[Note: The third incarnation of this website, which will be at theonlinephotographer.com and will launch in October, won't publish on weekends, or during August, as Yr. Hmbl. Ed. continues the Battle Against Burnout. But it also won't have off-topic posts on specific enthusiasms, such as WFPB diets and electric cars. Those will spin off to different sites, eventually. But as long as this version of the website endures, you are not yet safe!

My readers are very indulgent.  :-) ]

Woo-hoo! The day finally came. I got my 240-volt AC Level 2 EVSE installed. Level 2 is overnight charging, used by the vast majority of EV owners who charge at home.

The thing that says "LENZ" is not actually a "charger." (It's not a lens, either. Although it is named for a physicist—Emil Lenz.) It's a supply box. Technical name EVSE, for "electric vehicle supply equipment." EVs—electric vehicles—don't use external AC chargers. The AC charger is in the cars. For a month now I've been using Level 1 (standard 120-volt outlet) with the portable cable that came with the car. Honestly, it's almost good enough for me to use permanently. Not everybody needs all that much charging. 

But it's nice to have a little more. Level 1 supplies about 1.2 kW of continuous power. My new circuit is an AC 240V, 50-amp circuit. The maximum it will supply is 40 amps. My car's maximum acceptance rate is 30 amps (it's more in European versions of my car, a Nissan Ariya. Don't ask me why). I had Richard Bruno, the electrician, set my EVSE at 24 amps. That's 5.8 kW, so it'll be almost five times faster than the Level 1 cable I've been using.

So what you're seeing in the picture is a 14-50 outlet, the EVSE plugged into it, and the cable and cable holder. The electrical box (pre-existing) is on the wall in front of the car. Total cost of installation, about $790, including the EVSE, the receptacle (outlet), the wall plate for the outlet, and the plywood. 

With most EVs, you let the car tell the supply box how much power it wants. With most cars you can choose a percentage of full—I normally charge to 80% or so. But for some reason the Ariya doesn't let you do this—all you can set is the time of day and the length of time you want it to charge. So you do have to kind of estimate how long you're going to need to charge. Funny thing is, though, the MyNissan app does tell you to the percentage of charge—for instance, I just unplugged from my new EVSE's maiden voyage, and the app looks like this:

More weirdness, though—the apps lets you start charging remotely, but it doesn't let you stop charging remotely. I read the reason for this somewhere but I don't remember it now. 

Once I get use to it, though, this is going to be very easy. And fast. It takes me about a minute to program the charging time on the screen in the car, and then no time at all, really, to plug in. After that there's nothing—you just come out in the morning, unplug, and off you go. With a "full tank" by whatever your own definition of "full" happens to be. Did I mention I haven't been to a gas station in a month? I wave as I glide silently by, though. 

Level 2 charging just means that you're plugging in to a 240-volt circuit instead of 120V. The outlet looks like the one for your dryer or range (but it had better be better quality—cheap 14-50 receptacles aren't designed and built for continuous current. This is the one I bought. It's expensive, but worth it unless you want your outlet to melt or, in rare cases, your garage to burn down).

Fun fact: Volts are named for Alessandro Volta. I don't know if you learn something new every day, but I do. 

Many sizes all fit all
There is no single power level for Level 2 charging. You can set yourself up for a variety of levels of power and the associated charging times. Here's a brief look at the circuit breaker you need, the EVSE amperage it supports, and the power expressed in kilowatts for the various levels of level 2 charging: 

100-amp circuit: charger amperage 80; continuous power 19.2 kW.

60-amp circuit: charger amperage 48; continuous power 11.5 kW.

50-amp circuit: charger amperage 40; continuous power 9.6 kW.

40-amp circuit: charger amperage 32; continuous power 7.7 kW.

30-amp circuit: charger amperage 24; continuous power 5.8 kW.

20-amp circuit: charger amperage 16; continuous power 3.8 kW.

All these are compared to Level 1, which requires a 15-amp circuit and supplies 1.2 kW continuous power. 

It's worth noting that it's not entirely up to you what you get. All EVs—the cars themselves—have a maximum acceptance rate. It does no good to get a charger that's faster than your car allows, except if you're future-proofing your setup for your next car. 

The thing is, though, for AC charging, it really doesn't matter how fast your car charges. All Level 2 charging is essentially overnight charging. It takes no time at all because you're not waiting for it—you're inside, sleeping.

Mike

Coda: This is the post I was working on when the line went dead on Sept. 4th. It's now the 13th, and in those nine days I've only had the car hooked up to the electricity four times, for a cumulative grand total of about 12 hours—two hours the first night, four the third night, and so on. My best estimate of the cost for that is somewhere between $3.16 and $3.89. I didn't need to charge yesterday, for instance. The SoC (state of charge) has only been below 30% once, and the highest SoC I've charged up to is 85%. It almost seems like it should be more difficult.

If my usage for the first nine days is typical, and the cost estimate is correct, then my electricity cost for the car for this month should be between $10.43 and $12.84. In a typical household with an EV, the car is not the biggest user of electricity—it comes in third, after heating and hot water. 

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

     

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I've been battling a marauder. He eluded all my traps and forced me to consider lethal force. 

Before I get into that, a few notes about animal life this year at TOP Rural World Headquarters, a.k.a. my little farmhouse in the Finger Lakes.

