My electricity costs of $0.11 per kWh plus tax (say, $0.01 per kWh) are my residential rates. That's what I pay at home, and WV doesn't have time-of-day pricing, so I get no discounts for middle-of-the-night usage versus during the day. Things may be different where you live.

The cost calculations I've done are based on that, though I'm still waiting on the permit to get my home charger installed so I'm not charging at home, yet. My county, where building permits are regulated, is running about a 21-day delay in issuing any sort of permit. This isn't unique to electrical or EV-related requests, that's just how overworked they are. As I'm DIY and not hiring a licensed electrician for the install, they're applying a little more scrutiny and it is taking a little longer.

Hyundai has a deal with Electrify America (EA), a nationwide charging network owned by Volkswagen, for 2 free years of charging on a new Hyundai EV. I get a free 30 minute session a day of DC fast charging. The nearest EA fast charger to my house is 22 miles away in a Walmart parking lot, but free electrons are free electrons and I can do my weekly shopping while charging. There are closer chargers than that, both Level 2 and DC fast, but free electrons.

There are basically three types of chargers -- Level 1 (AC), Level 2 (AC), and Fast DC which is sometimes (erroneously) called Level 3. Again, I'm in the US and our home mains comes in at 120 V, single phase AC. If you're in a country that doesn't use wimpy circuits, Level 1 may not exist for you at all.

Level 1 is simple run and extension cord from your car to your wall and plug in. Trickle charging. The car comes with an adapter for doing this and mine will supposedly pull up to 18 Amps this way, charging at a rate of 3-5 miles per hour. Unfortunately my house is over 100 years old and some of the wiring is still what they'd call "pre-War" in the UK, so the closest plug to my driveway was only giving me 6 Amps, or about 1 mile per hour of charging. Almost, but not quite totally useless. Trickle indeed. I have a long-term project to upgrade the rest of the circuits in my house, but this is a bit better than nothing.

Level 2 is what we in the US use for electric clothes dryers and ovens, 240 volt circuits. That's what a "home charger" is if you buy one. They are configurable to a variety of amperages, from 12 on up to 48, giving you upto 19.2 kW of charging power depending on your actual circuit. Circuit breakers are supposed to be rated 20% higher than the amperage draw of the devices on the circuit, so my 40 Amp Electrify Home charger needed a 50 Amp breaker. That's a fairly common size for L2 chargers you see out in the wild. They're often referred to as "destination chargers" and can be found at many hotels, universities, and office buildings. They add about 30 miles of range per hour of charging. In may of those places they are free to use for a couple of hours while you're at work, in class, or staying at the hotel.

DC Fast Charging are those chargers that look like gasoline fuel pumps. They commonly range from 50 kW to 350 kW for charging, though the amount varies based on what your model of car can handle, temperature, number of cars charging at once, phase of the moon, you name it. The ones closest to me are 150 kW and with my free 30 minutes I can go from 20% to 80% in my car. Unfortunately that's because the damn things usually cap out at around 75 kW for some reason. There is a set of 350 kW chargers a little further away at a mall, and I've used those with rates of 280 kW for my car, meaning 20% to 80% in like 10 or so minutes. They are nice. 10 mintues is simply me plugging in, going in the store to take a piss and buy a drink.

But let's talk reality. Where I live in WV is as close as you can get to not WV. I could just release my brakes and roll down the hill into VA and then keep coasting right on into MD. There may not be a lot of EVs in WV, but the Greater Washington DC area has a bunch, which means there can be lines to charge. So far the longest I've waited for a spot is 30 minutes. This is very much due to two factors: lack of enough chargers and free electrons. There are other chargers I could pop off to, but...free electrons. I'm not really in a hurry so the only DC Fast Chargers I've used are those belonging to EA. The Nav in the car (as well as Google Maps) shows chargers as POI, just like gas stations. If I was back in my always-in-a-hurry days, then I'd be checking out other charging stations. But, just like my grandfather would only full up at Shell stations, I'm only using EA for now.

That being said, their rates are NOT $0.12 per kWh. The EA rates are between $0.36 and $0.48 per kWh depending on prime vs non-prime times. So 3x to 4x what I'd pay by filling up at home, or standard big-business fuel rates comparable to gas prices.

The EPA window sticker says I am expected to save $4,500 over 5 years in fuel costs. The fine print around that is "Actual results will vary for many reasons, including driving conditions and how you drive and maintain your vehicle. The average new vehicle gets 28 MPG and costs $8,000 to fuel over 5 years. Cost estimates are based on 15,000 miles per year at $0.14 per kW-hr. MPGe is miles per gasoline gallon equivalent." Adjustments to their numbers based off of my local electric rates and driving habis should get me to $5,000 over 5 years -- almost DOUBLE that compared to the beast of a truck I was driving prior to this, which was getting about 15 MPG.

Finally, I've had one instance where the charger that I pulled in to didn't know the car that was there before me had left. It was still sitting there racking up idle time and I couldn't convince it to stop and let me charge. I called the EA support number (Sunday early afternoon) and it took 17 minutes on hold before they picked up. Once support answered they were able to quickly reset the charger and I was able to charge. For the record the charger was running Windows 10 and they just remotely rebooted it. Sadly, some things never change. I waited because the other spots were in use, and I just waived other people ahead because I wanted the experience with EA support. There were also other brand DC Fast Chargers around the corner, so if I was actually in a hurry, I wouldn't have bothered. Free electrons.

I'm a little over 40 days in with my new Hyundai Ioniq 6 and wanted to share some of my experiences in driving an EV as well as charging. To put things in perspective, I live in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia, which means there are no long areas of flat road at all. Everything is hilly with my house being at 660 ft elevation, but the nearest shopping center is at 450 ft and 5 miles away, with a bunch of up-and-down in between.

