Having just had our Mercedes CLA 250+ for a week, I wanted to write down some first impressions and contrasts to our Tesla experience, from buying to driving, having had a Model X since 2020. This is that. Big picture The 2020 Tesla Model X is a 7-seater (7 actual full seats although there is limited headroom on the two most rear seats). As a family of five, we usually have the two last-row seats folded down, so the car has five full width seats and a very large trunk area.

Watching this pivot-to-ai video I was struck by a thought (as it sometimes happens)… I think “we” may be setting ourselves up for the return of the internet worms, 1999-style, but with a vengeance. Let me explain. Software security in the ’90s In the early days of the public internet, especially as e-mail became widely adopted (mid/late ’90s), a very peculiar thing happened on the client (end user) software side: In the name of progress, some productivity software like the Outlook e-mail client, the Word word-processor and other applications would begin supporting “macros”; little snippets of software written in a high level language such as (at the time) VBScript, embedded inside the data the application would be processing (so embedded inside an e-mail or a document for example).

Here I was going to describe the rough configuration of my four node cluster - however, based on questions I’ve gotten, there was a more pressing issue to address first. First let me just re-iterate why I run the cluster at all: I want a neat little compute cluster at home from which I can serve this web site, my e-mail plus whatever other services I want for hobby purposes at home (like a git repo, file services etc.

A while back, as part of my ever so slightly over-engineered noise reduction effort on the basement cluster, a simple fan manager daemon was developed. Emphasis was on simplicity and small footprint. Now some weeks down the road, looking at systemctl status fanman output, I cannot help but notice that, accumulated, the fan controller software does burn quite some cycles on the CPU. A full 38 minutes and change, from running just around two and a half weeks.