Wesley's Tool-Box

I've been oscillating between Mac mini and iMac for the past two decades for server use. An iMac 21.5" (2017) took over the job of a Mac mini (2012) for the past five and a half years, and now I'm moving back to Mac mini.

This time, it has an M2 Pro processor that uses the ARM architecture instead of Intel x86. So I took my time in setting everything up from the scratch, which took about three weeks. On the hardware side, I wanted to recreate the integrated look of an iMac, so gathering the necessary components required some time. On the software side, there were some compatibility issues in the server components that needed resolving. Most of them are fixed now, so I moved the server operation to the new system today.

My friend Andy in the United States pre-ordered this year's new iPhone on my behalf and sent it over to Korea as soon as he received it. After six days it finally arrived on my doorsteps.

It's a Sierra Blue coloured iPhone 13 Pro with 1TB of storage. As mentioned earlier, my iPhone 11 Pro is nearly full. So I need to switch over as soon as possible.

I'm looking forward to upgrading my iPhone 11 Pro 512GB to iPhone 13 Pro 1TB soon because I have nearly run out of storage space. This is primarily due to me taking tons of photos every day and keeping them on the phone. I had a similar experience three years ago on an iPhone X 256GB, and was saved by iPhone XS having a 512GB option.

At the beginning of the week, my phone running iOS 14.8 had about 5 to 6GB of space left. This may seem a lot for those using a smaller storage tier, but having lots of files apparently cause lots of temporary data to build up. As a result, the remaining space could drop to 2GB or less depending on what you're doing and so it was becoming dangerous. Then iOS 15 came out on Tuesday and I installed it right away. After completion, I was left with just 2GB of space on the phone and it dropped to nearly zero when I attempted to do a local backup.

With the space filled up, apps slowed down or stopped working. I tried rebooting, but the phone would hang at the Apple logo indefinitely. So I put the device into recovery mode, connected it to my Mac, and did the "Update" procedure. Thankfully, the phone could boot up again after doing that and I was told that there was now more than 30GB of space available. It turned out that the photo database was flushed to make such room and so the Photos app didn't show any photos initially. Over the course of more than 24 hours the database was automatically rebuilt with just minor hiccups and everything came back. The iPhone now has about 11GB left as seen above, which should give it much more breathing room until a new device arrives.

The whole experience was unsettling. Although I didn't lose anything important this time, it should serve as a reminder to have ample storage space left at all times, proportional to the overall size.

It's been about two weeks since my new book officially went on sale at various online and offline bookstores around Korea. The book saw its interest surging the subsequent Monday (August 30, 2021), and so it peaked at 32nd position of the tech / engineering online weekly bestsellers at Kyobo Book Centre the next day.

The wave has somewhat calmed down at the moment, but for some reason Naver has now decided to label it as a bestseller. I first spotted the red tag on September 4, before disappearing just a day after. It then returned today (September 7). I'm not sure what this classification is based on, but I guess the book is doing well.

A few months ago, I had the idea to gather all sorts of replies and posts I made in the electric vehicle-oriented communities on the Internet and organize them into a single book called "Electric Car - Common Sense Dictionary". Luckily, one of the major publishers I sent the first draft to thought it would sell and decided to publish it. So after beefing up the content and updating the data up to the last minute, the final manuscript was sent off to the press yesterday. And as of today all the major bookstores in the country have listed it for pre-order. Official release is slated for August 25, 2021. Here are where you can find it (all in Korean).

Official page at the publisher (Nexus)

- Kyobo Book Centre
- Youngpoong Bookstore
- Interpark
- Aladin
- Yes24

Since buying my own EV back in June 2018, I started to notice other electric vehicles in the city. So the "EV spotting" became a hobby of mine ever since. Including seven that I found in the photos I took between July 2017 and May 2018, I saw a total of 1,030 different EVs up to April 20, 2021. Here are some of the statistics from the data.

As with the internal combustion engine cars, Hyundai is the dominant player. Its two best-selling models, Kona Electric (36.0%, 370 units) and Ioniq Electric (15.0%, 154 units), take up over half of all the cars I came across. In fact, Kona was seen more often than the major models from other big players - Niro EV (11.3%, 116 units), Bolt EV (10.2%, 105 units), SM3 ZE (7.6%, 78 units), and Soul EV (4.8%, 49 units) - which account for only 33.8% (348 units) together. I should note that Ioniq, Bolt EV, and SM3 ZE were dominant early on because they started selling earlier than other models. But Kona (and to a lesser extent, Niro) eventually rose to the top.

Meanwhile, Tesla Model 3 (3.5%, 36 units) and the hydrogen fuel cell powered Nexo (4.5%, 46 units) have been rising in popularity quite recently and are starting to take bigger slices of the pie. EV versions of the signature 1-ton trucks Porter (1.7%, 18 units) and Bongo (1.2%, 12 units) have also started to make a dent. But other than the ones I mentioned so far, I was not able to find other cars in double digits, and that includes the BMW i3 (0.6%, 6 units) in the chart. These "others" make up 4.5% (46 units), which includes rarities like Hyundai BlueOn (first mass-produced battery EV) and Tucsan (first mass-produced hydrogen FCEV).

By looking at the pattern of the license plate numbers with other visible cues, it's possible to infer where the car was registered at without searching the official records. As it was expected, the much of the cars are local, with 41.7% (430 units) apparently from within the city. Cars from the much more populous neighbouring city of Gwangju (1.471 million, as opposed to 116 thousand in Naju) also take out a big chunk, with 29.4% (303 units) of total. Vehicles with rental license plates make up another 8.3% (85 units). The rest are suspected to be from other regions, although some may be local but not yet positively determined.

One thousand is a big number, but the EV market is just starting to bloom. I'll be interesting to see how different the chart will look with another thousand cars added in.