Being the type of guy who uses metal bits & pieces, I thought this might be a useful aluminum rod:
EonSmoke vape stick
It turns out to be an aluminum tube holding a lithium cell and a reservoir of oily brown juice:
EonSmoke – peeled open
The black plastic cap read “EonSmoke”, which led to a defunct website at the obvious URL. Apparently, EonSmoke went toes-up earlier this year after ten years of poisoning their customers, most likely due to “competitor litigation”.
The black cap held what looks like a pressure switch:
EonSmoke – switch
Suck on the icky end of the tube to activate the switch, pull air past the battery (?), pick up some toxic vapor around the heater, and carry it into your lungs:
EonSmoke – reservoir heater
Maybe there’s a missing mouthpiece letting you suck on the icky end, activate the switch, pull vapor through the heater, and plate your lungs with toxic compounds. I admit certain aspects of my education have been sadly neglected.
The lithium cell was down to 1.0 V, with no overdischarge protection and no provision for charging, so it’s a single-use item. I’m sure the instructions tell you to recycle the lithium cell according to local and state regulations, not toss it out the window of your car.
Rt 376 SB Marker 1110 – Near Miss – oncoming bicyclist and wide trailer – 2020-07-07
On the northbound side, another cyclist rides the sliver of pavement between the fog line and the gravel ridge built up from the deteriorating patches, being overtaken by a huge pickup towing a full-width quad-wheel trailer full of lawn maintenance equipment. The driver has eased about as far toward the yellow line as possible to give the cyclist barely enough clearance:
Rt 376 SB Marker 1110 – Near Miss – oncoming trailer – 2020-07-07
I am not “taking the lane”, because I’m towing a trailer of groceries and there’s always overtaking traffic coming around the blind curve behind me:
Rt 376 SB Marker 1110 – Near Miss – horn – 2020-07-07
You can’t hear the car’s horn, but it’s right in my ear.
The white patches beside and behind the trailer are the fog line paint on the original asphalt surface showing through the disintegrating scab patch. Cyclists cannot ride safely on broken pavement with half-inch discontinuities, which is why I’m to the right of the fog line, mostly off the edge of the patch. If I “took the lane” as expected by NYS DOT, I would be riding about two feet into the lane, in line with the car’s right headlight, to avoid the wheel-grabbing longitudinal fissures showing through the scab patch.
Back in the day, John Forester’s Effective Cycling defined how vehicular bicycling should be done; our now-fragile comb-bound 1980 Third Printing of the 1978 Third Edition still has a place of honor on our bookshelves. I recently discovered his analysis of how traffic signal timing should work online, which says I’ve drawn the wrong conclusions from my observations of the absurdly short green / yellow / red cycle on Burnett Blvd at Rt 55, just in front of NYS DOT’s Region 8 headquarters.
The phasing sequence that is required by current traffic law is as follows:
1. Green, which may be very short when only one vehicle is waiting
2. Yellow, of only sufficient duration to allow a stop from maximum legal speed before entering the intersection
3. Red (a 4-way red), for sufficient additional time for traffic to clear the intersection before the conflicting green appears.
With that in mind, here’s how his analysis stacks up against one of our recent trips through the intersection. The four-digit number in the picture titles gives the time in frames at 60 frame/sec.
We’re stopped one car length behind a long trailer of paving equipment sporting an Iowa license plate. The driver has stopped with the trailer straddling the lane divider line, so we cannot determine which way he will turn. Because we no longer trust turn signals, despite the trailer’s blinking left signal, we will not pull up beside it in the right lane.
Frame 0127, T = 0 s, Δt = 0 s: The signal has just turned green:
Burnett Opposing Green – AS30V – 2020-06-26 – 0127
Frame 0264, T = 2.28 s, Δt = 2.28 s: The trailer has started moving and Mary is rolling behind it, with her foot just coming off the ground:
Burnett Opposing Green – AS30V – 2020-06-26 – 0264
Frame 0721, T = 9.9 s, Δt = 7.6 s: The signal turns yellow, after DOT’s additional five seconds of green; previously, we had five seconds and would have been able to stop. We’re accelerating as hard as we can, but Mary has barely passed the stop line:
Burnett Opposing Green – AS30V – 2020-06-26 – 0721
Of course, entering an intersection on a stale yellow is undoubtedly unwise. It is not so unwise for someone traveling fast, because that person may well clear the intersection before the conflicting traffic starts. It is much more unwise for someone traveling slowly, but it is done and it is lawful.
