Tag: TeslaOS

Tesla OS 2020.16.2.1

TimeHorse May 20, 2020 No Comments

Finally!

TeslaFi had been spamming me with news about TeslaOS 2020.16 for a while and I’ve been itching to see what, after giving us the amazing stop at a stop sign in the last minor update.

Turns out, not much. I am mostly unimpressed by Tesla with this update, though nonetheless very appreciative. Autoformatting a DashCam drive—I wonder if it supports 2TB yet—and a better layout for Easter Eggs are, after all, improvements, even if the Easter Eggs aren’t really hidden gems anymore.

The coolest new feature, though, is the new SuperCharger filter, allowing the driver to only see Version 3 stations and filter out all the slower ones. I love the fact that I have free, lifetime SuperCharging, and one of these days, I’m gonna cross the continents with that perk.

Overall, I’m not disappointed despite being underwhelmed. And one rumor is that this, or a soon to be released version will add V2G to the Tesla. I can’t wait until that rolls out as the Tesla Battery Pack may make for a new, mobile Powerwall. Mind you, even if #CO2Fre could do V2G, my house isn’t equipped for it anyway. So, even if it doesn’t have V2G, it’s still a cool update!

Tesla OS 2020.16.2.1
Tesla OS 2020.16.2.1 adds a new toy box interface, a SuperCharger filter, and auto-formatting of DashCam media. © 2020, Jeffrey C. Jacobs

Gentle reader, if you have been keeping up with me since 11 February of this year, you know that I have been posting once a day since then. As such, today marks a hundred days of a hundred daily posting. Through that, I’ve shared with you exciting electric car news, updated to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, my struggles to get the Equal Rights Amendment to be our Twenty-Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, written about my many works of fiction, and the many books of nonfiction I voraciously read to be a better scientist. I’ve shared with you my cosplay adventures, and my love of Doctor Who, my love of games, and a bit of my speaking in tongues as well as delivering speeches and singing to my heart’s content. I’ve talked about international travel and how I love to fly there in my own plane, discussed my acting and my dietary needs. And most of all I’ve told you I’m an excellent coder who is always keen for new work. Thanks for riding with me as we cruise upon the cloud to another one hundred posts!

Tesla OS 2020.12.11.1

Tesla OS 2020.12.11.1

TimeHorse May 5, 2020 No Comments

As I went to bed last night, I decided to check #CO2Fre to see if there were any Tesla Operating System Updates. TeslaFi sends me emails when a new TeslaOS is found in the wild, so I had a feeling I might be due for another update. I was not disappointed. Just before bed, I set #CO2Fre to update. After the update finished, I had Tesla OS 2020.12.11.1, and the 01:00 charge began.

I was eager to see what the new TeslaOS would bring. Alas, technically, it was nothing new. I’m guessing it may be internal improvements to Stop at Stop Signs, but since I can’t test that—or the DashCam viewer, it’s kind of moot. Nonetheless, pretty cool to get a new TeslaOS.

Stop at Stop Signs
This is the same message from Tesla OS 2020.12.5 and it’s unchanged in 2020.12.11.1. Still, can’t wait to try out the automatic stopping at stop signs and stop lights. © 2020 Jeffrey C. Jacobs

Overall, I was happy with the update and I want to share a screen capture of the release notes, even if they’re unchanged. I then wanted to share version number page just to confirm I was upgraded. I didn’t think much of it but then I was startled by a field I hadn’t noticed.

Tesla OS 2020.12.11.1
New Tesla Software, version 2020.12.11.1. The release notes are unchanged. Note though, the Premium Connectivity! Yes, I purchased #CO2Fre in Bergen, Norway, on the tram, at 10:59 AM 24 May 2018, meaning I have Premium Connectivity for Life! © 2020, Jeffrey C. Jacobs

I never noticed before that I also had the Premium Connectivity package. I was unsure what that was, so I looked it up. And that’s when I was astounded.