The official EPA fuel economy estimate for my car is 103 MPGe combined city/highyway with a rated range of 270 miles on a full battery. That works out to 33 kWh per 100 miles, according to the window sticker, or a calculated 3.0 miles per kWh. That's the full EPA estimate.

The car records these numbers in three groups -- all time, since last charge, and current trip. With the settings I have these numbers are in miles per KwH for efficiency. For the rest of the world, except Myanmar, who doesn't use Freedom Units, measurements are in kWh per 100 Km.

My actual usage, 2,950 miles over 40 days (I've been busier than normal), has recorded 3.7 mi / kWh as opposed to the 3.0 window sticker, so I'm getting about 23% better mileage with my driving habits than EPA rating. On short runs to town an back (10 miles roundtrip), I'm averaging between 4.1 and 4.5 mi / kWh. The car is reporting a full charge range estimate of 326 miles when I topped off. I am expecting the difference comes from the EPA calculations are on the "normal" drive setting of the car, which engages both drive motors regularly, and also they don't include any regenerative braking. I routinely drive using the "Eco" setting, which is more aggressive at shutting down one motor when cruising, and use a fairly aggressive brake regen setting. I don't notice the difference in the settings, except when accelerating from a dead stop, or rapid overtaking to pass. "Eco" behaves more like an ICE car, but still quicker off the line than almost anything other than a sports car. A quick tap on a steering wheel-mounted button gets me to "Normal", and a double-tap to "Sport" -- which brings me to around a 4-second to 60 MPH, neck-snapping level of acceleration.

So, for me, not paying special attention to driving, I end up with right around $0.03 per mile fuel cost to drive ($0.12 per kWh local electricity cost, 3.7 mi / kWh) or 120 MPGe. While my car came with the 20" wheels with no option for the 18", switching to the manufacturer 18" rims would up the fuel economy estimate to 121 MPGe combined with a 316 mile rated full-charge range. But if I did switch, it would actually be cheaper for me to buy aftermarket. Fast.ca makes titanium wheels that are 20 lbs(9 kg)/wheel lighter than the stock Hyundai wheels. If I was going to obsess over range efficiency, I think the combination of ligher and smaller on the wheels would easily bump me to a full-charge 350 mile range.

Note: For those who aren't familiar with car wheels, the actual tire size on the 18" and 20" is the same. The difference is the amount of sidewall exposed, with the 20" being physically larger rims. Those larger rims are metal and heavier, but "more aggressive" and "prettier". It is mostly a cosmetic thing, but the smaller wheels provide a smoother ride as well as a more economical one.

For comparison, today's fuel rates in my area are $3.69, $3.89, $2.99, and $6.49 all per US gallon for Regular Unleaded, Highway Diesel, E85, and Untaxed Kerosene.

I've been planning on buying a new car for over a year as my existing vehicle was getting to the point that repairs were starting to get big, expensive, and plentiful. I have been watching the EV market for a couple of years and finally took the plunge. I selected a Hyundai Ioniq 6 after a ton of research and test driving. Most of my decision making was standard big purchase car standard, and not specific to EV. The EV-specific stuff is below and really the only thing that might interest people.

EVs have been politicized in American culture. With gov't incentives and even some State mandates, our "you, especially gov't, can't tell me what to do" DNA kicks into overdrive. While the saying used to be "You can have your own opinions, you can't have your own facts", in about the mid-2010s conservatives went "hold my beer" and fully embraced "alternative facts" and yes, then they DID claim to have their own facts. Combine that with the "just asking" trend of not understanding the difference between "possible" and "probable", and flooding the field with manufactured "issues", when my wife understood that I was leaning towards an EV, I had to address her concerns. After all, we both had old friends who've gone off the deep end with "conservative" and anything that "owns the libs" they push around, actual facts be damned.

That being said, the various "issues" we wanted to research to see if they were real or imagined, were: horrible charge times, cold weather vehicle range, fire risk, towing range, being towed, excess vehicle weight, and excessive registration fees. These are in addition to normal car-buying concerns of insurance cost, financing, and service availability.

I'm going to address these in order of ease of answer.

[Towing Range]
While the Rivian R1T and Ford F150 lightning were vehicles I considered, once I ruled them out then anything towing-related was no longer a concern. I've towed one thing in the last 7 years and don't anticipate doing it again.

[Being Towed]
The disinfo going around is that if you tow an EV you'll destroy the drive train so you will always need a flat-bed, and then be prepared to wait longer and to pay more. The truth is this isn't an EV issue, it is an AWD/4WD issue. For a FWD/RWD car, EV or not, you need to put it in neutral and hoist the drive end or you're destroy the transmission. As someone who has had Jeeps and other 4WD vehicles for decades, I am used to having to request a flat-bed for a tow.

[Excessive Registration Fees]
West Virginia charges a $200 fee for registering an EV. I don't consider that excessive since our road maintenance is paid for with fuel (gas/diesel) taxes, and I'm no longer buying fuel but still using the roads, this seems fair to me.

[Excessive Vehicle Weight]
I've seen lots of disinformation out there about EVs being heavier so they damage the roads more and thus should be charged more in fees. This is factually incorrect. The average EVs are slightly heavier than mid-sized ICE sedans, but well under the standard American pick-up truck or SUV. To prove this, I went to Kelly Blue Book's site to get vehicle sales numbers for 2023, then either the manufacturer's website or Edmunds.com to get the vehicle curb weights. The short answer is the #1, 2, and 3 sales figures in the U.S. are for pickup trucks: the Ford F-Series, Chevy Silverados, and Ram (nee Dodge) series, and they're all heavier than most EVs. Only the Tesla X Plaid compares -- well, and the F-150 Lightning, Rivian R1T, and Hummer EV, but if you can afford $80,000 - $120,000 for a vehicle, you can afford a weight tax. So NOT cherry-picking super expensive, extra large vehicles gets us this:

Kelley Blue Book - 25 Best-Selling Cars of 2023, So Far (07/17/2023)

