It seems toads really like the plant cell packs that Mary uses to start her garden veggies:
The garden isn’t quite as snug, but the camouflage works much better:
It’s been a dry year and we haven’t seen many toads or slugs around the house.
Author: Ed
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Dell Optiplex GX270 Power Control PCB Connections
The general idea is to gut an old Dell Optiplex GX270 and stuff the high-voltage parts of the sewing machine controller inside a well constructed and solidly grounded metal shield inside a not-too-ugly plastic box. It’d be nice to reuse the power control button and status LEDs on the front panel…
The few parts on the front of the through-hole board:
Dell Power Button PCB – component The copper side, with annotations:
Dell Power Button PCB – copper The red tracer on the ribbon cable goes to Pin 1, which is a blind key on the PCB.
The LEDs do not have ballast resistors, so those must go on a circuit board somewhere else.
The connections:
16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 Gnd nc nc nc nc HD+ HD- Button+ Gnd nc Gnd Pwr Y+ Gnd Pwr G+ Gnd Key 15 13 11 9 7 5 3 1 -
Invisible Asterisk: Except Cops
The signs at every Dutchess Rail Trail grade crossing and access point seem unambiguous:
DCRT – No Motor Vehicles More specific signs appear at random intervals along the trail:
DCRT – All Terrain Vehicles Prohibited You can’t see it, but every sign includes an invisible asterisk introducing the invisible clause “Except Cops”:
DCRT – Sheriff ATV Convoy Back when the Dutchess County deputy sheriffs rode huge ATVs that occupied nearly the entire paved trail and bulldozed everybody out of their way, I had the temerity to ask why they weren’t riding bikes. The deputy sheriff told me, rather condescendingly, that they had to be prepared for anything and that there had already been incidents.
These little ATVs aren’t quite so imposing and, more likely, also fit on the new bridges and between the bollards, which may explain everything.
I’ve seen what might be their best use case, although ambulances can attract your attention without an ATV escort:
DCRT – Sheriff ATV Leading Ambulance Straight up, I have no objection to police patrols on the rail trail.
I do object to the official mindset that simply adds an invisible exception to any inconvenient rule.
As I see it, the root cause of the militarized police and extralegal government activities we’ve seen across the country in recent years boils down to “That law / regulation / rule does not apply to us, because we are the government.”
I can ride the length of the DCRT and back in about two hours, averaging 12 mph, without getting particularly sweaty in the process; the track in that link shows a three hour ride that includes the HVRT and a Walkway scrum, plus the ride from and to home. A police ATV can’t go much faster than that on the trail, even with lights and sirens, because oblivious pedestrians keep getting in the way.
If an officer on a bike can’t keep up with me, then something has gone badly wrong with the job requirements for becoming a deputy sheriff.
As far as “being prepared for anything” goes, the cargo capacity of those little ATVs rules out a bunch of hardware that fit in the big ones: anything seems an elastic concept. A bike can carry enough equipment for many incidents; my tool kit weighs more than some bike frames, the packs have plenty of room to spare, and there’s always the trailer option. I doubt genuine Mil-Spec assault rifles would come in handy on the rail trail.
It’s also not clear why an officer on a bike can’t call for the same backup as an officer on an ATV: those buggies lack fancy VHF antennas, so they’re using a hand-held radio or phone. The 5 W amateur radio on my bike, through a mobile VHF antenna on a crappy ground system, can easily reach local amateur radio repeaters and APRS nodes. Many pedestrians seem absorbed with their phones, so getting microwaves into and out of the trail doesn’t pose much of a problem.
Cops-on-bikes present a much less aggressive aspect than cops-on-ATVs who ignore the rules that apply to the rest of us.
They could do it differently, as the department has both bikes and ATVs.
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Dis-arming a Steelcase Leap Chair
Steelcase lists the arm rests on their Leap chairs as “factory installed” and not removable, perhaps because the brackets supporting the arms also support the backrest. In the event you must ever remove the arms, perhaps because your wife decides she’d like to try the chair without them, it’s straightforward.
Loosen the Torx screw visible through the slot in the bottom of the plastic shroud about a dozen turns (it will not click or feel loose), use a flat screwdriver to unlock the shroud from the flat plastic plate on the seat side of the bracket, then forcibly pull the sides of the shroud outward until you can pull the arm extension mechanism up-and-out of these slots in the bracket:
Steelcase Leap – arm bracket This view from the side of the chair shows the screw hole in the bottom, with a pair of holes for alignment pins beside it:
Steelcase Leap – arm bracket You can remove the flat plate by pushing the latch at the top center (just below the backrest screw boss), then sliding the plate upward.
As nearly as I can tell, there’s no way to remove the shroud from around the arm extension mechanism, so you must pull off the whole thing in one lump:
Steelcase Leap – arm mechanism The two pairs of slots in the edges of the shroud engage tabs on the plastic plate; that’s why you need the flat screwdriver.
