Demolition and Salvage

So what did I just do? I took the McYork.com WordPress site offline and put up a static site. I'm gonna have a book or two that I'm probably going to publish for free, because who knows how good they are, and they're short. One's a kid's book. The other's sci-fi that I think expresses our concerns about AI. AI wrote a lot of it, in fact, but I'm not not liking it, so I may as well put it out there.

One of the sadnesses about taking the old WordPress site down was that there were several articles I thought I'd want to keep for posterity. So my AI and I went there, pulled all the articles that were of any consequence — meaning I liked them for some reason — and we rewrote them and published them here. Well, we didn't really rewrite them, we reformatted them. Most are untouched, a few have some comments at the top. Some of the links were bad so they were pulled, but otherwise everything is transcribed.

Below are links to all of them. They're technically not in the menu system, they're only linked here, and that's because they're not quite workshop articles — but yeah, you tell me. I was pleasantly surprised to find the one about the keyboard helper, because I was just over at Jerry's and he says it's working well. It's still working — that's amazing. It's been through zero iterations from a software and hardware perspective. And I think I could use an ESP32 to do a much more satisfying job. So I put that back on the front burner, and reading the article reminded me about just how fun that project was.

A shout out to Jerry, by the way — you can see him live stream here periodically, almost every day.

And then there was that shiny brand new day when I got that Tesla and I promised some numbers. So fourteen years later, this is what we got:

The car

What the miles cost me in energy

What the same miles would have cost in gas

California premium averaged $4.25/gallon over 2012–2026 (EIA statewide annual data — and it's been $5.50–6.40 this past year).

The difference

All-in cost per mile including purchase: $0.68 + $0.04 = $0.72/mile — and every additional mile drives it down. No oil changes, no brake replacements. Tires, yes — those were expensive. They came with low profile; I switched to the high profile. So — I'm not gonna kid — there's real costs. 90% of anything I've paid for out of my pocket was post-warranty, and a lot of that, you just look at them funny and say, seriously? The window's not going up and down? I don't think that's my problem. So yeah, early adopter. I had a few issues. Nothing catastrophic. And then next you're gonna say, but what's your battery like? I haven't charged it to full to find out recently; at eighty percent I think it's telling me I've got 181 miles, and I think the original spec on the car was 265...

The math: 181 miles at 80% extrapolates to ~226 miles at full charge. Against the original 265-mile EPA rating, that's 85.4% capacity retained — about 14.6% degradation in 14 years and 161,561 miles. So I guess if you can find an older Tesla like mine — I call it the iPod version: no auto-driving, no cameras, no navigation in fact, it just has the map, nothing special — probably under twenty thousand dollars, with a battery that charges to something like mine and no significant damage or lemon characteristics, and you need something cheaper than gas: it's a steal, especially if you're on solar.

Ok, here are all the promised links. AI tidied the punctuation and the tenses — dictation makes a mess of those — but it didn't ghostwrite anything. This is 100% Ian today.

• Coffee Shop Login, and my early iPhone apps (2009)
• Questions your phone should be smart enough to answer (2010) (and still can't!)
• Stock Bot (2012)
• New proposed TLD: .pinkbunny (2012)
• Knowledge is the reset button (2012)
• The Tesla Model S (2013)
• Chip programmer with a twist (2013)
• The keyboard helper (2013)
• The autonomous road (2016)
• What could you possibly use 8 relays on a board for? (2016)
• NeoPixel Link connector board (2017)
• A perfect read / listen (2021)