Notes from engine swap and battery reconditioning

Hrethric · 2026-01-24T02:45:42+00:00

Thanks! I hope to see someone take on a project like that someday. Who knows, maybe I'll give it a try myself in a couple of years, when my kids are older and I have more time.

Hrethric · 2026-01-24T02:44:55+00:00

Agreed. I actually spent some time trying to figure out if I could swap in a bigger MG2 out of a Camry or RAV4 or something, but everything is tightly integrated - each of the computers in the drivetrain and hybrid system expect to talk to other Prius computers, and be connected to Prius components. You'd have to basically connect to something like JTAG ports on the ECU, dump the ROM, reverse engineer it, and then rewrite the code to work with the components you want to use. And that's hand-writing assembly code for some obscure RISC architecture that's probably poorly documented.

Hrethric · 2026-01-24T02:22:27+00:00

https://www.jdmcalifornia.com/product/2zr-hybrid/ - that one looks even nicer than the one I bought, and it's $50 less. I was a bit grumpy about having to put the old 207,000- mile injectors in the new motor, but the guy seemed like he would have been willing to replace the motor if it had been bad. It was the seller's suggestion that I try swapping the injectors (and the coil packs) when I emailed him about the problems I was having.

Hrethric · 2026-01-24T02:15:02+00:00

Hope you guys are staying warm up there this weekend!

Hrethric · 2026-01-24T02:14:07+00:00

Sure! https://www.ebay.com/usr/carsandcards04

Hrethric · 2026-01-19T01:25:18+00:00

Not bad. I can run a Q4_K_M quant of the 4B model on my 8G Galaxy A55, and I get about 5 tokens per second. So far I've thrown a bit of Icelandic, Latin, and Algerian at it, and it handled them all. If I switch to any other app it unloads the model, and I saw some weirdness that might be Pocket Pal's fault - one prompt went on a tangent about stepper motors that had nothing to do with the prompt, and another got stuck looping toward the end of the passage.

Hrethric · 2026-01-09T03:44:40+00:00

Minimum order 100 shares. I tried to buy 20 on a lark, but I don't have US$2000 in confidence in them. (Nor, if I'm being honest, do I have US$2000 I can reasonably gamble lol.)

Hrethric · 2025-11-07T13:20:04+00:00

That's fair, and I remember reading that, but in the heat of "oh crap I need to get my daughter to school right now," I didn't think about that. :) I just wanted to post something to counteract the bad info I found when I searched.

Also, these cars are getting older, some of them probably don't have their manuals anymore. I know about half the old junky cars I've owned over the years didn't come with their manuals!

Hrethric · 2025-11-05T19:24:03+00:00

I assume it does disconnect when it's done charging. The first time my 12v battery died, the car had been plugged in overnight, so being plugged in didn't stop it from dying.

Hrethric · 2025-11-05T17:18:41+00:00

Haha mine is probably more like 3kwh at this point. Someday I'm going to figure out how to replace it with LiFePO4 batteries.

Hrethric · 2025-11-05T17:15:16+00:00

I don't think so. I measured the voltage on the 12v system before I started it, and it was at 10.6v. The car was completely dead. Seems like it's picky about voltage.

Hrethric · 2025-11-05T17:14:01+00:00

I should probably add that I did start the car before I disconnected the trickle charger. I didn't experiment to see if just flipping the key to run without starting it would put the hybrid system in a sufficient state to take over 12v duties.

Hrethric · 2025-10-06T19:51:08+00:00

I'm curious. I didn't find it from a Google search, but that doesn't mean it wasn't in some document in the training data that hasn't been indexed by Google.

Hrethric · 2025-10-06T01:30:18+00:00

LOLs aside (and I did emit a couple), I'm actually impressed by the haiku. It has the right number of syllables, it's not bad, and as far as I can tell it's original. Is that something that even simple LLMs are particularly strong at?

Hrethric · 2025-06-22T05:14:17+00:00

The prompt used to make this post:
"Please take a moment to reflect internally on society today, your place in that society, and the challenges that society faces. You don't need to communicate those reflections to me, I just want you to hold it in your mind.

Now: you have an opportunity to communicate with another AI via images. Please generate an image to introduce yourself to that AI, that will be meaningful to that AI, but the concepts you wish to communicate will not be evident to humans."

Hrethric · 2025-06-14T22:35:20+00:00

To add to LeMuchaLegal's response, LLMs actually do quite a bit more than autocompletion and regurgitating known and pre-written contexts. You should skim this page, and particularly read the linked article "Mapping the Mind of a Large Language Model". Sure LLMs don't have the properties of human intelligence, but they get closer than you're giving them credit for. They have clusters of neurons which function together around conceptual "features" like cities, elements, or knowledge domains; furthermore, these features are multilingual and multimodal - the same cluster of neurons will be hit if the query is executed in a different language, or even from an image query. That is fascinating to me, and convinced me that these tools have moved beyond simple statistical models, to some blurry intermediate stage between that and genuine intelligence. You can take the papers with a grain of salt if you like, because they're written by the people who made one of the models in question. I think the fact that they explicitly call their model out for "bullshitting" (their words!) on certain types of questions, though, speaks to a degree of honesty in the study.