For the first time in years, I had no robins. I did finally take down the robin high-rise on top of the lamp at the corner of the house in back—they had built it up year after year until they could barely get in under the soffits. It was seven inches high by the time of demolition. I tried to make up for the lost housing infrastructure by commissioning two beautiful robin shelves from 13-year-old Anthony Sensenig, son of my woodworker friend Andrew. He did a nice job, but we made a tactical error and varnished them—the birds like untreated wood better, I later learned. I located them, as the birds prefer, on north- and east-facing walls. But of course they didn't touch them. Too new and unfamiliar. I certainly saw a lot of robin mating activity going on during the Springtime, but where were they nesting? Not around the house. 

But I did have a pair of doves for the first time. Maybe two pairs, I was never sure. One of the doves seemed to settle into the gutter, which showed poor foresight. Actually I shouldn't judge; I don't know bird culture. Maybe gutters are a high-prestige address for doves.

Heading to the pool-table shed one night after dark, I startled a snake, and he startled me—I almost stepped on him in fact. It was a garter snake, which are common around here. Between two and three feet long. I tossed a few pebbles at him and he vamoosed. I'm just as happy I didn't step on him—they're not poisonous but are known to bite anyway, and I wouldn't have liked getting bitten by any sort of snake. I've been looking out for them on the boardwalk ever since.

As regular readers know, the premises sadly became dogless in early June. I'm still mourning for my dear Butters, but I'm getting used to life without him. Every time I think of him I try to think of something good and of how grateful I am for his company all those years. It tamps down the sadness to approach it that way.

Happy family
Then, finally, very late in the season, a robin couple moved in. The female is small. Why did she start so late, and miss the first nesting cycles in the Springtime and early Summer? I don't know enough about robins to know. She built her nest under the pavilion from scratch in mid to late July, and she did a nice, neat job, too—it's a sturdy, well-crafted nest. Not like the family I had in nearly the same place last year, whose nest was so poorly made it kept falling off the beam or being blown apart by the wind (one of their children was the robin who wouldn't leave the nest). Maybe there wasn't enough mud that year; I won't judge. Anyway, the new couple are model parents. The male hangs around. The two of them got used to me quickly, because I put food out for them regularly and announce my presence when I go by. They never give the "warning call" on my account, or seem to get upset about my presence, even when I come under the pavilion close to the nest. They have three healthy nestlings, who I expect will leave the nest any time now. 

 

But back to the marauder. I occasionally get deer mice in the basement. They get in but can't get out, so over the years I've found eight or ten dried, mummified remains of mice in corners or between old paint cans or boxes. But once, a few years ago, one of them was smart enough to figure out a route up to the kitchen. I use a sort of mousetrap that is supposed to be adaptable to live trapping or kill trapping; it's a 5-gallon bucket with a Planky-Pro and a bit of peanut butter on the end of the plank. Put shavings in the bucket, and you can live trap; three inches of water in the bucket makes it a kill trap—they fall in and drown. My first kitchen marauder was a clever, resourceful mouse—he not only figured out how to raid the kitchen, but after I caught him and threw him behind the woodpile he found his way back into the house again (they do that) and reappeared in the kitchen. I knew it was him because he used the exact same strategies in trying to elude me when I was chasing him. I considered live-trapping, but it was the middle of Winter and bitter cold; if I had released him far from any building in a snow-covered field he probably would have died anyway. So I resorted to kill trapping. That's when I got the Planky-Pro. I didn't like to do it...it offended my sense of justice. He was an exceptional mouse, smart, strong, and resourceful, and he didn't deserved to be un-alived by me. But he was in my kitchen, eating my food and sh*tting on my counters, and sympathy for animals has sensible limits. 

But this time, I thought, I can live trap, because it's Summer, and merely relocating the new clever mouse would still give him a fighting chance at life. So I tried putting shavings in the bucket. Mysteriously, it didn't work—twice, I came down to find the peanut butter licked clean but no mouse in the bucket. The only explanation was that he was being trapped, but was strong enough to jump out of the bucket. Most mice aren't. 

I realized I was probably going to have to replace the shavings with water and make it into a kill trap. But I was uncomfortable with the idea so I did what I usually do in such situations...I procrastinated.

Cheeky bugger
Then I had a bright idea. I get those sometimes. What I could do was put only an inch of water in the bucket. Ever tried to jump out of the shallow end of a pool to a seated position on the pool's edge? Jumping out of shallow water impedes you just that little bit. In an inch of water, he wouldn't drown, but it would probably make it so he couldn't jump out of the bucket. 

It worked in only a couple of hours. He raided the kitchen while I was in the adjacent office, awake and working! Cheeky little bugger. It was midnight. I taped a lid on the bucket, loaded it in the car, and off we went. I drove five miles into the hills, stopped in a remote location by a stand of woods, and set the little guy free. A mouse's heart beats at 450 to 750 beats a minute (oddly, many creatures get about the same number of heartbeats in a lifetime—our lifetime's allotment is roughly the same as a short-lived mouse's or a long-lived tortoise's), and his must have been higher because of fear. When I let him go he quickly burrowed under the thick grasses and stayed motionless, doubtless hoping I'd go away. 

I did.

