Google Photos Takeout Download using Firefox

Four months ago I exported all photos from Google Photos to import into immich, and scheduled followon Takeout runs every two months. I had naively assumed the subsequent exports would be incremental changes from the first one, but they are instead complete exports again. Two months later, download of the first scheduled Takeout repeatedly failed until Google disabled the download links, leaving me unable to download my photos at all.

After another two months, I made another attempt with the next scheduled export. I tried downloading the first archive using Chrome, and it failed twice. I switched to Firefox to download instead of Chrome, and it worked much better. Firefox appears to not give up so quickly and keeps trying. I was able to download all fifteen ZIP archives, fifty Gigabytes each, with only one download failure where I had to start it again.

Hurray!

Electrified USPS Fleet

In its initial proposal for a refreshed fleet of delivery trucks in 2022, the US Postal Service and its contractor Oshkosh Defense proposal listed a combined vehicle + cargo weight of 8501 pounds. This is a remarkably specific number, exactly one pound heavier than emissions rules would constrain. Were the vehicle 1 pound lighter it would be required to be considerably cleaner — and likely electric, to meet those requirements.

With more effort, and additional $3 billion in funding from the Biden administration, by the following year this proposal was revised and proposed that most of the fleet be electric. A gasoline version would be used for long routes in rural routes, areas without sufficient charging infrastructure. Initial electric vehicles were delivered in September of 2024, apparently to excellent reviews by postal workers using them.

Oshkosh has delivered only 100 electric trucks thus far, production was expected to ramp up from the initial deliveries a few months ago. The Oshkosh Defense CEO now says they'd be happy deliver the rest of the order as solely gasoline vehicles. It is difficult to see this in any positive way.

Google Cloud Four Cent Bill

I'd say not to spend it all in one place but I think the maximum number of places they could possibly spend it is four, so... go ahead. Live your best life, Google, with my compliments.

OPNsense 25.1 and ZFS

OPNsense 25.1 has been released. I'll update in a week or two, it looks neat.

My OPNsense instance is a VM running on a Proxmox host, where Proxmox uses ZFS as its storage. I doubt the ZFS support within OPNsense will be applicable, I think it sees a raw block device. I wouldn't want OPNsense to create a ZFS filesystem using the blocks which reside within the Proxmox ZFS filesystem. While I'm sure it would work, it seems like it would just be confusing without really being beneficial.

YOLO Credit Union

This is a legitimate credit union in Davis, California, I just find it amusing.

:cpu: emoji reaction

I agree, Slackbot.

California Driver's License reciprocity status 1.2025

Reciprocal driver’s license agreements allow a license in one participating nation to be exchanged for the other — either in whole or in part by waiving the practical driving exam and any mandatory driving lessons and requiring only a written/eyesight/etc exam.

Twenty-eight US States and territories have reciprocal driver’s license agreements with Germany. Similar agreements exist between US states and South Korea and with Taiwan. California is not a party to any such agreement. California Vehicle Code §12804.9 does not allow the DMV to negotiate reciprocity agreements with foreign governments.

I am seeking a California legislator willing to author legislation enabling foreign driver’s license reciprocity in the 2025-2026 legislative session.

Prior legislative activity

Several prior attempts have been made to pass enabling legislation:

• AB 639 in 2023-2024: did not leave committee
• AB 723 in 2021-2022: left committee but timed out in Assembly
• AB 629 in 2019-2020: did not leave committee
• SB 1360 in 2017-2018: left committee but timed out in Senate

AB 639 and AB 723, the most recent, were submitted by the Honorable Evan Low who will not be returning to the California House in 2025.

In 2021 the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators published a best practices guide for foreign license reciprocity, including suggested language for enabling legislation, at: https://www.aamva.org/topics/driver-license-foreign-reciprocity

Why we will succeed

• Immigration is at the top of the national agenda. Steps demonstrating a positive approach to immigration help counterbalance the news cycle.
• Three organizations representing >100,000 Americans living overseas are willing to canvas their members registered to vote in California who would list themselves as supporters of the legislation at https://calegislation.lc.ca.gov/Advocates/
• Advertisements on Reddit subs and Facebook pages for US immigrants and expatriates can also seek more supporters registered to vote in California. The website to use in these ads has been created: https://sites.google.com/view/ab-123456-advocacy/home by foreign.license.reciprocity@gmail.com

OPNsense and sonic.net DHCPv6

I love the Sonic Fiber-optic Internet Service and use it in northern California. Their support is great, the price is reasonable, and the throughput is good.

