Buying a Tesla in New Mexico

Mitch Chapman

2020-11-12 06:00

(Note: A version of this post was submitted to EV4Corners. Check them out for all things EV, including DC fast charger news, in the Four Corners region.)

Tesla sells to customers via their website, rather than through a franchise dealership network. For this reason they're not allowed to operate directly in New Mexico. This adds a little uncertainty to the Tesla purchase process.

I live in New Mexico, and I recently bought a Model 3. Here's how everything played out for me. I hope this information helps others who may be considering a Tesla.

macOS: Removing Items from Print > PDF menu

Mitch Chapman

2020-04-11 08:55

I no longer have Aperture installed. But it still shows up in my Print > PDF popup menu. How to remove it?

In Praise of a Dog Park

Mitch Chapman

2020-04-03 16:35

I live in Santa Fe, in a sort of depression. The area was a Japanese-American internment camp in WWII. Sometimes I call it "the hole".

COVID-19 Digest

Mitch Chapman

2020-03-10 07:13

Introduction

Here are some illuminating posts about COVID-19. Never mind the quotes, please read the originals as they are full of interesting information.

[Update 2020-03-28]

Larry Brilliant (twitter):

Too often we see “cumulative cases” which does not tell todays story. “New cases” or “incidence” is better. But best to guide action is ACTIVE CASES = sources of virus = (total cases minus recovered cases minus deaths).

See worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-cases

Crowd-sourcing and Modeling

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation has a website that predicts hospital resource use for the United States as a whole and for individual states. It predicts peak resource use for the USA on 14 April, 2020. For my state of New Mexico it predicts a peak on 25 April, 2020, with a shortfall of 121 ICU beds, but with sufficient beds overall.

Should you really wash your food with soap?

In a word, no.

How A Wing Works

Mitch Chapman

2020-03-01 10:53

[Updated 2020-03-15: fixed plot auto-scaling, and discovered that the simple definition of a normal vector still yields inward-pointing vectors, given the airfoil vertex ordering. ]

"The Sibley Guide to Bird Life & Behavior" is a beautiful book, filled with elegant illustrations and clear explanations of bird physiology and behavior. It's a wonderful composition of art and science.

That's why I found this passage so jarring:

Physical laws ordain that the air flowing over the top of the wing must reach the back of the wing (the trailing edge) at the same time as air flowing under the wing. The curvature of the wing forces air to travel farther across the top surface than across the bottom. In order to travel the longer distance in the same amount of time, the air passing over the top of the wing must flow faster than the air flowing underneath the wing. This faster-moving air results in lower air pressure above the wing than below. The net result is lift...

If not GPG, then what?

Mitch Chapman

2020-02-15 07:05

Sometimes you need to keep secrets. Maybe you are involved in organized crime or a revolutionary organization. Maybe you need safe-keeping for your build system credentials.

In my very limited experience, gpg is painful to use.

I've tried to use Hashicorp Vault, but I'm not sure I've understood its documentation. I think it recommends storing secrets in a vault on a dedicated secret server, and connecting to that server via a well-known URL when you need authentication tokens. And if/when that server needs to restart? Require three separate humans to manually, interactively, apply their keys to unlock the vault and get things running again.

Yikes.

What are the alternatives?

Darned if I know. But I just tripped across this post by Latacora and am grateful to its author(s). The recommendations seem to be:

For secure chat, use Signal. (Or WhatsApp? Really?)
Don't encrypt email. [Insert long list of failure modes.]
Use Magic Wormhole or Signal to send files securely.
Use tarsnap to encrypt backups.
Use signify or Minisign to sign packages.
Use libsodium to encrypt application data.

Our Changing World

Mitch Chapman

2020-02-14 06:02

Seymour Island (Image: Daily Mail UK)

To commemorate the first-ever recorded 68°F temperature on Seymour Island in the Antarctic, here is a jumble of random thoughts.

Canon PIXMA MX870 and macOS Catalina

Mitch Chapman

2020-01-19 08:31

When I upgraded to macOS Catalina I didn't expect to lose the ability to print in duplex / grayscale, or to lose the ability to scan via Preview. Here's what it took to revive my MX870.

The Wild Turkey of Alto Street

Mitch Chapman

2020-01-07 14:27

On a morning walk early last year I heard a noise that seemed out of place in Santa Fe. It sounded a lot like a turkey.

Remembering Larry Haight

Mitch Chapman

2019-04-13 13:05

On the 8th of April, 2019, a light sport aircraft crashed at Santa Fe Airport. It had been flying touch-and-goes. The two persons aboard were killed. One of them was my first flight instructor, Larry Haight.