Curb Weights from either Edmunds.com or Manufacturer's site

Rank, Make/Model, Units Sold YTD, Curb Weight in Pounds

1. Ford F-Series (212,516) - 4,021 - 5,886# Depending on cab style & engine
2. Chevy Silverado (140,076) - 4,750 - 5,600# Depending on cab style & engine
3. Ram Pickup (117,699) - 4,765 - 6,439# Depending on cab style & engine
4. Tesla Y (105,500) - 4,415#
5. Toyota RAV4 (102,313) - 3,450#
6. Honda CR-V (96,456) - 3,926#
7. Toyota Camry (84,705) - 3,340#
8. GMC Sierra(75,810) - See Silverado Numbers, Same Truck, Different Badge
9. Nissan Rogue (71,246) - 3,616#
10. Jeep Grand Cherokee (70,454) - 4,413#

For Comparison Select EVs

• Hyundai Ioniq 6 (4,990) - 3,950 - 4,650# Depending on trim level
• Tesla Model 3 (63,001) 3,582 - 4,065# SR, LR+P

[Fire Risk]
Lots of scary stories out there about Lithium fires and how EVs are so dangerous and can spontaneously combust. While Lithium is a metal, and the fires are seriously challenging, the simple fact is EVs are less likely than ICE or Hybrids to catch fire. According to the NTSB, there are an average of over 200,000 vehicle fires in the U.S. each year, with ICE cars being the most both in absolute terms (because they are the most on the road). You don't read about them every day because there are over 600 every day and that is "dog bites man" and isn't NEWS anymore. EVs are new and even though SAFER and cause fewer fires per mile driven, they're a novel "man bites dog" and thus make the news. Battery-electric vehicles are only .03% likely to ignite, compared to 1.5% for gas-powered vehicles and 3.4% for hybrid vehicles. CarsDover summarizes the NTSB statistics nicely.

[Cold Weather Range]
I live in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia. We have winter, where it can routinely fall below freezing, but normally doesn't get frigid or below 0F. Still, I need to get around in the winter and it is common knowledge that batteries don't like excessive cold temperatures. Temperatures like this do affect gasoline cars, and the frigid stuff can turn diesel into jello in the fuel lines, but how does it really affect a new EV?

According to these two articles in Consumer Reports, the first from 2019 and the second from 2021, it most certainly does. Anywhere from 20% to 40% depending on just how cold we're talking about. Below 20F is when it starts to really kick in, so if you routinely have winters that stay well below freezing, this is an important consideration. In my case, it doesn't normally get that cold here. However, I also don't have an enclosed garage and park in my driveway, so the car is exposed to the elements and outdoor temperatures.

But, I work remotely and thus don't regularly drive into an office. If I do need to go in, I take the commuter train for the 60 miles, with the train station being only 2 miles away from my house. With me normally averaging less than 10-20 miles of driving a day, we were comfortable with the possible range loss. InsideEVs has a couple of superb articles with real-world testing of specific vehicles and details on how they each react in both charging and running. The first is from 2020, and the second a follow-up from late 2022.

[Horrible Charge Times]
One of the biggest complaints by ICE supporters is that they can fill their gas tank up in 5 mintues and be back on the road, but it could take anywhere from half-an-hour to multiple DAYS to fill up an EV. And that's assuming you don't have to wait for a free charge bay. Why would anyone do that? The short answer is, no one does. IF, like me, you own a house, you install a Level 2 charger and charge at home. I had space capacity, so didn't need to upgrade my electrical service to do this. In all my years I've never known ANYONE who has their own gas pump in their garage. I have a charger at the end of my driveway. It takes me an extra 30 seconds after I park from my last trip of the day to plug the car in. How long does it take to charge? I'd have to look because the car manages that overnight when I'm asleep. In the morning it is always topped off.

And if you don't own a house and use public charging stations? Well, first of all you're going to be paying retail rates for electricity prices. For Electrify America (EA), the largest non-Tesla charging network, and who is owned by Volkswagen, that's $0.48 per kWh guest rate, $0.36 per kWh subscribed "member" rate. Or back to "bend over and insert nozzle" big company greed. How long to charge? It depends on the rating of the charger you're at. For me I've used the common 350 kW super fast and 150 kW fast public chargers and they bring me from 20% - 80% in 15 and 35 minutes respectively. Fortunately Hyundai throws in 2 years of free charging with EA as a promotion so I get a 30-minute fast charge session a day for $0 for the next 2 years, which is why I know the charge times for those chargers.

As a sidebar, almost all cars use lithium-ion batteries, and those don't like to be regularly charged to 100%, or let drop below 20%, if you want to maximize their lifespan. My car is set to normally "top off" to 80% charge. In the app I can tell it to "trip charge", meaning I'm going on a longer trip and bring me to 100%. I can also schedule that, telling the car next Friday to bring me to 100% because I'm going to go on a weekend trip.

[Fuel Cost Stability]
Now, some people live in places that not only have time-of-day variable pricing on electricity, but demand pricing. That means the cost of electricity can vary depending on overall usage in the area and can change on an hourly basis. Gasoline at the pump has always been that way, with pricing changing depending on which way the wind blows. But some of us live in areas that have regulated utilities and it takes and act of the State Legislature to change electricity prices. It can be a year or more for some places to get an electricity rate increase. This means my costs to fuel up are stable and predictable, unlike some of my friends who bemoan seasonal, if not weekly or DAILY, gas price changes.

[Fuel Convenience and Speed]
One of the biggest complaints by ICE supporters is that they can fill their gas tank up in 5 minutes and be back on the road, but it could take anywhere from half-an-hour to multiple DAYS to fill up an EV. And that's assuming you don't have to wait for a free charge bay. Why would anyone do that? The short answer is, no one does. IF, like me, you own a house, you install a Level 2 charger and charge at home. In all my years I've never known ANYONE who has their own gas pump in their garage. I have a charger at the end of my driveway. It takes me an extra 30 seconds after I park from my last trip of the day to plug the car in. How long does it take to charge? I'd have to look because the car manages that overnight when I'm asleep. In the morning it is always topped off.