The two pins on the bottom lock the arm into the bracket: you must raise it vertically until those come out, after which you can ease the bottom outward until the pins on the sides (which you can’t see inside the shroud) disengage from the bracket slots.
It takes a whole lot more force than seems necessary, but it can be done.
Wrap Gorilla tape around the raw edges until you decide whether it’s worthwhile to design and print a pair of plastic caps to cover the whole bracket.
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When the Phone Don’t Ring, We Know It’s Carmen
A few weeks ago we ported our landline number to Ooma’s VOIP service, turned on their Community Blacklist, blacklisted a few pests that crept through, and … the scam calls vanished. For the first week, the only calls we received came from people we know.
Most of the Caller ID numbers seem faked, so one side effect of blocking them will be to prevent calls from real persons or businesses eventually assigned those numbers. In particular, I’ve set up a blacklist filter that kills calls from numbers that differ from ours in only the last few digits: at least one scammer combined the first several digits of the called number with some random digits at the end.
Obviously, it’s impossible to kill all the faked numbers. The filters work surprisingly well, though.
Killing nearly all the scam calls is worth ten bucks a month right there, even though it seems odd to pay a private party to prevent illegal action by somebody else. Used to be the government put our tax dollars to work and dealt with people who performed illegal actions, but … that was then, this is now.
As an aside, I wonder how the NSA handles all those scam calls. Given that the Feds regard anybody within three or four hops of a Person Of Interest to be a Person of Interest, not only should all the scammers have terrorist tags (they call everybody all the time, right?), we ordinary folks picking up the phones are now within a few hops of a known terrorist affiliate.
Conversely, if the NSA discards scam calls, then I know precisely how to set up the perfect terrorist communications network.
Verizon refunded $3.11 from our last bill and didn’t try to convince us to retain our landline service. They’d recently “upgraded” our copper line to fiber, so the basement has a nice Optical Network Terminal that I just unplugged; they don’t seem to want it back. Maybe I’ll harvest the 12 V 8 Ah (!) SLA battery for a project.
We’re not interested in the FiOS “Triple Play” special offers that hover around $90/month for two years, plus unknown equipment charges, plus a regional sports network surcharge, plus unknown taxes and fees, with or without a $250 gift card kickback, with or without a discounted tablet. The cable company recently boosted what we pay for 15/3 cable to $60/month, so we’re definitely trapped by a duopoly.
Some things (all, some, or none of which may be true) I learned while chatting with various contestants:
- Overtalking them with “You may hang up at any time if you agree that you’re a scammer” produces either an immediate hangup (they agree!) or a very interesting discussion.
- Starting with “You have sixty seconds to prove you’re not a scammer. Go!” generally produces an immediate hangup.
- Setting up a call center “the size of your garage” costs about 85 kilobucks and provides seats for about a dozen “agents”.
- It’s the best job you’ve had, if you’ve been unemployed for three years, because it’s minimum wage plus a bonus for every prospect you “qualify”, all without having to work in a retail environment. I was unable to discover when the bonus kicks in, but likely after the Level 2 closer sucks actual money out of the victim’s credit card account.
- Some contestants sincerely believe they’re doing a Good Thing: helping people get lower interest rates on their credit card debt. Pointing out that I’ve asked my credit card issuer whether that works and getting a firm “No!” in reply doesn’t change their belief in the least.
It’s sad that getting a dead-end job in a scamming company might be the best thing that’s happened to some of those folks in a long time. Makes me almost regret having some of them break down and cry under interrogation…
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Eroded PTT Cable
While installing new underseat packs (about which, more later) on my Tour Easy, I discovered a bight of PTT cable had been touching the top of the chain:
Eroded PTT cable – Tour Easy The gentle ripples to the right of the worn-through section seem particularly nice; you couldn’t do that deliberately if you had to.
This section of cable should have been taped to the upper frame bars. It’s hidden under the seat, just in front of the rear fender, and between the under-seat packs, so it’s basically invisible from any angle.
Soooo, that probably explains a bit of the intermittent trouble I’d been having with the PTT switch, although most of it came from the corroded switch contacts.
Rather than replace the whole cable, I cut out the eroded section, spliced the conductors, and taped it firmly back on the tubes.
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Hudson River Eagle Sightings
A pocket camera can’t do justice to the Bald Eagles, just before dusk and halfway across the Hudson River from our river cruise yacht:
Bald Eagles at dusk – Hudson River near Hudson NY We got a closer look at the pair of eagles who once graced the original Grand Central Station and are now standing guard at St Basil Academy in Garrison.
This one glanced away from the entrance, perhaps to keep an eye on us:
Eagle at St Basils Academy – entrance Another watches over an interior road:
Eagle at St Basils Academy – cliff They’re two tons of cast iron apiece and, should any of you want a restoration project, I’m sure the good folks at St Basil’s could work something out.
We saw those during the Cycling the Hudson Valley tour: riding during the day, camping and touristing in the evening.
Several years ago we encountered a Penn Station eagle at the Washington Zoo:
Karen on Penn Station eagle Fly away, young Valkyrie, fly away …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 