Since 2010, low beam halogen bulbs on the above-referenced vehicle have been replaced on three separate occasions. Not terrible, but my relatively new driving daughter has noticed my wife’s car (HID bulbs) and my parents’ electric cars (LED bulbs) illuminate features on and off a night-time road much better than our New Beetle’s halogens. And when the driver-side low beam bulb recently capitulated, I got serious about converting it to newer bulb technology.

I understand LED’s have a much lower watt draw than halogens (and presumably also better than HID bulbs), so I focused my effort on LED bulb conversions. I figured more people are considering this, so I was somewhat surprised after searching online inventory for my local NAPA and finding that they had no LED conversion bulbs available. Maybe I searched wrong? I know many different options exist. Sadly, I don’t like buying car parts online and prefer to source them locally should a problem crop up later, so I moved on to AutoZone and Advance Auto Parts. Both carry LED conversions, specifically one made by OSRAM Sylvania, the H1LEDHP.BX2 for our New Beetle.

At the time of this post, AutoZone’s website shows:

Autozone’s listing for above-referenced part number has incorrect product picture.

After having to return what AutoZone showed in the picture, which was difficult considering the receipt showed the website’s part number, I found the correct H1 bulb in-stock and for less at Advance Auto Parts just down Lake Street.

Installation was nearly identical to a halogen bulb. The one adjustment I had to make was bending each of the New Beetle’s bulb clips outward, so that they could fit around the LED’s cooling plate. This slight modification aside, I tested the bulbs last night and wow, I’m impressed. I wouldn’t say they are twice as bright, but they definitely appear to be close to the 1,621 lumens that Sylvania claims and Advance Auto Parts repeats.

One other odd behavior with these bulbs that I noticed: when flipping the New Beetle’s high beams on, the low beams illuminate along with the old halogen high beam bulbs I left in. I think this happens, because Sylvania’s H1 bulbs operate at both voltages unlike the old halogen bulbs. I bet there’s an intermediary device I could add to stop this. I considered a workaround of replacing the existing high beam halogens with another set of these Sylvania H1 bulbs, but I think the problem then would be that both sets of bulbs will turn on when the low beams are flicked on – fellow road users won’t like the New Beetle’s headlights if it operates this way. For now, I’ll stick with the Sylvania H1 bulbs only for the low beam, though when the lower hanging halogen driving light bulbs break I may replace them with H1 LEDs too.

Final verdict on these: buy! Should the operation of these bulbs be causing other issues, Sylvania ships them with a lifetime warranty. Keep your receipt/paperwork. Should these Sylvania LEDs not work out, I may consider options here.

Folks here have broken the bypass tray on my workhorse Brother HL-L8350CDW, so when I happened across our electronics recycling bin at work and noticed a HL-L3250CDW, I quickly snatched it. It needed toner and new drums, no biggie. I picked up some of these off of eBay and have it operating; however, the magenta toner is shifted a bit. I’ve been messing around with the printer’s maintenance mode to make manual tweaks. To access this menu:

1. On top of the printer, hold the home button for 5 seconds.
2. Next four white boxes appear on the display, press and hold on the bottom box for 3 seconds then release.
3. Using printer’s on-screen keypad, type *2864 and it will say “MAINTENANCE” across the top of the screen.
4. Using printer’s on-screen keypad, type *66 and it will say “REGISTRATION” across the top.
5. Using printer’s on-screen keypad, tap the “>>” button twice and you’ll reach a keyboard with arrow buttons.
6. Tap the up arrow twice to navigate to “PRINT CHART”, then press “SET”.

This post may be a work in progress as I next explain how to improve the alignment of what you see from the printed output. This is an iterative process that is necessary, because the third party toner cartridges must not be fully compatible with Brother’s firmware.

Lately spammers seem to be coopting a feature in Gmail, and other email platforms, where a calendar appointment is automatically entered into a user’s calendar. To prevent these appointments from automatically appearing through your Gmail account, watch my demonstration to disable this feature or follow the instructions below:

How to configure Gmail to only allow appointments from known senders.

Log into your calendar at https://calendar.google.com
Click the settings icon/settings menu.
Scroll to “Event Settings”.
Change the contextual menu from “Add invitations to my calendar – From everyone” to “Only if the sender is known”.