He doesn't realize he's about to go free

The project took half an hour in the middle of the night. Which is, okay, stupid. But I didn't mind. This way, the mouse doesn't get sentenced to death for being smarter, stronger, and more resourceful than other mice. He gets a chance to live his life. Or, he becomes a quick snack for an owl or another sort of raptor, or a fox, weasel, or, yes, snake. And there's nothing wrong with that. Then, his fate is a mouse's fate; he wasn't born to be the prey of me.

Ferocious fight
The last animal happening I'll tell you about was dramatic. I came into the kitchen and saw a large spider in a web just outside the big plate-glass window. It had trapped a wasp, who was half encased in webbing, but the two of them were energetically engaged in an epic fight. The spider was trying to entomb the wasp in more webbing material and the wasp was not giving up—he kept trying to maneuver his stinger into position to get at the spider, and he kept managing to free it of the webbing. The spider fought while trying to keep clear of the stinger. I watched for a while, fascinated, then ran to get my phone (my phone is always in the other room no matter which room I am in). I managed to record them in focus for quite a few seconds.

A few hours later, they were both still locked in a close embrace, but both were utterly motionless. They were the same way the next day. So unless I'm wrong, and I could be, I think it was a battle to the death—I think both insect warriors died in the titanic fight.

I'd show you the video, but I submitted it to "Daily Dose of Internet." Do you know those? If you happen to see it there, let me know. Even if I watch for it, chances are I'll miss it.

I hope it makes the cut. It's been a long time since I was published.

Life goes on,

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Ed Hawco: "Thousands of years from now, when intelligent mice rule the world, the Rodentia geneticists will trace their lineage back to 'Finger Lakes Freddie,' who was spared an early death by a stick-carrying primate who captured him in a bucket and then set him free. A monument will be raised to this primate, who was unaware that this one kind act was the turning point that marked the decline of the Anthropocene and the beginning of the Apodemocene."

Chris Kern: "Re: 'The project took half an hour in the middle of the night ... But I didn't mind. This way, the mouse doesn't get sentenced to death for being smarter, stronger, and more resourceful than other mice. He gets a chance to live his life.' Don’t look now, but you have just made a contribution to deer mouse evolution. If this particular creature survives and breeds, we all may soon be contending with pole-vaulting or trampoline-toting murine escape artists. Let’s just hope they don’t discover AI. My recommendation: save the birds, not the mice."

Mike replies: Chris, meet Ed. Ed, Chris.

James Bullard: "Any live trapped animal has to be taken twice their range for release to ensure that they don't return. In the case of a mouse that is three miles away. You went farther than necessary.

"That said, it is illegal to relocate nuisance animals in New York (and several other states), leaving killing them as your only legal option. Or at least not publicly posting your actions. The logic, I am told, is the relocation is cruel, and 90% of relocated animals don't survive. I am puzzled how they could possibly know that. Is DEC taking animal censuses? The other puzzle to me is that DEC relocates nuisance bears. I'm not sure how they rationalize that."

Mike replies: But...he's only a nuisance when he's in my kitchen, eating my banana, right? (Seriously, he ate a banana.) When he's out in a field or the woods, he's just a mouse.

Amine Sultan: "Get a cat or, better yet, cats, but ones that love to hunt (usually females but not exclusively). Cats that hunt will do so even when they are well-fed. Some cats live in perfect harmony with mice or birds under a roof or even outside. Oh, and breed also matters: Abyssinians, for example, love to hunt and, in every other way, are like dogs—they adore their owners. In any case, the cat is a writer's best friend; there's no shortage of examples."

ColinC: "Enjoyed the post, as usual. For what it's worth, though, spiders aren't insects—spiders class Arachnida, insects class Insecta. They are however both in the phylum Arthropoda (jointed-feet), as are for example crustaceans like crabs and lobsters. There are many differences between spiders and insects, the most obvious perhaps that spiders have eight legs, and insects only six."

ASW: "As a biologist, I feel obligated to respond to a few things.

"Forest fire—while birds and a few larger mammals (e.g., deer) might be able to move away from a fire, the vast majority of creatures, whether we're talking about amphibians, arthropods, insects, mammals, or reptiles, simply can't. Instead they seek refuge in moist/muddy areas (e.g., amphibians), in vegetation (e.g., arthropods and insects; often a poor choice), or underground (pretty much anybody who can find a hole or rock to get underneath). Some make it but many don't.

"Cats—while they make wonderful companions and can be a useful pest deterrent inside your house, I would discourage anyone from letting cats roam outdoors. They are a plague on vulnerable wildlife (which is basically anything they can get their claws or teeth into), and certainly don't live 'in perfect harmony' with mice and birds.

"Survival of relocated animals—I can't quote an exact number for small mammals without doing further research, but the very high mortality rate is based on actual research. Small mammals are generally quite territorial. They survive by knowing where their food is and more importantly where their shelter is. When dropped into a new location they are very vulnerable to predation until they get the lay of the land, not to mention competitive exclusion (up to and including full-on fighting) with the current residents of the neighborhood you have brought them to.

