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

Category: Home Ec

Things around the home & hearth

Credit Union Email: Phishing or Not?

The Credit Union recommends we practice “Safe Computing” with this helpful advice (clicky for more dots):

HVFCU – Safe Computing – sketchy URL

The link leading to that page was on their website, but the page is on trabian.com, whoever they are. Should I trust the links on that page to return me to the credit union site or not?

Here’s their definition of “phishing”:

HVFCU – Phishing description

Having just switched to “paperless statements” at the Credit Union, a recent email prompted me to look at my statement. Let’s start by seeing where the email came from:

HVFCU – Statement email – From address

Huh.

It claims to be from the credit union, but does its actual address (insofar as anything concerning email can be actual) of statement2web.com sound a little phishy to you, too?

Well, let’s look at the full headers, which I can do because, yo, 1337 H4X0R. Here’s a snippet from the bottom of the stack:

HVFCU – Email detail header

Huh.

So the email started from statement2web.com and bankshotted off kbmla.com. Further up, the headers show it rattled through pobox.com and eventually arrived in my inbox. As far as I can tell, it never touched its alleged starting point of hvfcu.org at any point in its journey.

Quick: phish or no phish?

Of course, it’s a perfectly innocent message from the credit union, but it contains every single warning sign we’re supposed to notice in spam or phishing emails, complete with a clicky link!

[heavy sigh]

2017-03-12
Monthly Science: Minimal-Woo Cast Iron Pan Seasoning
After trying several variations on a theme, our daily-use pan now looks like this:

Cast Iron Pan – after weekly seasoning

Those obvious wiping marks come from an oily rag in a hot pan. What could go wrong?

The reflected light bar comes from the under-cabinet LED strip.

The surface withstands stainless utensils, cooks omelets with aplomb, and requires no fussy KP:

Omelet in cast-iron pan

The low-woo seasoning recipe, done maybe once a week when the bottom has more gunk than usual:
- Clean the pan as usual, wipe dry
- Begin heating on medium burner set to High
- Add 0.2 ml = 10 drops = 1 squirt of flaxseed oil
- Wipe around pan interior with small cotton cloth
- Continue heating to 500 °F, about four minutes
- Carefully wipe oily cloth around pan again
- Let cool
Works for us and doesn’t involve any magic.
2017-03-01
Kenmore Progressive Vacuum Cleaner Carpet Brush Disassembly
The beater bar found and ingested a remarkably long strip of carpet yarn, resulting in a sudden stop and an acute need for disassembly. In the unlikely event that happens again:
- Remove hose
- Release latch to lay hose fitting flat
- Remove two obvious screws
- Pry rear latches adjacent to hose fitting to release rear of top cover
- Pry side latches to release middle of top cover
- Pull rear of top cover away from base
- Disengage latches along front of beater bar
Those places, neatly marked for future reference, with the top cover against the floor:

Kenmore Progressive vacuum – carpet brush – disassembly latches

With the cover off, the beater bar lifts out and you can easily unwind the mess.
2017-02-09
Forester: TPMS FTW, Redux

Now I know the Forester’s TPMS icon blinks on 1000 feet from a cold start with 12 psi in the offending tire. I returned home and pulled this from a sipe in the left rear tire:

Road debris – blade fragment

It’s atop a 0.1 inch grid.

The flat side on the right rode tangent to the tire surface, recessed slightly below the tread, and pretty much invisible inside the sipe. Of course, the point punched through the tire’s steel belt and let the wind out, ever so slowly.

I initially thought it was a utility knife blade fragment, but under the microscope it looks more like a saw blade tooth. It’s obviously been kicking around on the road for quite a while; back in the day, they occasionally swept the roads, but that was then and this is now.

Makes me glad I didn’t buy four new tires after the last flat. I suppose installing two plugs in the same tire counts as a net loss, but they’re small, widely separated injuries and that’s how it’ll roll.

For the record: with 14 k miles on the tires, tread wear = 2/32 inch of the original 6/32 inch depth.

Those tires should last another 30 k miles at our current pace, although I expect more random debris will kill one stone cold dead before that.

