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.
Who’d’a thunk it?
A giant envelope containing one of those “political surveys” that’s actually a thinly disguised fundraiser arrived, with this confidence-inspiring ID in the upper-right corner:
The questions were all examples of false dichotomies.
A pox on their backsides, sez I.
A day or so after kvetching about that informal DCRT vehicle entrance to the head planner developing the Dutchess County Master Plan for bicycle & pedestrian facilities, this appeared:
Notice the blue electrical junction box on the right? That can’t possibly be a Good Thing… but, so far, it doesn’t seem to bother anybody enough to repair it.
Those missing ADA strips at Grand have been swept out, converting them into rough-bottomed trenches across the trail. At least they’re not quite so slip-prone, even if they’re still a tripping hazard.
So I picked up a lot of 20 p-channel MOSFETs from the usual eBay supplier in China, which arrived in good order. As is often the case, the SOIC chips are in snippets of tape-and-reel carrier, but this tape looked decidedly odd:
Peeling back the tape shows that the crud is just on (or perhaps inside) the tape, not on the ICs or inside the carrier pockets:
Some of those specks are dirt, some seem to be bubbles, other are just, well, I don’t know what they might be. Maybe they were having a bad day in the tape factory?
One might reasonably conclude the chips aren’t in their original carrier…
I must gimmick up a quick test to verify that the chips behave like p-channel MOSFETs, instead of, oh, solid plastic; that Fairchild logo looks a bit grotty, doesn’t it?
This critter trundled across the driveway after a shower wetted the area:
They do some damage in the garden, but we let them alone elsewhere…
Sometimes crickets make their way into the basement. This one, a model that I’ve always known as a Jerusalem Cricket(*) evidently lost a pitched battle with one of the Dust Bunnies guarding the Basement Laboratory:
A rear view:
From the front:
I deported it to the flower garden outside the basement door, where I hope it can brush off the Bunny’s entrapments…
It may not be a Jerusalem Cricket, because they’re more common out west, but that’s the best match in our bug books and that’s what we’ve always called them.
[Update: (*) It’s most likely a Cave Cricket. See the comments for details.]
Mary’s been picking blueberries and freezing them for winter treats, a process that involves inspecting each berry laid out on the tray.
This one failed QC:
A closer look shows some remarkable structures:
Unfortunately, they’ll probably turn into Brown Marmorated Stink Bugs. This is not a Good Thing, because those stink bugs will devastate fruit harvests, including all the apple orchards along the entire Hudson Valley, over the next few years.
They may be Predatory Stink Bugs, which would be unusual in Dutchess County, but not nearly so awful.
This email worked its way through the filters:
Dear Business Partner,
We are very much interested in some of your product. We try to contact you online but you are not online so we decided to attach the picture of the product we need to dropbox and put it in your offline. Open the bellow link and download the attachment to preview the product we need:
... dropbox url snippage ... /Product%20Pics.rarLet me know if the product is still available for sale and how much it costs, also tell us the product details.
Regards,
Allen Moore,
Procurement Officer,
International Product Buyers
Well, I don’t generally rebuff the humble, but I don’t have any “product” for sale. Also pulling the suspicion trigger:
It’s not clear what “attach the picture of the product we need to dropbox and put it in your offline” might mean. Despite the Dropbox URL, the email sported an attachment named Product\ Pics.rar, showing they come from a different universe wherein every operating system has a native RAR extraction program.
Being a dutiful citizen of the Interwebs, I did what the nice man asked:
unrar e Product\ Pics.rar
That produced a single file which RAR described thusly:
Extracting Product Picjpg.SCR
At least that’s what it looked like on the command line. I think they were trying to overwrite the SCR with the jpg, as the file name was really Product Pic<U+202E>RCS.gpj, but the Unicode U+20E bidirectional text control character seems to be in the wrong place. I think they wanted Product Pic.SCR<U+202E>gpj, but I also confess to having no experience with sixth-level Unicode direction reversal rendering.
Anyhow, handing the entire RAR archive to VirusTotal produces the expected result:
It’s disconcerting to see ClamAV asleep at the switch on this one, but signature detection has become decreasingly relevant these days.
I opted to not respond to the request..
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 