"'Field' mice—I assume you're using a local name here, as the common name 'field mouse' generally refers to one of several species of the genus Apodemus found in Europe and Asia. Based on your description and what I can glean from your picture, my guess is that you caught a member of the genus Peromyscus, most likely the deer mouse (P. maniculatus) or white-footed mouse (P. leucopus). They are both wonderful mice, although perhaps not when you're fighting them for your bananas."

Mike replies: I love it when a post elicits comments from expert. Thanks for this. I changed "field mouse" to "deer mouse" in the post. I'm disappointed that relocation is most likely futile, but, really, I did have to get him out of the kitchen.

     

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["Open Mike" is the weekly Editorial page of the vertical magazine that is TOP. In it, we dip a toe into the filtered-but-not-very mind of Mike.]

-

The significance of this is explained eventually
herein. Read on. Photo by Georg Sander.

I'm actually thinking, actually really thinking, of not getting another iPhone. 

I've recently given some longtime e-friends who know my predilections and peccadilloes—longtime readers, that is—maybe including you—a bit of a surprise: I moved on from ICE cars. Decisively, like Ctein moved to digital and struck his darkroom. No more stick shift allegiance, no more Miata-is-the-answer-to-every-question, no more naturally-aspirated-engine or rear-wheel-drive oversteer purity, no more blather about exhaust notes and le pur sang and petrolhead lore, no, none o' that from here on out. I'm quite certain I'll never buy an ICE car again. I would propose a rather radical reason for this. EVs are better cars. Period and end of sentence. Throw out all the blather and disputation about cost, ecology, infrastructure, politics, efficiency, everything. All of it. EVs are better cars.

That's a big enough tech-bro sea-change right there. But not only that, I'm also thinking about...an Android phone.

Does the apocalypse approach? Do birds fly backwards in a purple sky? What about the old unshakeable never-say-die Apple allegiance, the "my-first-Mac-was-the-first-Mac," the cozy fishbowl of the integrated Apple ecosystem, all that? This could be a shock to your conception of Mike-ishness, and, coming so soon after my defection from internal combustion...well, I hope I'm not rocking the rowboat too much.

Skip three
I have an iPhone 13 Pro. It's been fine. Normally I've updated every three cycles, skipping two. But this Fall the iPhone 17 will be announced, meaning I will have skipped three cycles. Plus, my battery is getting iffy. That's because "it's that time." But for the first time, I'm not looking forward to it. I'm not dreading it, exactly, but I feel resigned rather than inwardly excited.

Here's the thing that started the snowball rolling downhill: Siri is stupid. There is no way around this. My friend Dan and I play pool most Monday mornings, and typically talk a good deal about music. Matters of mild dispute and questions of fact come up lots, and despite the fact that Dan has an old Android phone the screen of which is permanently tinted magenta, his phone aces Siri seven times out of nine when verbally asked questions. I've recently taken to asking him to ask HIS phone something instead of merely asking the same question of mine. He'll get an answer, whereas Siri won't understand the question, or will give me an amusingly nonsensical answer, or will require me to type something out...whatever. He casually asks his phone stuff that I wouldn't even attempt to ask Siri, because I know better. I'd be anticipating the usual bollix.

Apple is behind. It took me a while to wrap my mind around this if I'm honest. I accepted it only because the realization is unavoidable. 

Here are a few other things that I'm assuming, or that have been bugging me:

First, Apple will want a hella lot of money. You just know the big-screen iPhone 17 with the good camera (both of which are important to me) is going to cost way north of a grand. Apple loves to soak my wallet. They farm money—that seems to be the thing they care most about now. That was fine back when I thought I got value for it...I liked Apple, and that was the way it was. If I had to pay more for it, well, so what, then I did. I got value in self-satisfaction and seamless integration and a cool form-factor, and that was enough for me. But recently it seems like there's nothing to get excited about. It'll be just be another phone, pretty much like the last phone. Another button here, another functionality there maybe, but nothing to knock glassware off the shelves. For some reason it seems like Apple stopped innovating around the time the Pandemic started. It's just the same old products in the same old wrappers. They don't even look that good any more—the designer left the company. Or rather, they look good, but in the same old way. The CEO doesn't visit the design studio every day like Steve did; Steve loved products and Steve loved design. The new guy just sits in his ivory tower atop a giant heap of gold coins plotting how to get more. When he already has too many. Which is his business, except that he wants my gold coins. And I ain't got that many. 

Know what else Steve did? He kept thinking up ideas for new products. Some weren't such good ideas, others were great, others looked like they wouldn't succeed but did anyway. But he kept coming up with new things. What's been new lately? Yes, my current Mac Mini is the best desktop I've ever had, of my 17 or 19 Macs or whatever it is. They do iterate and improve. And the goggles (Vision Pro) are new, but they're expensive and some of the functionalities are not quite thought-through. Who wants to watch a movie alone with another person who is also watching the same movie alone? I do like the noise-cancelling headphones (AirPods Max), too. But basically it's just Macs, iMacs, iPads, iPhones and the Apple Watch, same as it ever was. (Current Not-Steve Guy does get the credit for the Apple Watch. But that was more than ten years ago—that's 70 years in device- and dog-years). 

That's an oasis ahead
Maybe I'm not making my point convincingly. But have you ever looked at all the exotica you can get in the Android phone-i-verse? Did you know there's a phone with a Leica one-inch sensor?! It has a name I can neither spell nor pronounce, Xiaomi. Did you know there's one you can fold out to make a double screen?! Did you know Google makes phones?! Who knew these things? Nobody! 