One area where they were a little behind the curve is in IPv6 support. I used a 6IN4 tunnel until just a few weeks ago, after Sonic completed rollout of DHCP6 support in my neighborhood sometime last year. An issue I ran into was in receiving NoAddrsAvail in response to the DHCP6 Solicit send by my router.

14:59:58.681985 IP6 (class 0xc0, hlim 64, next-header UDP (17) payload length: 204) fe80::5e5e:abff:fed5:a1c0.547 > fe80::a236:9fff:fe59:19b0.546: [udp sum ok] dhcp6 advertise (xid=42fee3 (client-ID hwaddr/time type 1 time 656596109 a0369f5919b0) (server-ID vid 0000058335633a35) (IA_NA IAID:0 T1:0 T2:0 (status-code NoAddrsAvail)) (IA_PD IAID:0 T1:10800 T2:17280 (IA_PD-prefix 2001:5a8:xxxx:xxxx::/56 pltime:21600 vltime:21600)) (DNS-server 2001:5a8::11 2001:5a8::33))

As a result, my router did not get an IPv6 address.

igb0: flags=1008843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST,LOWER_UP> metric 0 mtu 1500
        description: WAN (wan)
        options=4800028<VLAN_MTU,JUMBO_MTU,HWSTATS,MEXTPG>
        inet 135.180.x.x netmask 0xfffffc00 broadcast 135.180.x.x
        inet6 fe80::a236:9fff:fe59:19b0%igb0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1
        media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)
        status: active
        nd6 options=23<PERFORMNUD,ACCEPT_RTADV,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>

 

Sonic answered the question in their support forum that their DHCP6 rollout only delegates prefixes. My router needs to only send an IA_PD, not an IA_NA. With OPNsense this is done in the Interfaces setting, "Request prefix only."

 

Voila! IPv6 works from within the house.

Google Lens Determining the Year

"This is a photo of the Justizpalast (Palace of Justice) in Munich, Germany, taken around 1970."

Ok, that is impressive from Google Lens. The photo was taken in 1969. Presumably the metadata about images in the training set includes the year when the image was taken often enough for it to have associated the shape of automobiles with a range of years.

I absolutely understand the belief that Google rushed out its AI too early, resulting in embarassing snafus. I do however wonder, had Google not gotten its work into the field, whether it would have the opposite problem now: being perceived as incompetent, hopeless, obsolete. Google's AI work at DeepMind has been very strong and done very early, were they to demonstrate an inability to bring feature to market that would also be damaging.

Personally: I value the AI features but do not yet trust them. I'm willing to give it time.

Nextdoor Emails Ads to Non-Users

I received an email from Nextdoor, clearly a paid advertisement targeted at people who live in my town.

The person who paid for the ad is asking something fairly innocuous, trying to build their business by generating enthusiasm on Nextdoor. Fake enthusiasm, but that is the way capitalism works nowadays.

I decided to obscure the name of their business because I don't really consider them to be a bad actor in this. Nextdoor is.

I am not a user of Nextdoor.
I have never been a user of Nextdoor.
I have no account there.

However, my mother was an active user and, as I learned today, likely allowed Nextdoor to access her contacts. Nextdoor's privacy policy article about this mentions names, email addresses, phone numbers, and "other information" will be harvested from uploaded contact information. Clearly it includes the postal address as well since Nextdoor targeted a geographical ad at me.

Nextdoor is selling access to me, without any kind of relationship with me and never having provided any value to me whatsoever. Someone had an account, therefore my information is free for them to monetize and do with as they please.

This stuff mostly fades into the background. Even while drafting this post, LinkedIn sent an email of "Denton, this top CEO is answering your questions live" which is clearly also a paid email advertisement targeted at me. I pay for LinkedIn Premium, but my information is nonetheless still used to juice some additional revenue. I receive this stuff regularly enough that don't even think about it, but Nextdoor stood out.

privacy@nextdoor.com

I wrote to privacy@nextdoor.com:

Referencing https://help.nextdoor.com/s/article/Information-for-people-who-don-t-use-Nextdoor-Products, may I have a copy of the information Nextdoor has for my email address?

They responded:

We’re sorry to hear that this email was unwelcome.
 
Upon review, there is no account associated with your email address, therefore we cannot provide a copy of your information.
 
From time to time, Nextdoor receives information from third parties about non-users. In your case, we received your information from a third-party partner and used this information to invite you to join your Nextdoor Neighborhood.
 
I can confirm that we have deleted from our systems the personal information associated with the email address that you used to contact us.
 
Let me know if you have any questions.

I didn't mention anything about an email. Apparently they get enough complaints about this practice that they just assume it is so.