2017-02-08
X10 TM751 RF Transciever: End of Life

X10 control from the two HR12A remotes got much worse over the last few months and eventually failed completely, which meant I had to actually walk over to the lights and click the switches. Not to be tolerated, sez I, so I would walk to the bedroom and poke the appropriate buttons on the wired controller (long since obsolete) by the bed. That worked perfectly, which eventually convinced me to dismantle the TM 751 transceiver.

It’s not good when soot plates the case:

X10 TM751 – Smoked case

I like how they capacitively coupled RF from the antenna for complete line-voltage isolation.

The PCB looked like it got rather hot over there on the left side:

X10 TM751 – Overheated PCB

A Zener diode on the component side of the PCB looked a bit toasty, so I decided this gadget had passed its best-used-by-date and dropped it in the electronics recycling box (after harvesting the antenna, just in case).

A new-in-box TM 751 from eBay arrived a few days ago and works just fine.

Done!

2017-01-29
Pot Lid Repair

For reasons not relevant here, we (temporarily) have a set of pots with glass lids. One of lids had a remarkable amount of crud between the glass and the trim ring under the knob, which turned out to be corrosion falling off the screw. Trying to remove the screw produced the expected result:

CKC Pot Lid – broken screw in handle

For whatever reason, they used an ordinary, not stainless, steel screw:

CKC Pot Lid – corroded screw

I figured I could mill the stub flat, drill out the remainder, install a new insert, and be done with it. The knob has a convex surface and, even though this looked stupid, I tried clamping it atop a wood pad:

CKC Pot Lid – precarious clamping

Two gentle cutter passes convinced me it was, in fact, a lethally stupid setup.

Soooo, I poured some ShapeLock pellets into a defunct (and very small) loaf pan, melted them in near-boiling water, and pressed the knob into the middle, atop some stretchy film to prevent gluing the knob in place:

CKC Pot Lid – ShapeLock bedding

That’s eyeballometrically level, which is good enough, and the knob sits mechanically locked into the room-temperature plastic slab. Clamping everything down again makes for a much more secure operation:

CKC Pot Lid – clamped ShapeLock fixture

A few minutes of manual milling exposes the original brass insert molded into the knob, with the steel screw firmly corroded in the middle:

CKC Pot Lid – screw stub milled flat

Center-drill, drill small-medium-large, and eventually the entire insert vanishes in a maelstrom of chips and dust:

CKC Pot Lid – OEM insert removed

Run a 10-32 stud into an insert, grab in drill chuck, dab JB Kwik around the knurls, press in place while everything’s still aligned in the Sherline, pause for curing, re-melt the ShapeLock, and the insert looks like it grew there:

CKC Pot Lid – new insert installed

Wonder to tell, a 1 inch 10-32 screw fit perfectly through the pot lid into the knob, with a dab of low-strength Loctite securing it. Reassemble everything in reverse order, and it’s all good:

CKC Pot Lid – repaired knob

Well, apart from those cracks. I decided I will not borrow trouble from the future: we’ll let those problems surface on their own and, if I’m still in the loop, I can fix them.

2017-01-19
Cast Iron Pan Seasoning: Round 3

After seasoning the pan after every meal for a few weeks, then not doing that for a few more weeks, its thick glaze began looking somewhat scuffed:

Cast Iron Pan – scuffed

You may recognize some of those scars from the previous picture:

Wagner skillet – two weeks of use

Perhaps the multi-layer seasoning was entirely too thick and prone to chipping; this time, I’ll try a thinner coating. Because it’s cast iron, the pan under the coating remains undamaged.

A few hours in a bucket of sodium carbonate solution with a battery charger driving a few amps through it removed most of the glaze and a few minutes with a sponge sanding block cleaned off the rest. Applying flaxseed oil and heating it to 400 °F on a regular burner (under close supervision!) produced a nice coating:

Cast Iron Pan – seasoned

The single layer was way slick for veggies in the evening and handled the morning omelet with aplomb, so we’ll run with it until something interesting happens.

2017-01-08