Upgrading the headlights on an EV from incandescent bulbs to LED’s will save some electricity, but it’s such a small amount of electricity compared to what the motor uses to move the EV that it’s probably not worth the effort purely from a range perspective.

My original OEM halogen headlights (together, at high beam) take 130 watts, while the motor takes around 12,000 watts just cruising down the road. So the headlights account for only 1% of the total energy usage.

One burnt out, so I replaced them with LED units that take less power.
Driving around with my high beams on, I’m saving a maximum of 78 watts by replacing both my headlights. 78 / 12000 = just over a 1/2 of one percent energy savings. So that gives me an extra quarter mile of range.

There are other benefits to LED headlights when compared to the OEM halogens. First, they produce more light, which is a safety advantage when driving at night. (I was never happy with the light output from the original headlights, and feel happier driving at night with the LED units.)

If you like the “cool white” color temperature of LED bulbs, you can say it’s an improvement in appearance. (They do make the headlights look more modern, as most newer cars have “cool white” headlights.)

Because the headlights are one of the largest consumers of power on the 12 volt accessory bus, swapping them out would allow you to significantly reduce the size/capacity of your DC-to-DC converter used to keep your 12 volt accessory battery charged.

The real power savings come from the addition of DRL, which only take 2.2 watts, compared to driving around with my low beams on.

The new Google Keyboard application (G-Board / Gboard) works fine, and has a few nice features, such as the ability to search for an animated gif to send when you want to blow through a lot of bandwidth.

You might notice that in the screenshots above, the Gboard power usage is higher than my email client, and even YouTube.   When you take more power than streaming videos, you know you are a power hog.

However, all of these new features come at the expensive of battery life.   As a simple keyboard application, it shouldn’t be using more power than any of the other applications on my phone.   I use the keyboard when sending text messages or email, and for a few search bars, etc…

In my opinion, a keyboard app should never appear in the top power consumers on your phone.

I’ve moved my SamKnows FCC broadband testing unit from one location to another in the middle of the month. The first location had one of the best home Internet plans available from BrightHouse networks (now Spectrum after the Charter purchase), the “Lighting 200” plan. The new location has the best available AT&T U-Verse plan, limited by the distance from a central office and older wires. AT&T did set me up with a bonded pair (using 2 phone lines, or 4 wires to provide better service).   The U-Verse plan is much slower, on both downlink and uplink, but is perfectly serviceable. The graphs below do show the stark contrast in available bandwidth.

I am going to miss the 24 up / 200 down of BrightHouse, but the 5 up / 30 down on U-Verse is still enough bandwidth for most needs.

The quality of the service has also gone down slightly, with slightly higher rates of packet loss and slightly higher latencies.

The extra 12 ms of latency isn’t much to worry about, but it is a definite change. The jump from almost no packet loss to 0.5 to 1 percent packet loss is annoying, and you can see that even on the worst day Spectrum / BrightHouse   is better than AT&T U-Verse on an average day.

Or, how I lost several hours of my life to a tricky and hard to diagnose networking issue.

I recently set up broadband Internet service with AT&T U-Verse. The internet appeared to be working correctly, except that I was not able to send or receive email (via IMAP and SMTP) from my work account, which is hosted by Microsoft on their office365.com platform.

I could send and receive email via IMAP/SMTP with two OTHER email providers, and if I used any other network (Brighthouse, T-Mobile, etc) the outlook 365 email would work just fine.

After calls to AT&T (Internet is working just fine, must be a problem with Office365), and my companies’ helpdesk (sorry, we don’t support Thunderbird or K-9 mail). I finally had to figure out the problem myself.

I thought that perhaps the issue was with the IP address I had from AT&T (perhaps Microsoft’s servers had blacklisted it for some reason, although I could still access the web based Office365 cloud with no problems), so I turned on my VPN software to tunnel all of my traffic through the work network (and get a new IP address).

Even with a new IP address via the VPN software, I still had the problem!
(BUT, if I used my t-mobile phone mobile hotspot, and THEN turned on the VPN, everything worked just fine). However, I was able to ping the smtp server just fine, so it wasn’t a network routing issue.

So the problem was definitely a symptom of the U-verse network. And if a tunneling VPN wasn’t fixing it, it had to be a packet problem (the tunneling VPN would get my packets out of the local network, but not change them).

The solution:
So I found the MTU (maximum transmit unit) on my modem, which defaulted to 1500 (usually a safe number) and changed it down to 1472. Problem solved: Suddenly I was able to communicate with the Microsoft IMAP servers.

I did this with the online web interface for the modem. Settings -> Broadband -> Link Configuration, changed “Upstream MTU” to 1472 (from the default of 1500).

I found that I also had to disable IPv6 on my modem to be able to send email via SMTP.

My best guess is that Microsoft may be running IPv6 inside their server farm, but tunneling it over IPv4 connections, which means that any 1500 byte packets are too big to be tunneled. (And they are not supporting packet fragmentation correctly.)

So by artificially limiting my packets to 1472 on the sending end, it allowed them to make it all the way to the SMTP/IMAP servers.

[I’d like to point out that the other two email providers I use on a regular basis did not have this issue, so it is probably something specific to the Microsoft Cloud.]

So, now I can get back to work. I pity the casual user who doesn’t have a background in computer networking…..of course, they probably all use the Outlook application, which hopefully doesn’t have this issue.