criticism of the Smart car that I do think is valid, though. I will get into that in my review.

And now, my review of the Smart car

Every time I get out of the Smart car and look at it, I’m shocked how small it looks. Because when you’re inside it and driving it, you don’t feel like you’re in a small car. If you’re accustomed to driving a Lincoln Navigator, you may feel differently. But the Smart car rides high with a good view of the road, and both passengers have plenty of space. To me it feels about the same as riding in my Jeep Wrangler. My lifestyle, luckily, does not normally include freeways, but I’ve had it up to 70 mph a couple of times on six-lane highways. It feels perfectly stable at those speeds. It is not buffeted by nearby trucks. I have no particular sensation of being in such a small car. On two-lane roads, I find that, rather than driving in the center of the lane, I tend to keep more to the right. This feels safer to me, because oncoming traffic is farther to my left, giving me more time to react if an oncoming car strays into my lane. Smallness does have certain safety advantages, so one ought to use those advantages.

Some reviewers have said the car is noisy. That is not true. I don’t even hear the engine while cruising. I can hear a quiet engine noise when accelerating or climbing a hill, but it’s not very noticeable. There is some minor carriage noise, but the level of carriage noise depends greatly on the quality of the pavement you’re on. I have a simple test for noise level. I extend my right arm so that my hand is as far from my ear as possible and swish two fingers together. If I can clearly hear the swishing sound, then the environment I’m in is not noisy. The Smart car is not a noisy car.

Some reviewers have complained about the transmission. It’s a five-speed transmission. It’s automatic, but I believe it uses a clutch similar to the clutch in cars with a manual transmission. However, the clutch is controlled by the car’s computer using servo motors. There is no clutch pedal; anyone can drive it. Having driven with this transmission for a thousand miles now, I like it a lot. You can use the transmission in two different ways. The first is just to put the car in “Drive” and not worry about it. A second mode permits manual control of the automatic clutch. You tap the lever forward to shift up; you tap it backward to shift down. I usually drive this way, because the computer can’t anticipate the driver’s intentions, and the computer can’t know anything about the road just ahead. Some reviewers claimed that the Smart car “lurched” while shifting. It will lurch only if someone doesn’t know how to drive, or under difficult conditions such as shifting down when acceleration is suddenly demanded on a steep hill. That would be a tough shift with any transmission. On normal roadways with normal acceleration, the Smart car’s transmission is very smooth and quiet. It purrs.

I’ve never had to make any kind of evasive maneuver with the Smart car, but some owners have testified in Smart car forums that the agility and smallness of the car has permitted them to evade collisions in a way that would not be possible with bigger cars. The Smart car is very polite in its handling. It takes curves like a sports car. It is relatively wide. It corners nicely and often can make left or right turns in third gear. Compared to the awful ride I get in my Jeep Wrangler, the Smart car feels more like a Jaguar. However, it does not like rough pavement.

Some reviewers seem to think that the three-cylinder engine in the Smart car has to run at a high rpm and work too hard. If that’s the case, they must be driving very aggressively and trying to accelerate at sports-car rates. At a reasonable, fuel-efficient rate of acceleration, engine rpm actually remains quite low. The transmission likes to shift at the lowest speed possible and keep engine rpm down. By any reasonable — as opposed to American — expectation, there’s more than enough engine power back there. (The engine is in the back so that the front of the car could be engineered as a collision crumple zone.)

As I mentioned earlier, almost all the interior space is available to the two passengers. The seats are staggered so that the two passengers are not shoulder-to-shoulder, giving a bit more room. There’s room for lots of groceries in the back. The right-side seat can be folded down for more grocery space if needed. The grocery space in the back is easily accessible through the rear hatch. There is a hidden lockable area in the lower rear door.

The model that is available for the $99 lease includes an air conditioner, an AM/FM radio (with USB and audio inputs), and remote-controlled electric locks. The rear hatch can be opened with the remote. There is a wiper and defroster on the rear window. The headlights are awesome, with a long-range high beam that I really appreciate on country roads.

Gas mileage

With the 2013 model, the EPA highway fuel economy rating went from 40 to 38 miles per gallon. There was much discussion about this in Smart car forums, but the explanation seems to be that this was because the EPA changed its rating methods, not because anything in the Smart car changed. Many Smart car owners report that the car gets poorer mileage when the engine is new, but that the mileage increases after the engine is broken in well. Some report mileage jumps around 7,000 or even 30,000 miles on the odometer.

I was disappointed to be getting only around 37 miles a gallon on my first three tankfuls of gas. However, when the odometer reached 1,000 miles, I got 41 miles per gallon on my fourth fill-up. I’m good at driving in a way that saves gas. My Jeep, for example, is rated for 19 miles per gallon, but I can get better than 23 out of it. So I expect my Smart car mileage to improve as the engine continues to break in. Even now, I think I could get 45 miles per gallon on a road trip involving extended cruising at 55 mph. Even my 41-mpg tankful included some city driving for shopping trips to Whole Foods.

Other drivers

I was concerned that other drivers might want to bully such a small car and beat up on me for my smugness. I have not found that to be the case. Only once have I had an angry, aggressive driver behind me, annoyed because I was driving at exactly the speed limit. I pulled over and let him pass. I’m used to that, as is anyone who drives at the speed limit.

Reasonable criticisms

I think that professional reviewers and others have had some criticisms of the Smart car that may be be valid.

