Scott's Blog

So I checked my trading accounts, and 80% of my portfolio  (by value) - not including Google (because I work there) or RRSPs - is TSLA. Some might think that I'm too heavily weighted on one company, I disagree. Why? Because everyone I know wants to work for Tesla or SpaceX. Not, Amazon, Facebook or Apple.  Why? Because Tesla  is making a huge  difference. Their mission statement is: "Accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy"  And they are accomplishing it! Also, Tesla is getting things done! They are coming out with new cars, factories, solar roofs, and batteries faster than anyone could have predicted.  The pace is exciting. The impact you can make, not to your own wealth, but to the whole world is enormous. If you are smart and capable, do you really want to work at a startup, where maybe, just maybe, you might make a small difference (and make some money) - or work for Tesla where even if you were a minor cog in the wheel you would make ...

 I still hear friends complaining that EV (Electric Vehicles) are too expensive compared to ICV (Internal Combustion (gas) Vehicles). Or they are worried about the range or battery life... Bloomberg thinks that peak ICV already here, the number of ICE vehicles sold will continue to decline year over year until there you can't buy them anymore - they are correct. Tesla vehicles are better in every way (safety, performance, reliability, price) than gas or diesel cars, already. You might think the price is higher for EVs, but only the purchase price, if you consider the total cost of ownership, Teslas are cheaper. Cheaper because they have far better resell value, because charging is way cheaper than filling with gas (and getting cheaper), cheaper insurance, less maintenance, and more reliability. Never mind that you aren't killing the environment or children . It's like comparing a feature phone with a smart phone: A feature phone is: Cheaper to buy! Batter lasts longer (li...

Unfortunately, I'm staring to be happy that certain people have died.  Like Fred Koch and, more recently, Donald Rumsfeld.. Frankly these are both people that should be celebrated for dying and not continuing the evil they perpetrated. More succinctly, they should be remembered for doing more evil than good during their lifetime and it is overall better that they have died than live a minute longer on this earth. These people can't repent but others (like Mitch) should link about their legacy. How many of us will be so happy that they are dead. Donald isn't the worst of them, but should be remembered for all of the evil that they have committed.

Segway Way back in 2001, the Segway "human transport", code named Ginger  (think Ginger Rogers), was all the buzz.  Segway promised to change the world with it's two-wheeled self-balancing personal transporter. It was amazing, but pricey ($5,000 USD) and slow max of 16 km/h. However, self-balancing really is the way to go, but the battery tech wasn't there in 2000's. Spinnick597 Wikipedia Electric Unicycle (EUC) Electric Unicycles, like the Inmotion V11 above, is the natural evolution of the self balancing Segway. It has bigger tires (18") which helps get over obstacles and absorb shocks. It also has a suspension which absorbs even more.  What makes an EUC the perfect transporter is that it is: Compact Long ranged Off-road capable Hands free Not a motorbike Let me go over each and compare to other electric vehicles: Compact You can't get much smaller or lighter without going for a smaller wheel ( electric shoes ?). You can just throw it in the trunk, whi...

Photo by  Mehluli Hikwa  on  Unsplash Currently the price of gas in North America is at the lowest value we've seen in a decades because of the pandemic and a price war started by Russia. This whole situation is not great for gas stations of course because people aren't driving and their profits increase with great gas prices.  This also points gas price volatility, both down and and up. Some gas stations will go bankrupt, some owners will retire a little earlier, but eventually there will be less gas stations. As more and more people are buying battery electric vehicles (BEV), the writing will be on the wall. Who would want to open a new gas station in this climate?  Could you guarantee that there will be more gas guzzling customers in 5 years? As you have to drive further and further to gas up, the practicality of charging your car at home becomes more and more attractive. With less competition from other gas stations, the opportunities to price...

It's pretty odd that Tesla makes their own seats for their cars. There are only four seat manufacturers  worldwide that all other car manufacturers use.  Tesla is the only major car company that makes their own seats. Why? Here are my guesses as to why they do this: 10. Tesla wants to make seats better than what other car companies can offer. Seats are half of the car experience, if they aren't super comfortable for long rides you won't want to buy the car. My neighbor was on the fence, but ten seconds sitting in my Model 3 and he had already decided to pull the trigger. 9. Tesla has high quality vegan leather seats that the other seat manufactures might not be able to offer. 8. New car smell, Tesla doesn't want it, and seat manufacturers probably do things to make smell worse. 7. Tesla wants to make super durable car seats for the autonomous vehicle (AV) future, where the car is being used all the time, like a taxi - and the traditional seat manuf...

