Sparking an Improvement

 My daily driver car, a 2013 Buick LaCrosse eAssist hybrid, is approaching the 100,000-mile mark, so I decided a bit of scheduled maintenance in the form of a new set of spark plugs was in order. After a little online research, I discovered that the plugs on my engine, a 2.4L four-cylinder Ecotec hybrid, are very easily accessible, right on the top of the engine. Having all of the necessary tools (a socket set with a spark plug socket and extension bar, flat blade screwdriver and needle-nose pliers) I decided to forego the services of a mechanic and undertake the swap myself. 

The first step was to research what kind of spark plugs to use, as they come in three varieties—copper core, platinum, and iridium. Copper core plugs are what usually comes in a car from the factory and are the least expensive option, but they typically have the shortest service lifespan. The next step up is platinum, which has a coating of that rare and expensive metal on the electrode. There are also double-platinum plugs that have a tiny platinum disc on the ground contact, where the spark from the electrode hits. The advantages of platinum plugs are better spark and longer service life. Some cars even require platinum plugs. The top of the line, and most expensive option, is iridium. These plugs outlast platinum, use less energy, and produce an even better spark, resulting in improvements in both fuel economy and performance. 

Since General Motors is presently offering a substantial rebate on its ACDelco Iridium plugs, which cut the price almost in half, I ordered a set from Rockauto.com. They're probably a bit of overkill for the little four-banger under my Buick's hood, but for the price, I saw little downside to that choice, and a big win, if they delivered on the promises of improved performance and fuel economy. Since the engine was not misfiring, I decided to keep using the original ignition coils and save that expense until it is truly needed. Generally speaking, it is best to replace all of the coils when one fails, since the others will likely not be far behind.

Installation was quite easy and only took me about 45 minutes. As with any such project, replacing the first plug was the most difficult. Repeating those steps with the next three was easier, as I knew exactly what to expect. The basic procedure went something like this:

• With the engine cold, remove the plastic engine cover
• Unplug the wire from the ignition coil
• Unbolt and remove the ignition coil
• Remove the old spark plug
• Put a small amount of anti-seize compound on the threads of the new plug
• Screw the new plug into place
• Put a dab of dielectric grease on the bottom end of the ignition coil to seal out moisture
• Put the coil in on top of the spark plug and bolt it down
• Replace the electrical connection
• Repeat the above steps with the three remaining spark plugs
• Replace the plastic engine cover and put your tools away.

I wasn't exactly sure what to expect in terms of performance from the new plugs, but in driving the car the past couple of days, I have seen a noticeable, albeit not dramatic, improvement in throttle response and the car labors a bit less going up hills. The car is still a somewhat under-powered, but it's a definite improvement.

I can't yet speak to fuel economy improvements, as the new plugs have not yet been in place for 48 hours, but I am topping off my tank today and we'll see how it goes. Even a modest improvement in fuel economy would eventually pay for the plugs, and delivering more power in the process makes it a double-winner. 

And the sense of satisfaction that comes from successfully installing the new plugs myself was priceless.

Network Complications

 Like most people here in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, I have become overly dependent on my home wireless network, and as a result I have a lot of—arguably too many—devices connected to it, including four laptops, two tablets, two printers a smart phone, three Roku boxes, two Google Home devices, and a half dozen smart plugs. It's probably little wonder that my wireless router recently a little flaky and failure prone, randomly dropping devices. A quick unplug and re-plug would correct things, but who wants to be doing that several times a day?

I'm not sure whether it was out of frustration or desperation,  or despair, but I reached the point last week where I felt the need to take decisive action, so I replaced my wireless router. Physically disconnecting and reconnecting the cables only took a couple of minutes, and setting up the new wireless network took a couple more, but getting everything back registered on the network has taken several days. 

In all fairness, I got most of it—the laptops, tablets, Roku boxes, printers and Google Home devices—done in an hour or so, but the Kasa smart plugs proved the most vexing of all. Despite the simplicity of their operation, the setup routine is anything but. The plugs must be set up using the Kasa smartphone app, and the on-screen instructions are less than accurate. To put it into perspective, I have a master's degree in technical communication and I couldn't properly follow the steps as written. 

Where they fell short was in the crucial step of registering the plugs on the new network. The instruction said to "join the network," but failed to make clear that this was accomplished by finding the plug as an unsecured network, then joining that to the router's network. This had to be done for each plug. As if that weren't enough, my Google Home devices still did not recognize the plugs until I reset them again, after I had gotten the plugs working.

