Job's Not Over Till the Paperwork is Done

Our Job of acquiring Zesty is now complete. Just under 14 years ago, Oscar and Penwiper inspected the new plates for for Purr More the Green and the Bronze Audi.

The Catzilla in Training and the Fluffy Ninja inspecting the new plates

The PURRMOR plates have graced three MINI Cooper S convertibles, nearly half of it on the 2019 Caribbean Aqua one.

The MEOWLES plates only lived on the 2009 Bronze Audi A4 until now, but forthwith they will be on our 2023 Zesty Yellow MINI Cooper S 4-door.

Sisters Meow Less the Zesty and Purr More the Aqua tucked into their garage

Note: Zesty's name is simply Zesty, not Zesty the Yellow. We love her color, but she does not want it even implied that she is a lemon in the manner of the long-departed Purr More the Melting Silver.

Out With the Old, In With the Gently Used

It's getting time to replace our 16 1/2 year-old Audi A4, and I'm doing something that I've never done in the 44 years I've been buying cars: Buy a used one. We are also buying a second car that's the same brand as the first (as opposed to replacing a car with the same brand). 

Basically, new shiny cars from both Audi and MINI (including dealer loaners) have a plethora of touchscreen controls on glass dashboards (Katherine's term is FGD — and the F is NOT silent.) Neither Katherine or I want controls you have to look at to manipulate; we want physical knobs and switches that you can adjust by touch while you keep your eyes on the road.

Given I don't drive much these days and don't need cargo space for more than groceries, I could look at getting a gently used MINI Cooper S two door. However, with our policy of one door per passenger, we don't take passengers in Pure More the Aqua (our 2019 MINI Cooper S 2 door convertible). So on my side of the garage we need at at least a 4 door MINI for passengers.

From the dealer we bought our last two new MINI Cooper S rag tops from, I selected a low mileage 2023 Cooper S 4 door (not a Countryman) that's the same generation as Purr More.

2023 Zesty Yellow MINI Cooper S 4 Door Exterior

The obvious differences with Purr More are the color, hard top, four doors, DCT transmission, digital instrument cluster, no head up display, and no navigation system. (However, apparently Apple CarPlay will talk to Apple Maps or even Google Maps on my iPhone.)

2023 MINI Cooper S 4 Door FGD-free cockpit

And oh yes, it's ~two-thirds the price of a new MINI.

(I have to admit, the color sounds like a dipping sauce for Onion Rings at Burger King.)

Update: This post was originally written as an adventure in progress. It's now complete. The Audi is gone (traded in), and the 2023 MINI is sitting in our garage next to Purrmore the Caribbean Aqua.

 Back when we lived in Stoneham, we once ended up with too many packages of your basic Morton Salt. It was referred to as the Salt problem. Ever since then, when we have an excessive inventory of anything X, we refer to it as the X problem.

These days, I have the Headphone problem.

I have:

• (At least) two ancient corded (DiscMan era) headphones in my closet (I'm afraid to look, actually)
• A corded USB headset in my closet
• High end corded Sennheiser headphones issued to me when I joined Google (under the stereo downstairs)
• Sennheiser 550-X BT noise canceling headphones I bought when I moved into a zoo of an office after five years at Google (they now live in my largest backpack)
• Soundcore noise canceling headphones I bought last year when I had trouble replacing the ear pads on the Sennheiser 550-X (since fixed)
• A cheap Motorola BT headset at my desk
• 3 cheap BT earbuds for my smaller EDC bags (never mind I only have two smaller bags)
• A pair of PowerBeats Pro earbuds I didn't like and gave to Katherine.

But I mostly use:

• Kipsch wired speakers on my Mac Studio
• My networked Yamaha office stereo
• A Motorola HX550 Bluetooth Headset I use for iPhone calls at my desk.
• Altec Lansing BT Boombox when on my exercise bike

QOTD (1995 edition)

Today's example of how 1980s-1990s era BSD fortunes have not aged equally well:

Dreams are free, but you get soaked on the connect time.