Tesla Model 3 Pros/Cons Cons The doors and trunk often need to be slammed to make sure they are closed properly. The frunk can't be closed without getting smudge marks on the hood. The bluetooth software to unlock your car doesn't work quickly every time, although it's mostly Android's fault. Parts of the central screen can be hard to read. It's expensive. Pros The supercharger network is the best in the world. Fast and cheap and so easy to use, and is a key selling point. The car's acceleration is instant and so addictive. Brings a smile every day! The traction control is unbelievably good. The handling and suspension are really good. Probably the safest car on the road. The whole car, and not just certain parts, can be fixed over the air by Tesla. Some days I wake up and the car can do new things. The car is connected to the Internet, for free! The battery will basically last forever, because Tesla protects it with careful software an...

In January I decided I would try a GoodReads reading challenge, 50 books.  I figured 50 books wouldn't be too bad, although it 10x more than I normally read in a year. When you consider it, it's only a book a week, with a chance to skip two weeks if something comes up. A typical book take less than 8 hours to read. That's a little more than an hour a day to get 1 book a week.  Even if I'm a little busy during the week, I can easily pick up the slack on the weekend by reading 4 hours a day. In March I was already pretty far ahead, it looked like 50 books in a year would be a cake walk. I prefer a challenge and decided to go for the much more ambitious 100 books in one year. Unfortunately, now I was very far behind. I would need to read 3 to 4 books a week in order to catch up. I had to start changing things in order to make it: Stop reading novels like the 1050 page opus  Reamde , by Neal Stephenson or even the 613 page New York 2140 , by Kim Stanley Robinson. ...

As Ray Kurzweil says, (information) technology is accelerating .  This is great but increasingly we are seeing devices turning obsolete faster than ever. Who want's to get CRT tv, anymore - even if it was free? Why would I want to buy a motorcycle that doesn't have fuel injection? Would you want a 3 year old cell phone? When you watched a movie on TV, for the longest time, it was difficult to tell which decade it was filmed in.  You sometimes noticed when there were k-cars on the road and the movie wasn't trying to be set in the 80's.  But once computers and cell phone started appearing then you could tell quite quickly what decade, even what year the movie was probably made.   What worries me is the change of more expensive technologies in the future: My car is obsolete because it doesn't have fulltime internet access or because it doesn't self drive. My house is obsolete because it isn't smart or is too far in the countryside for high spee...

My old web page forusers.com  had been down for more than a year. It had used an old version of TurboGears which eventually my provider stopped supporting and then finally last month my account expired and I didn't renew. So it was really without a home.  This weekend I decided that I should put it back up.  It's been pretty good to me, it got me this great job  because they found my resume on my site. As I got the old files I found that I actually had more than 3 versions of the site.  The very first one was using Microsoft FrontPage .  My backup was littered with .htm files. Later I had used PHP , and quite a bit. It's interesting how I used PHP more as programming language and less as a templating language.  It was difficult to understand how the site looked, it was all code and functions.  I had to use the Wayback Machine to find out what it really looked like. Finally I had used Python and TurboGears.  After that I pretty much ...

Hello streetview, how are you doing?

Finally decided to buy scottkirkwood.com for my vanity URL, why not? It points to my blog.instead of the less memorable scottkirkwood.blogspot.com  and paying for 5 years is relatively cheap.

In the spirit of "Release Early/Release Often" I've shipped the first version of key-train ( key-train-0.1.0.zip ). Here's a screenshot: Features include: Training for all the lowercase keys on the main part of the keyboard in two languages (English/Brazilian Portuguese) and two keyboards (qwerty/ABTN).  More languages and keyboards should be easy to add. Easy for others to contribute  better lessons  and  new keyboards . Easy for others to translate the software using the standard  gettext  package (I recommend using  poedit ). The  key-train.pot  file is created automatically - so don't edit it.  For your language, you would create a .po file like,  this one . A reasonable progression of keys and training (27 lessons). Speed and accuracy training by typing in parts of Wikipedia articles. Only one lesson file is required for different languages and keyboards. But the program isn't complete, here's a list of the biggest p...