I hope this helps!

I picked up a new suit to match my sister-in-law’s color swatch and the pants came as 38-inch lengths. Those would probably be too short Big W, but they are too long for me. And for suit pants, a blind hem is needed.

Going in, I was somewhat unaware that a regular sewing machine would struggle with this task, but there are ways to overcome it. This video is by far the best of ones that I watched and on my first try applying my new skills it worked for my pants:

Happy day with Tina, Wes, Talia, Jamala, and Voke!

Many thanks to Aspiring Gent for making this easier. And for whatever reason, it hurt my brain trying to think about what I was doing and how it would work, but trust the process that Aspiring Gent lays out – it works.

I’m really liking Inkscape. I wanted to customize it on macOS to make its default document a letter document in portrait (Inkscape ships with the A4 as the default). To make this change:

1. Open Inkscape and create a new document.
2. Set the Canvas Size:
   • Go to File -> Document Properties (Shift + Cmd + D).
   • Under the Page tab:
     • Set Units to in.
     • Choose Letter from the preset list, or manually set:
       • Width: 8.5 in
       • Height: 11 in
3. Save the Document as a Template:
   • Go to File -> Save As.
   • Save the file as default.svg to a temporary location like your Desktop.
4. Move the Template to the Correct Folder:
   • Open Finder and navigate to:
     ~/Library/Application Support/org.inkscape.Inkscape/config/inkscape/templates/
   • If the folder doesn’t exist, create it manually.
   • Move your default.svg file into this folder.
5. Restart Inkscape:
   • When you launch Inkscape again, it will use your customized default.svg as the starting document — now with a Letter-sized canvas.

Seems Safari’s cache is corrupted on my Mac, several of the WordPress admin pages look like this:

Corrupted Safari cache when viewing WordPress Admin page.

To get around this issue, I’m temporarily using Microsoft Edge, which seems to work fine.

I tried erasing Safari’s cache for my schwie.com domain and then quit/restarted Safari:

Go to Safari > Settings > Privacy and click Manage Website Data.
– In the search bar, type the name of your website.
– Select it and click Remove.
Restart Safari and check the WordPress admin panel
– Close and reopen Safari to ensure the changes take effect.
– Revisit your WordPress admin panel to see if the changes are now reflected.

But the above instructions didn’t seem to resolve the issue in Safari. More aggressive action with Safari may be necessary, but I’m reluctant to try it now.

** Update 11-26-2025 **

I found a better fix to this, maybe getting closer to resolving this issue. In Safari’s settings and then Privacy, you can delete the Website Data for a specific website, this still didn’t help. I then tried emptying the cache through the Developer menu, this still didn’t help. Ultimately, I found that holding down the Shift key and then choosing
“Reload Page” by navigating to View->Refresh Page has WordPress admin pages rendering properly in Safari again – yes! Oddly, I have to do this one time for ever admin page that loads improperly, but the change then seems to stick for future visits.

** Update 12-5-2025 **
Oh dear, this fix stopped working today. Will report back later when I figure out a lasting workaround/repair.

I’m trying to be better about digitally signing .pdf documents that I author as a professional engineer. And without needing to pay Adobe to use Acrobat. Enter pyHanko, which does not have a graphical user interface; however, with a little fussing it works well.

First, open Terminal.app and execute the following command to create a certificate and private key:

openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:4096 -keyout key.pem -out cert.pem -days 3650

When prompted, I entered:

Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]:US
State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]:Minnesota
Locality Name (eg, city) []:
Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]:Barr Engineering Co.
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:
Common Name (e.g. server FQDN or YOUR name) []:Bradford Schwie
Email Address []:bschwie@barr.com

Next combine the above generated cert.pem and key.pem into certif.p12 with this command:

openssl pkcs12 -export -out certif.p12 -in cert.pem -inkey key.pem

Verify the certificate.p12 contains a certificate and key with this command:

openssl pkcs12 -info -in certif.p12

Finally, create a .pdf with command:

pyhanko sign addsig --field Sig1 pkcs12 input.pdf output_signed.pdf certif.p12

pyhanko sign addsig --field 1/70,400,390,350/Sig1 --style-name default pkcs12 input.pdf output_signed.pdf certif.p12

I could probably do more fussing with the signature appearance, but it took a fair amount of effort and this was before Liam bailed me out – thank you! Hopefully others find this as helpful as I do.