[Fuel Cost]
Please tell me if I screwed up my math. I still have flashbacks of my high school science teacher with a disappointed look, shaking his head lamenting my innate abilities to invert units and totally screw up equations. Here I'm just multiplying tank/battery size by price per gallon/kWh of gasoline/electricity to get price to fill from empty. Then dividing that number by the range in miles to get cost per mile to drive. You can do your own math for your area's fuel prices.

According to Hyundai's spec site, all three versions of the Ioniq 6 have 77.4 kWh battery system capacity. The version I have, the Limited AWD, has a spec range of 270 miles, and that's about what I've been getting so far, plus or minus depending on how aggressively I'm driving. Living in West Virginia, I have fairly cheap electricity rates, but no variable pricing. That is a flat rate of $0.116 per kWh of electricity regardless of time of day or night, residential outside-city-limits tariff rate, plus tax. Including tax would bring me up to $0.12 per kWh. So, simply multiplying 77.4 by 0.12 (canceling out like units) gives me $9.29 to "fill" my car up from dead empty and that allows me to drive about 270 miles without charging. That works out to be about $0.034 per mile of fuel cost for the charged-at-home EV.

For an unfair, but real comparison with my directly previous vehicle, a Chevy Silverado 1500 LTZ came with a 26 gallon fuel tank. As it is a Flex Fuel vehicle, E85 in my area was right around $2.999 per gallon. Regular unleaded (E10) was around $3.499, though gas prices change so often you can do your own math. Nevertheless, that means between $78 - $98 to fill up from dead empty. However, the range varied from between about 315 to 400 total miles with the E85 getting the shorter range and E10 getting the longer. That gives me about $0.245 per mile of fuel cost for my gas hog truck with almost no difference in cost per mile based on fuel choice. No surprise there.

To be fairer with the vehicle type, my previous previous vehicle was a manual-transmission VW Jetta TDI. I was getting about 40 mpg with their emissions-cheating turbo diesel, but could hyper-mile up to 50 mpg on a long road trip. That lead to me destroying a clutch plate with too much dicking around with the clutch, so I'm not going to count that and go with the 40 mpg, which was real measurement versus the EPA 32 mpg rating. The Jetta had a 14.5 gallon fuel tank. So 40 x 14.5 gave me about 580 miles of range and that sounds about right. That Jetta would go forever! However, we're talking the more expensive diesel at $4.199 per gallon, or $60.89 to fill up and $0.105 per mile to drive.

All of that works out to be 3-times cheaper to drive of the barest bones, manual transmission, turbo diesel, butt-busting fuel sipper. God, I loved driving that car! Then a full 8-times cheaper to drive than what is the 2nd most popular vehicle for sale in America today -- beaten only by Ford's F150 and followed immediately by Ram's 1500. American's do love their pickup trucks.

[EV Driving]
So, trying to focus on just the differences of an EV and filtering out what is really just 10 year newer tech and a higher end trim, there are just a couple of things: regenerative braking, noise and vibration, and power.

[Regenerative Braking]
This is adjustable and can go from "off", where the car will coast just like taking your foot off an ICE gas pedal, to one-pedal drive where it'll start to "brake" when you lift your foot and bring you to a complete stop in short order as it captures energy back to the battery. The level is controlled by paddle shifters on the steering wheel. It tooks me about three days driving to get used to how it worked and another day or two to get fully comfortable. I almost never use the traditional friction brakes at all which means I'll be replacing the brake pads sometime around never. One less thing to service.

[Noise and Vibration]
There isn't any. Well, there is this ethereal tone the car plays because it is required by law to make noise so you don't sneak up on people and kill them. There are options for graduated engine sounds in case you go thru withdrawls. But the car is just SILENT and it is a thing of beauty. Now, the Tesla has fart mode, and the day Hyundai lets me change the sound it plays then The Jetson's car, here I come!

The car has push-button start, which I've used before on ICE cars, but this has been the hardest habit for me to break. I'm used to "push button until you feel engine vibration" but there IS NO engine in an EV. Turning it on is like turning on a silent PC -- the screen blinks on and you're ready to go. You can add certain on/off sounds and I had to do that to train myself to actually turn the car OFF when I get out. Again, think silent PC.

[Power]
And then the thing that electric motors do well. Instant torque and instant response. In "Sport" mode, the 0-60 time is just over 4 seconds, which earned me "you're never to do that again when I'm in the car" from my wife, but that doesn't really communicate the full experience. Even after more than a century of refinement, an internal combustion engine is a fundamentally limited device. It can't change speeds quickly or easily so needs gears of different ratios to compensate. The transmission in an EV is a single speed and just acts to redirect torque to the different wheels. It doesn't do anything else. If you want to go faster, the motor just spins faster. Backwards? The motor just spins backwards. But an ICE needs to coordinate the fuel flow for the little explosions that drive the shaft and timing for all of that, plus different gear ratios all because an ICE engine can't just "spin faster". Typical RPMs for an ICE road car are between 2,000 and 5,000. An Indycar can rev up to 12,000 rpm. The electric motor in the Ioniq 6 hits 15,000 rpm. Electric performance cars top 21,000.

What I'm getting at is there is no downshift to move faster to pass; no lag when you step on the accelerator before you move; the control stick-shift enthusiasts brag about is matched and even beaten by just a couple of inches of movement of a driver's foot on an EV. The torque is immediate and it just feels natural. Step on the accelerator and move. Step hard, move immediately. Step more, move faster. Nothing in-between you and the speed. You're one with the car. Even at slow speeds, the immediate response is what gives the feel of "this is the way things should be".

