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.

Category: Administrivia

Overhead

Power Outage

This housing development was the second in Poughkeepsie to have underground utilities and, to put it mildly, a lot has rotted out over the last 70 years.

Over the weekend, one phase of the AC power flickered and eventually failed completely, with the other phase supplying a steady 120 VAC. Central Hudson (Gas & Electric) crews located long-lost buried boxes in places not matching their maps:

Power Outage – flooded box

Then they pumped / bailed enough water to repair / lengthen the wires:

Power Outage – corroded wiring

I’ve never before seen anybody work on live wires underwater.

They installed above-ground boxes to simplify The Next Time.

Some improvisation was required:

Power Outage – improvised cocoa stirring

Gotta say, cold Fireball Cocoa tastes different than hot Fireball Cocoa.

2025-04-28
If Only I Were A Hotel

Every few days this month, a Korean company has sent identical spam email messages to a series of plausible, albeit unused, addresses at softsolder dot com:

As a forward-thinking hotel, we know you prioritize cleanliness and guest satisfaction.
That’s why we’re excited to introduce Harington, an advanced sterilization device designed to provide
99.99% bacteria and germ elimination for toilets, ensuring the highest standards of hygiene for your guests.

Wikipedia reminds us Sir John Harington gets credit for inventing the flush toilet, thus explaining the device’s name. Surprisingly, a casual search with the obvious keywords suggests a different origin story much closer to the (nominal) company sending the spam.

Another sentence definitely gained something in translation:

A short but happy time spent on the toilet with a trustworthy friend who protects my secret and precious place from bacterial infection!

The emails have an unsubscribe link, but experience shows clicking only encourages the senders.

I wonder how much they spent to buy whatever list says my domain is a hotel …

2025-04-17
An AI That Writes Just Like Me

This is getting to be a regular occurrence:

Site stats – 2025-04-13 scraper

Typically, every day two or three hundred visitors read three or four hundred posts, about 1.4 posts/viewer. Nearly 4000 views from the same number of visitors is unusual. The whole blog has just over 5200 posts; perhaps they don’t want really old content.

A look at the timing suggests what happened:

Site stats – 2025-04-13 detail

My guess: WordPress throttles aggressive scraping, so the program backed off for a couple of hours before finishing the job.

Long ago, a magazine editor told me I have the strongest writing voice he had ever encountered, so when an AI uses my blog as its training set the results should be obvious.

Let me know where else you meet me …

2025-04-16
Blog Theme Update

Over the past year, the ancient WordPress theme I use for this blog has gradually stopped working, to the extent that some of you cannot enter comments and the GitHub Gists no longer display properly.

So it’s once again time for a new theme.

The notes from the last time this happened remain appropriate and I commend your attention there while I screw around setting up whatever the new hotness might be.

2025-02-10
Blog Summary: 2024

It seems nobody else can find all the fuse boxes hidden around a Forester, either, and water heater anode rods continue to pose a challenge:

Page views – year to 2024-12-28

What is it about the Thermador heater?

Surely better cat pictures would create more traffic:

All-time Total Views – 2024-12

So I asked the WordPress AI to come up with a picture, given the minimal text in this post:

AI Generated Image for 2024 Blog Summary

The cat has approximately the right number of legs, if not toes, but what is the head in the corner?

Let’s take the rest of the day off …

2025-01-01
Rise of the Machines

Perhaps an AI / LLM has learned to write just like I do:

Blog visitors – 2024-12-09

The same thing happened last month, although a closer look shows no human can read that fast:

Blog visitors – detail – 2024-11-12

These Dirac-delta pulses seem to be a new thing, with one “reader” hitting many posts, rather than many readers hitting a single post. I can’t tell if it’s a new way for search engines to scan pages or an entirely new algorithm doing the scanning.

Should you run across another blog with similar verbiage, you know where it started …

2024-12-11
Welcome, Whoever You Are

Last week, somebody evidently found the blog interesting enough to more than double the usual page view count:

Blog visitors – 2024-11-12

Singlehandedly tripled the “Views per visitor” number from the usual 1.3-ish to 3.6, too.

It happens occasionally and sometimes I go back and read a few dozen posts just to remind myself what I was doing / thinking at the time.

2024-11-19