Forester, ibid.
We’ve traveled about three car lengths in the seven seconds since the trailer started moving. Our bikes will sometimes trigger the signal if we’ve stopped in exactly the right spot over the unmarked sensor loops, but we have never observed our bikes retriggering the signal to lengthen the green or yellow phases as we ride through the intersection.
NYS DOT apparently expects us to stop abruptly when the signal goes yellow, wherever we may be with respect to the stop line and regardless of how fast we may be moving. In fact, given what you’re about to see, we’re expected stop on green to ensure we can start from the stop line during the next green signal.
Frame 0983, T = 14.2 s, Δt = 4.4 s: The signal turns red. The trailer is visible on the left, beyond the median signage, but we haven’t reached the middle of the intersection. I’m lined up with the rightmost lane of westbound Rt 55 and Mary is about in the center lane. The white car on our right is stopped, the black car is slowing to a stop:
Burnett Opposing Green – AS30V – 2020-06-26 – 0983
Frame 1101, T = 16.2 s, Δt = 2.0 s: The opposing signal goes green for Rt 55 traffic, while we’ve barely reached the middle of the intersection:
Burnett Opposing Green – AS30V – 2020-06-26 – 1101
Frame 1205, T = 18.0 s, Δt = 1.8 s: I’m lined up with the median, Mary’s in the center lane of eastbound Rt 55, putting us squarely in front of drivers who may be unable to see us through the stopped cars. The drivers to our left are, fortunately, waiting, unlike a previous crossing:
Burnett Opposing Green – AS30V – 2020-06-26 – 1205
Frame 1440, T = 21.9 s, Δt = 5.7 s: After 22 seconds, we’ve cleared the intersection and are proceeding eastbound on Rt 55:
Burnett Opposing Green – AS30V – 2020-06-26 – 1440
Forester observes the all-red phase must be lengthened to allow cyclists to clear the intersection. Right now, two seconds isn’t enough. Ten seconds would suffice for a pair of reasonably fit, albeit aging, cyclists.
This system fails to provide the required safety in the case of bicycles for three opposite reasons.
1. Bicycles are small and are harder to see. In particular, the most visually impressive part of the bicycle and rider is low down where it is easily shielded from view by the hoods of motor vehicles. Sometimes the only part of the cyclist that can be seen by drivers waiting at the stop line with other vehicles on their left is the head of the cyclist.
2. The cyclist crossing a typical intersection is close to the fronts of the line of cars waiting at the stop line on the cyclist’s right. This is not good judgement on the part of the cyclist, but so much emphasis has been put on staying far right that this position is typical.
3. The cyclist who is traveling slowly, or, more importantly, is starting from a minimum-duration green, is barely into a wide intersection when the conflicting green appears.
The result is a car-bike collision as one of the vehicles in the lanes nearest the curb starts up, or speeds up, and hits the cyclist who suddenly appears in front of it.
Forester, ibid.
I’ve had a DOT engineer tell me, sneeringly, that they don’t design facilities for “professional cyclists”, which commuting to work evidently made me; he was not, however, a “professional driver” even though he used a car for a similar purpose. It’s obvious DOT doesn’t design facilities for “ordinary” cyclists, either, and the evidence suggests they don’t design facilities for cyclists, period, full stop.
I still want someone from NYS DOT to explain how this “makes our highway systems safe and functional for all users“, perhaps by bicycling with us through the intersection a few times, but I’ve never gotten a response, let alone an answer, to anything I’ve ever sent their way.
Dutchess County has another Household Hazmat / Electronics Disposal Day coming up, so I harvested some useful parts from the three dead dehumidifiers lurking under the bench.
The (perfectly good) blower motor in one unit lives inside a convenient plastic housing:
Scrap Dehumidifier Blower Motor – housing
It’s sitting on three foam pads hot-melt glued to three wood blocks cut to fit inside three convenient molded features, making it nice & quiet & stable.
I lashed it together with a chopped-off IEC cord, because the stock dehumidifier cords are just way too stiff. The motor and blower originally pulled air through the dust filter, the condenser, and the evaporator, before blowing it out the side, so it’s running pretty much unloaded. A quick test shows there’s not much difference between the high and low speeds:
High: 1050 RPM, 80 W, 12.5 m/s air flow
Low: 1000 RPM, 77 W, 11.7 m/s air flow
Low speed seems slightly less noisy, but the wiring now has insulated QD connectors just in case I ever want to run it at full speed.
