Toyota Woes: Getting Personal
Here’s an dispassionate analysis of the Toyota acceleration problem.
We have a 2003 Prius and a 2008 Yaris, neither of which appear to be part of any recall.
But even if they were recalled, I wonder if it would make much difference. My Prius has an issue when coming down long hills, where the regenerative braking appears to either actually overheat a battery terminal, or just trips the sensor, thereby hanging up the on-board computer. It was also the first car that I had that came with automatic skid control, and a couple times when I was evading a skid, I was automatically overridden, and it actually released the brake on the affected (skidding) wheel. If I had a choice, I’d be able either to turn it off, or not have it in the first place.
My theory is that there may be something going on with the cruise control, which affects acceleration, of course, or indeed a problem with a displaced floor mat, which has happened to me too, in other cars, not just Toyotas. Our Yaris is a totally low-end car, and is manual almost everything, so it is less likely that it would be affected.
Blogger FTP Service Deprecated
I only just noticed that the Blogger FTP service is being deprecated. Eeek. (If I may use the expression). TFNP has been a Blogger blog for almost ten years; before Google bought Blogger. So, sometime soon, we’ll have to figure out what to do next. My initial inclination is to take them up on their offer to move to a custom domain, or blogspot blog…. but blogspot is so, um, like AOL. This is a manageable problem for me, but in the comments about the move suggest it is going to be a real issue for people in China, where blogger.com is blocked.
Pesky Technical Problem #1 iDisk Sync Issue
After working flawlessly for what seemed like months, my iDisk synchronization stopped working with both my desktop and laptop machines saying “disk not in sync”, even after repeated attempts at syncing both manually and automatically. The solution was to sort of unwind everything:
1. In iDisk preferences, stop syncing on both machines.
2. Create a backup folder on the desktop machine, and copy everything from the iDisk into it.
3. Delete the iDisk contents on the desktop.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 on the laptop.
Now you have a local copy of the iDisk contents on both machines (which may or may not be in sync with each other.
5.On the desktop, go on the web in Safari and log into your mobile.me account.
6. Log off
7. Log in with bogus credentials (i.e. different name, different password). You’ll get an error message saying that your credentials aren’t valid.
8. Log in again with the correct credentials and log off.
9. Do a manual sync with the desktop. This will “refill” your desktop’s iDisk with the contents of the iDisk from mobile me.
10. Copy the contents of your backup iDisk to the desktop’s iDisk, and manually sync again.
At this point the desktop should be synced with mobile me.
11. Repeat steps 9 and 10 for the laptop.
This should have everything synced together.
Step 7 was a suggestion; it seemed dubious, but I tried it anyway. The explanation was that it “reset” the index or something on mobile me. Sound like a crock, but the above steps all seemed to work, and everything is back to normal.
Another suggestion is to only have one machine set on automatic sync…and then manually sync the other (probably the laptop if that is the one used only occasionally)
tfnp 