Honda Element: weBoost
Another upgrade I made to my car is to add the weBoost Drive Reach Overland antenna on top. It essentially takes whatever cell signal it can find and rebroadcasts it inside your car. The antenna can rise several feet over the top of the car, picking up distant signals that the iPhone’s built-in antenna can’t reach.
I knew I needed something like this after my trip to Colorado earlier this year. I still needed to work but I was sometimes without any cell coverage. Starlink would be great but it’s a pricey $150/month. The weBoost is just a one-time cost without an ongoing subscription.
I attached it to my roof rails, keeping it rotated so it’s parallel with the roof and turned off most of the time. It’s easy to flip it up when needed at a campsite. The wires are a little all over the place right now. I'm considering drilling a hole in the roof but not ready to make that leap yet.
It works as advertised. I first tested it in the city where I had 2 bars. I turned it on and right away had 4 bars. Out in the Davis Mountains, I had 0-1 bars and with the weBoost that jumped to a reliable 2 bars.
Of course, it’s not magic. If you are too far away from a cell tower, there’s nothing it can do. But I’m amazed by it. It’s a game-changer when you’re just a little too out in the middle of nowhere.
It's that time of year when my iTunes Match subscription renews and I don't know what will happen if I cancel it. One day need to figure out how to find iTunes Match tracks that are not on streaming. Or do I even care anymore? Just throwing money into Apple's services revenue pot.
Kottke.org is bringing back blog comments. Members-only, which seems like a nice solution. I think we'll see more of this as the social web evolves away from silos.
Found a great spot to work for the afternoon in the library at Sul Ross.
Finished reading: The Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson. Listened to the whole audiobook on the drive to and from the Davis Mountains. Brandon giving us a taste of the Cosmere endgame! Loved it. 📚
On the last Core Intuition, I joked about a hypothetical manton.ai... But then I sort of worried someone else would register it, so I decided to grab the domain myself. Whoops! Too many domains. Just made it a placeholder site hosted on Micro.blog.
Seeing some variety in reactions to Marc Andreessen's techno-optimist manifesto. I read it quickly and haven't thought enough to have a strong opinion, except that I don't like how "enemy" is used. Technology's role in society should be a conversation, not a war.
Reviewing the cross-posting chapter of my book, several things are out of date. I'm doing a final pass through the book, cutting a few sections. Would rather most of the book withstand the test of time but things change too quickly, calling it "done" has been hard.
Need to remind myself when on an interview or podcast: I usually do okay the first 15 minutes, then get a bit worked up, talk too fast, and lose my train of thought. Especially when the AC is off and I start sweating. Argh, summer.
Didn’t take many photos while in west Texas. Here’s a random shot as I stopped for a minute driving back to I-10.
Wow, great game to wrap up the WNBA finals. Liberty so close to forcing a game 5. Congrats to the Aces! Becky Hammon building a heck of a coaching career so far in Vegas. 🏀
Finished reading: Age of Swords by Michael J. Sullivan. Still enjoying this series. 📚
Thought I had a good job for our robot overlords. I grabbed a list of language codes from Wikipedia, ran some regex on it to make it JSON, then asked ChatGPT to trim it to the most popular 50 languages in the world. No luck, the output was wrong and not usable. AI still has a ways to go.
Looks like Georgia knew what they were doing with the 19-person indictment… One by one the defendants agree to tell the truth until only Trump and a handful of people are left for a trial? Sidney Powell pleads guilty, via CNN:
Fulton County prosecutors are recommending a sentence of six years probation. Powell will also be required to testify at future trials and write an apology letter to the citizens of Georgia.
Honda Element: bed platform
The last big upgrade for my Honda Element was to build a bed platform to use for car camping. I worked on this a little bit at a time over about a month. I was inspired by designs from other people, but ended up just sketching out something that I thought would work for me.
I wanted it to be exactly the size of a twin mattress. Also wanted enough space for storage underneath, but not so much that I would feel cramped with limited space from my head to the roof. I got a trifold, 4-inch mattress on Amazon. The platform itself would be in two sections, with one section folding down over the front seats when set up as a bed.
First building the basic structure:
Not pictured, later I ended up adding little metal braces everywhere for more support. Screws alone did not hold the legs in well. It was too wobbly and would even come disconnected. In hindsight, I might've been too worried about minimizing weight. I used pretty thin pieces of wood, mostly pine.
I sanded everything, stained it, and added hinges:
Testing it in the car, fully extended and folded up:
I plan to do another coat of polyurethane later. By the time I was ready to use it, I felt like it was really only about 90% done. You can also see some screws poking out from the hinges, which I covered up with several layers of tape after these photos were taken.
Here's the final bed set up, plus a shot inside at night from camping at the Davis Mountains State Park:
Overall, very happy with my little micro camper. I learned a lot during the first trip and there are some obvious things to improve for next time. I've collected the posts in this series in a category on my blog here.
Matt Mullenweg on the experience of riding in a self-driving taxi:
The thing is I know these self-driving cars exist, I’ve seen them around San Francisco forever, but the experience of being picked up and dropped off by a robot navigating the tricky SF hills and streets just hits different.
We have these in Austin now too. Seeing a car just driving down the street with no one in it is absolutely wild.
This post from @mia@void.rehab will ring true to anyone who has actually implemented an ActivityPub server. We talk about ActivityPub as if it's a fully-formed spec, but it's really a suite of specs, and trial and error. I'd love to see the specs streamlined without breaking compatibility.
Thinking about Biden's address to the country last night, he did something remarkable that I didn't realize at first. After the Hamas attack, I assumed that any chance of peace had been set back decades. Biden steered me back from the cliff: no, we cannot give up on peace, even when it is hard. 🇺🇸
Happy Friday! New @coreint podcast to wind down the week. Episode 573 covers Apple's "video reactions" feature and what we can learn about rolling out a surprising feature. Then we jump back into Twitter/X news with the $1/year subscription announcement.
Picked up Killers of the Flower Moon a few weeks ago and only now starting it. Got tickets for the movie next week so I have a little time to make a dent in the book, at least. 📚
The kids took all our Nintendo Switches to their own apartments. Seriously considering picking up a Lite to play the new Mario Wonder. 🕹️
Finished reading: Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell by Brandon Sanderson. Hadn’t realized until I had finished The Sunlit Man that I had missed this Cosmere novella. 📚