For whatever it’s worth, the most recent dehumidifier failed one year into a two year warranty, but the company decided it was simpler to just refund the purchase price than to replace the unit. It seems the “sealed system” inside loses its refrigerant after a year and there’s no practical way to seal a small leak and recharge the system; unlike an automotive air conditioner, the tubes are soldered shut after the initial charge.
They all sport Energy Star badges, but throwing away the whole damned thing every year or two tells me we’re not measuring the right values. Obviously, somebody could make a worthwhile dehumidifier, but as of now Frigidare, GE Appliances (sold to Haier), and Danby are on my shit list. Next year, I expect to add HomeLabs to the list, because the dehumidifier is identical to the Danby unit (and, ah-ha comes with a 2.5 year warranty). They’re all made by Haier (or another Chinese factory) and nobody applies any long-term QC to their products.
The strip mall down the road recently sprouted ersatz stone pillars around the steel posts holding up the roof:
Ersatz stone pillar failure
Six days later, more slabs have fallen off the first pillar in the row:
Ersatz stone pillar – failure 2
And the second pillar:
Ersatz stone pillar – failure 3
Those fancy(-ish) bases consist of a wood frame covered with a mortar layer holding tiles of imitation stonework. From what little I know of stonework, mortar works only in compression, so you can’t glue tiles onto the side of a concrete lump using mortar.
After four years, I finally had occasion to use the blue label cartridge, only to have the tape refuse to feed. The mess on the tongue sticking out shows the result after I forcibly pulled the tape from the cartridge:
Cheapnified Brother Label Cartridge – exterior
The proximate cause was a fold in the imaging tape takeup path causing the driven spool to stop turning:
In the genuine cartridge, the base tape (with the sticky side and the colored side) feeds from the lower right directly into the assembly pressure roller. The transparent cover tape feeds from the spool in the lower left, up around the imaging tape supply spool, has the image fused to it, and is then pressed against the base tape on the assembly roller.
Update: Per david’s comment, the cartridges are even more complex than I thought! The printer has sense pins matching a group of cartridge holes to determine (at least) the tape size & orientation. See the pix added below.
Despite using the same cartridge body, the cheapnified tape path is entirely different. The base tape now feeds from the spool in the lower right through what should be the cover tape supply reel, around the imaging film supply spool, has the image fused directly to it, then passes out through the assembly pressure roller.
The cover tape is completely missing!
It turns out the cheapnified cartridges don’t bother with lamination. Instead, the printhead presses the imaging film against the top of the base tape, leaving the black image exposed to the elements. The assembly roller does nothing, apart from pulling the base tape through the cartridge.
Now that I know what to look for, the visible difference is the orientation of the base tape. A cartridge with the correct innards feeds the base tape with the colored side + image facing away from the long side of the cartridge. A cheapnified cartridge has the color + image facing the long side, with the major benefit of making the advertising look more appealing:
Fake Brother TZ cartridge – Amazon image
A genuine Brother cartridge would print the image on the bottom of the tape in that picture, so you’d see the blank side of the tape in that picture.
The “Amazon Marketplace” being what it is, I assume any pictures will not, in general, have much in common with what you actually receive, but at least I now know which ones to reject out of hand.
Update: The PT-1090 label printer has cartridge sensing pins:
Brother PT-1090 Labelmaker – sense pins
And the cartridges have corresponding holes, although the printer doesn’t sense all of them:
Brother PT-1090 Labelmaker – cartridge ID holes
Despite that, cheapnified cartridges are still cheapnified.
I learn something new every day around here! Thanks!
A Yubikey 5 NFC turns out to be perfectly compatible with any website using Symantec’s (no longer available) hardware key and VIP Access (definitely a misnomer) app to generate TOTP access codes, because the sites use bog-standard TOTP. The only difficulty comes from Symantec’s proprietary protocol creating the token linking an ID with a secret value to generate the TOTP codes, which is how they monetize an open standard.
Fire up the app, wave the Yubikey behind the phone, scan the QR code, wave the Yubikey again to store it, sign in to the Schwab site, turn on 2FA, enter the ID & current TOTP value from the Yubikey Authenticator, and It Just Works™.
Of course, you can kiss Schwab’s tech support goodbye, because you’re on your own. If you ever lose the Yubikey, make sure you know the answers to your allegedly secret questions.
Equally of course, you’re downloading and running random shit from the Intertubes, but …
Now, if only all my financial institutions would get with the program.