To be sure, this is not the first time I've changed out a wireless router. This has got to be the seventh or eighth time I've done it. But over the past three or so years, the sheer number of things connected to it, both via the 802.11 wireless protocol and physically via Ethernet cables, has expanded phenomenally. The router is no longer just a jumping on point for a wireless Internet connection; it is now a central technological fixture of my home, enabling so many other things to function. As far as I can see, this role will only expand in the future.

Re-reading World War II

I recently revisited a piece of my childhood through a book I found at a second-hand store called Life's Picture History of World War II. There had been a copy at my grandmother's house, which had belonged to my grandfather, a veteran of both world wars. When I was growing up, my cousin Bob and I both enjoyed looking at it, together and separately. Published in 1950, a scant five years after that conflict had ended, it presented a visual account of the war through Life magazine's archive of photos and illustrations with a minimal amount of interpretive text. Although not necessarily intended as such, it was a good introduction to the conflict for a young reader. I even used it as a source for a paper I wrote on the Blitzkrieg in ninth grade. When I had it in my possession for that project, I really did not want to give it back.

Toward the end of her life, my grandmother passed many treasured belongings to family members, who would appreciate them. Although I would have enjoyed having that book, it went to Bob. I respect the fact that my grandmother took the time to make carefully considered decisions about her belongings, and I am happy that he has it and will one day pass it down to his son, yet I've long thought that I'd like to find a copy of it for myself. I have often looked for it on the shelves of second hand book stores, but until recently, I haven't even seen another copy.

Having not seen the book in about 40 years, I had forgotten the exact title, which made searching for it a little more difficult; in fact, when I found my copy, I wasn't sure at first that it was the same book, but leafing through it quickly convinced me, even though it had a different cover. The copy I remember from childhood had a red leatherette cover and may have originally come with a paper dust jacket, while the one I bought has a tan, cloth binding with a brown spine and a matching slipcase, but for the two dollars I paid for it, I can't complain; in fact, it is a rather handsome edition. 

Having the exact title, I was able to take a look online to get an idea of how rare this book actually is. Second hand copies are readily available both on eBay and Amazon and prices are all over the place, ranging from about $4 to $75, which makes my $2 investment for the more deluxe slip cased edition a real bargain. When looking for this book, be aware that there is a later and entirely different book called Life Goes to War: A Picture History of World War II, which was published in the 1970s. Interestingly, one version has a cover that could easily be confused for this earlier volume. 

Looking through that coffee table sized volume after so many years, I was struck by a couple of things. One was just how many of the images I vividly remembered from back then, but also how I regard them differently, viewing them through adult eyes. For one thing, the book is definitely a product of its time, making liberal use of terms we would deem offensive today, such as 'Jap', and editorial choices that represent an almost propagandistic mindset, the same that would have existed at Life, or any other American publication, during the war. Any atrocities depicted in the photos were being committed by Germans or Japanese, not Americans or their allies, and any grievously wounded soldiers mangled corpses were always those of the enemy. The few images of wounded G.I.'s depicted them receiving first aid for fairly minor injuries. 

In a broader sense, it is interesting to note that despite the patriotic tone, the book presents a surprisingly unflinching look at the grim realities of war, neither glorifying nor condemning it. That said, one shocking omission from the book is the lack of any mention of the Holocaust or Nazi concentration camps, which would have been common knowledge by the time the book came out. Perhaps that also is a product of its time.

While I am glad to finally have my own copy of Life's Picture History of World War II, even if it is not the one I enjoyed looking at when I was a kid, I'm not sure how often I will be looking through it. My feelings toward war and its destruction are much different today, and I'm not as fascinated by it as I once was. Still, the connection to family history makes it a special addition to my library.

How to easily increase storage on a Chromebook

If you have been reading this blog, you are doubtless aware that I enjoy my Chromebooks for basic productivity tasks, but they do have a few shortcomings, one of which is a meager amount of internal storage. To be fair, Chrome OS is designed to need minimal storage space, as it is designed to make use of cloud storage such as Google Drive to save files, but I also like to save them locally. Both of my Chromebooks came with 64GB and little in the way of upgrade options, save for adding a micro SD card. Fortunately, these are dirt cheap, which made it possible for me to triple the amount of available storage for about the cost of a fast food value meal.

I purchased a 128GB card for each machine for $10 apiece, which provided an instant upgrade as soon as I placed the cards in their slots. The only real problem was that while the card was mounted in the Files app, it was not visible to Linux applications running under the Crostini Linux environment. This is because Crostini is intended primarily as a developer environment, so everything in there is walled off from the rest of Chrome OS. 

