We started our trip from Lewis Center, Ohio to St. Louis Park, Minnesota on June 17th. This was our first longer trip in the 2025 Model Y we bought last October. We have used FSD very frequently in our local area. It seemed amazing. Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

All was well until we began the run north on the Illinois tollway the morning of the 18th. The car simply could not maintain a steady speed. It kept changing the cruise set-point for no reason we could discern. We arrived in St. Louis Park somewhat flustered by the jerky, distracting, and tiring experience.

The next morning we went out to the car to find a Starbucks for coffee. The car’s nav said nearest was 1400 kilometers away. We did the math to find out how far that was in “real” (yes, we should all be metric and we knew how far it was.) distance and found it to be too far for today’s needs. So, walked across the street and got coffee at a Caribou shop.

Later we left the hotel to visit our family members a few miles away. FSD took us to some unknown location in Minneapolis and parked nicely. We used an iPhone to get from there to where we needed to be. We had two instance of that behavior.

We did soft and hard resets on the car. Starbucks was no longer a day’s drive away, and we could get where we needed to be. Improvement.

We left Minneapolis for Lewis Center on the 22nd. FSD going south to Chicago was a continuous and stressful battle with the cruise control to maintain a constant speed. But we did find the cause. The tollway has three speed limits, one each for cars, buses, and trucks. FSD would reset the speed set-point every time it saw any one of those signs. So, could not use cruise with any comfort on the tollway. Web research offers no hope of an early fix. It’s been that way a while.

As we tried to keep our speed constant and legal, the FSD mode kept changing by itself. Now chill, now hurry, now standard. Another distraction. This thing may be too complex for only two Ph.D.s.

We recharged in Chicago and upon leaving the charging site, FSD tried to drive us into a recently jackhammered area of the road that was as big as the car. I had to jerk the wheel to go around the rubble. And of course the incident survey came up to distract me while I was trying to avoid being stuck in the rubble pit. The rest of the trip required only the unrelenting vigilance of a soldier trying to avoid snipers in an urban setting.

So, rating for FSD? Solid 0 on the course we had to drive. It was distracting in many ways and dangerous to use. A speed limit change chime with a confirmation screen button might earn Tesla a 3.0. Couldn’t cost much.

-George

A family member just retired her beloved but tired Honda CR-V (173,000 miles)and replaced it with a Chevrolet Equinox EV. Today was her first battery charge in her garage at home, which she got to by driving happily past her normal gas line at Costco where fuel was selling today for $4.39 per gallon (and $4.99 at a station near her workplace) – thanks to the Felon-In-Chief’s war on whatever he has a war on in Iran.

The EV gets her out the high-risk, volatile fossil fuel market and into an energy market where much more stability exists. Where contracts can be written to regulate costs even for residential customers. Where diverse renewable energy sources are displacing fossil fuels.

And, of course, EVs get us all air we can breath while we work on getting atmospheric carbon back to pre coal and oil levels.

Each little action like this is a positive step in the slog through the much we have to do.

-George

Geoffrey Morrison’s “Why That Cheap Used Windows 10 Laptop Is Actually a Terrible Deal” March 17, 2026 article in CNET (1) was, in my opinion, a terrible idea in itself. Here is why. These older laptops that may not run Windows 11 are still good machines that can do really useful work. I have one, and use it every day. As far as I’m concerned, Windows died with Windows 7, and that’s been a while ago.

I have a great little 12 inch Dell  Latitude 3190 that I bought on eBay for $75. Super travel machine. As far as I could tell, it was brand new when it arrived. It came with Windows 11 installed. I have no doubt that it would have been an absolute dog had I set it up on Win 11. I popped out the Win SSD untried, slipped in a new one, and installed Linux Mint. These older machines are great. You can do that! It’s YOUR computer, not Microsoft’s. Linux Mint, like many other Linux distributions, comes with everything you need to do serious work. The Win 11 SSD will go back into the 3190 if I pass it on to someone who doesn’t get it. And that’s who Morrison’’s article is directed to.

We don’t want to let obsolescence be declared by the people who sell us hardware and software. That’s a bit suspicious. We can define obsolescence ourselves when our tools won’t work for us anymore. Not when the merchants decide they need more money.

So, my advice is to think again before tossing that perfectly good and familiar machine you have or that cheap Windows 10 machine you are looking at and at least take a look at an alternative that will help reduce e-waste, save you money that Microsoft does not need, and enhance your technology independence. It’s really getting easy.

That Cheap Used Windows 10 Laptop Is Actually A Great Deal — if you ask me.

-George

1. https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/dont-buy-a-refurbished-or-used-windows-10-computer/

Our last ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicle went away this week (March 17, 2026). It was replaced by a small electric car that does not care too much about the Orange Felon’s illegal wars or crackpot energy policies.  There shall be no more fossil fuel vehicles at the Legacy House, where all lawn and garden power tools are electric, as well.

It occurs to me that the rising cost of gasoline and Diesel might actually be doing some good in terms of converting vehicles to electric power in opposition to Trump’s own drill-baby-drill policy. Albeit at the horrendous human costs of dead soldiers’ and innocents’ lives and degradation of the general quality of life for all in the Persian Gulf region. But, higher energy costs, for whatever reason, do present a force for change.

Here at the Legacy House, we spent $48 last year on power from our local utility. All the rest, for heating, cooling, and transportation, was derived from our solar panels. So, to Dear Leader, shine-baby-shine.

-George

1. https://muchado.us/wp-admin/post.php?post=67

I have not been posting a lot recently (obviously). But I do need to update the Mulberry House project. The house has been a happy home for about a year. The technology is working as planned, and we have had no major issues.