You see, I purchased #CO2Fre in Bergen, Norway. I was on holiday and was checking my email as I was waiting for the Cable Car to the top of the Ulriken. I had delayed ordering #CO2Fre despite getting the option in April, because I wanted all-wheel drive. So, that morning, I spotted an email from 01:48:06 local time, which was 16:48:06 Pacific Daylight Time, and, nine hours later, I was seeing it.

I didn’t hesitate. I clicked the button to order and elected every premium option. I waited this long, I wanted #CO2Fre to be fully loaded. When I was finished, it was 10:59:16 local time, or 01:59.16 Pacific Daylight, Thursday, 24 May. Ironically, I ordered the car, in a sense, minutes after receiving it when adjusted for time zone.

In any case, the point is I ordered #CO2Fre before 30 June, 2018, meaning, it seems, I qualify for Lifetime Premium Connectivity.

That’s awesome, as that means I can watch as much Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and RiffTrax as I like on Twitch, ready for anytime I’m stuck at a Free V3 SuperCharger. And when I’m done with filling up on lifetime complementary fuel, I can get back to cruising on the cloud.

Stop at Stop Signs, and record, under 1TB

TimeHorse April 26, 2020 1 Comment

The third time’s the charm. After over a week of trying to get the Tesla DashCam to work, a USB Stick arrived yesterday. After again formatting with a GUID Partition Table, a FAT32 file system, and adding the /TeslaCam directory, I plugged it into #CO2Fre.

USB Stick
Installed a USB Stick with GUID Partition Map, FAT32 drive format and /TeslaCam in its root folder.It worked! © 2020, Jeffrey C. Jacobs

When I then looked at the screen, lo and behold, the DashCam was restored!

DashCam Restored
The TeslaCam is back! The USB Stick did the trick © 2020, Jeffrey C. Jacobs

But that wasn’t all! Turns out I also got the 2020.12.6 TeslaOS. Eager to install, I hit the install now button because I knew this update would be adding auto-stop at stop signs and stop lights. The quirk with the update is that it will even stop at green lights, so if you want it to keep going you need to keep your foot on the accelerator to get it to run the green light. It’s probably okay, though, to let it stop on yellow or red. Also, it won’t turn for you; to do that, you need to take control of the wheel.

Finally, once that was installed and Stop at Traffic Lights was activated, I decided to have another go with my 2TB SanDisk Extreme SSD. Because it was also formatted properly and had the same directory structure as the USB Stick, I had a hunch it was because the drive was a whopping 2TB that the Tesla couldn’t recognize it.

With a little work, I re-formatted the drive as GUID, with one FAT32 partition with 996GB and another 1TB of free space. After adding the /TeslaCam directory, it worked like a charm!

In conclusion, although the 2TB SanDisk Extreme SSD drive works with Tesla, Tesla cannot understand drives above at least 1TB. This seems like a failing of the TeslaOS, but one I can live with. After all, my long-term plan is to have a Raspberry Pi Zero W installed and use the 2TB drive for portable backups.

Now that I have my DashCam back, and have the automatic stopping at stop signs, I can’t wait to take #CO2Fre for a spin. I hope to be cruising on a cloud soon!

TeslaCam, Tesla Can’t

TimeHorse April 20, 2020 2 Comments

I haven’t been able to use the TeslaCam since 27 July 2019. That’s because, around TeslaOS 2019.28.1, Tesla broke most USB Sticks used for Dashcam functionality, because, it claimed, they were too slow.

Not having a DashCam and having such a mysterious and incomprehensible error—my USB stick was fast enough—I was afraid to buy a new USB stick to see if I could get it working again. For months I dithered on the issue, totally unsure what Tesla wanted, and wanting so badly not to waste money on a device that would fail with Tesla.

