Here is a PDF with information about the Tesla Roadster’s log system. It looks like they don’t record a continuous GPS trace, but it’s a pretty detailed record and not fully documented.

I like the idea of the electric car, and I’ve generally been impressed with the style and quality commitment I see in Tesla; friends who drive Tesla cars have been very happy with them. The New York Times posted an article today about aTesla test drive which didn’t go so well, and Elon Musk, head of Tesla, used Twitter to post an allegation that the author was not being totally honest about his experience:

NYTimes article about Tesla range in cold is fake. Vehicle logs tell true story that he didn’t actually charge to max & took a long detour.

Wait a minute. Forget the question of battery performance in cold weather; that’s old news. Forget the question of whether the journalist lied – disappointing if true, but we’re not exactly talking Judith Miller-level malfeasance here. No, what really concerns me is this: what the hell are “vehicle logs”? Obviously the Tesla cars are deeply dependent on computers: are those computers infested with spyware? How much does Tesla know about what the car was doing? Is this custom spyware for demo models only or is this something they can enable for every car? Do these cars record GPS traces or something? I’m suddenly worried that the Tesla future is actually a grim police state dystopia, where anyone who gains physical access to your car can reconstruct your movements from its computer’s memory.

A new observation technique has revealed small rocky planets around many red dwarf stars, which are the most plentiful type of star in the galaxy. The article calls them “earth-like” but it’s not clear whether this just means that they are small and rocky or whether it further implies that they are located in the Goldilocks zone. The nearest is practically next door: only 13 light-years away.

We’ve been working out of a temporary office for the last few months while the Bellevue Place contractors build out the permanent office upstairs. We moved in last Friday and today everyone is busy running power and network cables and setting up their desks. There’s a guy with a paintbrush finishing up some trim work, there are boxes all over the floor, and nobody has pulled the protective plastic film off the fancy stainless-steel wall panels yet…

It’s an open-plan office, and all the developers sit in one long room with south-facing windows. We picked out where we wanted to sit today, and I grabbed a desk with a westward view: I may have to spend my days in Bellevue now, but I can look up any time and see the Space Needle peeking over the top of Capitol Hill. The window frames my home neighborhood almost perfectly.

Now it’s time to figure out how the new coffee maker works.

“Long Live the Kings” is a short film about motorcycling, a five minute piece of beauty: gorgeous, shot on film, evocative, so full of joy that it brought the tears up a bit. The imagery is a little bit larger than life, but that’s part of what makes motorcycling fun – out on a bike in the wide open world, nothing but you and your machine and the wind and sun, you feel larger than life, and that’s part of what I like about it. Still, you have to stay grounded, because it’s dangerous, too, and you need to keep your wits about you… the trip doesn’t end til you reach home.

I want to quote the whole narration, because it’s all true; but really, just go watch it.

Amazon Profits Fall 45 Percent, Still the Most Amazing Company in the World:

Amazon, as best I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers. The shareholders put up the equity, and instead of owning a claim on a steady stream of fat profits, they get a claim on a mighty engine of consumer surplus.

Engadget has a list of all (or nearly all?) of the commercially-available 3D printers, with prices and notes on unique features.

I have a hard time mustering as much enthusiasm for 3D printers as the technology seems to deserve; I just don’t use plastic parts in my projects unless there’s no other material that will do the job. Maybe it’s a function of growing up in the early ’80s, but “plastic” suggests “cheap, disposable, trivial, wasteful”, and when I am trying to make something I care about I always prefer to use wood or metal or glass. People are excited about 3D printers, though, and that excitement seems to be drawing a broader world of hobbyist-level CNC tools along in its wake, so I’m glad to see the field developing even if I will likely never buy a 3D printer myself.

A big list of single-board computers which can run Linux.

In the long run, X86 is doomed. It will live on as an emulation target, of course, but ARM is the architecture of the future.

