It's almost Christmas. Time for a Central Heating failure F1.

Almost Christmas. The ideal time for the central heating to go wrong. we were getting an F1 error on the boiler. It means insufficient pressure. 

I did the usual things with a radiator key and that 'U' connector to refill the pipes and it worked again for a bit, but then failed again with the same error.

 I worked out it must be more than a simple DIY problem. Except when I contacted various plumbers no one was available. 

 I had to turn to physics.

The inside of our boiler is like something from NASA. But I realised that there must be an expansion tank inside for the radiator water. Check out the right hand side tank. It can't be simply a reserve tank, because it needs to maintain a certain pressure. 

 That's how I worked out that the expansion tank inside the boiler is cleverer than it looks. And why it has a bicycle tyre valve on it. Check out the middle of the steel tank.  

The water must go into a bladder where it can expand but gets pressurised from surrounding air in the tank. Compress air not water etc. (real physics)  

The expansion tank air, if insufficiently pressurised, won't create the starting pressure for the boiler. 

 So what to do? Don't try this at home etc. I thought it was a case for Joe Blow. I found my bike tyre pump, conneted it to the pressure vessel valve and pumped it to just under 1 bar. It only took about three pump fulls to do this. The boiler pressure was restored and hasn't given any more F1s since. 

An odd repair, strangely satisfying.

christmas cars

I've been doing some of that pre-Christmas driving recently. Many miles, Congestion Charge zones, ULEZ etc, yet - now - because I've gone electric, I don't have to pay. Well, okay £5 for 300 miles worth of fu-u-el.

I'd semi forgotten about London Traffic though. I was on the road by 06:00 but already stuck in a huge tail back on the M25. Meh. I remembered my old commute by car would mean leaving home by 06:20 to get on the M3 before half past and that way I'd miss the rush.

And coming home in the evening, I could land at Heathrow, be out of the airport by 20:00 and then drive along the M25 and onto the M3 in - yep - a traffic jam. Maybe I didn't get back to LHR until 9pm. Traffic jam. From Norway, I'd be one of the last out of T4. M3. Tailbacks. Pah.

Now I've moved to the Wild West, we have a traffic jam in the morning from about 8:45 until maybe 09:00. I try to avoid it, but don't get me started on tractors. Of course I understand that CLAAS 660 drivers are up before dawn and want to be putting their lovelies away by daybreak. And they do beat any SUV for the school run.

also fun going backwards

The thing about a blog is it goes backwards as well as forward 2022

2019 2018 2015 2014 2013 2011 2009 2008 2007 2006 1999

Tesla: worth a punt?

I'm wondering about EV car stocks and shares. Some will say it is a fool's mission to play the stock market [INSERT SCARY WARNING HERE], but I can't help wonder whether here's a unique situation at the moment because of the state that Tesla's shares are in. 

They have dropped to about half of their start the year position and therefore could be seen as a bit of a bargain. The drop is consequential on the twitter shenanigans and various short-sellers throwing out rumours about the share price. 

But consider: the company has a gross margin of around 25%, which is ridiculously high for the automotive sector. VW is 6.2% and BMW and Ford are about 15%-16%. Additionally, it had a suite of Gigafactories just to produce EVs. A couple of these (Berlin and Austin) are only ramping up production at present, from around 60k/Qtr compared with the Shanghai Giga factory at 250k/Qtr. 

Other manufacturers are repurposing their gasoline vehicles to electric, leaving the transmission tunnel in place and making a few cosmetic changes to the exterior. They say it is so they won't scare the client base.  A client base buying a legacy adaptation. I followed an electric beemer along the road the other day and it even had the two cutouts for the dual twin tailpipes.  They surely miss the point about a paradigm shift (I know, extra consultant bingo points for that mention).

The predictions are for Tesla to ship around 500,000 cars in 4Q22, which makes a total of around 1.4 million vehicles. Consider that BMW produces 2.2 million or 2.5 if we include the Rollers and Minis. Conceivably Tesla could be bigger than BMW in another year. 

Assuming that there will also be a Tesla share buyback during 2023, the share price could rise, in line with both the results and the effect of the buyback.

But I also look for ideas and the rumoured Tesla Model 2, or whatever, is of immense interest. It reminds me of our Alfa Guilietta. If a denuded Model 2 comes in close to $25,000 then it could be a real challenge to the lower end, knowing it will come with the same chipset and operating system as the high end vehicles. 