Well, I suppose somebody. 

Here comes the kicker. Old Apple, when it introduced something, actually had them to sell, or at least would very soon. New Apple announces sh*t when it's still vapory and then sits on its own thumbs. And sits. And sometimes, like the charger-pad thingy or Apple Intelligence (a "product" I do not want, would rather not have, and am not looking forward to dealing with, so I suppose that's a win???), never come out at all. They're just describing mirages in the desert air, shimmering on the horizon. Surely they can come up with it; they're Apple.

So what? Well, so Apple is promising that iPhone 17 will integrate EV route planning into Apple Maps in CarPlay. But some of Apple's promises lately are worth tears and a heap of ash. So I know I'm going to expect iPhone 17 to have route planning, and they'll say it's coming, but it will either come many moons late or never come, while I wait, wait, wilt, and grow old. But I said "kicker": the kicker is that Apple doesn't keep stuff updated. Never has, never will. Twenty-eleven Siri still lives in my pocket and gets sklonkered by Google Assistant. Aperture was great, but it was never maintained or updated until it got so wilty it had to be killed (I didn't fall for Lucy and the football on that one). I still miss WriteNow*. (I am the OG.) 

So here's what I think is going to happen. Apple will charge me $1,800 plus 8% tax for a new phone. For the phone I paid $1,100 for four years ago, they'll give me $85 in trade, unless they give me nothing. I won't be able to buy the new one outright at Verizon so that I can get the good monthly plan price—I'll have to buy it on time for three months for twice as much, on account of a certain calibrated percentage of customers will forget and keep paying the high price. They'll tell me the camera is improved but I won't be able to see any difference. Three things I already liked about the old phone will be gone, gone. Thirteen controls I already knew how to use and have committed to muscle memory will be changed around for absolutely no explicable reason. End result: four months of d*cking around and a bunch of cash sacrificed to the spaceship, and if I'm lucky I'll get back to...where I am right now. And, insult to injury, even if EV route planning is well implemented in Maps sometime within the current decade, parsimonious Apple won't pinch off the bucks to keep it groomed and up to date, so the functionality will age and fade, even though being up-to-date is the most crucial mission of an EV-charger-finding route planner—and even though Apple could afford to keep it sleek and groomed with less cash than it devotes to keeping the bathrooms spotless in the spaceship. I foresee frustration, in other words. 

Great-great-grandmother
Oh, almost forgot—the picture at the top.

A curious fact: my great-great grandmother had an electric car. In 1907. The one in the picture is a restored 1907 Detroit Electric Model D, an automobile brand produced by the Anderson Electric Car Company in Detroit, Michigan. I have no idea if that's the one my great-great-grandmother, Hannah Milhous** Wright Furnas, owned; but my grandmother told me her grandmother had an electric car. She remembered being sent to bed early when her grandmother was visiting, but staying awake at her upstairs window until her grandmother left, and that all she could hear were the tires crunching on the gravel of the driveway. She said this was when she was six years old, which would have been 1907.

It's quite possible Hannah might have been driving herself. My grandmother also said that Hannah Wright Furnas was the first woman in Indianapolis to learn to drive; her chauffeur taught her, on the little lanes that snake and loop around the sprawled-out grounds of Crown Hill Cemetery. My grandmother, who had a prodigious memory, said this like it was something that everyone once knew and that was not in dispute. There is of course no way on Earth to prove it now. But I'll believe it because she did.

Back to Earth now, and the solid ground of fact: I probably won't actually buy an Android phone. Only because I am not the type to be able to manage the transition. Many websites say it's do-able, many videos claim they tell you how-to, but I've never been much good with computers. I've known that all my life. New iPhone, here I come. I'm just no longer inwardly happy about it is all.

Mike
(Thanks to several readers for the "better cars" link.)

*Best word processor ever. "In the opinion of many of its users, WriteNow represented the ideal Macintosh application. It had a simple, intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), no copy protection, and it worked in practically every revision of the Macintosh operating system, including in the Mac 68k emulator on PowerPC Macs and in the Classic Environment under Mac OS X. Its biggest claim to fame, however, was its speed. It was written in assembly language (Motorola 680x0) by a group of developers who had a reputation for producing extremely efficient code." (Wikipedia)

**Yes, that Milhous. Richard Nixon was my sixth cousin. Maybe once or twice removed, I don't know.

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Maggie Osterberg: "Siri. Oh lord, Siri. Dumber than a box of rocks, and twice as infuriating. But, maybe, a secret comedian. I was in a therapy session, speaking about some pretty heavy stuff in my past and how trauma had impacted my life, and, you know, the usual stuff, when, out of nowhere, my Apple Watch suddenly pipes up with my Irish Siri's voice. 'I'm not sure what to make of that, Maggie.' 'What?' I said out loud. 'I can't help you,' Siri replied. My therapist and I totally lose it, laughing our asses off. That was it for the session!"

Ronny Nilsen: "Have a look at the app 'A Better Routeplanner' for planning you EV trip, no need to wait for Apple, and it's available on both iPhone and Android."

Mike replies: I signed up. I'm all in. I'll use that. Thanks Ronny!

