The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Author: Ed

  • Sloop Clearwater: Sailing on the Hudson River

    Back in the old days, the Hudson was clogged with sailing ships; now only a few carefully tended reproductions remain:

    Sailing ship under Walkway Over the Hudson
    Sailing ship under Walkway Over the Hudson

    That’s the Sloop Clearwater as seen from the middle of the Poughkeepsie Bridge on an overcast day that brings out the vignetting in the long telephoto image.

    A bit earlier I was westbound on the Walkway Over the Hudson while the Clearwater was headed northbound:

    Sloop Clearwater
    Sloop Clearwater

    Turns out they carry a GPS tracker (accessible from a link on their site):

    Sloop Clearwater Track - 2012-05-14
    Sloop Clearwater Track – 2012-05-14

    So do I:

    KE4ZNU-9 APRS Track - 2012-05-14
    KE4ZNU-9 APRS Track – 2012-05-14

    It was a fine day for a ride (or a sail) before the storm!

  • Subscription Billing Service: Scam by Mail

    This sort of thing arrives quite often, looking very official with all its Control Numbers, three-color printing, good production values, and suchlike:

    Subscription Billing Service - front
    Subscription Billing Service – front

    Generally, Subscription Billing Service offers subscriptions / renewals to magazines I’d never subscribe to. As it turns out, we actually subscribe to Science News and their subscription reminder arrived a few days later, which gave me the opportunity to fish the SBS form out of the recycling bin and compare prices. Turns out that the SBS  “one of the lowest available rates we can offer” deal is just about exactly twice what you’d pay directly to Science News.

    Huh. What a surprise.

    The Fine Print on the back of the SBS form shows how they get away with this nonsense, at least given an unending supply of new suckers to exploit. You have seven days to “cancel” and you’ll pay $20 for the privilege of not having a middleman double the price:

    Subscription Billing Service - back
    Subscription Billing Service – back

    I do wonder how they can act as an “agent” without having a “direct relationship with the publishers”. Just one of those little mysteries of the universe, somewhat like how dark matter can be everywhere and nowhere at once.

    It’s a perfectly legitimate business, I suppose, but that doesn’t mean they’re not scum…

  • Converting DICOM X-ray Images to Something Useful

    For reasons that aren’t relevant here, we have a CD bearing X-rays of Mary’s shoulder. Of course, they’re in DICOM image format and come with a relentlessly Window-centric viewer that won’t run in Wine and can’t export the files in a more useful format.

    Imagemagick to the rescue:

    
convert /media/floppy/DICOM/997313/00100000 "Mary Shoulder 2.jpg"
    Mary Shoulder 2 - detail
    Mary Shoulder 2 – detail

    They tell us she has great bones and everything worked out fine…

  • Outdated First Aid Instructions

    The Plumbing Treasure Chest started life as a first-aid box designed to hang on a  wall. Inside the drop-down lid appears this list of Instructions For First Aid:

    Instructions For First Aid
    Instructions For First Aid

    You can’t even buy some of that stuff these days…

     

  • Did You Notice Any RSS Feed Problems?

    Normally, about 100-150 people arrive here every day through the RSS syndication feature, mostly looking at the daily post.

    Over the last two weeks (more or less), that number dropped to 10-50. I prefer to believe something has gone wrong with the WordPress RSS mechanism, rather than that 100 readers suddenly vanished. Of course, the wordpress.com Happiness Engineers can’t find anything amiss…

    If you use the RSS feed and experienced any recent problems, please leave a comment explaining the situation.

    Thanks!

  • Adobe Flash for Linux: Parting Gift

    Very recently, Youtube videos (including mine) took on a Smurf aspect: blue skin tones and other weird colors. I don’t spend a lot of time watching videos, but I’m pulling together a talk and wanted to be sure my videos still worked.

    Come to find out that:

    • Adobe is dropping Flash for Linux after version 11.2
    • The most recent update swapped the UV color channels
    • Adobe can’t reproduce the problem, hence no fix is in the offing

    At least for Youtube videos, one can turn on their HTML5 video option to avoid Flash, but that doesn’t fix the other issues.

    The recommended FlashVideoReplacer  plugin didn’t work for me in Xubuntu 10.10, alas.

  • Ubuntu 12.04: Random Crashes

    As if that, that, and that weren’t enough, Ubuntu 12.04 suffers from random crashes that occur without doing anything more challenging than turning the damned thing on and signing in to a user account.

    That problem report dates back to mid-December of 2011 and investigation has been ongoing, with notes like:

    We are getting tons of crash reports in Ubuntu (https://launchpad.net/bugs/507062) about programs crashing

    Yet Canonical decided to ship 12.04 anyway, with no fix in sight.

    I think disabling suspend mode reduces the number of random crashes, but it still seems to be about one a day. Resuming from suspend mode definitely messes up the network connection more often than not, so we just won’t suspend it again.

    This was a test installation on the Lenovo Q150, a bone-stock consumer PC, to see if I should upgrade the creaky 10.10 setup on my desktop box. Given the weird collection of hardware on my box (left- and right-hand trackballs, tablet, dual monitors with one rotated to portrait mode, etc), I’d hoped a “Long Term Support” version of Ubuntu / Xubuntu / whatever would be stable enough for use right out of the chute. Given the pervasive nature of the problems with 12.04, it’ll be at least a few more months before the code settles down and starts flying right.

    That’s not encouraging for what was supposed to be a well-tested release, with more attention paid to stability than fancy features.

    Mary is not pleased.