Now factor in the truck and the improved so called self driving, and we have a string of interesting enhancements. 

But let us not forget Tesla is down 51% year to date. Rivian is on life support at down 74%, Nio has dropped 61%, and even Ford is down 36% over the same period. 

The difference is that Tesla is kitted out with Gigafactories ready for pure EV production.

No recommendation here, just an observation.

Casino Britain

So, now it starts. Casino Britain. Tilt.

Strange Games : Slow Horses S1 and start of S2

I should have posted about Slow Horses sooner, but the second series (aka Dead Lions) has just popped up on Apple TV. 

It's been sympahetically redrafted for television and has some cracking actors including a shapeshifting Gary Oldman and ice-cold calculating Kirsten Scott Thomas. There's a London atmosphere often in close so the exact setting isn't immediately obvious unless you've been there. 

Plenty of the action takes place at night or in dimly-lit bars or cellars, yet the filming of the series is like the olden days of film noir when they knew how to put haloes around people and brighten up the pieces where there was action. Even an out of focus baby alarm is dramatically filmed. I really appreciate that they've taken some care over making the dark parts watchable. It is the same with the narrative jump edits. Something as simple as going up some stairs will have two 'up closes' and a flicker of a long view between them. Nice and almost non-linear - they didn't have to, but they did anyway and all the better for it. 

 Then there's the blend of dialogue between serious spy talk and bits of ribbing banter and occasionally daft scenes that just get sprung - like the jammed car CD playing Coldplay.

I can see the setup of the Slough House department with its manilla civil service folders is similar to the way the off-the-books setup is played in Killing Eve, and I wonder whether there were any inspirational points borrowed between them? 

 Gary Oldman, who has also played Le Carre's George Smiley, seems to take a delight in this world turned upside down view of espionage. Put all the slow horses (presumed failures) together and rain down often un-PC abuse upon them. A sure fire formula, but I'm not sure for what, exactly. 

 

I'm enjoying this series: 

1. Because it forced me to go back to the first series and watch it all over again. 
2. Because we are now only on book 2, and I'm eagerly waiting for episode 3 to drop. 
3. Because I know there are at least five more books in the Mick Herron series. Oh yes, and Mick Jagger wrote and performs the theme. 

schlecht

 I'll be off to my Stammtisch later for Weihnachtsfeier und Geschwätz. Sad to see that actions of rogue right populism have now leached into the German system, creating an attempt to storm the German goverment buildings. 

 These far right protestors are using the ant-vax capaign to drive support for their wider goals. They previously used Merkel's acceptance of migration and fears of islamisation. 

The AfD (Alternative for Germany) uses its legitmised position to cultivate dissent and even includes 83 members in the German Parliament. Infiltration is part of their modus operandi. 

A German military KSK (Kommando Spezialkräfte) special forces unit was disbanded recently because it contained many extremists. Discovered buried in the garden by police, a Sergeant-Major's house had two kilograms of plastic explosives, a detonator, a fuse, an AK-47, a silencer, two knives, a crossbow and thousands of rounds of ammunition, much of it believed to have been stolen from the German military. 

Some 48,000 rounds of ammunition and 62 kilograms of explosives have also 'disappeared'.

art of the dodge

Remarkable that the dodgy ex-president has now been found guilty on 17 counts of financial crime including tax fraud. How remarkable that he can bounce free from this with a mere $1.62 million fine, which I expect he will contest. 

Plenty rests on a Mr. Weisselberg, who struck a plea deal with prosecutors. Weisselberg admitted that he had reaped about $1.8 million (ie more than Trumps fine) in indirect and hidden compensation, allowing him to evade hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes. The benefits included a rent-free apartment in a Trump building overlooking the Hudson River; leased cars for him and his wife; and Trump-paid private school tuition for their grandchildren.

The above 2018 art installation inside a Trump hotel hinted at what was to come. I wonder how many others are hoping to avoid the searchlight?

Trump is naturally calling it all a witch hunt.

enemy of the state? A supermarket hack, man

It has become slightly annoying visiting a wall-known supermarket and innocently setting off the theft alarms when I leave. I decided to ask the security guard what was happening and we experimented with my jacket, then phone and then wallet.

I was convinced it was the phone and had even seen other people complaining about similar effects, but in the end it turned out to be my wallet.