After a few power failures during a week of storms I rebooted my Ubuntu Linux computer and fsck found some errors. Next time I booted it found (and corrected) even more errors, until, eventually I wasn't able to boot anymore (couldn't find grub). I have a good backup system * so I wasn't too concerned (although this was my first real test).  I had run smartctl on the first sign of trouble and it didn't give any errors, so it didn't appear to be a hard disk failure. I figure this is an opportunity for me to setup 64bit version of Ubunt and I've also been thinking about dual booting to Windows ® because Steam looks like an easy and cheap way to install games. I put an old version of Windows XP in the drive and... it blue screened.  It just didn't want to install.  I tried two other versions and it also failed.  I then got the Ubuntu disk and it installed with no problems.  I tried Windows again, again it failed to install even though I had reformatted ...

Today I got a little sidetracked while working on my key-train (keyboard training) project.  I thought I might spruce it up a little by using a seven segment display for the digits (say for the words per minutes), similar to what kTouch has.  I found an open source font, but it appears to be difficult to just use a ttf font in GTK. So I figured, it's only 10 images, I'll just make them in svg. I vaguely remembered a heathenx inkscape podcast  describing how to make an LCD display and decided to use that at my base. Unfortunately, they didn't provide any source files in the show-notes (as far as I could see) so I had to watch and redo the drawings myself! By naming each of the seven segments I could create the 10 digits simply by deleting a few elements in one template svg file .  I can create the template as beautiful as I like and quickly create the 10 derived images with these programs . Unfortunately, both ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick don't hand...

Well I've done it again, started another open source project . Renata and I want Victor to learn how to touch type, but these days, it's hard to find a school that teaches just that. So I looked at what available in open source and found KTouch .  It's pretty good however I found some issues with it: The lecture files aren't very obvious. It's not clear, for example, that it has already loaded the default lecture file. The keyboard is rather plain looking. The scrolling text area you type in is nifty, but gets in the way for advanced users.  My typing speed is limited to how fast it can scroll back.  Also, as you get near the end of the line it's becomes difficult to see what characters are coming up, slowing you down and creating additional errors. Like many other typing tutor programs, it shows only one line of text at a time, it's not obvious how many lines you have left to do. The first time I ran it I thought it was going to go on forever. It doe...

I saw this week that Meet the Gimp is using my keyboard monitor program and gave me nice plug as well. It was thrill, but bittersweet, since key-mon still doesn't support the Wacom table (and I don't know how to fix it ). I also feel it could look a little better (at least that I can fix).

Street view has some great shot's of Lennoxville. Bishop's University View Larger Map Lion's Pub View Larger Map Also of the the house I grew up in in Montreal. Exibir mapa ampliado No street view for Kingston yet. But there's this areal view of where I used to go windsurfing. Exibir mapa ampliado

I've been busy and did lots of updates to key-mon , my keyboard status monitor. The big news is that it's now resizable! Normal size: Small size: Larger size: It can be scaled to any size not just three, here it is at 2x without the mouse and showing the meta (Windows) key: Heathenx is helping me get nicer looking images, especially at smaller sizes. For the really small sizes I needed to change the look a bit,  so now I have two sets of SVG files, one for the normal size and another for the smaller size. Creating the different sizes was a bit of a pain. GTK wants to read the svg from disk so any changes made to svg needs to be dumped to a temporary file.  Also GTK doesn't seem to have a parameter to load and resize, so I end up manipulating the svg so that it is scaled larger or smaller. The extra work was worth it, I think.  Some screencasts today are high resolution, so the key status monitor will be tiny.  Other screen casts are very small, ...

This weekend I was watching screencasters.heathenx.org a video podcast about Inkscape with the  Miro player. Heathenx had to apologize that his key status monitor wasn't displaying mouse activity.  This wasn't the first time I've seen problems with this utility, earlier in the year Meet the Gimp also had some problems getting it to work. I downloaded the program  and put in on my machine, and sure enough the mouse wasn't working for me either. Looking at the output, it complained that I have more than one mouse and it was going to pick the last one.  It lied, I looked at the code and it actually picked the the first one. I changed the code so that it did pick the last mouse and it worked.  I thought of submitting a patch, but I realized that arbitrarily picking the last one might break the program for others for which it was working. To my delight the code was written in Python, using PyGTK . It wasn't even that much code, I could probably write a simil...