Compound that with, in December, 2019, thanks to an AutoPilot, #CO2Fre failed to stop when a vehicle with California plates cut me off by jumping into the exit lane ahead of me at the last minute, causing $4,000 worth of damage I can’t remotely afford to pay. The scratches, therefore, remain to this day. And as no solace, I don’t even have the Dashcam video to go over the details even if I wanted to make an Insurance claim. So, I have scratches but still no Dashcam.

Then TeslaOS 2020.12.5 came out, which added support for watching Dashcam videos within #CO2Fre. Since I had the time off thanks to Covidapolis, I decided to try again with the Dashcam, and found this neat video:

Thanks to that video I decided to buy a 2TB SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD drive, a SamSung SXDC UHS-I EVO Select Card, and a Raspberry Pi Zero W.

I didn’t have access to my car because of the hypochondriac until the day of my #CO2Fre demo. I plugged in the SanDisk drive with its USB-C to USB-A adaptor and… nothing. I had the drive plugged in, but no camera was showing, and I couldn’t show off any of the Dashcam features during my entire presentation, including Dashcam footage of the speed test on the main screen after I parked, despite having the drive plugged in. The demo still went well, but I’m annoyed how hard I tried to get this working and still failed.

No Camera Icon
Sometimes the Camera with an X appears, but usually there’s no camera icon whatsoever, as can be seen here. © 2020, Jeffrey C. Jacobs

Afterwards, I tried to play around some more. Doing so requires me to go through decontamination because, for some reason, the hypochondriac thinks #CO2Fre has SARS-CoV-2. Meaning, I have to keep changing my clothes every time I go to the car because sitting in my car contaminates my clothes.

The drive was exFAT, so I reformatted it as FAT32. The drive did flash on the screen after some cord giggling, but it said it wasn’t formatted properly despite having the TeslaCam folder and being named TeslaCam. Since I’ve read that Tesla supports exFAT, I formatted it back as that, and it sits now, unable to connect.

2TB SanDisk
I have a 2TB SanDisk Solid-State Drive USB 3.1 compatible 10GB/s Drive plugging into #CO2Fre with a USB-C connector and a USB-C to USB-A adaptor hooked into #CO2Fre, yet #CO2Fre can’t see it! © 2020, Jeffrey C. Jacobs

I also tried my MicroSD chip with an adaptor. Originally, the chip was supposed to be part of the Raspberry Pi, but I wanted to test to see if it could be used as the TeslaCam directly. No dice. I’d hook up the Raspberry Pi and try with that, but I have to finish updating my Résumé and fix my broken Zone File updater for Reston Writers first. I just have too much going on to worry about going any further with this nightmare of Tesla‘s.

The way I see it, the drive works in a PC, the drive works in a Mac, it just doesn’t work in #CO2Fre. When you’ve tried everything else, the simple answer it so blame Tesla. So, I made a Mobile Service Request and they should be here Friday morning.

Why must Tesla make this so hard!?!?

In any case, unless I find another set of clothes to wear, even without my Dashcam, I shall very much miss cruising on a cloud.

50 Science Books I’d like to read

TimeHorse April 10, 2020 2 Comments

Last year, when we were setting the schedule for the Bowie Bevy of Brainy Books, I went through my Audible back catalog and by my calculations, there are 209 titles in my library that I’ve yet to listen to. Some of these are scheduled in my upcoming meetup events but most are gathering dust as I am busy with the official book club list of titles.

Now that it’s time to chose the 2020–2021 Science Book Club. Although I run that meetup and have run it for longer than the founder Megan Thaler, which still amazes me, I always allow a democratic decision on the series of books we read, always scheduling the top 10–12 to form the cycle for the following 11–13 months, with December reserved for our retro cycle books.

I should explain, the Science Book Club has been running since 2009 and has a tremendous back catalog, and although I didn’t attend every meeting, I have attended every one since I began running it in the Summer of 2013. As such, I have a general rule that we can’t do any book we’ve done before in the group as part of the main eleven month year. Also, I require that books be published within the last ten years. I am a little lenient on this in terms of allowing books technically eleven years old given that I’m planning for books into 2021 but allow books from 2010, but no earlier. But official, the rule is no repeats, no fiction, and no books older than ten years. If a book fails any of those tests, it goes into the December book bin, were I allow anything goes!

