Car history

My dad's post on car history, prompted me to make a similar page.

After getting my driver's license, I was driving my dad's Volvo 343. Not a lot of power, so quite boring to drive.

As a conscripted hussar in the Dutch Cavalry, I learned to drive this DAF YA-4442. Six-wheel drive! Picture taken on an exercise in Hohenfels, Germany.

I bought a Peugeot 309 GLD (1.9L Diesel) from my colleage Arjan who worked at Nuson. Very reliable, and loads of torque from the engine.

To get my next car, I had to deal with a hostile salesman! When I asked to test drive the Suzuki Swift GLX 16V, the salesmen responded with a "Why?" Confounded, I replied "To buy it?" This car was high-revving, and boy, it was fast. It weighed next to nothing, but had a 100HP engine. It was a little rocket! I had to scrap it when the bottom turned to rust.

Its replacement was the worst financial decision I ever made: I wanted a classic Chevy Camaro. To finance it, I sold my stock portfolio comprised of ARM Holdings (!) and Samsung. I was a very early investor in those companies, and it would have been worth a fortune today! This was a decade before the iPhone! Instead, I got a car that cost me an arm and a leg to maintain and repair. Oof.

In Canada, I got a 2012 Subaru Forrester with 2.5L boxer engine. Costly repairs include a new clutch at 70K km. It is currently also leaking oil. A fun way to explore British Columbia, though!

My next car will definitely be electric.

Oven 0 - Bram 2

This year, my 10-year-old DCS RGU-366 oven stopped working twice. Both times, I was able to defeat it! I feel like an accomplished repairman now, when it comes to ovens.

In Februari, the oven stopped working because it was run with the door slightly ajar. The control panel and knobs heated up so much, that a safety thermostat blew. Once I learned how to dismantle the oven, studied the schematics (glued to the back of the unit) and measure the switches, I was able to identify and then replace the Stalled Fan Thermostat using a cheap replacement from Amazon.

And in September, the oven stopped working again. This time with slightly different symptoms. Again, after two days of dismantling, studying the schematics, and measuring, I was able to determine that the ignitor had failed. This is a $150 part, OEM, but all you have to do is look up the specs for it (Amperage) and find a matching generic ignitor for $40, which works just as well!

In both cases I saved a lot of money on a repairman. But also a lot of money on parts. The OEM parts are priced outrageously. All you need to do is determine what the phsyical characteristics are of the OEM part, and buy a generic part with the same specs. Again, a lot of money saved!

I now feel like an expert on the RGU-366 oven. I understand how they work, and if one stops working, I think I can quickly diagnose it.

I fought the aphids/ants, and I won!

So, five years ago, I planted a blossom tree seedling. Pretty much every year, I had to fight the ants that farmed aphids. Those aphids would destroy the leaves of the tree.

But! I would not give up my little tree! I fought them with soap, with borax, with cayene powder, with ant poison, aphid-spray, yet they would come back every year and eat up my blossom tree.

But this year, I won. I sprung into defense early in the season, and managed to stave off the invasion.

And guess what... the tree is now taller than me! Yay! Achievement unlocked!

Annelies took this picture for me, from our balcony, using her own camera. We hope that the little tree will survive into adulthood when it can sprout some nice pink flowers.

Lessons Learned When Building a Speaker

I have been building a 3-way center speaker for my home theater, because the Triangle BRC1 I picked was never delivered. It showed as in-stock and as shipping-next-day at Electronics For Less, but alas.

Screw that, I will design and build my own speaker, with blackjack and hookers.

And unlike the Triangle, my speaker will be a proper 3-way one. A driver dedicated for the low frequences, one for the high frequencies, but also one for the middle frequencies.

For my design, I kinda winged it. I didn't simulate wave propegations, or accurately calculate volumes.

Lessons learned:

• MDF makes for excellent material. I complimented it with Oak sides for a nicer look.
• You cannot use a water-based paint on MDF. I find that Rust-oleum LEAK SEAL is excellent: it puts a rubber coat on the MDF. It is bumpy though, not for a smooth finish. But I like it.
• Home Depot will make excellent saw-cuts for free (12" and up.) But if the saw-operator is an under-trained teenager, you get crooked pieces.
• Ryobi $59 circular saw is straight up crap. I returned it. It's not even safe. It will always kick back violently. You get what you pay for.
• Those hole-saws that you put on a drill, work just fine. But it will not make those fancy recessed holes that a router could.
• Parts are plenty and cheap at AliExpress, and the seller (I used HIFIDIY) will guide you if you need help.
• Mid-ranges are harder to find than tweeters and woofers.
• Learned by mistake: don't order a sealed mid driver. You are building a pressure chamber from MDF, don't undo that with a sealed driver (other than tweeter.) I had to order a second mid range driver to correct this, which I sourced in Canada for faster shipping.
• Drivers have a preference on how to be used: Bass-Reflex (ported cabinet) or Acoustic Suspension (sealed cabinet.) There is an online calculator for this.
• Try to match up the sensitivities of your drivers. If one of the three is very sensitive and others are not, one frequency band will be too loud. And this is probably obvious, but each driver should be flat-ish in the range that the cross-over will give it. And of course, you do not need "full-range" drivers. Stay away from those, because you are building a 3-way, aren't you?
• Sealed cabinet is easier to get right than a ported cabinet, which is more finicky. And you should probably build separate sealed chambers for mid-range and woofer.
• Seasoned audio DIY people will try to talk you out of designing your speaker, and get a carefully planned kit instead. I say hog-wash: go for it! It's a bit like a stock portfolio manager: A pro is nearly as likely to get it wrong as an amateur. Also, making mistakes and learning is fun. I find that high end audio is some Science with mostly Art thrown in. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Just roll those dice yourself.
• Drivers often come without a gasket. To make your own, get Duct Seal from your hardware store. It is dirt cheap and works great.
• I wish I had known this, but: Don't buy those connector boxes for the binding posts. Just buy two loose posts, and dril a small hole for each. If you really have to get a box, get one for a circular hole, not a rectangular one.
• Off-the-shelf 3-way cross over works just fine, despite their cheap price. You can save yourself a lot of time (and possibly troubleshooting) by getting a pre-built cross over.
• The closer you can place your drivers to eachother, the less likely you will get out-of-phase cancelations between them. Especially for audience not dead-center in front of TV.
• Get good glue-clamps.
• Don't embark on this if you do not have carpentry skills. It's just a rectangular box, but even making a rectangular box requires skill.

To my layman ears, the speaker sounds great, and at least as good as the commercially built bookshelf speakers I use with it.

Parts list:

• Kasun 1635C 3-way crossover at 1300Hz and 4800Hz.
• KS-167S woofer.
• Q1N 4 inch tweeter.
• SEAS PRESTIGE MCA12RC 12cm mid range.
• 3/4" oak panels, 0.5" MDF, glue, duct seal, driver screws, rust-oleum leak seal, binding posts, wire, solder.

Chock

It was only 200 years ago, or so, that for any implement you may require, you would commision a local craftsman to craft it for you. You need a wagon wheel? Visit a local tradesman. You need leather shoes? Visit a local tradesman. You need soup bowl? Visit a local tradesman.

Fast forward to 2020. Everything that you may require is sold by Amazon and sourced, most likely, from a factory in China. And this factory churns out at least a million copies of your wheel/shoe/bowl, all 100% identical to each other.

Imagine, if you will, you are a Ferry service with a billion dollar revenue. Surely, every little cog in your billion dollar machine is some factory-spec item that is ordered from some sort of industrial product catalogue.

Or... is it?

Behold these quaint looking implements. Stacked ply-wood, hand-painted in orange, and stapled to a belt. I can guarantee you, these definitely do not look like they were sourced from Alibaba or Amazon.

They may not look like much, but you will be hard-pressed to safely park a motorcycle on the deck of a Ferry without it. Especially if said Ferry would sail the open sea.

The chock looks to be as old as the Ferry itself, which would make it a 1993 chock. But just imagine for a second, how the Ferry corporation got hold of these. Surely, a local handyman was at some point tasked with fabricating these chocks, simply because an Amazon/Alibaba search yielded 0 results. Just too niche to be manufactured according to factory spec. Simply bang out a few of these when you need them. I wonder who the local BC carpenter was that put these together, and if he will get a replacement order in the next maintenance cycle.

Just because they are so delightfully quant, one more chock:

In-door Fun: Brick Factory

It is a challenge to entertain kids at home when social-distancing during this COVID19 event. How do you keep them occupied for a good stretch of time? This made me think about my favorite hobby projects when I was a kid. And one of them was manufacturing your own bricks, and then build with them.

Your home-made bricks are more fun than LEGO, and bring out the little industrialist inside of you. You get to plan your production runs through-out the day, and have all the anticipation about what you will do when you have enough bricks. It's a week of playful work, and cheap to do.

All you need is some Gypsum (plaster powder) and a silicone mould. I used this mould which is targeted to bakers as a tool to make desserts. I recommend using a mould that creates blocks where the dimensions have a ratio of 1:2:4 for easy construction. I used this particular plaster.

STEP 1

Mix the plaster with water. Start with water and keep adding gypsum powder, spoon by spoon, while stirring. Once you get a thick yogurt-like viscosity, it is time to pour it in the mould.

STEP 2

Let it harden in 2 or 3 hours or so.