"connect time?" 

It's been a long time since we worried about connect charges.

It's been …

• 30 years since we went to a always-on PPP link (56 Kb/s) to our ISP
  (this required a second dedicated analog phone line)
• 27+ years since we switched to an always-on cable modem (6 Mb/s)
  (Katherine wrote up our experience for the October 1997 WIRED)
• 17+ years since we switched to FiOS (60 Mb/s),
• 4+ years since we upgraded to 1 Gb/s FiOS.
  

Out With the Old, In With the New

I go way back with music on Apple devices; I owned multiple iPods going back to the iPod classic (Click Wheel), ripped 600+ physical CDs, and I joined the iTunes store in October 2003.

(Why yes, I do have 27 years of personal email archives.  Doesn't everyone?)

Today, the Library has 9,608 items using 68 GB.

This relationship has not always gone smoothly. I distinctly remember years ago after a software upgrade of my iOS device or MacOS, my iPhone had Biblical performance issues when initializing. When moving from iTunes to Apple Music, Apple broke automatically adding user ringtones to devices, and since 2015 the push for Apple Music over Libraries of user owned music has driven me nuts for years.

Consider my current iPhone settings:

Note how Apple Music is clearly set to not show.  (And no, I don't belong to it!)

However, in the actual Music App, search still shows an entire screen full of selections from Apple Music:

Quite frankly, I have no idea what the "Do Not Show Apple Music" toggle does at all.

This week, I finally sufficiently got sick of accidentally searching Apple Music instead of my own Library that I did a little research and found the iOS app Marvis Pro.  

Marvis Pro:

• reads (and updates) the user's music Library synced by the MacOS Music application.
• favors the user Library over Apple Music.
• has more powerful display options:
• displaying more information about tracks and playlists
• (for example) setting any playlist to display as Albums, not individual tracks,
• sorting
• works with various functionality in the Apple Watch Music Apple and other Bluetooth devices (like our Audi A4) to play music.  (This is similar to other apps like Spotify and Podcasts)

Now, if I could just tell my iPhone to never open the Apple Music app again …

Field Expedient Hardware Modifications

 The MINI Cooper S has a never needed its Sport Mode (just keep the manual gearbox in second gear), and the Audi has also has one I do use on the Ramp of Chaos (Washington Route 202 onto Washington Route 522 West). Some of the more witty plush creatures around here think the new chairlift needs one for when I'm in hurry.

Nope. Nope. Nope.

I offer you exhibit one of what can go wrong:

A Software Safari in the Land of Intel

I think I seriously Crossed the Streams … and I liked it.

My favorite Tetris game is from the ~1990 MS Best of Entertainment Pack for Windows 3.x. It runs well on Windows 98 SE and even on Windows 7, but forget about it about on Windows 10. (Windows 10 doesn't do 16 bit apps.)

Unfortunately, I haven't had a machine on my desk which will run Windows 98 (real, virtual, or emulated) since I switched away from my Intel-based iMac to the Mac Studio two years ago.

Until now. (And no, I didn't buy an obsolete Intel box on EBay.)

The x86 emulator Bochs is described as the slowest of the popular emulators because it's the most accurate; I'll take that trade off. I installed Bochs on a Raspberry Pi 4B. Suffice to say having the 4B emulating processors popular 26 years ago (~12 iterations of Moore's Law) might be heavy lifting, but the machine is up to it.

So I now have Tetris (and Solitaire and …) on Windows 98 SE on an emulated Pentium MMX host on Bochs on X Windows on Linux on an ARM single board computer. I actually installed most of the games I had in CD images on disk; testing will continue. :-)

Footnote: The 2 GHz 8GB Raspberry Pi 4B with a 512 GB SSD is the size of 5 stacked CD classic jewel boxes.