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: Oddities

Who’d’a thunk it?

  • Comment Spam: Industrial Sabotoge?

    A new trend in the comment spam load that you don’t see involves a concerted attempt to post irrelevant comments with links to obviously junk websites. The URLs vary, but each site’s links cross-connect it with its peers in weird ways that recycle the few real pages of content (such as it is). However, every page of every website included a specific company’s contact information at the bottom, which is truly weird; usually junk websites have no identifying marks.

    Generally I ignore such crap, but after discarding several dozen such comments over the course of a week, I called the company’s phone number and, amazingly, spoke to an actual person. It’s impossible to determine honesty over the phone, but he certainly sounded like a real human who’s busy running a small company and who has no idea what’s going down.

    Perhaps his internet marketing company has gone mad?

    Perhaps unsurprisingly, that series of spam comments stopped immediately after I hung up the phone. I’ll never know the end of the story, even though we all know the motivation: money changes everything.

    The last time this sort of thing happened, I also talked to a pleasant voice who observed that it could well be an unscrupulous competitor (or a hired “internet marketing” company) trying to smear their good name. There’s no way to confirm or deny such a claim, of course.

    For what it’s worth, Akismet reports these statistics since Day Zero of this blog, back in December 2008:

    • 42,143 total spam
    • 1,982 total ham
    • 225 missed spam
    • 10 false positives
    • 99.47% accuracy rate

    It’s currently killing over 150 spam comments every day, leaving only a dozen or so for me to flush. The lure of easy money seems irresistible, so there’s no hope of a letup.

  • Credit Card Services: More Details

    Just fielded a call from Credit Card Services that got all the way to 6:35 before the final disconnection!

    Based on the conversation, we have a few more details:

    The slimeball outfit identifying itself as Credit Card Services turns out to be a wholesale demon-dialing operation, which leads one to wonder why the FTC can’t figure this out and take some action. I mean, sheesh, CCS must represent a substantial fraction of the total voice phone call traffic; a few honeytrap numbers should be productive.

    Anyhow, when you answer the phone and “press 1 to speak with an associate”, CCS farms the call out to a variety of back-end operations that evidently pay for live prospects (i.e., suckers). In this case, I was talking with someone working for “Client Services”; she was remarkably friendly and patient, which suggests she’s very new to this game.

    The minimum balance they’re interested in has dropped to $3k. Used to be $4k; must be a sign of the times.

    She wasn’t representing a loan operation, but was quite hazy about the details of how her organization would reduce my loan rates, other than that they “worked with the lenders” to that end. I pointed out that, while I wasn’t mad at her, she should understand that I’m reluctant to discuss my financial affairs with someone who really couldn’t describe the proposition in any detail.

    She said that she could “do her best” to get me off the Client Services calling list, but that would have no effect on further calls from Credit Card Services, as other companies would be paying for those calls. She had no idea why “pressing 3 to discontinue further calls” didn’t work, of course.

    So I asked if she had a supervisor that might be able to explain how the whole operation worked, she said she’d try to find one, and the next minute produced the usual clunks and tinks that presage a dropped call.

    Perhaps the pleasant voices are “make money at home” suckers fronting for the loan sharks?

  • Credit Card Services: Payback

    If you have a landline telephone number, you’ve probably been robo-called by “Rachael” from “Credit Card Services” with an offer to lower your credit card rates. She gives you two options:

    • Press 1 to speak with a live operator
    • Press 3 (or, sometimes, 2) to prevent further calls

    I presume you’ve discovered that pressing 3 has no effect.

    Credit Card Services is obviously a scam:

    • We’re on the FTC Do-Not-Call Registry
    • We don’t have a pre-existing business relationship with CCS
    • They use a robo-dialer
    • Pressing 3 (or whatever) doesn’t discontinue the calls
    • Their caller ID is spoofed

    Rather than get mad, play along. CCS obviously preys on suckers willing to read off their credit card information to total strangers, so you can retaliate by stringing them along as far as possible, thus increasing their cost-per-sucker. Admittedly, their “agents” are (at best) minimum-wage slaves, which means you’re messing with their income stream, but after the first few months it becomes pretty obvious that the calls will never stop and you may as well roll with the punch.

    Suggested topics, all presented in a slow monotone with long pauses:

    • Making sure they’re not associated with any of your credit cards (they aren’t)
    • Understanding whether they’re offering a loan to pay off your cards (they lie)
    • Asking for a callback number in case the call gets dropped (it’ll be a junk number)

    They expect a minimum $4k account balance with the usual usurious credit card rates. Getting them to admit any of that requires carefully paced inquiry, because their script requires getting my balance before they devote any more time to me. I haven’t fed them any (totally bogus) numbers yet, but that may be the only way to get beyond the preliminaries.

    Topics I’ll investigate in upcoming calls:

    • Their current interest rate
    • The repayment schedule
    • What they hold as collateral
    • How’s the weather where they are (it’ll be terrible here, for sure)

    Thus far, I’ve discovered that any mention of these topics produces an instant disconnect:

    • Why pressing 3 does not discontinue further calls
    • Inquiring about their company mailing address
    • Asking to speak with a supervisor
    • Whether lying to strangers all day affects their personal relationships

    My record so far is 3:05 from picking up the phone, which includes the recorded message and a bit of hold music.