Chris Kern: "The best thing about Apple: the company’s products cooperate to form a coherent ecosystem—iPhones, iPads, Macs, and (with some limitations based on the characteristics of the platform) watches—you have seamless access to your data and application software from any of them. The worst thing about Apple: the frequent churn of user agent features: configuration parameters that are moved from one location to another and bundled applications whose functionality is altered for no apparent reason."

Christer Almqvist: "The salesman at my Apple distributor shares your opinion about the iPhone."

robert e: "Ah, what irony! Or do I mean metaphor? Do you know what else Apple under Tim Cook didn't do? Build an electric car, after trying to develop one for ten years at an estimated cost of $10 billion, possibly in collaboration with VW. (Per Wikipedia, 'Apple car project'). Do you know which electronics company did develop an electric car? Xiaomi. They announced their intention in 2021, started production in 2023 and officially released in 2024, the same year Apple gave up on its EV. The car, the SU7, is a runaway success. Jim Farley, Ford's CEO, had one for six months and said he loved it.

"Unrelated, but, a few years ago, I switched from Google's Maps app to Apple's for driving directions because I preferred the way Apple telegraphed turns way ahead of time, but on a recent cross-country trip, I had to switch back to Google Maps because Apple's directions often seemed a little bonkers."

Mike replies: Strange thing happened to me on my trip: I was driving my old Acura, but had my eyes peeled to see if I could spy any Nissan Ariyas in the wild. Driving to Vermont the directions take you off the expressway and never take you back on, and eventually I saw one pass going the other direction on a New York two-lane. Much later, I'm in Vermont, trying to make the final few miles to my friends' house, and Apple Maps in bonkers mode takes me down a very obscure dirt road that I strongly suspected was wrong. Then, about a mile down this road, Siri pipes up and says, "There is an obstruction ahead. Your route is cancelled. Goodbye," and falls silent. I phoned my friends for live directions. They got me turned around and headed back toward known roads, and then, on this remote dirt road on which I had seen no vehicles at all, what should pass by but the second Ariya I'd seen on the trip. Weird. 

Later I was told by several Vermonters that Apple Maps often bails out like that on routes over dirt, seasonal, or steep roads, apparently so no one gets disappointed or stuck and later makes a complaint. 

Oh, and when I arrived at the cookout area on Blue Moon, where the group was gathered for their weekly Summer picnic, Siri unexpectedly came to life again and said, "Arrived!" 

Kirk: "I use an iPhone XR. It's seven years old. It works perfectly. Consider security before you switch out of the most secure phone system the world has ever known.... If you have a 13 you are two upgrades ahead of me. And I reiterate, mine works perfectly and in no way inhibits my progress or my business. And yes, it works flawlessly in my car via CarPlay. Seven years old. Just sayin'. Sigh, and people tease me for upgrading cameras...."

Eric Chin: "Hi Mike: You may not be aware that Google also has a phone service, Google Fi. It uses the T-Mobile network. You could probably get a pretty good trade-in on your phone if you join the service. I started using Google Pixel phones because you get software upgrades immediately from Google. With the carriers, you have to wait for them to get the upgrade and sort it out for their phones, which can take a long time. Maybe more detail than you need, but the Pixel 10 coming out this year is the last year they're using the current chip architecture, and they'll be changing to a different architecture with the Pixel 11. Since last year, it's nice they now offer the Pro models in two sizes, so you don't have to buy a large phone just to get the best camera."

Robert Roaldi: "I use an iMac and an iPad but I'm still ticked at Apple for letting Aperture slide into oblivion. I still prefer it to anything else I've used. I don't like touch screens or those talking interfaces but I assume they are useful to someone."

Nick: Mike, you're thinking about switching from Nikon to Canon. Every phone is largely the same these days; the top models are roughly the same price and have the same features. Every maker tries to lock you into their own ecosystem, and they all have various positives and negatives. Not to say that your Apple complaints aren't valid, but you'll find just as many issues with a new Samsung or Xiaomi etc., and you will have lost a lot of UI know-how. You are correct of course there is more variety in body shapes outside of Apple, if a folding phone is of interest to you. Otherwise I think it's a grass-is-greener problem. But apart from losing integration with your Mac etc., at least it's an easier switch than camera bodies as you don't have a similar collection of lenses that won't work anymore. Relatively easy to buy another phone for this three-year cycle and see how you go."

John Gordon: "My son, living in Hong Kong in 2018, gave me a Xiaomi Android phone to compare with my iPhone. Technically the Xiaomi was good; the Android opsys not so much. And that version of Android was not upgradable so I quickly returned to iPhone and the Apple ecosystem. But the big news today is that Xiaomi now manufacture some of the best EVs in the world. According to an article in The Atlantic by Patrick George, 'The American Car Industry Can’t Go On Like This,' (14 August), Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, last year drove a Xiaomi SU7 for six months 'to scope out the competition.' The Chinese-made EV is 'one of the world’s most impressive cars: It can accelerate faster than many Porsches, has a giant touch screen that lets you turn off the lights at your house, and comes with a built-in AI assistant—all for roughly $30,000 in China.' Farley said, 'It’s fantastic...I don’t want to give it up.' Ford is now redesigning its manufacturing processes in an attempt to produce a Xiaomi-competitive truck that will sell for much less than the current F150 EV. Due in 2027."

