Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Three weeks, more or less, from my exposure to clearing the hurdle. Mary, being tougher than I, got it done in two.
For the better part of the first two weeks I was in bed ten hours every night, plus an hour or two of afternoon nap (no milk & cookies, drat), plus dragging around the house getting nothing done.
No major health problems, good blood oxygen levels throughout, no loss of smell apart from what you’d expect during three days of complete nasal blockage, and we’re both feeling OK-ish now.
However, we are making more than the usual number of stupid mistakes, which is one way we know we’re not really OK yet.
Back to the Basement Shop, with considerable caution …
Memo to Self: That was the first time in four years you didn’t wear a mask in close quarters. Don’t ever do that again.
An email from Electronic Arts arrived in an email account I haven’t used in over a decade:
Welcome to your EA Account! Your EA Account serves as an all-access pass to everything EA, from websites and mobile apps to console and PC games.
Seconds later:
Your EA Security Code: <<< redacted, not that it matters >>> If you didn’t request this code, please go to your My Account page and change your password right away. For assistance, please contact EA Help.
Thanks for helping us maintain your account’s security.
Not ever having had an EA account nor being in the process of signing up for one, I did nothing.
After a few more seconds:
Dear EA Insider,
Thanks for signing up. We’re looking forward to bringing you the latest news and information on your favorite games.
All the emails look to be genuinely from Electronics Arts, not scam emails routed through the usual sketchy / compromised servers.
Four days later:
Dear Customer,
We are contacting you regarding your EA account.
We wish to notify you that we have found your account to be in violation of our User Agreement or our Terms of Sale, and due to the nature of this violation we are left with no option other than to permanently close your account with immediate effect.
Which looks much more impressive in email HTML:
EA Account Closing
Although I did not respond to the Security Code message, the scammer surely used a phone number under his (it’s always a he) control, because “2FA” really means “pick an authentication method that lets you in”.
Just for the amusement value, I fed that email address into the EA sign-in page, hit the “Forgot my password” button, and got a Security Code just like the scammer didn’t. I suppose I could change the password and discover / change the phone number, but that would put me in full ownership of an account used for nefarious purpose.
I sometimes wonder what else happens using my identity.
A good prosecutor could nail me for Third Party Retro-associative Complicity and, if I didn’t already live in Poughkeepsie, send me up the river.
It’s not clear why a Sergeant in the US Army would translate her request for help into Simplified Chinese so I can better understand it, but that’s the world we live in.
This deposit would move my Quality-of-Life needle, but certainly not in a good direction:
Mrs Sgt Candy Payne spam – detail
Today I Learned: there are humanitarian doctors connected with the Red Army in Morocco.
The cost of sending this junk must be low enough to fuel the spam machine from a minuscule response rate.
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.
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.
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.
