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
Not what you want to see when trying to extract a month’s worth of data from your blood pressure meter:
Perhaps the format string should be $1$s or %1%s, not a mixture?
It’s typical for Omron to issue two updates in quick succession after months of no activity, so programming by successive approximation may be a thing.
The Comment form you’ll see down below says:
Spam comments get trashed, so don’t bother. Comment moderation may cause a delay.
My apologies to real people, but this junk would appear without that little speedbump:
The IP addresses map to Singapore and China, for whatever that’s worth.
The game is on …
Just for fun, I handed the text of a recent post to one of the myriad AI detectors:
AI generation score: 12%
This text reads as highly authentic human writing, likely from a personal blog or DIY/home repair journal. The author demonstrates a genuine personal voice throughout, with specific technical details that feel lived-in rather than generic. Phrases like ‘sad bent wreckage on their stems’ and ‘yet another nonstandard standard size’ carry real personality and mild frustration that feels genuinely human. The writing has a casual, matter-of-fact tone typical of someone documenting their own project for an audience of fellow hobbyists.
Yeah, that’s about right.
Of course, an AI analyzed my text and generated the response, so I tossed its response back into the hopper:
AI generation score: 72%
This text has several hallmarks of AI-generated content, particularly in its analytical, evaluative framing. It reads like an AI detector’s own output — a meta-analysis of writing rather than original creative or personal content. The language is polished and structured in a way that feels templated: it moves systematically through observations (voice, tone, specific phrases, audience) in a formulaic progression typical of AI summarization tasks. Phrases like ‘feel lived-in rather than generic’ and ‘carry real personality and mild frustration’ are the kind of hedged, evaluative language AI systems use when describing human qualities they’re trying to identify or simulate.
However, we know real humans sometimes steal content from other authors, so I ran the same text through one of the myriad plagiarism detectors:
Guilty as charged: my text always exactly matches what you’ll find at softsolder.com. I have no idea where the “83% Match” for the first paragraph came from.
Remember: you read it here first …
I long ago learned to never trust Amazon’s unit pricing (or, for that matter, their recommendations), so this came as no surprise:
OK, you generally don’t buy hoses “by the ounce”, but “per fluid ounce” may not mean what you think it means:
Pricing items individually should be simple, if you know what a single item is:
Even knowing the number of items and the overall price isn’t enough for Amazon to get it right:
Amazon now has a “shopping assistant”, so I asked Alexa why the unit prices were incorrect. After some back-and-forth providing details Alexa should have known from the context, this seemingly plausible sequence of words emerged:
Amazon apparently stopped commingling knockoff crap with brand-name products under the same SKU earlier this year, a change driven by major brands refusing to have anything to do with Amazon’s “supply chain”, but the probability of my one-by-one reports producing any discernible improvement seems low.
Two years ago I installed the DuckDuckGo browser on my phone and activated its app tracker blocking, which is basically a fake VPN swatting known tracker destinations out of the bitstream.
Somewhat to my surprise, the credit union’s app attempted to send my personally identifiable bits to a destination seemingly unrelated to any banking needs:
So I called up the credit union and asked:
Over the course of the next few weeks and many follow-up calls, I was told:
The intensity of the tracking attempts continued, even after disabling location sharing and not opening the app on any given day:
Eventually, I was told, in no uncertain terms:
They never did answer any of my original questions.
As I get very few checks in the mail, I have had little occasion to fire up the app since then.
The tracking continues apace, albeit with a different cast of characters:
You might think “The Trade Desk” has something to do with financial trading. You would be wrong.
I expect commercial banks to be even worse, so there’s nothing to be done.
Apart, of course, from blocking app tracking attempts with DuckDuckGo, using Firefox (with uBlock Origin) rather than Chrome, and running Pi-Hole on a Raspberry Pi for the home network. I admit my faith is touching.
The sign makes it fairly clear what NYS DOT intended, even if they don’t dogfood their designs:
We ride to the left of the fog line for good reason:
Those are nominally “bike safe” drain grates, but some of the joints between the catch box and the grate can snag a bike tire, so they’re best avoided. Bonus: not all the drain grates are bike safe, so making a mistake will be costly.
The lane has enough clearance for passing cars, presuming you don’t flinch at the wrong moment:
That same DOT engineer told me the correct way for cars to pass is to drive up on the sloped curb onto the median. Some drivers do that, but further down Raymond they would collide with various obstructions.
Not flinching is difficult to do when there’s a horn blaring immediately behind you:
I wonder if the mattress was on its way to the dump.
We’ve begun exiting at Chapel Gate and riding through campus:
Which is exactly what the DOT engineer who designed Raymond suggested we do. Why a state agency can recommend riding on private property to get off a nominally standards-compliant state road remains a puzzle, but, hey, I’m no longer a Registered Professional Engineer.
IMO, the man needs a bigger pickup:
Just another day riding on NYS DOT roads, where bicycling is always an uninterrupted delight.
Searching for Raymond will produce more examples of NYS DOT’s design prowess.
While setting up a Raspberry Pi camera, I had occasion to pull out its USB power cable, whereupon grabbing the camera while unscrewing it from the tripod felt unusually sharp:
It seems the wall wart’s USB Micro-B connector pulled apart:
Somewhat to my surprise, it was a CanaKit 5 V 2.5 A wall wart, definitely not the cheapest piece of junk ever made by the hand of man. On the other paw, it’s been around for quite a while, so …
Even I will agree that’s not a repairable failure, so I planned to splice in a Micro-B connector from a volunteer chosen from the Box o’ USB Micro-B Cables:
Nice color code in there, eh?
Each of those conductors appears to be made up of nine springy copper-colored 0.06 mm strands, somewhat smaller than 40 AWG: not what you want on the business end of a 2.5 A wall wart. I had previously measured the cable’s overall resistance with a surprisingly useful Treedix USB Cable Tester and it was on the very high end of the charge-only cable collection.
So I soldered a female USB-A breakout from the Drawer o’ USB Breakouts to the wall wart’s wires, snapped a 3D printed case around it, got a good (0.26 Ω) A-to-Micro-B cable from the Box o’ USB Adapters, and moved on.
Ya gotta have stuff, but that was absurd.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 