Random musings on software in an embedded world.
In the summer of 2026 we took a two week trip to Canada including stays in Montréal, Toronto, and the Atlantic coast of New Brunswick. The house we rented in New Brunswick did not accept credit cards and instead asked to be paid using the Canadian Interac system, which ties an email address to a Canadian bank account. We've used wise.com to send payments in Europe for some time, and fortunately…
US policy toward electric vehicles abruptly changed in 2025, rapidly winding down the sales incentives which had previously been in place and resulting in blunting what had been healthy growth in the sales of electric vehicles. Rising gasoline prices in 2026 has restored some of that interest, but primarily in used electric vehicles now as supplies of new vehicles have shrunk. Nonetheless the fact…
Postmortem Culture means getting more actionable followups out of each Postmortem, and a very frequent action item we look for is, "where did we not have the visibility that we wanted to have?" Adding metrics, log messages, and trace points are all fine action items to take after an outage. Surely there is something which could have been more clear and reduced the time to remediate. Observability…
A service I wish to will into existance would help us better leverage our observability work, our traces and metrics and logs, in incident response during an outage. I want the service to be part of a channel where we’re working on an outage, in Slack or Microsoft Teams or in some incident response tool, so the agent can see what is being worked on and get context of what we’re looking at. I want…
Texas has long been a leader in the deployment of solar and wind, though conflicted about it. Power outages in Texas are often attributed to wind and solar, with the sage observation that the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine. With the Texas grid mostly isolated from the rest of the US, gaps in generation mostly cannot be ameliorated by importing power from elsewhere. For…
Military records of your German ancestors can be illuminating, though it is very hit-or-miss what records survive. You can order military records using the forms at the Bundesarchiv . We sent a request to poststelle-pa@bundesarchiv.de in Deccember of 2025, and in April 2026 received an email response with PDF files of all records found. For our great-grandfather's service in WW I, only the index…
Our 2016 Kia Soul EV is able to charge at about 7 KWatts using our charger at home, a level2 EV charger built into the SolarEdge solar inverter. It has a CCS plug. Today I charged the car while out and about, using the other charging port on the Kia: CHAdeMO, a DC high power charging standard. I should put "high power" in scare quotes as it is quite pedestrian by today's standards, it is a…
A number of citizenship processes require a certificate of good conduct that one does not have a criminal record in another country. Within the US this is generally an FBI Identify and History Summary Check (IdHSC). One can have the FBI IdHSC within a day, it is not a complex process. One starts by applying at the FBI IdHSC page and you get back a file number immediately. You give the file number…
My mother was German, am I a German citizen? That depends on when you were born a whether your parents were married. It notably does not depend on where you were born, whether in Germany or not. If your parents were not married and never married: German mothers have always passed on German citizenship to children born out of wedlock. This question commonly comes up in the context of a German…
On services I run, I make sure that we have a prober to check how long the site's certificate has remaining to allow AlertManager rules to be written if it is getting close. Hey LabCorp hit me up, we should talk.
I let our LG Washer-Dryer connect to Wi-Fi, but blocked its access to the Internet. I don't want it communicating with whatever cloud service they run, I just hoped there would be a local web page to scrape or some other port open so I could build a "Send a Signal message when the dryer finishes" service. Alas, no, it only makes outgoing connections to its cloud service. I'm not ready to commit…
The Personenstandsgesetz (PStG) specifies the privacy protection periods for civil records in Germany, after which the records move to an archive where they become publicly available for anyone to access. 110 years after a birth 80 years after a marriage 30 years after a death The Hannover Stadtarchiv closed in March of 2025 to move to a new building. The archive had gradually fallen behind: where…
I really do appreciate that recent Android releases notice and notify a user when an Airtag is accompanying them . Stalking via surreptitious Airtag is a real thing which happens. One might think that the specific phrasing of "unknown Apple Airtag" implies the existence of a known Apple Airtag, but if such functionality exists I have not found it. I would really love to have a "it's ok, that one…
Clock at Sansucci in Potsdam This coming week is special. You might know it as "intercontinental meeting scheduling goes sideways" week. Most of Europe adjusted their clocks for daylight savings this morning, the US does so in a week. German Consulates around the world add new appointments at midnight in Germany. Polling for an appointment right before midnight has the best chance of grabbing one,…
German Consulates around the world add new appointments every weekday at midnight in Germany . For example, that is 3pm in California — or rather, it was at 3pm in California. Europe moves the clocks by an hour for Daylight Savings Time on October 26th, which happened a few hours ago at the time of this writing. The US moves its clocks one week from now, on November 2. So for this one week,…
The market for forklifts and similar lift trucks electrified early. The market for Class I lift trucks intended mainly for use inside warehouses crossed 50% electric in approximately 2010. In indoor environments there is a substantial advantage for a vehicle which produces no exhaust fumes. The early models used lead-acid batteries, gradually shifting to Lithium chemistries as batteries aimed at…
The California Independent System Operator (CAISO) has published a report regarding electricity generation in the summer of 2025, which includes data through the end of September 2025. They provide a nifty interactive chart at that link, and the underlying data is easy to find in the source of the web page. I've included the data for July and September at the bottom of this post, as we're going to…
In our collection of family photos we have a number of sets taken in Germany over the decades: in the early 1950s by my spouse's grandparents in the late 1960s by my father while stationed in Germany in 1995 by my spouse in summer 2024 on our first family trip to Germany in summer 2025 on our second family trip to Germany In our trips of the last several summers we've made an effort to take photos…
Tell me your game development is done outside of the United States without telling me your game development is done outside of the United States. As an alumnus of the University of Michigan, I approve of the association of Ohio with "Calamity".
**Try our New Beta Features**: Create a more engaging reading experience with the help of Google Google Search previews: Easily insert visual Google Search previews for popular people, locations, pop-culture and more directly in your blog! In Compose View, look for the ‘G’ button in the editor tool bar to get started. That is the notice greeting me at the top of draft.blogger.com today. After…
If you've ever flown into Germany you've seen the two lines at customs and immigration, one for citizens of the European Union and one for non-EU citizens. The non-EU line is often longer and slower, though not exceptionally so at the times I've been through. Nonetheless in a family like ours, where the rest of them go through the EU line and I wait in the non-EU line, it leads to some extra…
Microservices entered the lexicon of systems engineering a number of years ago, breaking up a system which might once have been delivered as a single large binary — though usually with separate relational database at least — to instead consist of a series of small microservices each performing a specific function and communicating amongst themselves to provide an overall service. In my…
Today I rode the Bay Area Rapid Transit train from the peninsula up to San Francisco. Our stop at the 24th and Mission station was unusually long. The conductor announced on the speaker that they were rebooting part of the train computer. The universal first troubleshooting step now extends to turning the train off and back on.
In November 2020 California voters passed Measure RR to fund electrification of Caltrain down the San Francisco Peninsula. After several years of construction, the new electrified trains entered service on September 21, 2024: exactly one year ago at the time of this writing. The electrification measure was an audacious plan for Caltrain to recover from the Covid-driven disruption in travel…
Android keyboards can be quite sophisticated, including learning of commonly used words or languages. Some of these result in uploading what you enter to a service you may not know about. The Signal app on Android includes a setting to say that its keyboard input should not be uploaded. Malicious keyboard apps can ignore this, but if a malicious keyboard has made its way onto your device I think…