Rent Then Versus Now, 32 Years Later

When I first moved to California in 1992 I rented a one bedroom apartment in Mountain View at a complex called The Shadows. I remember it being $900 for a 700-750 square foot apartment with one bedroom and a small kitchen.

The apartment complex is still there. Rent for that apartment now starts at $3295 per month.

Passport Cards

In November 2024 we decided to renew our US passports. We also ordered Passport Cards for the first time. The cards arrived 18 days after we mailed in the forms, without paying for expedited service nor even for express mail.

The Passport Card is a stiff plastic card, slightly thicker than our driver's licenses. It is not as broadly applicable as a traditional Passport Book:

• There is nowhere to put a visa nor anywhere for entry/exit stamps.
• It is specifically not valid for international air travel, though it can be used to board a domestic flight and is Real-ID compliant.
• The card is considerably cheaper at $30 versus $130 for a Passport Book, at least as of the timeframe we ordered in late 2024.

Most importantly though: it is rugged and fits in a wallet. It is much more reasonable to have a Passport Card with you at all times than it would be to carry around a Passport Book, and the card is a valid proof of citizenship. It can be used within the United States, can be used for travel within the Americas, and will allow re-entry into the US even if you have lost the regular Passport Book.

One caution: in another ten years when it comes time to renew, both the Passport Book and Card will need to be turned in for renewal. Keep good care of both, if one is lost then the renewal of the other becomes a Lost Passport event which requires DS-64 and DS-11 forms to replace. The DS-11 requires birth certificates and other proof of citizenship, just like getting the passport for the first time required.

Family Use of Signal Messenger Status Report

About six weeks ago we moved our family chat over to Signal Messenger after considering alternatives WhatsApp and Telegram. We are a mix of very technical, somewhat technical, and non-technical users. Signal has been quite usable.

• We have 1:1 conversations between each of us, and a Family group chat.
• We've used it for group video calls and voice, text and images.
• We paste silly GIFs and use emoji to react to things.

It is, quite simply, fine. We use it for all of the important conversations now.

A+, would recommend. If you are looking for alternatives to WhatsApp, because reasons, Signal is fine for groups of all sorts.

AuthaGraph World Map Projection

The AuthaGraph map projection projects the Earth's surface onto a triangular pyramid which is then unfolded and transformed into a rectangular map. The size and position of the continents and oceans are much more accurate while preserving a rectangular shape for ease of use — and our comfort, that maps are usually rectangular. Its designer, Hajime Narukawa, won a 2016 design award in Japan for this effort.

 

I just think it is neat. I've tried using the Dymaxion triangular projection but it just looks so weird that it distracts from the point it is trying to illustrate. People instead get lost in the sharp edges of the map. It looks dangerous.

 

Inovative map projections which do not exaggerate the land area of Canada and Greenland seem especially relevant right now.

Sauna Heaters and AI Misinformation

It started, simply enough, as a search for manuals for a sauna heater. The nameplate says it was made by AB Bahco in Enköping, Sweden. Google confidently informs me that this heater does not exist.

According to the faceplate the heater was made by the Ventilation division of AB Bahco. Snap-on Tools bought AB Bahco in 1999. I wrote to Snap-on customer support asking for PDFs of owners manuals or other documentation. Their response was as one might expect.

"The assortment of products Bahco offers is limited to professional hand tools, metal cutting saws, files and rotary burrs, wrenches and spanners, sockets and accessories, torque tools, impact tools and bits, screwdrivers, pliers, automotive special tools, electronics and fine mechanical pliers, extractors, refrigeration tools, tool storage, woodworking tools, pruning tools, and forestry hand tools.

I do not believe we have ever made saunas or sauna components."

I'd provided pictures of the heater with the original inquiry, but still I sympathize: the acquisition was 25 years ago, and clearly motivated by Bahco's power tool product lines. Google says Bahco doesn't make sauna heaters. What else is a customer service rep short on time going to respond with?

Thus I am left trying to add facts to the machine's training corpus, with a blog post. I feel like I am poking at the bear with a stick.

Let this be a record on the Internet of a thing which exists: AB Bahco sauna heaters, made in Enköping Sweden, do exist. They were sold in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, distributed by the Viking Sauna corporation based in San Francisco, California. The model we have is a 9 kilowatt unit labelled "BTD 9."

I don't have owners or repair manuals, only the simple circuit diagram on the label. It is a very simple unit with just a thermostat control. We added a mechanical timer on the control circuit to ensure we don't accidentally leave it on.

I am still seeking manuals, if I find them I will update this post with links. If you have owners or repair manuals and are willing to scan them in, please contact me.