Access can be granted easily enough by right-clicking the micro SD card's icon in the Files app and clicking a menu choice to allow Linux access. Now that the card is recognized by Crostini, one must create a path for direct access in LibreOffice. This is accomplished by choosing the open file command in LibreOffice, then select '+Other Locations' on the left side of the window. The main window will then show an icon labeled 'Computer' Double-click it and scroll down the menu until you find a folder labeled 'mnt' (mount). Open that and then open the folder labeled 'chromeos' and then open the folder labeled 'SD Card', or whatever your SD Card is named, and click 'Add to Bookmarks'. Your SD card will now appear on the left side of the window and you will be able to open and save files directly from LibreOffice. 

The cool part is once you do this for one application, the SD card will be available to others as well. I created a bookmark in LibreOffice and then opened the GIMP photo editing application to discover the SD card was visible there, ready to be accessed. Best of all, the SD card can be removed and replaced with one from another device, such as a digital camera, to access those files, then put back without having to repeat the setup process.

 So now, both of my 64GB Chromebooks have a total of 192GB of storage and readily accessible to both the Linux and Chrome OS partitions. This small addition should serve to make the Chromebooks that much more useful—and useful. Best of all, it did not require using the command line at all, just a few mouse clicks. If you have a Chromebook and your internal drive is feeling a bit claustrophobic, there really is no reason not to expand it using an inexpensive micro SD card.

Ten Good Reasons to Use LibreOffice

 It's hard to believe I've been using LibreOffice and its parent application, OpenOffice, for more than two decades. And you know what? The more I use it, the more I find to like about it. Even though my employer supplies me with M$ Office for free, I still keep LibreOffice on all my computers and use it by default for most of my personal projects. Below are ten reasons (in no particular order) why I use it over M$ Office:

10. It's free—You just can't argue with that price. Why shell out for M$ Office when LibreOffice doesn't cost you a cent?

9. It's a single application—Having a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation package, drawing application, database, and equation editor in a single application makes for a more streamlined workflow than the M$ approach of several separate, yet loosely linked applications. As a single application with integrated modules for its various main functions, LibreOffice takes up less disk space without redundant code in each application. It is also less hungry for RAM and processor cycles.

8. Its interface is customizable—Users have far more latitude to make LibreOffice their own than they have with M$ Office. A number of different icon sets are available, as are various color schemes. You can even apply themes designed for the Firefox Web browser. Best of all, one can choose between a traditional interface with drop-down menus and a tabbed interface, reminiscent of recent versions of M$ Office. For what it's worth, I prefer the drop-down menus.

7. It's under active development—LibreOffice has version updates coming out on a regular basis and it has continued to evolve beyond its parent application, OpenOffice, which has not seen a major update since 2014. 

6. It's free and open source—The source code for LibreOffice is readily available to all comers and anyone with the requisite programming skills can modify it and create their own version of the software, just as LibreOffice's developers did with OpenOffice, when they forked the project more than a decade ago. Due to differences in licensing, LibreOffice can incorporate any features from OpenOffice, and has done so, but OpenOffice cannot do the same with LibreOffice.

5. Development is done by volunteers—Those who maintain and develop LibreOffice are all volunteers, whose sole motivation is to create the best possible software they can, not to make a profit. If you know how to code, you are free to join in the fun.

4. It opens and saves M$ Office files—You can work in LibreOffice, save your files in the appropriate M$ Office file format, share it with a M$ Office user and they'll be none the wiser. Its filters are that accurate. As a bonus, it also fixes broken files. I have many times tried to open an M$ Office file that Word or Excel or PowerPoint  thinks is corrupt, only to have LibreOffice open it accurately and with ease. After saving the file in LibreOffice, I can open it in the appropriate M$ Office app with equal ease.

3. It's the default office productivity suite in Linux—Major Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, and Linux Mint were quick to drop OpenOffice for LibreOffice as their included office suite, once it made its debut, and it remains as ubiquitous in the Linux world as M$ Office is on Windows.

2. It's cross-platform compatible—LibreOffice is supported on Windows, Mac OS, and most major Linux distributions. M$ Office is available only on Windows and Mac OS. Android and iOS users can use Collabora Office, which is based on LibreOffice. Chromebook users can also run LibreOffice under the Crostini Linux environment, or run Collabora Office as an Android app, so everybody can play.

1. It's not from Microsoft—Microsoft not only takes your money but also your data. LibreOffice is just one more way to keep more control over both.

What's in the Box?

