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.
Here’s what the headlights look like, in three of 4 stages, from left to right.
As they sat on the car, only washed clean.
The first stage of renewing, with a partial 800 grit wetsand.
The next stage, using 1000 grit.
I then clean up the scratches that are still evident with 2000 grit, and finally fill and seal the new layer of plastic to alleviate UV ray damage in the future.
I intended to have today to get many of the vehicular projects done, but the weather just has not cooperated! It was maybe 55 degrees by 11am, with 20+mph winds. That’s a bit cold to clean sticky residue from paint, and wetsand the plastic headlights.
So, it became oil change day, since the 9-5 needed it, anyhow. Then, the Impalas got new filters, which is a good thing- since their air intakes looked like they were submerged in a mountain for a few millennia.
I managed to get the right one fairly well initially sanded with 400 grit before the cold got to me; It looks as cloudy as the left one because that’s the nature of abrasions on plastic. It will be sanded with progressively finer grit, then given a clearcoat. That will brighten it up, and keep it from yellowing likely for the rest of the duration of the vehicles’ use.
I may have to add a new Category classification: “Auto Relatedâ€.
