GM, in their overtime-penny-pinching wisdom, left the cabin air intake (this is what goes through your heater, and your AC) open in the 2006-2013 Impala.

It’s nearly directly exposed to the weather. This cover (which was not designed to be completely watertight) will not keep water from pooling on the filter (which may mold- certainly will annoy allergies), so they decided to stick another piece of plastic over the filter itself- beneath the now-top cover to assist with mold prevention. It does nothing to prevent the filter from getting wet, except for ‘dribble through’ prevention. What about other allergens, such as dust?

The pictured filters were new in 2014. Obviously an open-exposed filter will degrade faster- but this is the worst “not original” filter I’ve seen in a car that didn’t have something BROKEN in order for the dirt to get to it. It’s always a good plan to replace these yearly- more often if you are in a harsh climate. This is still no excuse for poor design.

The “Former Known As” Police Impalas are shaping up!

New fluids, bulbs, buffed out headlamps, and a preliminary rub of the paint- they don’t look all that bad. Oh, and I cleaned the engine compartment. I don’t understand why so many people let them stay filthy. They don’t need to be this clean, but it serves a secondary purpose so I can identify and fix any issues before they find their way home.

Also, got the headlamps done on the Dodge- it’s going to need some paint touchup.

I’m not the biggest fan of overcast, rainy days- they tend to usher oneself inside, since it’s never fun (or sometimes safe) working in a cold, damp environment. The good thing about this weather, however, is that it allows you to work on “to do later” projects. Today was one of those days.

This started out as a dollar store 2.1A dual-port charger in an ugly translucent orange case. I measured it to ensure it worked well under load, examined the boards, and decided that they’d work great to add dedicated charging ports in my daily driver.

As this car did not have heated seats, I have 4 “dummy” plugs, and decided to use one of them so myself, and a passenger, might charge our phones- or even use them as GPS/etc without concern for power related issues.

Including the solder, electricity, and epoxy used to mount the ports in the dummy plugs- I may have $2 into this project. Not bad!

After so many short posts (after hours of work on the cars), one might wonder where all of my nerd posts have gone- they’re still here, and some I’ve been holding off until I have adequate time to compose an actual article, rather than a drive-by paragraph.

Void Linux, while it may deserve a better writeup, is far too good to keep bottled in.

It’s a very simple distribution based around XBPS, a rolling release, meaning that as soon as it’s up on github, it’s ready for you to add to your own build.

It does many things different than other distirbutions- for one, and the reason I decided to give it a try- NO SYSTEMD. It uses runit, which is a very simple init system which is design compatible with djb’s daemontools. Anything you want to run- you explicitly tell it so.

It’s light weight, multiplatform, and other than a little annoying to work with closed source/binary blobs, amazingly versatile. It runs loops around other distributions- my Core2Duo has booted and loaded Chrome before a basic i3 Windows 7 machine several years NEWER has even managed to get to the desktop (and over twice as fast as Mint, with half the RAM use for a similar configuration).

My ohmmeter wasn’t working. Batteries were fine, but absolutely no juice. Needed to test fuses. Fuses were fine. There was actually an issue with the negative post. I wrapped it with aluminum foil, and everything is back to normal.

The bulbs have been replaced, and the headlamps put back into the Impalas. They don’t look brand new, but they look quite a bit better than they had. The missing spark plug for the Dodge arrived, and it’s put back together and idled for a few minutes to get the battery charged up.