Apparently a single RFID card won't cause it, but put several together and their combined signal is enough to trigger 'modernised' supermarket systems. 

The security guard was quite helpful and suggested I needed an RFID-proof wallet. A truly first world problem?  I could remember enough schoolboy physics such that I could line my wallet with aluminium foil and it should block the signals like a Faraday cage.

It would work like the one that Gene Hackman used in The Conversation and then reprised in Enemy of the State, only much smaller. They are like those mesh bags they give out at some concerts to put one's phone in. 

I also discovered that there are credit card sized anti-RFID cards which can be placed dierctly in the wallet. They are also triggered by the same scanner frequencies but then send out jammer signals. Now that is worth trying, although I expect I'll be tapped on the shoulder again.

Our Tragic Universe

I originally trialled mastodon back in 2018. It was much more of a DIY project back in those days and I even tried setting up a home made decentralised server. I did my usual thing of setting up a test userid, but now I can't find it. Like those bitcoins I left on a server that I eventually scrapped. 

C'est la vie. 

This time I followed a message from Scarlett Thomas, which took me into the world of Mastodon. Thomas has been a positive influence on my attempts at novel writing and also the appreciation of the artifact of a book. A couple of her marvellous black-edged paper novels continue to inspire - The End of Mr Y and Our Tragic Universe. 

Mr Y freaked me out with ideas of homeopathy in a parallel univese and Tragic Universe plays big with these ideas, blending cosmology, physics, tarot and foxy narrative theory, Our heroine(s) in both books wend their way through asking many questions including whether they are a superbeing. I realise that my own novel The Watcher must have been subconsciously influenced by these ideas. 

And at the prosaic end of fun, Tragic Universe also - even after ten years -  has a particular new-book inky-aroma from the pages, which works well if you open it slightly and dive in nose first. 

Penhaligons, take note:  'He's got his nose in a good book' etc. 

And back to Mastodon, and its 7 million subscribers. A subtlety is its distributed nature. Instead of big central servers, the architecture of Mastoden requires the servers to be spread around. Add to that the inconsistencies of the User Experience, different on a web browser from within a smartphone App. 

I'm here 

I can't help think there will be a tipping point when the Signal to Noise tragically increases to the level of other well-known social platforms. I'm following an experimentally curated set of users to see the way that things change. 

Or not.

#LTN: watching and waiting

Twitter has become the news in its own right, a little like some journalists who stumble into the story. I'll bide my time to see how it plays out. After all, many well-known names have been around on the system for a long time. I guess I'm also a #ltn (low twitter number) 

Anyone can find out this stuff.

Despite all the naysayers, I suspect Musk will weed most of the pile-on-noise-merchants out of the system.

But then, I'm holding economically priced Tesla shares as well, since they temporarily became discounted.

tout va bien - A Book of Days - Patti Smith

I've been reading Patti Smith's new book - A Book of Days. It proto-blogs years of her experiences across art, music, photography, poems and features many great moments from a life. Every day of the year features a picture and a short text. 

It's a work of loving art.

I first obtained her music - Horses, - with that Robert Mapplethorpe photo of her emulation of Rimbaud, back when I had a red Ford Escort and worked in Germany.

The cassette - long since gone - accompanied my trips from Ostende to Stuttgart.

Then later - Just Kids - a slim memoire of her relationship with Mapplethorpe all the time continuing music and art. 

In the new book she features many: Murakami, Camus, Kurosawa, Lou Reed and Martin Luther King. Hendrix and the Electric Ladyland Studio where she made Horses and argued with producer John Cale. There's Virginia Woolf’s bed with its embroidered bedspread, Georgia O’Keeffe’s with a more humble covering ; Frida Kahlo’s with a spooky black skeleton above it; John Keats’s, which 'seems to contain the luminous dust of his consumptive nights'.

She holds a Polaroid Land Camera 250 on the cover of the book, which she used in earlier times to take the photos. Later, on her daughter Jesse's advice, she took to Instagram, where she now has many followers.

It's a book to dip into as well as read. There are so many inspirations, given and personal.

8 January

‘As a young girl, I admired the skater’s attire, eventually adopting the look as my own. The plate belonged to my mother who always tried to make me wear bright colours. The skater won out. He dwells beside my copy of Ariel, given to me by Robert Mapplethorpe in 1968.’