Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
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:
Blueberry with eggs – overview
A closer look shows some remarkable structures:
Blueberry with eggs – detail
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.
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.rar
Let 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:
To: Recipients <Procurement@Officer.com>
Subject: Open Attachment For Product Picture
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:
VirusTotal – Product Pics malware file
It’s disconcerting to see ClamAV asleep at the switch on this one, but signature detection has become decreasingly relevant these days.
Based on this evidence, the hawks seem to be tackling larger prey:
Turkey feathers in the garden
Mary found turkey feathers drifting across the garden, with the largest concentration near this assortment, much along the lines of the pile left at our back door. Given the 6 ft deer fence surrounding the garden and the complete absence of yummy debris, we think this wasn’t the work of a land-based predator.
Parents, guard your children…
Along those lines, once upon a time, long ago and far away, we attended a show-n-tell featuring a (rescued) California Condor. The exhibitors ushered us into a tight group and told parents to keep their small children close beside them, because condors attack stray animals and pay particular attention to infants of herd animals. Of course, one couple didn’t get the word (or didn’t think it applied to them) and let their toddler wander off. As soon as the kid got a few feet away from the pack of people, the inert condor abruptly powered up and got weapons lock on the kid; a warning from the exhibitor sent the parents scurrying to correct collect their blunder.
This message may be useful, in the sense that it reports something about the internal state of the cash register:
Walmart cash register – buffer full message
But the fact that it appears on the customer-facing display means that the cashier won’t see it and can’t do anything about it. I’m not sure if the floor personnel know anything about buffers, either.
The cashier-facing display says: “Welcome to Walmart!”
I have a deep and abiding cynicism about the wisdom of building Special Facilities for bicycles and pedestrians. We very much enjoy biking along the Dutchess County Rail Trail, but I fear the County’s initial enthusiasm and funding will quickly wear off, leaving us with another poorly maintained facility.
For example, the section of trail just south of Morgan Lake (a.k.a., Phase II) opened in July 2009, a mere four years ago. This view shows the North Grand Avenue at-grade crossing:
DCRT N Grand – overview
Shortly after the opening, the ADA-mandated vision-impaired tactile pavement strips at that crossing began to deteriorate and, by now, they’re just rubble-filled depressions across the trail on either side of the road.
The south strip:
DCRT N Grand – South ADA Strip
The north strip:
DCRT N Grand – north ADA strip
Evidently, the Official Personnel traversing the DCRT lack the responsibility / authority / initiative to apply a broom and sweep the pebbles out of the path, much less schedule a repair crew. I suppose I should haul a shovel along on one of our trips and privatize the upkeep; it’s been two years, so further waiting will be pointless.
It’s not as though there’s no Official Traffic, as witnessed by this well-worn informal entrance at the south end of that trail segment:
DCRT Overocker – vehicle tracks
There’s an Official Gate just to the left of the trail at that crossing, but, judging from the weeds, it’s evidently easier to stay in the car or truck than get out and unlock the barrier:
Perhaps the original owner, one “E Dunbeck”, scribed his name on the back. Perhaps he gave / sold it to Mad Phil, who passed it on to me. Although I may not use it much, it has a place of honor in the tool cabinet…
You could get a new 185 Time Saver direct from Starrett, with the front and back sides reversed: same holes, mostly the same printing, just flipped.
Back in the day, long before the environmental movement got any traction, the Poughkeepsie waterfront along the Hudson River used to be an industrial hotbed. That tapered off and, after a while, only the Dutton Lumber treatment facility remained; they manufactured classic CCA pressure-treated lumber. Quite some years after (IIRC) they went bankrupt and abandoned the facility, various buildings burned and the site seems to be slated for redvelopment into condos and suchlike.
The wisdom of siting condominiums along a tidal estuary, just a few meters above the current waterline and well below the future projected flood stage, seems dubious to me, but, then, I’m not a developer.
Anyhow, a recent ride across the Walkway showed that they’re sealing off the contaminated soil under what was once the lumberyard:
An excavator moves gravel from the barge, which probably came a few miles upriver (or downriver, depending on the aforementioned tidal flow) from the Tilcon quarry at Clinton (no relation) Point, into the dump trucks:
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 