The front view (north) shows the xeriscape yard, no grass, all mulch. We are saving energy and water here. Except for the required grass parkway, irrigation is drip. All irrigation is managed by a weather smart controller. Behind the black fence is a raised bed garden that produces vegetables for the owner. There are two paperbark maples in the front yard that grew from seedlings found under trees at the owner’s previous home.

The solar panels on the south roof of the garage are presently providing about 50% of the all-electric home’s energy requirements. The owner has begun a project to add 10 additional panels on the south roof of the main house before solar incentives disappear. That should take the building up to about 75-80% solar. If a decision is made to go further, that will require panels on the west roof or batteries. Something to ponder. Maybe later.

-George

Zero Energy Ready (1) home number 3 is well under way (11/25/2023).

This home, called The Mulberry House, is based upon the building we erected about 2 years ago (2). We made some changes. The house roof on this project is 8 inch SIP, about R-32 (3). The earlier building had a truss roof. The house walls are 6 inch SIP, about R-24. The 3 stall garage has conventional 2×6 walls and a scissor truss roof to provide overhead storage space. We enlarged the kitchen and owner’s bathroom. Ceilings are raised a bit, and the front porch is deeper and higher. Heating and cooling will be Mitsubishi air-sourced heat pump with a central air-handler. Water heating will also be by heat pump. Just as we did before. Results have been great. The roof will be metal, and the south garage roof surface will support 24 PV solar panels.

Mulberry will be all electric, no fossil fuels used on this site. It is something we can do. In fact, it’s easy to do. When our governments fail to do what must be done to address our environmental crisis, we must do it ourselves, one small effort at a time. I can assure you that neighbors in the know will see the difference in operating costs, and that alone will result in more projects like this.

-George

1. https://www.energy.gov/eere/buildings/zero-energy-ready-home-program
2. https://muchado.us/2026/03/13/second-high-performance-home-project/
3. https://www.sips.org/what-are-sips

“Last year, I had a life-changing experience at 90 years old. I went to space, after decades of playing an iconic science-fiction character who was exploring the universe. I thought I would experience a deep connection with the immensity around us, a deep call for endless exploration.

“I was absolutely wrong. The strongest feeling, that dominated everything else by far, was the deepest grief that I had ever experienced.

“I understood, in the clearest possible way, that we were living on a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death. I didn’t see infinite possibilities of worlds to explore, of adventures to have, or living creatures to connect with. I saw the deepest darkness I could have ever imagined, contrasting so starkly with the welcoming warmth of our nurturing home planet.

“This was an immensely powerful awakening for me. It filled me with sadness. I realized that we had spent decades, if not centuries, being obsessed with looking away, with looking outside. I did my share in popularizing the idea that space was the final frontier. But I had to get to space to understand that Earth is and will stay our only home. And that we have been ravaging it, relentlessly, making it uninhabitable.”

-William Shatner, actor

https://www.facebook.com/revolutionaryNatives

6/30/2023

“Hidden code in hundreds of models of Gigabyte motherboards invisibly and insecurely downloads programs—a feature ripe for abuse, researchers say.” (1)

This sounds just like the same story I wrote here nearly two years ago (6/22/2023 as I write) about Apple. (2) Except now, we find that a popular motherboard maker is imbedding internet access code in the boot-up software that lets their boards start and run, in motherboards that people use to try to get away from commercial and governmental surveilance by building their own secure machines.

It’s not that this was unpredictable. There has always been a security issue with closed source boot firmware. It has never been fundamentally trustworthy, but a foundation of sand upon which to try to erect a safe and secure computing structure. Gigabyte’s present problem is just one real material example of what is really going on. What other computer builders and chip makers are doing or not doing, we can only guess. How it can be misused, we don’t know. Is it intentional and malicious, or just crappy code? It would be great to see the code and make sure our computers, unlike my MacBook of three years ago, are really ours. And it is absolutely necessary that the computer owner at least has a kill switch on any such code, or else, it’s not their machine.

Well, we can look at some boot-up code. Open source boot-up software is available from coreboot (3). I recently bought a refurbished Lenovo T440p laptop from Minifree Ltd (4) that uses coreboot in a product it calls Libreboot. Some builders include a coreboot option, the StarLite MK IV, for example (5). My experience with Libreboot has been good.

-George

1. https://www.wired.com/story/gigabyte-motherboard-firmware-backdoor/
2. https://muchado.us/2026/03/13/iprivacy/
3. https://www.coreboot.org/
4. https://minifree.org/
5. https://us.starlabs.systems/collections/laptops/products/starlite?variant=33046352166971

I just (1/22/23) ordered “The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America”. I saw a picture of a Ukranian soldier reading the book in a foxhole (posted by the author on Telegram).

The Goodreads reviews of conservative readers were pretty bad (a reciprocal indicator of potential value for me), and I figure the soldier has a much better perspective from which to judge the validity of Snyder’s claims about Putin’s unhinged genocidal goals than the author’s detractors. Those factors make me think this might be worth some time, so off I go.

-George

Our three-year-old Legacy House just had a solar PV upgrade. We added 19 panels on the house to make about 100% of our energy. Net metering, no batteries (yet).

Public access to PV information is at https://enlighten.enphaseenergy.com/pv/public_systems/gReL1525541/stats?preview=1. Recent numbers will show the bump in production.

his “old farmhouse” is anything but. It’s an all-electric ultra-high-performance SIPS building for the next generation.

Say thanks, kids.

-George