Spotted on a walk around the neighborhood:
If only it was a sign of the times …
Tag: Rants
And kvetching, too
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Naming Is Hard
A recent update to the X Windowing System (or whatever it’s called) once again changed the names of its monitors / displays / output devices, so that my startup script no longer confined the tablet to the landscape display.
In mostly reverse chronological order, here are various commands I’ve puzzled out:
#xsetwacom --verbose set "HUION Huion Tablet stylus" MapToOutput "DP1-8" xsetwacom --verbose set "HUION Huion Tablet stylus" MapToOutput "DP-1-8" #xsetwacom --verbose set "HUION Huion Tablet Pen stylus" MapToOutput "DP-1" #xsetwacom --verbose set "Wacom Graphire3 6x8 Pen stylus" MapToOutput "DP-1" #xsetwacom --verbose set "Wacom Graphire3 6x8 Pen stylus" MapToOutput "HEAD-0" #xsetwacom --verbose set "Wacom Graphire3 6x8 Pen eraser" MapToOutput "DP-1" #xsetwacom --verbose set "Wacom Graphire3 6x8 Pen eraser" MapToOutput "HEAD-0"
Over the last two years, the display name changed from
DP-1toDP-1-8toDP1-8, and back toDP-1-8. I grew accustomed to this with the Wacom tablet (HEAD-0‽)and now know where to look, but I still have no idea of the motivation.Aaaand the tablet’s stylus name? The Wacom names were stable, but the Huion names apparently come from the Department of Redundancy Department.
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Guten Tag, Deutchland!
Mostly, this blog ticks along with 400 to 500 page views per day, with 300-ish visitors looking at a page or two each.
This week, something happened:
Blog Stats – 2021-08-28 Both of those spikes came from Germany:
Blog Countries – 2021-08-28 Traffic spikes generally come from a single post getting fifteen minutes of Reddit fame, with a zillion visitors hitting a specific page.
In this case, a German “visitor” read nearly all of my 4461 posts on two days: 822 + 3561 = 4383. I’m reasonably sure no human finds my writing that interesting, so it’s likely a scraper capturing my text for the purposes of spinning it into a blog-like site with “unique content” for the purposes of SEO.
Perhaps the first traffic spike was a targeting run?
I’ll never know the rest of the story, but if you happen to stumble across a blog with an uncanny resemblance to this one, written by something with a wide vocabulary and no techie knowledge, let me know.
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Google Play Store Ad Bidding Delay
Being that type of guy, I turn my phone off during the night while it’s charging, turn it on for the next day’s adventures, and check the Google Play App Store to see which apps will get updates.
The vast machine learning / AI / whatever analyzing my every move still hasn’t figured out my morning ritual, so it desperately tries to sell me crap:
Google Play Store – app ad delay My guess: those blank spots are placeholders for app ads, but, while the phone is busy scanning for malicious apps, the ad bidding process doesn’t complete fast enough to update the display before I see it.
FWIW, I had the Genuine NYS Covid-19 app installed for a while, but I very rarely go anywhere or see anybody, so it seemed to offer no net benefit.
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Natural Gas Meter non-Protection
Spotted on the way into a fast food joint:
Natural Gas Meter Plumbing – overview Reading the lower meter seems particularly difficult:
Natural Gas Meter Plumbing – detail Given how bollards embedded in concrete fail, they’re not providing any protection.
Did the meters get plumbed in first, with the bollards carefully fitted around them?
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Elevator Control Quiz
You’re on the ground floor of a motel, on your way to your room on the second floor, and you’ve found the elevators:
Ground Floor Elevator Station Which one of those six button-like objects will summon the elevator for a trip up to your room?
Quickly, press one of them!
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Side Marker Beam Patterns: FAIL
The truck side marker lights I’m thinking of using as daytime running lights have a pentagonal lens, so they should have a pattern with a bright central beam surrounded by five lobes. The one on Mary’s Tour Easy produced an oddly shaped blotch on the garage wall, so I ran the others though a simple test setup:
Side Marker – beam test setup The lights sit horizontally in a small vise to keep them level and in the same position, although in no particular rotational orientation, and 100 mm from the graph paper. It’s running at 6 v to keep the brightness down enough to avoid blowing out the image. All of the images were exposed based on the central spot, so the surrounding paper gives some idea of the relative brightness: darker paper = brighter LED spot.
The front view of the lights comes from the stereo zoom microscope, with the wires gripped in a Third Hand and rotated to put the (inverted) TOP label where you’d expect it. They’re all roughly at the same position and pretty nearly lined up with the lens axis. The bubble-looking thing behind the central pentagon is the lens on the Piranha LED package, which should be centered but rarely is. You can see the dark orange square of the amber LED chip in some of the pictures.
Without further ado, the nine truck side marker lights that aren’t on her bike:
Side Marker – beam test – A 
Side Marker – beam test – B 
Side Marker – beam test – C 
Side Marker – beam test – D 
Side Marker – beam test – E 
Side Marker – beam test – F 
Side Marker – beam test – G 
Side Marker – beam test – H 
Side Marker – beam test – I
Side Marker Light – Beam tests Side Marker E has a blob that looks like a cataract atop the LED lens, but it might be a mold imperfection.
Obviously, paying a buck a light doesn’t get you much in the way of build quality these days.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 