jasonrparadis.xyz

About the battery age switch reset in 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrids aka cars are really just fancy computers

a 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid. This is someone else’s picture of a perfectly reasonable driving appliance.

I’ve had a 2010 Ford Fusion for about 40k of the 150k miles on it, and I’ve been satisfied with it for what it is – a midsize sedan that gets 40ish MPG but still has power comparable to a 6 cylinder. I have not done anything to it other than normal maintenance, until now anyway – my engine would not turn off at idle or drive in purely electric mode. I only noticed because I’ve been getting low MPG for a while, I figured it was just cause I haven’t driven very much this year, but I had to wait for a grocery pickup and it took 40 minutes and I knew it should have turned off after 20 minutes or so. So I started googling and reading. There’s a service advisory for some electronic issue, but I didn’t think it was that. I noticed this thread:

https://www.fordfusionforum.com/index.php?app=forums&module=forums&controller=topic&id=19361

It says these cars have a switch that disables some electronic functionality around the 8th or 9th year and you can fix it with an OBD-II cable & laptop running FORscan. I had one for an old Subaru laying around, so I tried that – but I couldn’t connect. I took a chance on buying the cable recommended in that thread for around 30 dollars. It took me a while to get it recognize, first driver issues (and then issues finding them since they aren’t on their site), then issues getting it to connect with MS-CAN. Finally I get connected, and it says my battery is 10 years old? I’m not sure when it kicks in but I’ve barely driven at all this year so it’s possible it happened at the beginning of the year and haven’t noticed. I set it to 1 year old, hit the buttons, heard a click in the trunk, and drove. 10 minutes later I’m at a stop light and the engine turns off and the car is in EV mode again. Back to normal.

No check engine or anything comes up on the dashboard when this happens. It’s kind of silly, but maybe it’s a liability thing? I wonder how many people have gotten rid of these cars thinking something was bad when nothing was actually wrong.

I’m kinda bored of it and want to get a 3rd generation Mazda Miata, but I’m too reasonable to go from 40mpg and a bunch of power + space to a tiny noisy roadster just for fun when I don’t even drive much anymore. Maybe at 200k or a real issue happening to this car, or if I find a really good deal.

Painting with a pen plotter

I realized that painting with the axidraw API and scanning SVG files was actually pretty easy, so I’ve been trying to rewrite some of my old plotter scripts to work with painting. It works okay for pointillism and long strokes, but short strokes don’t turn out well or just get painted over by the next lines.

The pen drawings near the bottom are mostly for testing https://github.com/jrparadis/plotplot which is a web interface for the axidraw CLI I wrote because I dislike using Inkscape or CLI for basic things like disabling motors.

A lot of these are bit op patterns layered and transformed multiple times. I think I’ve got a bit more experimentation to do – the only one that’s actually new and not adapted from old pen plotting scripts is #4, which is an abstract version of Louis Wain’s Early Irish-Indian Cat xy scanned for closest colors and plotted about 10 times (it’s not suppose to be very accurate, just the basis for something abstract). The current script only seems to get results from really colorful pictures though. Guess I need to keep on trying!

Rename / Migration

I think I’m gonna migrate this from onionandgarlic.com to jasonrparadis.xyz since I’d like to document some of my tech projects like my pen plotter scripts, programming stuff as well as food / gardening.

What the heck is a Kohlrabi?

A few years ago I was on a big gardening kick and came across kohlrabi. It’s some sort of cabbage / mustard relative that’s normally harvested when it’s young. I decided to let them keep growing (I had no idea what to do with them), and they ended up with some looking like really weird aliens.

Kohlrabi. I think you normally harvest it a bit before this.

same date as above (timestamp says 8/9/2014)

Some of the kohlrabi above left in the ground for waaaay too long. (11/25/2014, almost 4 months after the above)

I never actually tried eating them but I’ve seen them occasionally at Winco – when I do, they are usually about the size of a small apple – ones like these are too woody to be edible, I think. I’ll have to find a recipe and pick some up next time. They are definitely going in my next garden, if only as a weird decoration.

an overgrown kohlrabi with all the leaves taken off (2013)

A relevant meme

I found this in the depths of the internet and it made me laugh.

Timelapses of Future Bread

I’ve been making a lot of bread and dough lately, and I like photography, so I decided to setup a webcam to watch it grow. I use python scripts to grab webcam images, turn them into gifs, then turn those into videos. I’m still working on what quality and setup works best, so it’s not the best quality yet, but I think I’ll keep making more.