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: Home Ec

Things around the home & hearth

Bank Website Cookies
Seeing as how we live in The Internet Age, I must fetch my statements from Big Bank’s website, rather than extract quaint sheets of paper from an envelope. Seeing as how the start of the Internet Age is over, I run a fairly well armored version of Firefox that ruthlessly suppresses ads (have you ever bought anything as a result of an Internet ad?), crushes cookies, rejects malware, and generally defends my interests.

Big Bank’s website doesn’t work without adjusting the armor and, equally unsurprisingly, those adjustments seem to depend on both their website’s current revisions and my browser / plugin / extension versions. It seems mildly odd that Big Bank would depend on the same techniques that identify advertisers and scammers and malware purveyors, but so it goes.

My most recent attempts to retrieve an account statement produced an indefinite “busy” loop instead of a PDF file, which usually means something got blocked. Big Bank outsources its statements and I’ve already whitelisted internet-estatements.com and allowed its popups, so it must be something else.

A bit of rummaging in the sump revealed cookies from several domains that didn’t get set whenever I tried to access my statement:
- adsrvr.org
- bigbankcardus.com
- casalemedia.com
- doubleclick.net
- mookie1.com
- serving-sys.com
Pop Quiz: which domains in that list would you trust without question?

Bonus: Explain why “mookie1.com” isn’t funny in this context.

Double Bonus: Why is a banking website dealing with doubleclick?

It seems the missing cookies came from bigbankcardus.com, as the statement PDF appeared after I whitelisted that domain and reloaded everything.

I could understand (if not enthusiastically approve of) getting advertising cookies from Big Bank’s main page, but there should be exactly none of that crap when I access my statements.

There is no point in complaining: it’s like that, and that’s the way it is.

At least they don’t require Internet Explorer…
2014-10-22
Search Engine Optimization: Replacement Shelf Bracket Whirlpool Freezer

If I were selling those brackets, I’d be rich:

Search Engine Optimization – Freezer Shelf Bracket

Now, that looks like Search Engine Optimization it is to die for! Google will give you a different set of pictures, but I own that all-important top row.

Alas, anybody can just print their own…

2014-10-20
Crysknife Modification

For whatever reason, the handle of the ceramic knife extended a few millimeters below the blade heel:

Farberware ceramic knife

Now it doesn’t:

Farberware ceramic knife – trimmed handle

Which makes it much more usable for the kind of chopping I do around here: the blade hits the cutting board squarely, producing chunks of veggies along its entire length.

A coarse file removed most of the stub, followed with a fine file and a little sandpaper action to round the edges.

Amazingly enough, none of that fussing around touched the blade, nor did I gash myself!

2014-10-18
Chipmunk Feeding Zone

Mary puts damaged cherry tomatoes beside our resident chipmunk’s favorite hideout:

Chipmunk Feeding Zone

The critter eats them from the inside out, then tosses the shredded skins.

Since she started leaving her offerings, the chipmunk has been leaving the good cherry tomatoes in her garden untouched. We’re both astonished at how many tomatoes fit inside one chipmunk…

2014-09-27
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.

2014-09-10
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…
2014-09-09
Real Estate Sale Signage

Real Estate Agencies used to post property marker signs like this:

FSReEx-168

Even far off to the side, a bright background color catches your eye:

FSWeRe-107

The signs sported primary colors, reasonably large type, and simple words, making them almost readable in those pictures and definitely legible from the driver’s seat. While not particularly handsome or stylin’, they got the message across: this house is for sale.

Then a strange thing happened.

Berkshire Hathaway somehow got into the real estate business and Borged several of the local agencies. BH being a Name Brand with a connotation of wealth & taste, their branding imposed a subtle touch on the new signage:

FSBkHath-113

No, you can’t quite read that in real life, either, although the agent’s name and number on the header come close to the old standard.

One day, a old-school sign appeared along one of our usual routes:

FSHoLa-127

Although white and green don’t pop out of the background, the sign has enough contrast that you can read what’s needed.

Then they became affiliated with Christie’s, the Big Name in the realm of high-end auctions. I have no idea what Christie’s has to do with real estate, but if Berkshire Hathaway can do it, it seems Christie’s thinks they can do it even better.

In any event, the Christie’s Corporate Standard evidently calls for very, very subtle signage:

That sign might mark a high-end bed and breakfast, but certainly does not tell me that the place is for sale: none of the text approaches readability from the street, certainly not at normal travel speeds, and nothing about it even suggests that I should take action.

A few weeks later, two hang tags added a COMMERCIAL note (the property evidently has potential to become an office or retail space) and the agent’s name and phone number in minuscule type:

FSBase-128

After a while, a very bright red do-it-yourself HOUSE FOR SALE placard suggested the property owner wasn’t entirely satisfied with the results to date:

FSSign-148

The high-contrast black-on-white FOR SALE header definitely doesn’t match the rest of the sign, but its more legible information might motivate you to pause and puzzle out the rest. The red placard vanished a few days after the header appeared, leaving us with this peculiar mix:

FSHeader-153

None of the (numerous) Christie’s signs in the area have a header, so this may be a case of a squeaky wheel getting greased. I won’t be surprised to see a corporate image change, including larger type, as these fancy signs weather away.

Perhaps the correct conclusion to be drawn is that, in this Internet age, nobody buys a house based on the quaint custom of driving by a house-with-sign, thinking “Hey, that’s perfect for me!”, and calling the agent, so there’s no need for anything more than a pro-forma marker identifying a property that will be selected by filters applied to MLS / Zillow databases.

The most recent change simplifies the sign to the bare minimum:

FSMissing

Perhaps we’ve witnessed a falling-out over typography?

This began as a test of the Sony HDR-AS30V camera’s resolution, with the obvious conclusion it wasn’t intended as a camera suitable for recording text.

2014-08-30