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.
Things around the home & hearth
The chefs produced fine cookies from those fine Thing-O-Matic objects.
Although the economic argument for producing custom cookie cutters may not be persuasive, the fact that you (well, I) can produce custom widgets certainly is. Most of the things I build and repair don’t require great mechanical strength or finicky dimensional precision, so a DIY 3D printer is exactly the right hammer for the job.
Now, if only I had a laser cutter…
The headset / phone switch in my ancient HelloDirect phone headset became increasingly intermittent and finally stopped switching at all, so I tore the thing apart. It has two snap latches on each side in addition to the single screw in the bottom:
The 4PDT switch just to this side of the volume drum can’t be taken off the board without unsoldering all 12 terminals and two case anchors, so I just eased some DeOxit Red into the openings and vigorously exercised it. That seems to have done the trick.
I cleaned out a bunch of fuzz and a spider husk while the hood was up…
So the Credit Card Services scammers have a new back end name: Universal Card Services. According to the pleasant voice, UCS can reduce my credit card rates “from zero to six percent”… whether that’s the final rate or the reduction amount is not clear.
As with CCS, they “work with your credit card company” to reduce your rates. The pleasant boiler-room voice gave some numbers:
They are evidently scraping the bottom of the barrel of desperate credit card users: you must have a balance of at least $1500 (!) and a rate of at least 6%.
If I were willing to agree that I met those requirements, he’d “qualify me” and pass me on to the “low interest rate advisor” who would tell me more about the company. He “had only been working there for a month” and really couldn’t tell me more than the company name; the “advisor” would answer all my questions about where the company was located, what their phone number might be, and so forth and so on.
I asked again where they were located and click that was the end of that.
Elapsed time: 4:33. Not a record, but not bad at all.
I suppose I must start lying to them in order to make more progress… perhaps I should feed the “advisor” one of our old credit card numbers that’s been closed due to fraudulent activity? Nah, that’d give them entirely too much information.
The on-line driver safety review course that gets us a 10% premium reduction has a few glitches:
They evidently randomize the answer choices without considering spatial constraints. One question had “All of the above” as the first choice, with all of the other choices being valid.
The helpful tech support voice said they’re looking into fixing that…
OK, time for a Pop Quiz: Is it possible for a human being to write perfect straight lines diagonally across a ruled pad?
Answer: Evidently so. Consider this screen grab…
Taking the course online has the advantage of not requiring a trip or two to a classroom, but kills an hour a day for a week. It’s still a win, although it’d be much better if they didn’t use Adobe Flash.
The friendly, albeit almost unintelligibly accented rep from Credit Card Services had a ten minute conversation with me: 10:35 is a call duration record!
The minimum balance has bounced back to $3500 and they’re touting a 6.9% rate. She was unwilling to discuss exactly how this works before I “qualified” myself, but I was unwilling to reveal my financial details before knowing more about Credit Card Services.
So we went a few rounds…
Somewhat surprisingly, she gave me plenty of contact information:
All of it bogus, of course.
Perhaps Anna married into her name, because she has a thick Indian subcontinent accent that wasn’t helped by boiler-room background noise and VOIP dropouts. Correspondingly, I was hampered by a soft voice that often required me to repeat myself, despite speaking slowly and, if I do say so myself, rather clearly.
Anyhow, poor Anna became increasingly frustrated, accusing me of wasting her time and repeatedly telling me that if I was not interested in Lowering My Interest Rates I should just hang up. So I asked her if she worked for the same Credit Card Services that had called me several (dozen? hundred?) times previously; to my surprise, she said it was.
She said that she would “do her best” to remove my number, but that, because she didn’t actually do the dialing, it might not have any effect. That agrees with what I’ve been told before: CCS is actually a demon-dialing front end for other scammers.
She dodged my question about why CCS doesn’t obey the FTC No-Call Registry rules, claiming that she was just qualifying me for a credit reduction, not actually selling me anything. She was unwilling to discuss the relation between CCS and my various card issuers, which might have provided the “prior business relationship” required to work around the rules.
Somewhat surprisingly, she simply wouldn’t hang up before I agreed that I had no interest whatsoever in Lowering My Interest Rates. I eventually agreed, she wished me a good rest of the day, and I suppose we parted as friends…
The desiccant in the basement safe:
Continues to work just fine, much better than the first attempt:
The paper scrap gives the weight of tray+desiccant, so when the humidity finally starts going up I’ll have some idea of the average leak rate. Most likely, opening the door for the more-or-less monthly logger readout introduces most of the water vapor…
During a recent rainstorm I grabbed the fiberglass marker pole at the end of the drain pipe to clear a wad of leaves out of the driveway gutters. Unfortunately, that left me with a finger full of glass fibers; it seems the top of the pole has deteriorated. The first tweezer I plucked from the stash around the pencil-oid tool holder hadn’t had its jaws aligned, so after I plucked (most of) the glass using those tweezers, I did a bit of filing and sandpapering:
That’s a millimeter scale in the background: these really are needle-tip tweezers.
A closer view:
It still has a bit of overbite, but it grabs hairs from the bench with no hassle. Given that you can’t get all the glass fibers on the first pass, it’ll come in handy…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 