Thom Hogan: "Advice: replace the battery and fight the 'new phone' battle another day.

"Commentary: You're missing a couple of key points. First, you're assuming today's Siri will be tomorrow's. Pretty clear from Apple that won't be true. Apple has this long-established habit of appearing behind and then doing the better product. That will happen with AI. When is the only question, but I think it's Pournelle's Real Soon Now. Second, the post about Google being a parasite is correct and this should disturb you. The only reason for Android, Chrome, and the search engine are to control and track you, and make you the product to someone else. Apple's products are actual products, not you. AI, for what it's worth, is going to be another eventual monopoly, much like search became. The reason has to do with the economics behind it. The cost to scale is enormous and that cost never goes away; it is ongoing and just keeps scaling. Which means that revenue has to pay the way. Google and Meta see AI as 'the next search/social,' and they have the business model (selling you and your information) that is proven. ChatGPT and many of the others don't have a model that works, and are looking desperately for one. Apple's model is 'sell you more devices that work together' (e.g. AI from your watch can deal with home, car, computer, phone, et al., and vice versa)."

Jerker Andersson (partial comment): "In 1991, a friend and I were in Haarlem, the original, in The Netherlands. We had a coffee break in a small café at the outskirts of town and I put my camera under my chair. Halfway through our coffee, two young men came in and sat down at the table immediately behind me. They talked in Arabic with a few words in Dutch. My friend and I couldn't understand exactly what they were saying, but it was clear they were talking about us. So we decided it was time to leave. After a few steps I heard the scraping sound of a chair from their table and soon I felt a hand on my shoulder. I froze and slowly turned around. One of the young men stood there with my camera in his hand. 'I think you forgot something,' he said, and handed it over. My shoulders went down and it all ended with me paying for their coffee. There's lots of that stuff in this tale. And it's good to have your prejudices challenged from time to time. But hold on to your gear!" 

     

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The most fascinating portfolio of pictures I've seen recently isn't art. It's called "Photos: The Scale of China’s Solar-Power Projects," and unfortunately it's behind a paywall. [UPDATE: Many readers are reporting that the content isn't walled off for them. So give it a try! —Ed.] Absolutely mind-boggling.

Solar energy is a significant fascination. The best short primer on energy I've ever read (not all I've read on the subject, of course) is the first 98 pages or so of a book called American Theocracy by the late Kevin Phillips. The section, Part I, was called "Oil and American Supremacy." It is in essence a long essay. As with other Phillips books, its connection to the rest of the book is rather loose—some of his volumes are redolent of collections rather than concerted, coherent, through-going argument. So the essay can stand alone. Unfortunately, it's behind a paywall too—you'd have to buy the whole book in order to read that one little section. In the late 2000s, ever a Don Quixote, I wrote a letter to Mr. Phillips and Penguin, his publisher, suggesting that "Oil and American Supremacy" really should be issued as a separate small volume at modest cost. Penguin at the time had a series of pamphlet-style semi-miniature books that featured important short-form writing from the past and present. Here's one of them:

I also have the translation of Ecclesiastes from the same series and one or two others, but I can't find them. Frustratingly, the books, which I saw in a bookstore display and which all had similar-but-varied form, format, typography, and cover design, don't seem to have been given a series name, and I can't find a page for them among Penguin's far-flung constellation of imprints, house names, and web pages. (There are only five major publishers in the USA, of which Penguin/Random House is the largest.) It's possible they simply under-performed and were unceremoniously dumped. Doesn't matter. Long and short, I thought "Oil and American Supremacy" would fit perfectly in the series, and it's one of those things—you know how it is with those things—that I urgently felt every citizen ought to read. But by now, Penguin's had 20 years to get back to me, which kinda makes my hope for a reply grow dim. (I'm joking.) And Kevin Phillips died in 2023.

Kevin Phillips was an interesting fellow, by the way. He was one of the founding theorists of Movement Conservatism and post-Goldwater Republican strategy—usually credited with originating the Southern Strategy—who later moved toward independence and became an outspoken critic of the Republican Party. In other words, he actually thought for himself, which would make him stick out like a sore thumb today. I went on a deep dive into politics during the Bush II years—I probably read 150 books, all of them except one now slumbering in boxes in the attic of the barn. Kevin Phillips, the essence of an iconoclast, was the best find. (Well, Thomas Frank too.) 

Anyway, one of the points Phillips makes in "Oil and American Supremacy" is that rich and powerful national economies have historically had trouble moving away from the energy sources that made them rich and powerful in the first place. The Netherlands and wind power, Britain and coal. The Dutch windmills peaked in the 1600s and 1700s—yet there were still 9,000(!) windmills in The Netherlands in the nineteenth century! (There are some 1,200 left today—believe it or not, only partially for tourism.)