The first is the question of value, whether the Smart car is priced too high for the amount of car you get. That may be. I had also considered a Kia Soul, which is probably more car for not much more money. However, I could not negotiate a lease with my local Kia dealer. They wanted to play games. I won’t do that. In any case, I do think that the Smart car is a surprisingly sophisticated and polite little car. It is a Mercedes. It is built in Germany and France, not Asia. It may seem overpriced compared with a Kia, but if you keep in mind that it’s a Mercedes and compare it instead with, say, a Mini Cooper, then the price doesn’t seem so harsh. The low-price lease is a very fair deal, in my opinion, and resolves the value question.

The second is the question of gas mileage. Shouldn’t such a small car get better mileage than the 38 mpg rating? All I can say is that a good driver can easily get more than 40 mpg. And we can hope for a time when the diesel version, which is popular in Europe, is available in the United States. The diesel Smart car, one hears, gets more than 60 miles per gallon.

The third criticism is that Mercedes recommends the use of premium gas of at least 93 octane. I believe that Mercedes recommends premium gasoline in all its cars. Owners report that the Smart car runs perfectly well on regular gas (apparently the computer adapts the engine to whatever is in the tank), but mileage is reduced on cheaper gas. The owner’s manual says that, because mileage is reduced on cheaper gas, premium gas is the most cost-efficient fuel for the Smart car.

Summary

I really like this little car. After a month, I’m still always looking for an excuse to go somewhere. The cost of driving is low; the comfort level is high compared with my Jeep; and unless I drive it too much I’m reducing the amount of carbon I pour into the atmosphere. I’ll confess to being smug about my Smart car if the heavy-footed driver of the gas-guzzler behind me will confess to being insane.

The new iPad

It took me months to decide to splurge on a new iPad. In the end, I decided that I could justify the cost by the amazingly many things I can do with it:

— My old iPad 1 was my favorite reading device. The new high-resolution display is extremely easy on the eyes. It’s a fantastic reading device. The Kindle app has been updated to take advantage of the high-resolution display.

— My GPS device is five years old and was ready to replace. The iPad has a GPS chip. With an app like MotionX, the iPad serves as a GPS turn-by-turn navigation device. This must really be cutting into the sales of companies like Garmin.

— I have longed wanted an HD video camera. I’ve had no video camera at all for years. The iPad has two cameras. The forward-facing camera on the back can shoot high-definition video. The iPad also is a very good camera for snapshot quality photos.

— It’s an email device, including when you’re traveling. I have the Verizon 4G iPad.

— It’s a web browser.

— It’s the best device I’ve ever seen for video phone calls. It’s easy to switch between the two cameras on a video call, so the person you’re talking with can see your face, or, switch cameras and point it at other things. Using the Facetime app, I had a video call with a friend in California yesterday. He showed me what his cats were doing, I showed him what Lily was doing, and I walked around outside and showed him what’s blooming at the abbey. I am now sold on video phone calls.

— Using apps such as Apple’s GarageBand or MusicStudio, I can connect the iPad to my Rodgers organ with a MIDI interface and connect the audio output from the iPad to the organ’s amplifiers. Then the iPad can add orchestral voices, and other synthesized or digitally sampled acoustic sounds, to the organ. I’ve worked up a number of arrangements for string orchestra and organ.

In short, the new iPad does a lot of cool stuff to help justify its cost.

I haven’t even tried out the iPad’s new speech-to-text dictation feature. I’ve had the iPad for only two days, and it takes some time to try out all the iPad’s capabilities.

As many reviewers have said, the iPad’s high-definition Retina screen is stunning. Once you’ve seen it, there is no going back. In a few years, probably almost all device and computer monitors will have these displays. Individual pixels are now too small to be visible. You see only a smooth image and perfectly formed text. I’ve realized that I’ll consider replacing my iMac desktop Mac when Retina displays become available for iMacs.

LED lighting

There are five LEDs in these spotlights, in finned aluminum heat sinks.

LED light bulbs are still pricey, but the cost has been coming down, and the variety of bulbs available is increasing.

I wanted interesting lighting for my living room, which has a 21-foot ceiling and lots of planes and angles. My concept was to use spotlights for indirect light — not too bright — bounced off the walls and ceiling. I wanted fixtures that use bulbs with a standard base rather than odd bases that would lock me into high-priced and inefficient bulbs. When the house was complete and time came for the final inspection, I put ordinary 60-watt incandescent bulbs in these fixtures just to get through the electrical inspection — a total of 15 bulbs. So for more than two years, that’s what I’ve had, and of course they didn’t create the right effect at all. The power consumption also was outrageous — 900 watts when all the lights were on. So I very rarely used them. I was never able to find spotlight bulbs (as opposed to floodlights) in compact fluorescent. But LED spotlight bulbs have started to come onto the market at prices that are bearable.

Philips makes a line of LED bulbs that can be found at Home Depot. Amazon, and specialty retailers online, also carry a pretty good range of LED bulbs these days.

The color of light that you get from LED bulbs is not ideal, though some are better than others. My corner lights (each bulb is 3 watts) are too blue, but I decided that I can live with since they’re not terribly bright and since the light is bounced off of warm-colored walls. The three lights up at 16 feet (6 watts each) are a much warmer color. The warmer color lights tend to cost a bit more, and, per watt, they’re not quite as bright.

Now when all these lights are on, I’m drawing 54 rather than 900 watts. Of course I’ll use the lights more, now that they’re not sucking so much electricity.

It might be possible to justify the cost of LED bulbs now because of their long life and low power consumption. There’s a good chance that they’ll last me 15 years or more.

I have lights like this in each corner, nine feet up.

This fixture is 16 feet up.