Once you get used to that, going back to an IC engine feels downright primitive. There's all this noise and vibration and lag, like you have to hire a translator to communicate what you want. Don't get me wrong, after a century IC engines are a thing of mechanical mastery. But the simple fact is they need a couple THOUSAND extra precision machined, lubricated, tuned, and maintained parts all working in perfect harmony to come close to what a dozen or so EV parts are doing just by themselves.

I've driven the future and it is electric. ICE vehicles are rapidly on their way to being ever fading niche solutions.

The White House has announced that President Biden will pardon all prior Federal offenses of simple marijuana possession. This will also apply to DC convictions.

Using a Librem 13v3 with Pureboot, Heads for BIOS, and a Librem Key normally works without a hitch. However, I was wanting to install Kali on the 2nd internal drive and dual-boot. This presented a pain-in-the-ass challenge.

Kali Live works fine on the laptop. However the installer crashes the display. It seems there is a kexec parameter of vga=788 that the laptop chokes on. Updating the grub config on the Kali ISO, then repackaging it is the long, hard way to deal with this. The simple way would be to install direct from the running Live instance. Unfortunately the Kali gods have decided to remove that feature. Idiots.

Here's the fix. From running Live open a shell and "sudo apt install debian-installer-launcher". Then "sudo debian-installer-launcher" and follow the prompts. Works like a charm.

I'm posting this here because it took way too long to search for a working answer, not knowing exactly what to look for.

Forced perspective is a technique which employs optical illusion to make an object appear farther away, closer, larger or smaller than it actually is. It manipulates human visual perception through the use of scaled objects and the correlation between them and the vantage point of the spectator or camera.

Squid can range in length anywhere from 1 inch up to 80 feet. The Colossal Squid is the largest known variety, and thought to be the inspiration behind legendary monsters such as The Kraken of Greek mythology.

Calimari is the term for he culinary specimens of squid, and typically measure less than 12 inches. Squid lends itself to hot and fast cooking methods such as grilling, broiling, sauteing, and deep-frying. Or, by irritated judges when hack lawyers try and pass off itty-bitty lawsuits as "the Kraken" when they're really just suitable for calimari.

PULSE, developed by a small team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), is a 3D-printed wearable device that pulses, or vibrates, when a person's hand is nearing their face. The haptic feedback from a vibration motor simulates a nudge, reminding the wearer to avoid touching these entryways in order to reduce potential infection.

The project is open source, with all the information from parts list to assembly instructions freely available online.

My wife picked up a Google Home unit so she could listen to music without constant obnoxious advertisements. I've been wanting to replace it because I don't want a spy device in my house. As I'd been fiddling with a Raspberry Pi audio player for some time, this finally prompted me to finish it.

So the Google Home will do more than play music, but that is 99% of what she used it for, so that's all I tried to replicate. I normally rip all media I buy, and have a fairly extensive music collection that was almost exclusively purchased as used CDs from second hand stores, like Goodwill. For $1 to $4 I can pick up anything that catches my attention. I also have quite a few comedy albums, a few audio books purchased on CD, and several radio plays from either the BBC or HPLHS.

All of the music is ripped to Ogg-FLAC format, with a .oga extension. All of the spoken word stuff is just plain Ogg-Vorbis, with the traditional .ogg extension. For those who don't know, .oga files are FLAC lossless audio in an Ogg container. The native FLAC container is fairly barebones, whereas the Ogg container has better support for extensive tagging and the bits needed to properly stream and seek. It makes for better streaming of audio whereas FLAC has a tendency to just download the entire file before playing.

Streaming audio with MPD doesn't take a lot of horsepower, and can easily be done with 1 Gb of RAM on even the minimalist RPi Zero. For my house I use RPi 3B+ board with HiFi Berry DAC+ add-on if I want to support analog speakers. That was my original plan, but have since switched to the Bose SoundTouch 10 wireless speaker for convenience. It can be used as a plain Jane BlueTooth speaker and doesn't need their app or anything other than "pair and go". It is Bose's "dumb" speaker, with no built-in Alexa or Google and can be had for under $100. If you want two, they will pair wirelessly for a stereo pair, but as I was replacing those little pod-style speakers, I went with just one.

That being said, if you're an audio snob, the HiFi Berry like of DACs will give you audiophile quality sound to your favorite pair of overpriced sound reproducing boxes.

There are several full-blown FOSS projects designed to turn an RPi into an audio jukebox, and I went thru three of the more popular before settling on my eventual choice. I tried Rune Audio and Volumio before settling on Moode Audio.

There are plenty of online reviews and comparisons of all three, so I won't repeat any of that here. If you're interested in doing this sort of project I suggest to check all three out. They support plugins for handing things like Apple's Air Play, Spotify, UPnP, DLNA, SMB, local touchscreens for the Pi, whole-house synchronized audio, and web interfaces. What clinched it for me was Moode is the only one to support BlueTooth as an output option. For me, fewer wires is a plus.

This brings me to the real point of my writing this journal entry -- documenting a few quirks to maybe help out some poor soul, or maybe my future self after I forget it all.

The big one is that the Pi's BCM43438 wireless LAN and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) chip REALLY doesn't like running both WiFi and BT at the same time. Streaming audio from a remote source thru WiFi and then playing on a BT speaker is just crap. Either by themselves is fine, but the chip interferes with itself even if you're doing WiFi in the 5 GHz spectrum, so it isn't a signal interference thing. Save yourself the headaches and disable on-board BlueTooth and just add one of those mini dongles. I use a ZEXMTE USB dongle, which costs around $10 and works out of the box with Linux, no custom drivers needed.

Now that I think of it, that was really the only major problem, but it was a doosey. Depending on how the on-board chip initializes it can either start and give you fits where things randomly freeze, or leave things in an odd state where systemd won't recognize the BT part.

I haven't had a chance to test on the Pi 4, which has an upgraded CYW43455 chip (now owned by Cypress Semi) that support 802.11ac and BT 4.2.