** Update 11-26-2025 **
Today I was signing a document that another user had already digitally signed. No sweat, pyHanko seems to handle this situation with the following example that I used:

pyhanko sign addsig --field 1/90,215,360,185/Sig1 --style-name default --no-strict-syntax pkcs12 input.pdf output_signed.pdf certif.p12

** Update 12-4-2025 **
Today I signed a couple letter documents. The following pyHanko command worked for me once I navigated to the Archive folder on the Desktop, where I had the other files discussed above.

pyhanko sign addsig --field 1/70,275,370,225/Sig1 --style-name default --no-strict-syntax pkcs12 input.pdf output_signed.pdf certif.p12

** Update 12-30-2025 **
To stamp the fourth page of a .pdf, replace “field 1” (above), with “field 4” as shown below:

pyhanko sign addsig --field 4/140,150,410,120/Sig1 --style-name default --no-strict-syntax pkcs12 input.pdf output_signed.pdf certif.p12

My iPhone 15 Pro Max caps charging at 80% thanks to Apple’s built-in iOS feature; however, the same built-in feature doesn’t appear for a macOS Intel MacBook Pro machine and we have a fleet of these. BatteryOptimizer_for_Mac to the rescue! I installed it on my macbookpro11,5 this afternoon and will let it run for a few weeks to see how it performs. Installation is simple with a single Terminal command (and some fussing in System Settings):

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/js4jiang5/BatteryOptimizer_for_Mac/main/setup.sh | bash

While there are many other open source options out there including some commercial options, they appear more focused on Apple-silicon based MacBooks.

** Update 7-4-2025 **

Using the command:

battery status

Produces:

07/03/25-15:11:01 - Battery at 78.8%, 12.083V, 27.3°C, no charging
07/03/25-15:11:01 - Battery health 109.3%, Cycle 103
07/03/25-15:11:01 - Your battery is currently being maintained at 80% with sailing to 75%
07/03/25-15:11:01 - You haven't scheduled calibration yet

As you can see, the battery is now hovering just below 80%. This utility appears to work and well at that.

My kids love Spotify and I agree to keep a membership going for them. I could use it too Spotify and via its offline mode for RAGBRAI and other events where my devices don’t have wireless coverage, but I’m old school and prefer downloaded music files that I can see.

My kids offer me Playlists via weblinks so I can access the music via a web browser and many of these songs are also freely available on YouTube. Using a couple simple Terminal commands, these songs will get downloaded as lower quality formats (128 kbps) and my ears can’t tell the difference.

pip install spotdl

spotdl [insert Spotify playlist URL here]

Notes:

I had to use sudo before the first command, hopefully this is just my Mac and not applicable to yours.

For the Spotify playlist URL, just insert the link and don’t include the brackets as shown above. Get the URL through a web browser by logging into your account at spotify.com or use the URL to the playlist that your Spotify using friend gave to you.

You may need to install ffmpeg, consider brew for installing it. If additional ffmpeg errors persist, they may be originate from spotdl’s config file and its bitrate described here.

Within .spotdl and Terminal, I made a “music” folder with the command mkdir music, and then executed the spotdl command from there.

And if you want AAC files instead of mp3, something like the following command should work:

spotdl [insert Spotify playlist URL here] --bitrate 128k --format m4a

To update spotdl, run:

pip install –upgrade spotdl

I always seem to fumble with sharing files in OneDrive and my recipients receive multiple notifications. This post is instructions for me to hopefully reduce that

1. Open barr.onedrive.com (this is my work, replace this address with a site/location where you typically access your own OneDrive files).

2. Click the name of the file you want to send, it will preview it in a window.

3. Tap “Share” in upper right corner.

4. Tap “Manage Access”.

5. Tap “Links”.

6. Tap “Share”.

7. In the “Add a name, group or email” field, type in the email address you wish to send a link to.

8. Click the three dots and choose “Send link in Outlook”.

These steps will likely change with future OneDrive revisions and before I next need to share a file, but at least these instructions might get me on a notification-free track.