Assuming the pattern plays out, America is going to have a very hard time moving away from oil. We have long been the global powerhouse. We tend to think of the Middle East when we think of oil production now, but on this very day (and for years now) the United States is the world's largest producer of oil. Our big problem is not that we don't produce huge amounts of oil, it's just that we use even more than we produce—that's what gives Saudi Arabia such pull over us, and it's why we have willingly gone along with the largest transfer of wealth in the history of Planet Earth—American wealth shifted to the countries that make up for our oil shortfall. It's why our military budget is so huge—to protect the shipping lanes for oil coming from the Middle East. (If the military cost of protecting global oil extraction and importation were passed along directly to the pump, a gallon of gasoline in America would cost somewhere roughly between $13 and $18. That's including the offset for supplementary biofuels.) It's why we fought the Gulf War—by historical accident, Iraq has the largest and least exploited oil reserves left on Earth, and, consequently, America now has a dozen huge military bases in Iraq, all of them strategically "protecting" oil fields, oil production facilities, and oil shipping hubs. Of course that it is not their stated purpose, but it is their purpose. Never mind a wholesale switchover—it would make incredibly good sense for us to make it our national purpose to simply gain enough alternative energy production to attain energy independence. It would solve a large number of complications and eliminate vast expenditures of national resources.

Meanwhile, China has no such sentimental, historical, and institutional attachment to the energy sources of the 20th century, and the Chinese are killing us in the race to harness and develop solar. We've allowed them to get way, way out ahead of us. Photographs aren't proof, and photographs aren't argument, but what they certainly are is illustration, and I've never seen a more stunning illustration of China's emerging supremacy in what will surely be the dominant 21st-century energy source. No one sees the future, least of all me, but oil will not be the world's major source of energy in 2100—that much is easy to predict, simply because there's not enough of it left. With its electric cars improving by leaps and bounds (BYD just passed Tesla as the world largest EV producer), its battery research lapping us, and its solar power technology, implementation, and deployment crushing ours, China is setting itself up to rule the future. (Germany and Brazil are also well ahead of us in alternative and renewable energy.) One word describes the U.S.: behind.

I wish I could link to this set of set of pictures. The most symbolic one is captioned "Floating solar panels stretch across an aquatic farm built on land that subsided after extensive coal mining, in Suixi County, Anhui province, China, on April 28, 2025." But oh well. For those of you who subscribe to The Atlantic, be sure not to miss it. 

Mike

P.S. I'm watching this morning what are indisputably the two greatest tennis players alive on our planet. Back to the tennis!

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

John Shriver: "Dan Yergin's book The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power is also a great treatise on how the whole western world is wrapped around oil. I was half way through the book when my mother died in 2020, and had just gotten to the end of the Second World War. The Allies won that war much because of their control of oil. The Allies starved both Germany and Japan of oil. I took a course from Dan Yergin at the Kennedy School of Government on this topic about 1980, before he wrote the book. (Cross-registered from 'the small trade school down the river.') Very interesting; an enormous amount of reading. There's also a PBS multi-part series based on the book, which is accessible online. Here's the first part."

Mike replies: The Prize is now a trilogy: The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (2008); The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World (2012); and The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations (2021). The trouble is, their combined 2,336 pages (six and a half pounds of paper in the print versions, according to Amazon) isn't bathroom reading. I put a high value on primers (the word is properly pronounced to rhyme with trimmer) because they might actually be read, which is why I like Kevin Phillips' entertaining backgrounder. However, all you have to do is read the first page or two of the sample of The Prize at Amazon to realize that you're in the hands of a compelling and capable writer in Mr. Yergin. History well written is the only true page-turner. Like you, I read a lot of The Prize when it was more or less new, before ultimately being defeated. (I tend not to like histories as they butt up against the present, because they get less and less authoritative the closer they get to now. I learned that reading histories of photography.)

Jan-Peter Onstwedder: "I think you need to fact-check some of your post. The US imports crude oil, true, despite producing a lot. But it also is a net exporter of refined products. So imports + domestic production is greater than domestic demand, the balance being exported as fuels, plastics and other petrochemical products. It used to be true that OPEC had significant influence over prices and therefore US economics, but that influence is much smaller since US production has gone up so much. And the US now uses far less energy per unit of GDP than 20–30 years ago. All in all, oil is still important but no longer an excuse for meddling in other producing countries’ affairs."

Mike replies: And yet we still do. Oil imports have hardly abated. I admit I'm not up on "the Shale Gale," but the go-to book on it is for those who are interested is probably this one. Bear in mind that fracking in general might well be a sort of financial shell game: it succeeds by attracting huge amounts of speculative investment from the excess amount of capital "sloshing around the world" (a consequence of wealth hoarding) and has yet to prove that it's actually sustainably economically viable. At any rate, I'm not interested, because when the world is burning the last thing we need is more fire.

ASW: "Bill McKibben has a concise (online) article about recent and future growth of renewable energy sources, how China is in the driver's seat to dominate the space, and how our (America's) energy policies are both backwards and self-defeating, in The New Yorker. It's called '4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment.' It's well worth a few minutes of your time if you have access."

Mike adds: Here's a brief clip: "...Even though we’ve got used to seeing solar panels and wind turbines across the landscape in the intervening fifty years, we continue to think of what they produce as 'alternative energy,' a supplement to the fossil-fuelled power that has run Western economies for more than two centuries. In the past two years, however, with surprisingly little notice, renewable energy has suddenly become the obvious, mainstream, cost-efficient choice around the world."

I just read it. It's an incredibly hopeful article. And from Bill McKibben! (Who at times has sounded like the most pessimistic person on the planet.)

     

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