The only other quirk is that these programs rely on your IDv2 tags and honestly the most time I spent on the project -- other than debugging WiFi/BT issues -- was on ensuring my files were tagged correctly and consistently.

eol

I'm writing this down because it was driving me crazy, but I just figured it out.

I have a small system running Armbian, that I use as a DNS-Over-TLS proxy for my home network, using Stubby. This works by acting as a DNS stub resolver that then loops the DNS requests to encrypted DNS servers. This hides my DNS queries from my ISP -- the evil that is Comcast.

My problem has been that the service, managed by Systemd, fails to load on boot but will load if I log in and start it by hand. The error was the service couldn't bind to my chosen IP address, as it was starting up before DHCP finished setting things up.

The standard instructions for getting a service to wait is to use the network-online.target instead of the network.target.

What everything I researched failed to mention was this only works if systemd is handling the network interface and DHCP. If something else -- Network Manager, /etc/network/interfaces, etc. -- is handling your network interface, it just won't work.

Yes, in hindsight, that seems sort of obvious. But, it wasn't explicitly mentioned anywhere and Debian insists on providing half-a-dozen ways to manage your network interfaces, which is why I'm writing this down.

I've written here before about how I rip and store every bit of physical media that I purchase. Movies, television shows (on disc), music, and pictures, are all copied and stored on a little server I have in my home. Everything is available on my home network, via Samba shares, with televisions being connected to CuBox devices running LibreELEC for an interface.

All in all I have about 2.5 Tb of data, with over 600 movies and TV show episodes -- all legally purchased -- in SD or HD resolution. It was stored on a single drive in a small server I had in a utility closet. Backups were made to a USB drive, stored elsewhere. The ultimate backups are the original media.

Over the Thanksgiving holidays, it all imploded. I was sloppy and lazy and got burned. The server was not on a UPS and a nasty power surge took out both the motherboard and the hard drive. I was unable to get the drive to spin up at all. Any machine it was attached to wouldn't even enter BIOS/UEFI until after the drive timed out, so even SpinRite was useless.

My USB backup drive, of course, failed. I don't know why, and I hadn't used it in several months, but it had a ton of errors. I was able to recover about 5% of my data from that. The rest, I've been recovering from original media. I expect to finish some time in late January, because that is a slow, tedious process, and because I'm obsessive about getting the encoding right and the tags correct.

As before, I'm using MakeMKV for DVD and Blu-Ray rips, with HandBrake for encoding. Under Linux, these do an excellent job, but I can't get the tags to auto-populate like it is possible in Windows, so it can be slow.

To ensure this doesn't happen again, I'm doing the following:

1. Adding a UPS to the main server. And, instead of a normal Linux box, I'm expecting one of these to be delivered early in January. I'm planning on configuring it as RAID-5 with some 4 TB WD Red NAS drives, for a total of 12 TB of usable space.

The Internet is full of stories on how RAID-5 is dead and a bad choice for modern, large (multi-TB) NAS, but my use case is different. In my case, it is much closer to WORM than traditional NAS. I'll be writing to the system maybe once a month, as I add new content, and reading frequently by not continuously. It should serve my purpose without having to dedicate 2 drives to redundancy.

2. I'm also adding a second layer of backup in the way of BDXL 100 Gb M-Disc archives.

Surprisingly, Ubuntu doesn't properly support recording Blu-Ray discs out-of-the-box. It seems that some time ago there was a major pissing contest around the license between the original author of cdrtools and some distro maintainers. The end result was forking some tools under the CDRKit package.

TLDR -- My first attempt resulted in a $17 coaster, as 100 GB BDXL M-Discs aren't cheap.

For Ubuntu, follow the instructions here to add a PPA and then install both K3B (main repository) and the needed PPA tools, cdrecord and mkisofs.

After doing that, I can now successfully record 100 GB backup discs using K3B. It takes about an hour-and-a-half for them to burn, using an LG WH14NS40 drive. And while a 25-pack of these beauties will set me back about $375, it beats the pants off of 3 months worth of re-ripping and encoding.

For anything else, I'm comfortable just encrypting and uploading to Google Drive. But 2.5 TB of media is just too much, and the actual upload and download times are too damn long.

The original M-DISC company went bankrupt, and assets were acquired by the debtors, as documented in the Wikipedia link above. While the *idea* of long term, stable, archival storage in a DVD/BR media is fantastic, I think they bumped into a the reality of there's only so much data that I need to store long term. Once I bought a set of 10 DVD blanks, back when it came out, I only really used 1. Once you get rid of things like videos, music, and pictures, the rest of the data I generate and care about is significantly smaller than 4.7 Gb. I still have 7 of the original discs I purchased back in 2011, when I got my first M-DISC capable DVD-R. (Two were experimental coasters.)

Keeping older hardware useful:
P2V and V2P with an old Debian Testing PXE server and Vmware Workstation 11
By Dave Bechtel / Kingneutron

MARCH 2017 â" so I've had an old PXE server (an âoeASUS S-pressoâ - Pentium-4, 32-bit portable box) sitting around for the last few years, and got a wild hair to do a P2V on it â" make sure it still works right and test an upgrade of Debian Testing to modern standards. Last time this box was booted was November 2013 â" and it was provisioned with Dreamlinux 5 back in January of 2012.

--Thankfully, the SATA drive and CMOS battery have survived with apparently no ill effects, since the box has been moved around through a couple of house changes with no special storage arrangements â" it's basically been unpowered sitting in a corner.

( My unit has a PCI slot on the right that has a Gig Ethernet card in it, and an unused AGP video card slot on the left. Motherboard only supports 100Mbit Ether. )

--Rather than using the antiquated PS/2 ports, I used an adapter to combine a USB keyboard and mouse into (1) USB port.

STEP 1: BACKUP the physical PC

--This box is so old, I had to install fsarchiver (my preferred backup) manually. Incidentally, it's also heavy as hell with a DVD drive and a standard SATA hard drive, so removing the DVD and converting to an SSD (or laptop drive) to save weight would be recommended if I wanted to haul it around.