After winnowing out all the older books, the Great Courses and Fiction books in my back catalog, I was left with fifty books the Science Book Club has never discussed and are at most ten years old. The are as follows:

  • [Medicine] The Case Against Sugar (Gary Taubes, 2016)📖🕮💻💿🏢/384
  • [Sociology] God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales (Penn Jillette, 2011)📖🕮💻💿🏢/256
  • [Neurology] The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery (Sam Kean, 2014)📖🕮💻💿🏢/416
  • [Neurology] The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human (V. S. Ramachandran, 2011)📖🕮💻💿🏢/384
  • [Mathematics] Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data (Charles Wheelan, 2013)📖🕮💻💿🏢/302
  • [Chemistry] The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II (Denise Kiernan, 2013)📖🕮💻💿🏢/400
  • [Medicine] Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them (Jennifer Wright, 2017)🕮💻💿🏢/336
  • [Neurology] Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Nick Bostrom, 2014)📖🕮💻💿🏢/352
  • [Ecology] Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (Bill McKibben, 2010)📖🕮💻💿🏢/272
  • [Sociology] Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find – and Keep – Love (Amir Levine, Rachel Heller, 2010)📖🕮💻💿🏢/304
  • [Chemistry] The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women (Kate Moore, 2017)📖🕮💻💿🏢/496
  • [Biology] American Pharoah: The Untold Story of the Triple Crown Winner’s Legendary Rise (Joe Drape, 2016)📖🕮💻💿🏢/304
  • [Technology] Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (Ashlee Vance, 2015)📖🕮💻💿🏢/400
  • [Astronomy] The 4-Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality (Richard Panek, 2011)📖🕮💻💿🏢/297
  • [Physics] The Hunt for Vulcan: …And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe (Thomas Levenson, 2015)📖🕮💻💿🏢/256
  • [Biology] The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World (Peter Wohlleben, 2016)📖🕮💻💿🏢/288
  • [Genetics] A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution (Jennifer A. Doudna, Samuel H. Sternberg, 2017)📖🕮💻💿🏢/304
  • [Physics] The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth (Michio Kaku, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/368
  • [Technology] Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything (Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith, 2017)📖🕮💻💿🏢/368
  • [Neurology] Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts (Annie Duke, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/288
  • [Mathematics] The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America’s Enemies (Jason Fagone, 2017)📖🕮💻💿🏢/464
  • [Medicine] Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History (Florence Williams, 2012)📖🕮💻💿🏢/352
  • [Technology] Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War (Paul Scharre, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/448
  • [Chemistry] Atomic Adventures: Secret Islands, Forgotten N-Rays, and Isotopic Murder – A Journey into the Wild World of Nuclear Science (James Mahaffey, 2017)📖🕮💻💿FALSE/464
  • [Medicine] Pandora’s Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong (Paul A. Offit, MD, 2017)🕮💻💿🏢/288
  • [Medicine] Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ (Giulia Enders, 2015)📖💻💿🏢/271
  • [Biology] American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West (Nate Blakeslee, 2017)📖🕮💻💿🏢/320
  • [Biology] Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (Frans de Waal, 2016)📖🕮💻💿🏢/352
  • [Biology] The Triumph of Seeds: How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses & Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History (Thor Hanson, 2015)📖🕮💻💿🏢/304
  • [Mathematics] Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (Philip E. Tetlock, Dan Gardner, 2015)📖🕮💻💿🏢/352
  • [Medicine] First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (Bee Wilson, 2015)📖🕮💻💿🏢/352
  • [Medicine] Are u ok?: A Guide to Caring for Your Mental Health (Kati Morton LMFT, 2018)🕮💻💿FALSE/256
  • [Medicine] Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine (Thomas Hager, 2019)📖🕮💻💿🏢/320
  • [Physics] The Second Kind of Impossible: The Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter (Paul Steinhardt, 2019)📖🕮💻💿🏢/400
  • [Medicine] The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth: And Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine (Thomas Morris, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/368
  • [Sociology] Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free (Wednesday Martin PhD, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/320
  • [Mathematics] Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (Sabine Hossenfelder, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/304
  • [Neurology] The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home (Dan Ariely, 2010)📖🕮💻💿🏢/334
  • [Medicine] Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (David Quammen, 2012)📖🕮💻💿🏢/592
  • [Economics] Money: The Unauthorized Biography (Felix Martin, 2014)📖🕮💻💿🏢/336
  • [Physics] The Science of Interstellar (Kip Thorne, 2014)📖💻💿🏢/336
  • [Ecology] The Omnivore’s Dilemma: Young Readers Edition (Michael Pollan, 2015)📖🕮💻💿🏢/400
  • [Mathematics] Code Warriors: NSA’s Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union (Stephen Budiansky, 2016)📖🕮💻💿🏢/416
  • [Evolution] Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Yuval Noah Harari, 2017)📖🕮💻💿🏢/464
  • [Medicine] Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe (Serhii Plokhy, 2018)📖🕮💻💿FALSE/432
  • [Physics] The Order of Time (Carlo Rovelli, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/256
  • [Sociology] The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (Mark Forsyth, 2012)📖💻💿FALSE/304
  • [Technology] The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition (Donald A. Norman, 2013)📖💻💿🏢/368
  • [Medicine] Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes (Nathan H. Lents, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/256
  • [Ecology] My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places (Mary Roach, 2013)📖💻💿🏢/160

