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?

  • Security by Photographic Obscurity: FAIL

    Gas Storage Tank
    Gas Storage Tank

    We biked along the Poughkeepsie waterfront and spotted this stately gas storage tank. The shape tells you it’s a pressure vessel, not a simple fluid tank. I think Central Hudson has an underwater gas pipeline across the Hudson right about there; the waterfront is rife with oil storage tanks and suchlike, although less than in days of yore.

    As you might expect, I took the picture from a public area, pretty much in front of a house across the street. It’s not like this was a risky high-security red-flag penetration operation; we rode to the end of Dutchess Avenue (the better part of 600 feet), soaked up some of the decaying industrial-age vibe, turned around, and rode back up the hill.

    Dutchess Avenue - Google Obscured View
    Dutchess Avenue – Google Obscured View

    I made a ten-cent bet with myself that the Google-Eye view of the area would be blurred out “for security reasons” and, yup, won that sucker. This isn’t a case of JPG compression: notice how (relatively) crisp the railroad tracks are?

    Dutchess Ave - Topo Map
    Dutchess Ave – Topo Map

    The 1955 topographic map hanging on our wall (I’m a map junkie) was revised in 1981 and leaves very little to the imagination. It not only shows oil storage tanks standing on those now-empty concrete pads, but it also labels the area. Admittedly, it doesn’t show the gas tank, so the tank hasn’t been there for more than, oh, a quarter-century.

    I submit to you that the best way for an evildoer to pick a high-value target is to browse the maps and look for low-res areas. Here in mid-state New York, that’s an infallible way to find things like big petroleum storage facilities (or just look along the waterfront), airports with military-grade runways (the Dutchess County Airport evidently doesn’t count), oil / coal / nuke power plants, and good stuff like that. Then the bad guy gets in his car, drives over, gets some ground truth, and away they go.

    A lazy bad guy could even write a Google Maps app that quietly and slowly scanned a given area for low-res points of interest.

    That’s what Bruce Schneier calls a Movie Plot Threat. Ruining the resolution doesn’t change anything; you don’t need high-res imagery to blow something up.

    Sheesh & similar remarks.

  • GPS Position Jitter

    GPS Position Jitter
    GPS Position Jitter

    Everybody seems to forget that those wonderfully precise GPS coordinates have an underlying error on the order of 20 meters, more or less, kinda sorta.

    A friend took a bicycling vacation, riding about 50 miles a day, and camped overnight. Evidently his GPS tracker developed a nasty case of insomnia and wandered all over the campsite: the first two points might be actual motion, but the rest were in the wee hours of the morn when he says he was sound asleep.

    It became painfully obvious over the course of his journey that you cannot depend on continuous satellite uplink coverage. Even though he was riding on rail trails and open roads, the every-ten-minute position uplink to low earth orbit would vanish for hours at a time. The GPS tracker has a 911 button, but it might be a long time before they could figure out where he was.

    Memo to Self: get those GPS-to-APRS gadgets built for our bike trips…

  • Experian Triple-Alert Signup: FAIL

    So batteries.com had the usual security breach, lost the usual list of customer info, and sent out the usual letter advising the victims that they could get a free signup with Experian’s credit-report monitoring service.

    So I signed up, which involved the usual exposure of sensitive parts of my ID anatomy, and was eventually told (despite answering everything correctly, AFAICT) that they couldn’t verify that I was, in fact, me and would send a paper form to my (presumably known-to-them) USPS address for confirmation.

    The next day I get an email from “Triple Alert Redemption Customer Care <mumble-mumble@consumerinfo.com>” with this helpful offer:

    We employ a rigorous identity verification system in order to protect your personal information. Unfortunately, we could not validate your identity due to either technical difficulties with the system or information submitted that could not be confirmed.