(Physical box, bash shell, as root)
# apt-get update; apt-get install fsarchiver

# ddir=/mnt/extra
# outfile=spresso-p2v-backup-20170302.fsarchive.fsa
# rootdev=/dev/sda3

# time fsarchiver -o -A -z 1 -j 2 savefs \
    $ddir/$outfile \
    $rootdev

# cd $ddir
# fsarchiver archinfo $outfile 2> flist--$outfile.txt

--I then copied âoespresso-p2v-backup-20170302.fsarchive.fsaâ to my ZFS server (method omitted), since we will need it later for the restore.

--Also, since all of my Squid cache and ISO files for PXE are on /mnt/extra, I made a tar backup of those to my ZFS server.

# cd /mnt/extra
# time tar czpf /mnt/bkpspace/spresso-mnt-extra-bkp-20170302.tgz *

-------------

STEP 2: Setup the P2V VM in Vmware Workstation 11 and restore the backup

--I tried as much as possible to duplicate the physical box, but in this case I already had a P2V VM of my daily workstation (Ubuntu 14.04) that I wasn't using, so adding a 3rd virtual drive to the existing VM and re-using the existing GRUB saved me some steps. Running ' update-grub ' on the Ubuntu side after restoring enabled me to boot my restored environment.

VM details:

RAM: 1.5GB
Processors: 1
SCSI1: 23.5GB (this is the Ubuntu drive)
SCSI2: 20GB ( this is /home and swap )
SCSI3: added as new and then Expanded from 10GB to 60GB (after running out of space)

Net1: Bridged (gets DHCP address from my LAN)
Net2: Started out as Host-only and ended up as LAN Segment â" this enabled the âoeclientâ bare VM to boot over the network.

--I used Systemrescuecd to boot the VM, issued ' startx ' and used ' gparted ' to make 2 partitions that fairly closely matched my physical layout.

PROTIP: In hindsight, I should have made the root partition around 15-20GB because of all the package upgrades that needed to be downloaded. (I ran out of space on root once during the upgrade and had to issue an ' apt-get clean ' to free up space.)

sdc3: 10GB ext4 (restored root) â" make yours bigger.
sdc4: 50GB ext4 (/mnt/extra)

PROTIP: ' tune2fs -m1 /dev/sdc3 ' -- this will reduce the reserved space for ext4 and give you some extra usable free space.

--Now, since I had plenty of space to work with, I copied my fsarchive backup file from my ZFS server to the 50GB VM partition.

(still in Systemrescuecd, in the VM)

# mkdir /mnt/tmp
# mount /dev/sdc4 /mnt/tmp
# cd /mnt/tmp

# ifconfig # Make note of my IP address
# nc -l -p 32100 |tar xpvf -
##Netcat - Listen on port 32100 and untar

(Now on my ZFS server)
# tar cpf - spresso-p2v-backup-20170302.fsarchive.fsa |nc -w 5 192.168.1.95 32100
## (tar to stdout and stream a copy of the backup file to the VM's IP address)

--This is basically a quick-and-dirty way to transfer files over the network without resorting to FTP or slow SSH file copies â" the fsarchive backup file ended up being around 3GB and transferred in less than a minute over Gig Ethernet.

--Now to restore the backup:

(still in Systemrescuecd, in the VM)
# time fsarchiver restfs spresso*.fsa id=0,dest=/dev/sdc4

--And that's half the battle right there. Now we just need to make some changes to the restored /etc/fstab so it will boot. ( If we were doing a full migration, we would also need to adjust things like /etc/network/interfaces , /etc/rc.local , /etc/hostname , /etc/hosts )

--For completeness, here's more info on how to do a Linux bare-metal backup and restore:
http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=24268

--So now I ' reboot ' into the VM's already-installed Ubuntu 14.04 and edit my Dreamlinux /etc/fstab.

# mkdir /mnt/tmp
# mount /dev/sdc3 /mnt/tmp

# screen -aAO # PROTIP: GNU screen is invaluable for switching between virtual terminal windows

# fdisk -l # check out our disks
# blkid # get partition labels and UUIDs /dev/sdb2: LABEL="swapb" UUID="f0eb7148-4ff2-4eeb-a82c-349d384a5255" TYPE="swap" PARTUUID="ff1ca075-02" /dev/sdc3: LABEL="root" UUID="38f1d4be-3293-4272-ab79-4ad76cbd5a36" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="3a3b65f3-03" /dev/sdc4: LABEL="extra" UUID="603a61fc-4436-4cb0-baac-ef9170754228" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="3a3b65f3-04"

--NOTE that fsarchiver will by default restore the same UUID and filesystem label, so no worries.

( Now Hit Ctrl-A, then c to create a new Screen )

# cd /mnt/tmp/etc
# jstar fstab # use your own editor here, I happen to like Wordstar key bindings ;-)

--Now we can switch between those 2 virtual terminal windows and even copy/paste text without using the mouse. See ' man screen ' for more details.

--To make a long story short, I added or verified the following to SpressoVM's /etc/fstab to enable my existing swap partition and double-check that the root filesystem would be mounted as expected.

LABEL=swapb none swap sw,pri=2 0 0
LABEL=extra /mnt/extra ext4 defaults,noatime,rw 0 2

--While I'm here, I also restored the /mnt/extra files from their tar backup as well.

# umount /mnt/tmp # we're done with restored root

# mount /dev/sdc4 /mnt/tmp
# cd /mnt/tmp
# nc -l -p 32100 | tar xzpvf -

( then on my ZFS Server )

# cd /mnt/bkpspace; time cat spresso-mnt-extra-bkp-20170302.tgz |nc -w 5 192.168.1.95 32100

( now back in the VM )

# update-grub # make sure ubuntu knows how to boot dreamlinux
# reboot

--And that's pretty much it. After that, to make a long story short, I went through several cycles of
' apt-get upgrade ' and ' apt-get dist-upgrade ' making VM Snapshots along the way, and had to make allowances for files that were provided in more than one package.