I should explain here the shorthand I use to indicate the formats supported by each book. Unicode has icons for each of the formats as follows:

  • 📖: Paperback
  • 🕮: Hard Cover (Note, this Unicode Glyph doesn’t appear on all platforms)
  • 💻: eBook, such as Kindle
  • 💿: Audiobook, as in Audible
  • 🏢: The book is in the Library (this glyph, when present, contains a link to its entry in the Fairfax County Public Library card catalog)

The long and short of that is, to enter fifty new books into the nomination queue is a very tedious affair and took me so many hours yesterday, I forgot to post my note about TeslaOS 2020.20.5 on Thursday.

For the record, my fifty entries were appended to the end of the existing seventeen moniations already made or carried forward from the last poll. We are, therefore, in addition to the above, also considering the following books:

  • [Physics] Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality (Anil Ananthaswamy, 2018)🕮💻💿🏢/304
  • [Genetics] Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves (George M. Church, Ed Regis, 2012)📖🕮💻🏢/304
  • [Genetics] Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize (Sean B. Carroll, 2013)📖🕮💻🏢/592
  • [Biology] The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (Andrea Wulf, 2015)📖🕮💻💿🏢/496
  • [Evolution] From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (Daniel C. Dennett, 2017)🕮💻💿🏢/496
  • [Technology] Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (John Carreyrou, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/352
  • [Biology] The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World’s Rarest Species (Carlos Magdalena, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/272
  • [Sociology] Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions (Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths, 2016)📖🕮💻💿🏢/368
  • [Ecology] The Uninhabitable Earth, Life after Warming (David Wallace-Wells, 2019)📖🕮💻💿🏢/320
  • [Astronomy] The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe: How to Know What’s Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake (Steven Novella, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/512
  • [Health] How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (Michael Pollan, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/480
  • [Geology] Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History (Lewis Dartnell, 2019)📖🕮💻💿🏢/320
  • [Geology] The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions (Peter Brannen, 2017)📖🕮💻💿🏢/322
  • [Ecology] The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature (David George Haskell, 2012)📖🕮💻💿🏢/268
  • [Ecology] The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (David George Haskell, 2017)📖🕮💻💿🏢/304
  • [Biology] Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live (Rob Dunn, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/323
  • [Genetics] The Gene: An Intimate History (Siddhartha Mukherjee, 2016)📖🕮💻💿🏢/608

Thus, over the weekend, assuming no more last-minute nominations, I will be create a poll with sixty-seven entries, asking my members to rank them on a five-point system and then use those star rankings and member attendance history to calculate the top 10–12 books and then generate our schedule through the summer of 2021—with the exception of December.