  • Fruit Fly Traps

    At some point we brought home a fruit fly starter kit that produced a zillion fruit flies in the worm compost bin; every time we opened the cover, half a zillion flies would emerge. After a bit of fiddling with the usual Internet recipes, I managed to produce something useful:

    Fruit fly trap - overview
    Fruit fly trap – overview

    The trick involves making the liquid enticing enough to get the flies through the hole in the coffee filter top:

    Frut fly trap - filter paper
    Frut fly trap – filter paper

    I used about a cup of water, an ice cube of apple juice for sweetness (they are, after all, fruit flies), a tablespoon of vinegar for that delicious rotten aroma (they prefer damaged, easy to eat fruit), and a few drops of dishwashing detergent so when they hit the liquid they’re sunk.

    The container must be tall enough to let them rise past the entrance opening on their way toward the light; I settled on the 2 pound ricotta cheese containers we have in abundance:

    Fruit fly trap - results
    Fruit fly trap – results

    That’s the catch after maybe a month at the end of the season, but it represents a week of activity back when we were breaking the infestation. I deployed four of those traps atop the compost bin to catch the half-zillion escaped flies and fired up the vacuum cleaner to extract the half-zillion remaining inside every time we opened the lid. After a few weeks of that, we’d managed to get ahead of their breeding cycle and the problem pretty much Went Away.

  • Driveway Concrete Vandalism

    Driveway drain concrete
    Driveway drain concrete

    Having missed the fall driveway paving deadline, we will have a gravel section in the middle of the driveway until next spring. All the water from the garage downspouts and the back yard runs down the driveway, which dumps it directly into the gravel patch and the new retaining wall’s foundation. That means the gravel patch, at least, will become a mud hole, which I take to be a Bad Thing.

    So I bandsawed some 4 inch DWV pipe & fittings in half lengthwise, glued them together as a gutter to capture the runoff and divert it into 80 feet of DWV pipe leading to the bottom end of the wall, then filled the half-pipes with gravel to let us drive right over the whole mess. Unfortunately, the top end of the gravel patch has the driveway ending in broken asphalt, Item 4 gravel, fine gravel, and rubble that make it impossible to snug the pipes up against the asphalt. That means the runoff would pretty much vanish before it reached the gutters.

    So I excavated just barely enough gravel to ensure a downhill slope from the remaining asphalt, mixed up a random bag of mortar that’s been kicking around in the garage for a few years, and troweled an apron from the asphalt to the half-pipes. Generally I sign my work, but this kludge need last only a few months and I left it to cure.

    The next morning I discovered one of the chipmunks felt the work really needed a signature:

    Chipmunk tracks in concrete
    Chipmunk tracks in concrete

    That’s OK with me…

    FWIW, this is why you need Too Many Clamps:

    Clamping a half-pipe joint
    Clamping a half-pipe joint

  • Vanilla Extract: Commercial Variations

    This look at the ingredients found in various commercial vanilla extracts (plus their prices) finally pushed me over the edge into brewing up that DIY vanilla extract.

    We’ve been using McCormick vanilla forever, mostly because it has the simplest and shortest list of ingredients:

    McCormick Vanilla
    McCormick Vanilla

    Nielson-Massey vanilla seemed about the same, although it’s not clear why it needs more sugar than those “vanilla bean extractives”:

    Nielsen-Massey Vanilla
    Nielsen-Massey Vanilla

    Wal-Mart vanilla doesn’t smell like vanilla, even though it has more “extractive” than corn syrup:

    Wal-Mart Vanilla
    Wal-Mart Vanilla

    All three extracts have “Pure” on the label, which (according to Wikipedia, anyway) means that they have at least 13.35 ounce of vanilla bean per gallon of extract. I didn’t weigh the three beans in my 8 ounces of hooch, but I suspect they weighed far less than the regulation 0.834 ounce. Next time, for sure, I’ll go for triple strength extract!

    Despite that, my DIY hooch has turned brown and smells pretty good…

    These full-frame pix used my new close-up lens gizmo; even with some vignetting the results seem perfectly usable. Normally I crop pix down to the central section, so this will be as bad as it gets.

  • Northern Saw-Whet Owls at Vassar

    We recently attended an evening presentation at the Vassar College Ecological Preserve about their Northern Saw-Whet Owl (aka NSWO) research program. You can read more about both that and the owls elsewhere on the Intertubes, but I was impressed by the owl handling process.

    NSWOs arrive from the mist net (the location of which the researchers do not describe in any detail, for obvious reasons) in a bulk carrier made of small tin cans strapped together with duct tape:

    Owl carrier
    Owl carrier

    Another container holds the Owl Under Test while being weighed:

    Saw-whet owl in can
    Saw-whet owl in can

    They express their obvious displeasure at this treatment by clacking their beaks (“KLOK! KLOK!”) and, if given the slightest opportunity, latching onto a finger:

    Saw-whet owl vs researcher
    Saw-whet owl vs researcher

    Their claws will give you a nasty puncture wound or eight in a heartbeat; note how their feet remain carefully captured at all times. Despite that, the researchers sported many hand scars. FWIW, the owls are murder on mice and other critters, but evidently look a lot like lunch to larger owls and hawks.

    NSWOs obey the general rule that anything with ears enjoys being scratched behind them. It may be reflex, rather than true bliss, but it works:

    Saw-whet owl - calmed
    Saw-whet owl – calmed

    After weighing, measuring, blood-sampling, and stroking, the handler takes each owl outdoors, gives it a minute to reset its eyes for night flight, and releases it.