Laser Parking

Recently we traded cars. I got to playing around with the parking position in the garage and found that if I parked the Pilot just right I could open the liftgate with the garage door closed. That seemed like a good plan. The challenge was how to park in the right place every time.

I found Park Right Garage Laser Park with dual lasers on Amazon.

I mounted it high on the wall ...

... and pointed each laser to a car. It have the target on the crown of the instrument panel in front of the driver.

Works like a charm.

Traffic Signal Preemption

Every now and then my propeller beanie comes out.

Here I go again.

Now I knew that emergency vehicles have a way to make traffic lights change to allow them to traverse managed intersections but I really never had seen it happen.

Then I did.

That is called line of sight traffic signal preemption.

Watch that video in HD. Slow it down to 1/4 speed. The preemption light is the bright white light above and to the right of the middle signal light. It comes on just before 4 seconds in. At that time, the signal begins cycling the cross traffic to orange and then red. At about 10 seconds the signal turns green for the ambulance.

Isn't that cool?

Windows 10 MBR2GPT

Windows 10 keeps giving me pleasant surprises, e.g. this post.

The Windows 10 Version 1703 (Creators Update) has another feature that would have saved me DAYS.

Back in early 2015 I needed to migrate my Drobo from a MBR (Master Boot Record) volume to a GPT (GUID Partition Table) volume to allow me to expand the Drobo beyond 2TB,

I got this done by configuring a second Drobo to GPT and copying all the data from the MBR volume to the GPT volume. That took a couple of DAYS.

The Creators Update includes a includes a new tool, mbr2gpt, which converts an MBR volume to a GPT volume WITHOUT modifying or deleting data on the disk.

Winaero has an article with the complete instructions. It's not trivial but it's easier that what I did.

Nougat

I've been using CyanogenMod for years on a variety of phones. I've always had good luck with it. When Google announced that the Nexus 5 wasn't going to be updated to Nougat I decided to do it on my own.

I did my research and decided to do the upgrade between Christmas and New Years.

Then I saw this on 12/24/16: Cyanogen is shutting down all services and nightly builds on December 31st

Bummer.

But then I saw this on 12/28/16: CyanogenMod Is Dead, and Its Successor is Lineage OS

It was going to take Lineage a while to get up to speed but the CyanogenMod blood line was going to survive.

I had time over the holidays so I went ahead and flashed the final nightly of CyanogenMod Nougat. It worked fine.

As I had done previously I had to unlock the bootloader, flash TWRP using Fastboot, flash the CyanogenMod ROM and then the nano OpenGApps. I'm getting pretty comfortable with this.

By mid-January LineageOS had a nightly for the Nexus 5.

To migrate from CyanogenMod to LineageOS (LOS) I had to flash an "experimental" version of LOS and then the signed LOS ROM.

Just as with CyanogenMod this all went well.

The great folks at LineageOS are cranking out "nightlies" for the Nexus 5 every week. There isn't yet an "official" ROM for the Nexus 5 but the "nightlies" have been rock solid.

They have even gotten SafetyNet to run cleanly.

This means that Android Pay works fine.

The Over The Air (OTA) updates to LineageOS have started working and I've OTA updated each week.

Battery life seems generally unchanged from the OEM Marshmallow. I swapped from the PRIV to the Nexus 5 for a week or so but went back when I felt like the camera was much poorer than the PRIV.