 I've always loved CD boxed sets. They're a great way to take a deep dive into an artist's or band's catalog—more than one would get from a 'greatest hits' CD—without having to buy every album. Most also come with a booklet that goes much more in depth than an album's liner notes, along with other occasional bits of memorabilia. Some box sets, such as the Who's Thirty Years of Maximum R&B, provide a mix of singles, album tracks and rarities, while others like Citizen Steely Dan, comprise the entire contents of all their studio albums. 

I recently acquired a nine-disc boxed set from Pink Floyd called Shine On that presents repackaged and remastered versions of their popular albums—A Saucerful of Secrets (1968), Meddle (1972), The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977), The Wall (1979), and A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1988), along with a bonus disc of early singles, a collection of postcards of the album cover graphics, and a 112-page hardback book.

I remember when this set arrived in record stores in 1992. It was frightfully expensive at around $200. I paid less than a third of that for my copy and felt like I got a good value for the money, considering I only had two of those titles already in my CD collection. The titles included in Shine On bring together Pink Floyd's most commercially successful albums, offering a solid collection of 'must-haves'. 

For some buyers, it might well represent just about everything by Pink Floyd they're familiar with, but there's more Floyd to be experienced, especially their early material, which is given somewhat short shrift in this collection, especially the contributions of founding member Syd Barrett. His work is most heavily represented in their first album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967), which is not part of the set. Barrett's presence in Shine on is limited to a couple of tracks on A Saucerful of Secrets and the bonus disc.

Shine On omits most of Pink Floyd's output from the 1969 through 1972, including More (1969), Ummagumma (1969), Atom Heart Mother (1970), and Obscured by Clouds (1972). The next few albums after Saucerful are considered by many to represent an extended transition period from the Syd Barrett period to their classic progressive/stadium rock era. More and Obscured by Clouds are both movie soundtracks, created to fit the themes of their respective films, while Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother are both interesting experimental efforts, but for whatever reason, they were not well liked by the band's members. Also, Ummagumma is part studio album and part live album (one disc of each), The live portion revisits Barrett-era material, while the studio portion is essentially a collection of solo efforts by the four principal members. This combined dynamic may have technically disqualified it from consideration as a studio album.

The other conundrum is the omission of The Final Cut (1983). A follow-up and thematic extension to The Wall, it was bassist/vocalist Roger Waters' final album with Pink Floyd and the band's only album without keyboardist/vocalist/arranger Richard Wright, who had left the band after The Wall tour, but would return for its later projects, initially as a session player, but eventually as a full member. Wright and the remaining band members, David Gilmour and Nick Mason, may have concluded The Final Cut was essentially more of a Roger Waters solo album and thus disqualified it on those grounds.

All that said, the inclusion of A Momentary Lapse of Reason might seem as an odd a choice as the exclusion of its predecessor, being as as it is the sole representation of the post-Waters Pink Floyd. Then again, it was their only post-Waters studio album at the time. Although Waters was angered that his former band mates chose to continue Pink Floyd without him, instead of ceasing as a band as he would have preferred them do, Gilmour, Mason, and eventually Wright, saw it as a continuation of what had come before, just as the band had continued without Wright on The Final Cut. 

What also has continued is box sets. After Shine On, Pink Floyd put out two additional box sets, both consisting of all 14 remastered studio albums, called Oh, By the Way (2007) and Discovery (2011). But having Shine on in my collection, I don't feel the need to own either of those larger sets; instead, I may just grab a copy of Atom Heart Mother at some point down the road and call it a day. 

UPDATE--As it turned out, I ended up acquiring all of the remaining Pink Floyd albums I was missing, and now have the complete Pink Floyd discography in my collection.

E15's Unexpected Surprise

 It is almost ironic that in this day and age, where our society is supposedly moving away from internal combustion engines and toward battery electric vehicles, there is now a baffling array of gasoline grades available. Since the late 1980s, when leaded gasoline was completely phased out, most stations have offered three grades: regular (87 octane), mid-grade (89 octane) and premium (93 octane), but several new options have appeared in recent years like E85 (up to 85 percent ethanol) and E15 (15 percent ethanol), as well as non-ethanol formulations on the other end of the spectrum. This all begs the question of which is best for your car. The answer, of course, is 'that depends'. Different formulations are optimized for different types of vehicles.

To fully understand the differences among these fuel grades, not including diesel, we first need to understand what octane is and what it measures. Many people mistakenly believe octane is a measure of the fuel's potential power and that higher octane fuel will deliver higher performance, but it's a little more nuanced than that. Octane is a measure of gasoline's ability not to detonate under pressure. Higher performance engines often require higher octane fuel because they have a higher compression ratio, which delivers a bigger bang, if you will, when the fuel is detonated. For this reason, higher compression engines, including those that use superchargers or turbochargers, will not run properly on regular fuel, but the opposite is not true for more conventional engines. While higher octane fuel is not an issue for them, there is no real benefit, either. 