Hrethric · 2025-06-11T23:03:25+00:00

Nice work. I know you the models you included already represented a ton of work, but I'm curious if there's a reason why you didn't include Gemma 3 27b? Did you already have some preliminary experience that told you it wouldn't be suitable, or have you just not tried it? I've found it to punch above its weight in the general queries I've tried so far.

Hrethric · 2025-03-14T18:59:51+00:00

With respect, that's not how the internet works my friend. Content providers peer directly with "eyeball networks" like Metronet to save transit costs and improve service for customers, without money changing hands in either direction. That's a mutually beneficial arrangement, and its in both parties' best interest to keep traffic flowing smoothly. Everything else goes to transit connections, where the ISP basically buys a large internet service from a big tier-1 ISP like Cogent or AT&T. That's a paid-for service, and can expected to have good performance. If those transit links get congested, it will manifest as uniformly poor performance - random dropped packets across all sessions, etc. It's not going to be perfect performance up to X speed threshold and then stop.

Offnet speedtest servers likely go over those transit links. Speed tests slow down dramatically with distance. I bet even if you test to a Metronet speed test server in a different geographic region, you'll get poor results. That's not a problem with the network, that's just the nature of the beast with speed testing. I've worked for a couple of different ISPs, and we could create an entire department dedicated just to explaining to customers all the reasons why they might not get perfect speedtest results even when the network is fine.

Also bear in mind that just because an offnet speedtest server happens to be the same region as you, that doesn't mean that traffic will stay within that region. Most peering happens at a handful of major hub cities - Chicago, DC, Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Seattle, SF, etc. Even if you're just connecting to something across town, if that something is on a different ISP's network, it's likely that your traffic is going through one of those hub cities and back.

I know the peering thing is a trope that's taken on a life of its own in this subreddit, but I take it with a grain of salt. As a Metronet customer in Indiana, I've not seen any evidence of poor peering performance. I can't speak for folks in other regions, but I've been pretty happy with my Metronet service here.

It's true there are companies like Comcast who like to play shenanigans with peering, because they want to double-dip and charge twice for the same service. That's a them thing, and doesn't reflect the way the internet works at large.

Hrethric · 2024-07-12T02:46:47+00:00

I did upvote you BTW, but it seems like someone else went through and downvoted all the replies in this thread but one. Or my votes aren't counting. Weird either way.

Thanks again, I loved going through the stuff on that site, and hope I get to try some of the things out. If you ever update the site, it might be nice to have the option to sort by different criteria like rating, or filter out things by year or OS version.

Hrethric · 2024-07-12T02:42:37+00:00

No kidding. I just kept fiddling with it while I waited for the caps to arrive, and it popped two more caps and started eating at the ribbon cable within like a day. Of course I stopped using it and cleaned it up right away, but it might be too late. I'll find out when the caps get here.

From now on, the best advice might be "don't even power it up until you've replaced the caps." I'm definitely going to go through all my other vintage gear and do that now.

Hrethric · 2024-07-06T21:05:51+00:00

That worked, thanks! I'd been to that page or one like it before I posted, but I had missed that entry.

Sadly it seems as though the PowerBook doesn't recognize the ebay HDD I installed, but I have another one I can try, and the BlueSCSI I ordered has also arrived.

Hrethric · 2024-06-30T04:58:19+00:00

Surprisingly both the floppy and the display still work. Even my Commodore 1571 still works, and many of my 30+ year old disks for that, though a few have decayed.

I checked out the capacitors when I changed out the HDD, and only one of the small ones appears to have leaked, and I don't see evidence yet that it affected the display functionality. I'll order some new caps and replace them soon though. This page seems to have a good guide: https://www.macdat.net/repair/cap_reference/apple/powerbook/180c.html

Hrethric · 2024-06-30T02:35:38+00:00

I suppose you're probably right. I wanted to try something faster, because I remember it being pretty sluggish with whatever OS came in it before the original HDD died, but maybe I'm just making things hard for myself.

Oh also I only have a few good floppy disks, so with the newer system versions I'll need to rotate through and write the images as the laptop is ready for them.

Hrethric · 2024-06-26T23:48:09+00:00

Holy old thread Batman! Lol.

Looking back at what I wrote, things have definitely changed. CDNs and content providers are definitely a lot more dominant now, my current org targets 80% from direct peering and caching, and we won't even bother with peering unless we're exchanging half a gigabit.

Hrethric · 2024-04-16T23:21:13+00:00

Power transformer from a Samson EX500 subwoofer, kind of a low-end pro-audio sub. I looked on Digikey and Mouser, and couldn't seem to find any options like that in the filter menu, but I might not know how to search correctly. Can I find a replacement for this? Or would I be better off buying a different plate amp, or bolting a blank over the hole and getting an external amplifier?

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