As for the December, 2020 meeting, nineteen books from my back catalog didn’t satisfy my ten year or repeat criterion, and so I added them to the three books carried over from last December’s poll. The first three books are the ones carried over, the rest are from my back catalog.

  • Measuring Eternity: The Search for the Beginning of Time (Martin Gorst, 2001)📖🕮💻🏢/352
  • How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil, 2012)📖🕮💻💿🏢/352
  • (Fiction) The Witness Paradox: A Time Traveler Anthology (Martin Wilsey, TR Dillon, Jeffrey C. Jacobs, 2018)📖🕮💻FALSE/246
  • iWoz: How I Invented the Personal Computer and Had Fun Along the Way (Steve Wozniak, 2006)📖🕮💻💿🏢/313
  • How the Mind Works (Steven Pinker, 1998)📖🕮💻💿🏢/660
  • Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution (Neil deGrasse Tyson, 2004)📖🕮💻💿🏢/336
  • Fear Of Physics: A Guide For The Perplexed (Lawrence M. Krauss, 1993)📖🕮💻💿FALSE/224
  • The Elephant Whisperer: My Life with the Herd in the African Wild (Lawrence Anthony, Graham Spence, 2009)📖🕮💻💿🏢/384
  • Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic & the Domestic (Esther Perel, 2006)📖🕮💻💿🏢/272
  • The Invention of Air: A Story Of Science, Faith, Revolution, And The Birth Of America (Steven Johnson, 2008)📖🕮💻💿🏢/272
  • Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner, 2006)📖🕮💻💿🏢/336
  • Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos (Michio Kaku, 2004)📖🕮💻💿FALSE/428
  • The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms (Amy Stewart, 2004)📖🕮💻💿🏢/256
  • The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman (Richard P. Feynman, 1999)📖🕮💻💿🏢/270
  • Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (Mary Roach, 2003)📖🕮💻💿🏢/303
  • Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (Mary Roach, 2005)📖🕮💻💿🏢/311
  • Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English (John McWhorter, 2008)📖🕮💻💿🏢/230
  • Apollo: The Race to the Moon (Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox, 1989)📖🕮💻💿FALSE/506
  • Silent Spring (Rachel Carson, 2002)📖🕮💻💿🏢/400
  • Song for the Blue Ocean (Carl Safina, 1998)📖🕮💻💿FALSE/458
  • Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium (Carl Sagan, 1997)📖🕮💻💿🏢/244
  • The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Carl Sagan, 2008)📖🕮💻💿🏢/457

So much reading, so little time! Can’t wait to hear what y’all want to read, my sapiosexual friends!

UPDATE 2020-04-10 21:30: I do encourage my Science Readers to retrieve all the information above, such the full title, all authors and their full names, what formats the books are in, a link to the library listing, the publication year and the page count, and post all this to the Meetup Message Board. I do this because I get an email notification every time someone posts there. It’s hard to get to, to be sure, but when I send the email reminding folks to nominate things, I do provide a direct link to the Message Board discussion.

It’s therefore sad that most of my members used the new Meetup Discussion list instead. I get no notifications of any kind when people post here so I was shocked to see, when I posted a link to this article, that in fact a lot of my members posted sketchy book information to that list. A few of the nominations were in the list, but fourteen were new, as far as I could tell.

Of course, not wanting to ignore my member’s wishes, I spent a few more hours today trying to add all their nominations to the list. There are now eighty nominations, thirteen more added.