With that bit of knowledge in hand, let's look at the various gasoline grades and what vehicles they're best for:

Regular (87 octane)—More often than not, this is the fuel you need. It works in most cars, unless they have a high-performance, high-compression engine. If your car specifies "Unleaded Fuel Only", regular gas will work just fine. It will also work in flex fuel vehicles, but more on that later.

Mid-Grade/Plus (89 octane)—This is often the forgotten 'middle child' at the gas pump. This is the same octane rating as leaded regular gas, which has not been available in the U.S. since about 1988, and is best suited for older cars that ran on leaded regular. It will deliver slightly improved performance and fuel economy in some other cars, but the ever-widening price spread between it and regular often makes it somewhat of a false economy.

Premium (93 octane)—As mentioned earlier, this is the specified fuel for higher compression and forced induction engines. In most cases, a car requiring premium fuel will spark knock on regular, a result of premature detonation, although there are some exceptions, such as Cadillac's NorthStar V8, which would automatically adjust itself to run on regular, albeit with a modest loss of performance and fuel economy.

Non-Ethanol (90 octane)—Up until about a decade ago, most gasoline did not contain ethanol (corn alcohol), but today's gasoline is typically an E10 (ten percent ethanol) blend. Most cars run fine on E10, but some do not. If you have a car with carburetor, especially an old muscle car from the '60s, this might be a viable option, but for most applications the benefits are marginal at best, especially at a premium of around a dollar a gallon over regular.

E85—As the acronym suggests, this as an up to 85 percent ethanol blend, or more accurately, 51-85 percent. Regardless of the exact ratio of gasoline to alcohol, this fuel should only be used in flex fuel vehicles that are designed for it. The best way to tell if you have such a vehicle is to look for 'Flex Fuel' badging on it and a yellow factory supplied gas cap. I owned a flex fuel vehicle, a 2011 Chevy Impala, for a few years, but I never put E85 in it because the owner's manual stated due to the lower energy contained in ethanol. it would yield reduced fuel economy and performance. The few times I saw it at a gas station, the price was so close to that of regular gas, that running it seemed to present a false economy; that is, the lower fuel economy negated the cost savings. That said, ethanol does burn cleaner than gasoline and it is American made, so those might be significant feel good points for some people.

E15 (88 octane)—This fuel is designed to run in any 2001 model or newer passenger car or light duty truck, flex fuel or not. It has a slightly higher ethanol level than conventional gasoline, which gives it a slightly higher octane rating. Still, many drivers are skeptical of E15 because of the conventional wisdom that non-flex fuel vehicles can only tolerate up to 10 percent ethanol, and this was why I always ignored it, despite it being a bit cheaper than regular.  

That price spread suddenly opened into a chasm last week, when a local station ran a promo, knocking the price of E15 down to $1.35 below that of regular 87 octane. After some online research to assure myself that it was safe to run in my car, I topped up my tank ahead of a 200-mile road trip. The results were, to say the least, unexpected. I figured that if fuel economy were off even by as much as 5 mpg, I would still be coming out ahead, but instead, I actually got better gas mileage than on regular 87 octane fuel. While I usually average 32-34 mpg on that trip, my round trip average was 36.3 mpg. I was astonished enough that I refilled the next day with more E15 (still at the bargain price of $1.91 a gallon) to test it out on regular, in-town driving. So far, in-town mileage is comparable, so I'm declaring this experiment a success, in that E15 fuel has proven itself an economical alternative, at least in my car. While I may not use it exclusively, I will consider it a cost-effective alternative and will use it when appropriate. Late fall and early winter are when I see the best fuel economy, but it will be interesting to see how it holds up in the warmer months, when I am using the air conditioning and the summer's heat is putting an additional strain on the engine.

Check back for periodic updates...

SPEAKING OF UPDATES--It's been about eight months since I discovered E15 and I have continued to use it at least as often as I use regular gas. Although no longer as deeply discounted as it was, it's still a good 30 cents cheaper, and these days, every little bit helps. My long-term observations are that there is no noticeable difference in performance, but a slight dip in fuel economy, about 2-3 mpg on average, especially in hot weather. The difference during cooler weather, where the air conditioning is not needed, is almost nonexistent. 

All that said, I convinced a friend to try a tank of E15 in her 2001 Pontiac minivan, and the results were less than stellar, with a check engine light and hesitation occurring shortly after the fill-up. The problem went away once there was enough room in the tank to add a few gallons of regular gas.