STEP 3

Start designing and stacking. I recommend gluing them, and if you use thick cardboard between the layers, you get a simulation of a cement layer.

The one regret I have, is that I had not stained the mix with a red ink. I think red-brownish bricks would have looked better than white ones. If I redo this project, I would add the ink.

With the structures built, the kids now look forward to adding furniture to their designs. So in short, good fun, for young and old. Why not give it a try? And if you do, drop a a few lines in the comments!

Visit to Strathcona

Today we paid a visit to Vancouver's oldest neighbourhood, Strathcona. It features an ice cream shop with 238 flavours, which is always busy. The little convenience store on Vernon Drive caught my eye. It is a little shack that time itself forgot. I think it was still open, not too long ago, but seems closed down now. Also, store plus house are currently for sale, listed at $2.6M dollars, no less. Ouch!

It also has the Admiral Seymour school, which is quite striking. Here is what it looked like when it was freshly finished:

And this is what it looked like today, in april 2019. I must say that the school board kept it in remarkable good condition, considering its age.

Quickly after building, it must have gotten too small, as the brick annex was erected:

Fav Jokes.

My favorite jokes. (The Internet calls them dad-jokes. Meh.)

What is brown and sticky?
A stick.

What did the wall say to the other wall?
I'll meet you at the corner.

How do you cut an ocean in half?
With a see-saw.

Why do you never see elephants hiding in a tree?
Because they are so good at it.

How many apples grow on a tree?
All of them.

What is worse than finding a worm in your apple?
Finding half a worm in your apple.

What’s the advantage of living in Switzerland?
Well, the flag is a big plus.

Why did the spider go to college?
She wanted to be a web designer.

What did the 0 say to the 8?
Nice belt.

Seedling has survived.

So, two and a half years ago, I planted a Cherry tree seedling of just a few centimeters high. Now, I can happily report that it has survived its transplant into my garden. It is now approximately 2 feet tall!

It's survival was hanging by a thread, at some point. This was because I hadn't been paying attention, and the tree got infected by aphids. These aphids live in a strange relation ship with ants, because they were being farmed by carpenter ants.

Killing the aphids with dish soap made the ants go away, fortunately. But not before the tree was severely damaged by the aphids. As bad as that was, I think it survived and is still growing.

I estimate it will take a couple of decades before we'll see a sizable tree. I'll keep tracking its growth.

Build

Last year's big hole in the ground is now a six story apartment building. Not quite finished, but the main structure is there.

What surprised me is that they started building in concrete, for the parking garage and main floor, and then proceeded to put chip-wood apartments on top of that. It's almost as if the builder constructs a $40M garage with a million dollar worth of apartments on top. People told me this probably has to do with earthquake hazards. I guess a wooden structure is safer in this respect. I doubt it will last very long though. Only the bottom floor and the elevator shaft seem to have been built as solid structures, and cheap wood for the rest of it.

This is what it looks like today, photographed with my Fujifilm X100 and perspective corrected in Gimp.

Easel

My daughter wants an easel, so I decided to build one with her. What do you think? It's a table model. Not shown: hinge, chain.

The day I found a glitch in "The Matrix" and questioned Reality.

I am a level-headed guy, with immediate distrust of anything spiritual. This is a tale about the most spiritual thing that ever happened to me, and briefly caused me to rethink my existence.

It must have been roughly 15 years ago. I lived in Holland, alone, in a house. And I was doing work on a curtain rail in my bedroom.

The curtain rail looked very similar to the one shown above. Including the little plastic end-cap. After securely attaching the little end-cap onto the rail (it was fastened rock solid) I stepped down from a stool to switch out a tool. Two seconds later as I turned to the curtain rail again, that little end-cap was gone.

POOF... just like that.

Something that was there, two seconds ago, had disappeared into thin air! I knew for a fact it had not fallen, it was attached very tightly, and if it had, I would have heard it, or see it on the ground.

I tried to wrap my head around it. I was alone in the bedroom, alone in the house. Doors and windows locked. An object disappeared in the two seconds I turned my back on it. I had felt the objects with my own hands, seconds ago.

My mind raced for an explanation.

• I knew for a fact it had not fallen off.
• I had 100% faith in my mental state.
• I have never used drugs. I hadn't consumed alcohol in a long time.
• I was well rested.
• I was 100% certain that I was not dreaming. I imagine I would have pinched myself.
• My eyesight was perfect.
• No pets nor people in the house, and even then: it was just 2 seconds that my back was turned.

At this freak moment, reality had behaved differently from what I had observed in a life-time. And after discounting all the plausible and implausible causes for this disappearance, my mind was left with only one explanation for this.

I concluded that Reality may not be what it seems. Did I just see a glitch in "The Matrix?" Did the simulated universe run into a bug?

