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.
And kvetching, too
Perhaps there’s something to redundancy after all:
The four light fixtures serve as both tail lights and brake lights. This was at an intersection, we were both stopped for the traffic signal, and all those LEDs should have been glowing brightly.
AFAICT, each light fixture has 20 LEDs with a third to a half either dead or dying.
I wonder if those are replacement fixtures, installed on the promise they’d last forever, when the original incandescent bulbs burned out …
I discovered this commentary, in several variations in different contexts, after attending the Poughkeepsie No Kings protest last weekend:
You are allowed to say, at any point, “I can’t support this”.
Even if you did.
Even if you were unsure.
You can say, at any point, “This has gone too far.”
And, while the best time to say that was earlier, the second best time is now.
That is relevant, because the Executive branch of the United States government has internalized two facts:
The President and the Executive branch now act with the knowledge that the separation of powers, the checks and balances, and the restrictions written into the US Constitution no longer apply.
Justifications based on Constitutional hairsplitting are irrelevant. The Founding Fathers did not intend the Executive branch to operate as it does now.
Justifications based on “But what about …?” are irrelevant. The scale of current malfeasance dwarfs all precedent; there are no valid comparisons.
Justifications based on “But Congress is dysfunctional!” are irrelevant. It takes only one to dysfunction and the parties have been swapping irresponsibility for decades.
I commend to your attention the Army Talk Orientation Fact Sheet 64 from March 1945. It is straight-up US WWII propaganda with a rosy view of the Soviet Union, but you should fact-check all items in the section “Can We Spot It?” on page 4 against current events.
Should you think your particular identity, institution, tradition, behavior, property, possessions, protection, legality, or beliefs will remain untouched because you’re in a particular group, you are incorrect.
I changed my voter registration to “No Party” several decades ago, when it became evident the Republican Party had lost interest in whatever small-government / low-deficit / personal-responsibility principles it may have once had; thinking it had those principles was likely a misunderstanding on my part.
I cannot support many planks of the Democratic Party’s platform, either, but they remain based in rule-of-law and have some appreciation of what functions a government should perform.
I still vote in every election and intend to continue doing so.
WordPress likes images and this seems appropriate:
My Fitbit Charge 5 exercise tracker estimates my VO2Max as somewhere between 51 and 55. That seems absurd for a guy of my age, where “Excellent” is a bit under 40. I am most certainly not a highly trained athlete at the top of my form, so I wondered what the real value might be.
Fitbit calculates VO2Max from the ratio of my maximum to resting pulse rates, probably according to the Uth formula using a coefficient applicable to a much younger man.
It also computes my maximum heart rate from my age as 220 – 72 = 148, much lower than the values I routinely see while biking around the area. Reviewing a few months of data suggests an actual value around 170, although I did see 185 on one occasion.
Forcing a maximum heart rate of 170 changed the VO2Max estimate to 50-54, which still seemed absurdly high. At least that change made the Fitbit’s “heart rate zones” a little more reasonable, as ordinary bike rides no longer have me in the Peak zone nearly as often.
The Rockport walking test calculates VO2Max from a timed walk over a one mile “track” course, so I laid out a half-mile out-and-back route on Zack’s Way, which is a quarter mile from home.
Maintaining a brisk pace covered the mile in 15:49 and left me with a 110 pulse; it’s obvious I’m not a trained athete. Feeding those numbers and a few other vital details into the Rockport formula gives me a much more realistic VO2Max of 28.5, putting me somewhere between the 50th and 75th percentile.
Which is good, but not extraordinary.
Bottom line: don’t believe the hype.
An obligatory picture and link for enhanced SEO:
Mary got a pair of HOKA shoes in the spring and, after a few months of what we consider light usage, had the upper detach from the sole:
The oddly shaped holes in the rubberized area are a stylin’ thing, not defects.
The wet-looking stuff is E6000+ adhesive, which then got clamped overnight:
It cured and seems to be holding the pieces together:
HOKA shoes came highly recommended by a friend and carry a corresponding price tag. Mary felt expensive shoes should hold together better than that, so (before I undertook the repair) she returned them under warranty. Some weeks later, the shoes reappeared with a note describing the failure as “normal wear and tear” which is not covered by the warranty.
Whereupon I was given permission to have my way with them.
For whatever it’s worth, this also happened:
Mary’s conclusion was they’re nice shoes and fit well, but they’re definitely not worth three times the price of the shoes she’d been wearing.
Mary reported a problem unplugging the USB charger powering the light pad (the successor to the pad I repaired) she uses for quilting layouts:
Yes, that blade is sticking out of the hot (“Line”) side of the outlet.
The only way into the charger was through its other end:
Because I had no intention of returning it to service, I tried pushing the errant blade back in place, only to have it overshoot the mark and bulldoze various parts aside:
The two upright shapes contact the blades, but do not lock them in place. The PCB pulled easily out of the case, with no objection from the remaining (“Neutral”) blade.
The blades are simple steel bars press-fit into the plastic case, without holes / dimples / notches to lock them into the plastic. As far as I could tell, they were not molded in place.
I tossed the corpse into the e-waste box, extracted another USB charger from the Box o’ USB Chargers and returned the light pad to service.
I do have a few Genuine UL Listed USB chargers, but these are not among them.
Spotted on the way around one of the myriad strip malls (different from “strip clubs“) sporting a “Recently Renovated” sign out front:
You just know what those signs said, right? Must not be important any more.
Around the corner, the painters couldn’t get to where they needed to go:
A Streetview image from seven years back tells the tale:
So the most generous interpretation would be something like overspraying those signs was a mercy killing. I’m impressed they could get that much paint behind the UPS drop box!
Out front there’s another triumph of hope over experience:
If that pillar looks familiar, here’s what it looked like a little over two years ago:
Even in a recently renovated building, there’s never any money or motivation for repairs.
An email from Electronic Arts arrived in an email account I haven’t used in over a decade:
Welcome to your EA Account!
Your EA Account serves as an all-access pass to everything EA, from websites and mobile apps to console and PC games.
Seconds later:
Your EA Security Code:
<<< redacted, not that it matters >>>
If you didn’t request this code, please go to your My Account page and change your password right away. For assistance, please contact EA Help.Thanks for helping us maintain your account’s security.
Not ever having had an EA account nor being in the process of signing up for one, I did nothing.
After a few more seconds:
Dear EA Insider,
Thanks for signing up. We’re looking forward to bringing you the latest news and information on your favorite games.
All the emails look to be genuinely from Electronics Arts, not scam emails routed through the usual sketchy / compromised servers.
Four days later:
Dear Customer,
We are contacting you regarding your EA account.
We wish to notify you that we have found your account to be in violation of our User Agreement or our Terms of Sale, and due to the nature of this violation we are left with no option other than to permanently close your account with immediate effect.
Which looks much more impressive in email HTML:
Although I did not respond to the Security Code message, the scammer surely used a phone number under his (it’s always a he) control, because “2FA” really means “pick an authentication method that lets you in”.
Just for the amusement value, I fed that email address into the EA sign-in page, hit the “Forgot my password” button, and got a Security Code just like the scammer didn’t. I suppose I could change the password and discover / change the phone number, but that would put me in full ownership of an account used for nefarious purpose.
I sometimes wonder what else happens using my identity.
A good prosecutor could nail me for Third Party Retro-associative Complicity and, if I didn’t already live in Poughkeepsie, send me up the river.
This likely came from the old Thingiverse compromise, although that address also appears in the recent dump of a thousand dumps.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 