Random guy at the bar has a lot of questions about my netbook. How much RAM? What kind of processor? Why Ubuntu? Do I work in software? What am I going to do now that netbooks are dead? He thinks I look like Bill Pullman. He asks leading questions of the woman to his left, trying to get her to back this up, and eventually sort of cajoles her into agreeing with him. It’s clear she’s just trying to be polite.

I pitch some questions back at him, friendly-like, the usual getting-to-know-you thing; it’s hardly a new game, after all. “No no”, he laughs, as though this next bit is funny, “this conversation is a one-way street.” He’s serious about it, too: he won’t even tell me his name. How does he know all the right questions to ask about my computer? Does he work in the industry, too? Where’s he from? He won’t say – he offers nothing. He just keeps on smiling and asking questions.

It’s suddenly creepy. What? Really? How far off the wall do you have to be to say something like “this conversation is a one-way street” and actually mean it? How do you get to be late-forties or early-fifties or however old he is and not understand how making conversation works? Really, random dude, you can just ask whatever you want, and tell me nothing, and that’s okay with you?

I grinned even wider, dawdled around for a few more minutes, fed him a few of what Huck Finn might have called “stretchers”, settled my tab, and left. I don’t know what his game was but I don’t want to play it.

A 2 1/8″ square, quad-core 1.7GHz ARM Cortex-A9 computer including Ethernet, USB, and micro-HDMI, with a micro-SD card for storage. Runs Android or Ubuntu. $89.

The MPU-9150 is a single chip, 4mm square, which includes a three-axis accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass. Not so very long ago it was hard to find a three-axis gyro at all, much less one that came integrated with other sensors. This has happened in five years’ time, I think? It seems plausible that we might be able to buy a single chip incorporating processor, storage, radio, and sensors within another decade.

Riding home from work, west across the I-90 floating bridge, the lights of the houses sloping down toward the lake echoed the yellow-hued glow reflecting off the clouds over the city.

The color, I noticed: remember this yellow, because it’s not going to last. In thirty years’ time, Leschi and Mt. Baker will look pretty much the same, but the hue of their lights will have shifted. All of those incandescent bulbs are going to burn out, all of those sodium vapor streetlights will go – and the lights that replace them will be crisp white LEDs.

The kids of that generation will probably just assume that night skies always look weird in old pictures because the old people who took them had to deal with those hilariously antique cameras back then and they just couldn’t get the color right.

It wasn’t a particularly great year, but it wasn’t bad, either.

I have some challenges to deal with in 2013, but I have the resources I need to tackle them.

I have what I think will turn out to be a very good job. It will never make me a rock star, but it’s interesting work with smart, talented people, and I’m sure I’ll learn a lot. It’s a good place to be.

ALTSpace is running smoothly. It isn’t exactly what I had hoped for, but in some ways it’s better. It’s a great shared workshop: in 2013 I hope to make it a good community gathering place, too.

I don’t really know where I want my life to go. I knew exactly what I wanted when I left Real Software in 2008, but that dream is dead and I’m not sure where the pieces went. I know what I want to do in 2013, more or less, but beyond that I have no idea. I’ll spend some time thinking about this over the next couple of months.

We have done no Christmas-season decorating here at the House of Saxman and it feels a little weird that the Big Holiday itself is just a couple days away. Still, yesterday was the burner-triangle neighborhood Christmas Crawl, and we’re driving down to California tomorrow, so holiday-time it must be.

My unusually large immediate family have all rented a cabin together up near Lake Tahoe. We’ll be piling in for three days with all of our significant others. Since many of us now have second families to celebrate with, the big family gathering is rolled back a day late.

We’re all chipping in one dish or another for the various meals. I just finished stemming and stuffing five and a half pounds of mushrooms – one batch with crab and green onion, the other with spinach and herbs. Such an amazing pile of food! It’d keep Ava and me satisfied for a week, but it’s just one side dish for one dinner for the whole group.

Well, I’ve done this drive more times than I can remember, so I’m sure it’ll go by quickly. I probably won’t post much until New Year’s, so… hope you’re all having a good holiday yourselves, and I’ll see you in 2013.