Then my mind continued on its path. Ok, let's for a moment assume I observed a glitch, now what? And that thought scared me just as much as the freak-disappearance itself did. Would "the Matrix" care? Is there some pan-dimensional operator somewhere, sounding an alarm "SIMULANT BREACHED PROTOCOL! EMERGENCY INTERVENTION!" and press a red button?

Dazed, I looked up again to the ceiling and everything became clear again. There...... were...... two...... curtain-rails.

One curtain rail was mounted directly onto the concrete ceiling. There was a second curtain rail in the small window bay, 30 centimetres below it. One had a plastic cap, the other did not.

For all that racing that my mind did, it never for a moment considered the possibilities of having two rails. I had created a mental model of the room, with in it: me, my step stool, some tools and one mounted curtain rail. A completely wrong assumption, as there was one for a lace window in the window bay, and one for a heavier curtain on the ceiling.

Reality Restored! And that was quite a relief. Moral of the story? Freak occurrences? It's not supernatural. It's never supernatural. It's good old Reality, and it is reliable.

1908

Speaking of urban developments, I came across this visualization tool for city planning. It can visualize many aspects of the city, including the age of the buildings. By selecting the buildings built between 1901 and 1908, I could determine the oldest still standing house in my neighbourhood. And here it is, in all its glory:

I must say that 112 46th Avenue East is quite a beauty. It was built in 1908. And I think it qualifies as a Vancouver Craftsman home.

At first glance, it seems to be in decent shape. Will it stand for another century? Hard to say with this wet climate, and wooden construction. At least according to the database, it is a heritage site. So it will not see an excavator tear it down any time soon, fortunately.

Apparently, in 1912, Murdock McIntyre raised the house and added a basement.

Urban Renewal

There is some overdue renewal going on in Punjabi Market, Vancouver. For many years now, a substantial number of store fronts have been empty. I take it because low density neighbourhoods with single-family homes can't sustain too much commerce. So it's good that they replaced the stores with a complex of apartments and stores.

They dug up a cool looking boulder, and lying on top of it, what seems to be a tree trunk. I wonder what age would come up if they were to date it by its tree rings. I've heard that there used to be a river flowing through this area, so maybe that's how the tree got down deep in the ground. Peculiar that it is only one.

Just across the street from here (across 49th ave) there is a lot that has been empty for a decade or more. It used to be a gas station, but contaminated soil caused it to be unsuited for development.

It just occurred to me what a fantastic lawn ornament that boulder would be. Maybe I should offer to take it, surely it's cheapest for the developer to move that boulder just a 100 meters or so, as opposed to some off-site dump. But I shudder at the thought of dealing with the city if the bureaucrats ever deem the boulder to be illegal. What happened to my land, my rules? Oh wait, it's not my land, Queen Elizabeth owns it.

Real Estate pricing is inherently unstable.

Real Estate in Canada has been defying common sense for quite a while now. Especially in Vancouver and Toronto the prices have gone ballistic. I think this is because Real Estate plays more and more the role of investment as opposed to the utilitarian role of shelter.

Most consumption in our economy has nicely predictable pricing, as it follows supply and demand. Higher prices will lower demand, causing lower prices. This means, it is self-regulating.

When it comes to investments, however, lower prices often repel investors, instead of attracting them. Most investors will want to ride a trend. And if the trend is down, they will jump ship. If the trend is up, they are tempted to invest more of their money in it.

When viewed as an investment, or even a simple nest-egg for retirement, Real Estate pricing is doomed to a vicious cycle. So that means that the housing market is likely to be in a boom or in a bust. And it will be relatively hard to stay in a steady-state equilibrium. Because as soon as the price swings one way, investor behaviour is going to reinforce the trend.

How can these cycles be broken? Well, for that to happen, Canadian home owners need to take a serious look at the intrinsic value of their home, instead of the speculative value. Most people do not have a good feel for intrinsic value. But it can easily be calculated based on market rents.

For a stock portfolio it is not unreasonable to expect a 6.25% yield on your investment per year. If a house is viewed as an investment, we could compare its yield to this. Ignoring property tax and maintenance for a moment: if the price is 16 times the yearly rent, it would yield the same 6.25%. So to determine the intrinsic value of your home, just multiply the market's monthly rent by 12x16 (192.) If you can rent out the apartment for $1000 per month, intrinsically, the apartment is worth $192,000. Depending on the city, or even neighbourhood, the actual market price of the apartment may be much different from this. In the United States, the extremes are San Francisco and Detroit.

Children of Orc

I have just introduced my new game to the world. It is called Children of Orc.

Children of Orc is a real-time third-person strategy game that is set on a procedurally generated hex-planet. Check out the trailer video:

To get published on Steam, it can use a little help with green light votes.