    To continue the order process, please contact customer care at 1-866-mum-bles, Monday-Friday from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday-Sunday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific Time.  Please provide this Reference number (required):

    Reference number: make-up-your-own

    A representative will attempt to confirm your identity by asking you questions based on the information contained in your credit report.  Please be sure to familiarize yourself with data such as the names of your lenders and account balances before you call.  Once your identity has been confirmed, you will be provided access to your Triple Alert(SM) Credit Monitoring membership.

    Now, it’s highly likely that the email is on the up-and-up, but this seems to be precisely one of those situations they warn about:

    • you get an official-looking email
    • call the phone number
    • talk to the nice person
    • answer a bunch of probing questions
    • be assured that something pleasant will happen

    Instead, I called the “Contact Us” number from their website. The nice lady didn’t see anything wrong with them sending out an email like that. Nay, verily, she offered to do the deed right over the phone. I respectfully declined… I can wait.

    It’s worth noting that although it’s an Experian thing, the websites & email addresses involved include:

    • experian.com
    • consumerinfo.com
    • experiandirect.com

    It’s enough to make you think longingly of cutting up your cards, digging a hole, climbing down, and pulling it in after you.

    [Update: after a month or so, I got an email telling me that all was quiet on my Triple-Alert front and my delicate personal bits were in fine shape. A few days later, the long-awaited paper arrived with my confirmation numbers. So I suppose it’s working, but sheesh it doesn’t inspire much confidence.]

  • Fireproof Door: FAIL

    Warped fireproof door
    Warped fireproof door

    OK, this one is baffling. It’s a fireproof (well, more likely, just fire-retardant) door between a lounge and an equipment / elevator room.

    It looks like they made the door by casting something like concrete inside a standard lauan hollow-core door.

    What’s truly odd is that the concrete (or whatever) filling is also warped, convex side outward. The door edge strip with the latch is straight as an arrow, having separated from both of the facing panels and the concrete core at the bottom.

    Did the outside of the door get wet in some way that didn’t soak the surrounding room?

    We’ll never know…

  • Radio-Equipped Turtle

    Radio-Equipped Turtle
    Radio-Equipped Turtle

    We met this lass while walking around the high school one evening.

    My first thought was that eliminating the Morse Code requirement has definitely broadened the amateur radio population, but it turns out she’s part of the Hudsonia Blanding’s Turtle study. Perhaps the new construction around the school has opened pathways for her to explore the world.

    She seemed to be looking for a way up-and-over the curb to return home. We figured she was big enough to figure this out on her own and old enough to have done so many times before, so we left her to her own devices. When last seen, she was chugging along the curb at a pretty good clip.

    Listen for tag 123122 (or 817) on 150.888 MHz… she’s running AM QRP with a bad antenna.

    Update: It’s hard to tell with turtles, but it’s a girl! When I reported the tag number to Hudsonia, they said “817 is one of our old-timers; we’ve been tracking her for at least 10 years now.”

    Go, turtle, go!

  • End of an Era: Knights in Shining Armor

    Armor suit with bullet hole
    Armor suit with bullet hole

    This suit of armor at Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester MA pretty much sums up why armor suits went out of style in a hurry. Click the pic for a bigger view.

    That hole is much bigger than your (well, my) thumb and the dent above it isn’t much smaller. I don’t know if the gun fired two slugs (balls?) at once, but, given the accuracy of gunfire in that era, achieving two hits so close together seems unlikely.

    A gut shot was inevitably fatal: peritonitis was not your friend.

    Makes you appreciate the armor our guys wear a whole lot more…

  • Gas Pump Instructions: Help For Help?

    Mismatched gas pump instructions
    Mismatched gas pump instructions

    Challenge: given the conspicuous and obviously added-after-the-fact instruction sticker, find the HELP key on the stylin’ gray-on-black keypad.

    You may want to click on the picture for a bigger version. I had to remove my sunglasses and peer at the keypad; I’m glad I didn’t need any actual help.

    OK, maybe this is dynamiting fish in a barrel, but you’d sort of expect somebody would have noticed the problem along the way, what with the yellow background that required two-color sticker printing.

    My guess: they have more than one version of the pump…