--I also upgraded the kernel from 3.10-3-686-pae to linux-image-4.9.0-1-686. The full saga is documented with errors and fixes, so email me if you want to know more (but it's a pretty long read.)

# apt-cache search 4.9.0 |awk '{print $1}'

# apt-get install linux-headers-4.9.0-1-686 linux-headers-4.9.0-1-686-pae linux-headers-4.9.0-1-all \
linux-headers-4.9.0-1-common linux-support-4.9.0-1 linux-image-4.9.0-1-686-pae

STEP 3: Test PXE booting with another VM using a dedicated network segment

--The end result of all this: I created a âoeblankâ VM with the capability to boot from network (needed to modify the VM's BIOS for this) and after switching the 2nd network adapter to âoeLAN segmentâ I successfully booted the VM from PXE! Mission Accomplished!
--Now, since I've done all the heavy lifting in the VM and my original box is still working the same as it was (but running old software) I can use pretty much the same procedure to do a V2P (Virtual to Physical) to a spare 500GB laptop drive instead of having to repeat the upgrade all over again.

--For brevity, these are the instructions I include in my bkpsys-2fsarchive script:

# time fsarchiver restfs backup-root-sda1--ubuntu1404*.fsa id=0,dest=/dev/sdf1
Statistics for filesystem 0
* files successfully processed:....regfiles=159387, directories=25579, symlinks=49276, hardlinks=25, specials=108
* files with errors:...............regfiles=0, directories=0, symlinks=0, hardlinks=0, specials=0
real 4m26.116s
( 3.9GB )

# mkdir /mnt/tmp2
# mount /dev/sdf1 /mnt/tmp2

# grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/tmp2 /dev/sdf
# mount -o bind /dev /mnt/tmp2/dev; mount -o bind /proc /mnt/tmp2/proc; mount -o bind /sys /mnt/tmp2/sys
# chroot /mnt/tmp2 /bin/bash
# update-grub
[[
Generating grub configuration file ...
Warning: Setting GRUB_TIMEOUT to a non-zero value when GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT is set is no longer supported.
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.2.0-36-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-4.2.0-36-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.19.0-25-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-3.19.0-25-generic
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.elf
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.bin
Found Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS (14.04) on /dev/sda1
done
]]

# grub-install /dev/sdf # from chroot

^D
# umount -a /mnt/tmp2/*

# DON'T FORGET TO COPY /home and adjust fstab for swap / home / squid BEFORE booting new drive!
# also adjust etc/network/interfaces , etc/rc.local , etc/hostname , etc/hosts

--Once I had Knoppix up and running in the âoeblankâ VM, I used ' gparted ' to make a 768MB Swap partition and used the rest as a âoedataâ ext4 partition.

--NOTE that while the PXE boxes are running a 32-bit processor and environment, CLIENT boxes can boot a 64-bit kernel and environment as long as the CLIENT processor is capable.

STEP 4: Reverse the process and upgrade the physical box

--I haven't done the âoeV2Pâ part yet, but that's not a high priority at this point since I have everything pretty much the way I like it right now.

While the Brother P-Touch QL-500 is recognized out of the box by Ubuntu, it doesn't really work. Do the following to fix:

1. Go to the Brother driver site and download both the LPR and CUPSWRAPPER driver. http://support.brother.com/g/s/id/linux/en/download_esp.html#QL-500
2. Install both with "sudo apt install ./ql500cupswrapper-1.0.1-0.i386.deb ./ql500lpr-1.0.1-0.i386.deb"

That works.

Ideally, download and use the font "OCR-B", which is freely available from here: http://www.fontpalace.com/font-download/OcrB+Regular/

Note to future self.

I was fiddling around with my laptop and broke something. My WiFi kept disconnecting every couple of minutes. A quick look in dmesg showed the iwlwifi kernel module was segfaulting every couple of minutes.

This was new. WTF had I changed? Reminder to self -- don't fiddle with things that matter when really tired.

As it turns out, I had enabled up the amd64-microcode in my system, which is under Additional Drivers in Ubuntu. This played absolute havoc with the Intel WiFi and provided no discernible benefits.

Uncheck box, reboot machine, problem resolved.

When attempting to change your password on the genealogy website Ancestry.com, you get this not-so-helpful message:

New Password -- Your new password should be between 5 to 24 characters long and can be any combination of letters, numbers, and some symbols.

Really. Some symbols. Not that they're going to tell you which ones. Oh no, that would be too easy. You have to guess!

The best I can figure out is some dev is just fucking with people for fun. Either that, or they had to spend way too much time writing escape code for special characters and this is payback.

For the record, so far I've determined that a period, hyphen, and underscore are all acceptable and a space is not. . - _

Ugh!

--HOWTO safe rm on Linux (at least):

- Interactive:
o Use Midnight Commander. Works from a text terminal, no GUI needed.
Insert to mark files/dirs, F8 to delete. Never had a misfire, even as root.

- Script (for the paranoid, and want a log):
IF you have a known dir " destdir=/tmp/blah " with a subdir " /tmp/blah/1 "
$ cd $destdir && cd 1 && cd .. && rm -rv 1/* |tee /tmp/rm.txt

- REALLY safe rm, with find:
# find multiple (known) names of files > 40 days old in a given directory and delete them
bkpath="/mnt/bkpdrive"
pathh="$bkpath/work/bkpsys-laptop-p2400-thinkpad-xubuntu-14-04-LTS--64--sda7"
cd $pathh && \
        find $pathh/* \( -name "bkp*gz" -o -name "bkp*bz2" -name "bkp*lzop" -o -name "flist*" \) -type f -mtime +40 -exec /bin/rm -v {} \;

--If you need to delete multiple levels of subdirectories, or dotfiles -- do it interactively, and use MC.