  • [Medicine] The Body: A Guide for Occupants (Bill Bryson, 2019)📖🕮💻💿🏢/464
  • [Technology] The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect (Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/432
  • [Medicine] The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance (Nessa Carey, 2012)📖🕮💻💿🏢/352
  • [Evolution] Lamarck’s Revenge: How Epigenetics Is Revolutionizing Our Understanding of Evolution’s Past and Present (Peter Ward, 2018)🕮💻🏢/288
  • [Biology] Aliens: The World’s Leading Scientists on the Search for Extraterrestrial Life (Jim Al-Khalili, 2017)🕮💻💿FALSE/240
  • [Physics] The World According to Physics (Jim Al-Khalili, 2020)🕮💻💿FALSE/336
  • [Physics] Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics (Jim Al-Khalili, 2012)📖🕮💻💿🏢/239
  • [Technology] What the Future Looks Like: Scientists Predict the Next Great Discoveries―and Reveal How Today’s Breakthroughs Are Already Shaping Our World (Jim Al-Khalili, 2018)📖💻💿FALSE/240
  • [Technology] The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance (Jim Al-Khalili, 2011)📖🕮💻💿🏢/336
  • [Medicine] Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology (Jim Al-Khalili, 2015)📖🕮💻💿🏢/368
  • [Technology] An Optimist’s Tour of the Future: One Curious Man Sets Out to Answer What’s Next? (Mark Stevenson, 2011)📖🕮💻🏢/384
  • [Technology] We Do Things Differently: The Outsiders Rebooting Our World (Mark Stevenson, 2018)📖🕮💻FALSE/304
  • [Physics] Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (Max Tegmark, 2014)📖🕮💻💿🏢/432

In addition to these thirteen, one more nomination was added to the December list because it’s a book we discussed in the group before.

  • The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos (Brian Greene, 2011)📖🕮💻💿🏢/384

Exhausted but still sapiosexual.

TeslaOS 2020.12.5, or so I’m told

TimeHorse April 9, 2020 1 Comment

Thursday, I was so busy with updating my Science Book Club book nominations list, which I will discuss Friday, that I forgot to transmit this piece on time. I have, however, fixed the release date to correspond to when it was relevant.

That out of the way, I am very excited about TeslaOS 2020.12.5. Well, I would be if I could access #CO2Fre. Unfortunately, I am disallowed from entering #CO2Fre because of fears that, after the scam service from last week because someone things everything in the world has SARS-CoV-2.

One thing I hear is that you can now view your Dash Cam on the big screen. So, what? I’ve been struggling to find the right and reliable USB storage device that can allow me to sync my recordings to my capacious Google Drive but am completed paralyzed when it comes to finding a replacement for my original, failed device that stopped working many months ago. I just wish there was an out-of-the-box solution that didn’t require external DC Power.

And I still haven’t figured out what Game Controller to get. If only there was an official list of supported devices.

As for actually stopping at Stop Signs and Stop Lights, that’s yet to be seen. I’ve not seen it mentioned on any sites about TeslaOS 2020.12.5, so I’m dubious it has that.

But, I guess I’ll find out next week.

All this is bad enough it it weren’t for the fact that I was originally scheduled to give a demonstration of my Tesla #P㆔D and all the new capabilities of the vehicle this weekend with the RVA Electric Vehicle association meetup on Saturday. I’m really hoping to switch this to next week as if we hold it on Saturday, I will be presenting #CO2Fre without #CO2Fre!

But at least there’s TeslaOS 2020.12.5, in theory.

TeslaOS 2020.12.5
Apparently, #CO2Fre is now running TeslaOS 2020.12.5. Unfortunately, I have no way of verifying this in the automobile or see what’s in the update as I’m prohibited from entering my vehicle until next Saturday because of unfounded fear of SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Still waiting to return to cruising on a cloud…