How to prevent your car from catching on fire.

© Jane Tuv

Apparently a van caught on fire this morning in Flatiron, Manhattan. No one seems to have been hurt, thankfully.

This made me recall a few times in my old driving days, when the cars I drove had something seriously wrong with them. So in response, here are a few tips that will keep your car from catching on fire:

1. Watch your temperature gauge. It should hover in the middle once your car is warmed up. If it gets significantly past that, pull over, shut the engine off, open your hood, and let your car cool down before trying anything else.
2. It there's a gas station, an auto parts shop, or any kind of an auto repair shop nearby, consider getting some coolant/antifreeze. Most problems with overheating I have had in the past were from low coolant levels. Your coolant tank will have a max fill line, so top if off if necessary. If there's a coolant leak, you may have to do this several times until you get to a repair shop.
3. If you smell raw gasoline, and you're not near a gas station or a tanker, pull over, shut the engine off, get out of the car, and move away about a hundred feet. Then call a tow truck.
4. If you see black smoke coming out of your engine compartment, do the same thing as in the step above, only faster, and call 911 instead of a tow truck. 

The new iPad and "competition".

The new iPad was announced yesterday, and although I'm not in the market for one myself, I consider this the one that is really worth getting. The two major improvements are a Retina display and a good camera, likely the same as the one found in iPhone 4S. Those two things were critically missing in the previous iteration. Sure, a faster processor and 4G LTE wireless network support are always welcome, as well as the numerous software improvements.

Meanwhile, the press are split into two factions: Apple admirers and Apple opponents. The latter group is currently reporting their usual crazy statements like this one:

For Apple’s rivals, most notably Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., the incremental improvements in the latest iPad may be just the opportunity they need to establish themselves as legitimate competitors to the world’s most valuable company.

This corporate bullshit talk sounds very familiar to me. Spoken from first person, it's a denial of one's own poor performance. Notice how the article is not even denying that the new iPad will dominate the market; instead, it uses ambiguous lingo to get you to think so. All for a good cause, I guess. The cause, of course, is making money from serving advertisement to people who read the article.

I'll go ahead and make a statement of my own: if Apple hadn't come out with a new iPad this year at all, they would still dominate the market with their old tablets. iPad 2 is orders of magnitude better than anything else on the tablet market today. In fact, Apple created the market, and pretty much owns it. There is no competition. As popular as Kindle Fire has been, it is not competing with the iPad; it is competing with Kindle and other e-readers. The reason for that is that while Kindle Fire is a decent e-reader, it is horrible for pretty much anything else.

Northern Lights for everyone!

Those of us who were fortunate to see a clear sky last night were in for the show of a lifetime; perhaps several.

Yesterday, around 2 PM EST, a coronal mass ejection (CME) slammed into the Earth's magnetosphere, causing magnificent aurorae that were visible across Canada and the United States.