Category Archives: Technology and Society

Business, Technology and Society, Weird

Another Weird Car Problem

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My adventures in diagnosing the BMW made me decide to get another bluetooth OBD plug for the Toyota, and use an Android tablet as an extended dashboard. But I can’t get it to pair. My phone can’t even see it. It can see the one in the BMW next to the car in the driveway, but it can’t see the one that’s two feet away in the 2013 RAV4. The light is on, so it has power, and I turned the ignition on to make sure that it was transmitting, but no dice.

Another weirdness of the car (which may or may not be related) is that one of the keys doesn’t unlock the car electronically, and I’ve never been able to get it to go into programming mode to reset the key, despite following all the incantations of opening and closing doors and turning the ignition on and off that they say to do online.

[Update a few minutes later after a quick search]

Looks like it’s not just me.

[Update a few more minutes later]

Mystery partially solved. I plugged in a stand-alone OBD reader, and there’s no output. Maybe I need to look for a blown fuse?

[Monday-afternoon update]

OK, I pulled the fuse, clearly marked “OBD,” and it’s good. Now what?

[Bumped]

[Update]

I put the fuse back in, and now it works. Go figure.

Business, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Read It And Weep

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Bill “Ballast” Nelson is going to be head of NASA. This is almost the worst possible pick. Is there any level on which this administration is not a disaster, with less than two months in?

[Friday-morning update]

Five questions that Nelson should be asked (but probably won’t be).

The last is the most important. He’s never given any inkling of having anything resembling a vision for humanity’s future in space.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

SLS “Affordability”

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This new “study” may be the beginning of the end for the program. This graf stuck out, though: “McConnaughey is leading the study for Kathy Lueders, NASA’s chief of human spaceflight. Even before the study’s initiation, McConnaughey had been pushing for the SLS program to become more cost-effective. One goal of this analysis is to find ways for the large NASA rocket to compete effectively with privately developed rockets as part of the agency’s Artemis Moon program.”

No one seems to ask the question: Why should NASA even be attempting to compete with private industry? This is not a proper role of a government agency, but we’ve been stuck in this mode since Shuttle.

Technology and Society

Piano Problem

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We have an older-model electronic Yamaha piano. While I had the living-room wall open for various wire run, I decided to run an RCA cable from the piano location to our home-theater receiver, so we could hear the piano output in the home-theater speakers, instead of the built-in ones.

Lo and behold, though, when I plugged it into the headphone jack on the instrument, there was a distinct delay between hitting the key and hearing the sound, which makes it difficult to play. Why would there be any latency? This seems like it would be a problem using headphones with it as well. It seems like the only solution may be hack into the thing, to tap the speaker wires directly, and match the impedance somehow, maybe with transformers.