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
So. Many. Tiny. Words.:
For the record, the typeface in that block of Fine Print is 1 mm tall = 3 point, which I find barely readable without magnification and impossible to follow without a pointer.
I’ve come to realize being a “valued customer” does not mean what businesses want me to think it means.
An obvious spam email blew past the filters:
You can tell it’s spam, too. Right?
Those of you running Windows should have undone whatever setting removes file extensions from the usual views, because by default Windows won’t bother you with such trivia.
But, hey, maybe an SVG file can contain an audio recording. I mean, there’s an online file converter for that, so it must be a thing.
Spoiler: Audio-in-SVG really is a thing.
Having been around this block a couple of times, though, let’s peek inside the SVG file with a text editor:
Huh. Not an audio recording, but a Javascript one-liner with a URL/URI/IRI/whatever aiming Your Default Browser at a presumably compromised server.
I didn’t go further, but surely the payload would wrestle Your Default Browser into a position allowing insertion of a remote compromise.
Well played, spammer!
Just another entry in the “Why friends don’t let friends run Windows” category, despite knowing whenever security and convenience come into conflict, convenience always wins.
Thanks to Google Translate:
It’s not clear why a Sergeant in the US Army would translate her request for help into Simplified Chinese so I can better understand it, but that’s the world we live in.
This deposit would move my Quality-of-Life needle, but certainly not in a good direction:
Today I Learned: there are humanitarian doctors connected with the Red Army in Morocco.
The cost of sending this junk must be low enough to fuel the spam machine from a minuscule response rate.
A pox on their collective backside!
A postcard arrived last week telling me to call a special number for special deals on Medicare Advantage plans. Being that type of guy, I managed to read the microscopic Fine Print and found this amusing blooper amid the disclaimers weasel wording:
Inserting insurance carrier names should have happened before printing the card, so [CarrierA] and [CarrierB] are either placeholders or mail-merge variables.
Also, you’re seeing the contrast-blown and magnified version of the postcard. The original Fine Print had faint orange ink on light green cardstock: colors having different hues with the same saturation and value to minimize legibility. In general, folks eligible for Medicare Advantage plans have trouble reading Fine Print, so the choice was not accidental.
Not a compelling value proposition, as they say.
As is usually the case, the assortment of tiny switches arrived with no pinout documentation. The 6 mm square SMD switches were easy, but the 7 mm through-hole switches posed a puzzle.
With the switch standing to make the return spring visible as shown, the pinout looks like this:
TIL, somewhat to my surprise, both the latching and momentary 7 mm switches have DPDT contacts!
Now I know how to wire the next thing …
Every few days this month, a Korean company has sent identical spam email messages to a series of plausible, albeit unused, addresses at softsolder dot com:
As a forward-thinking hotel, we know you prioritize cleanliness and guest satisfaction.
That’s why we’re excited to introduce Harington, an advanced sterilization device designed to provide
99.99% bacteria and germ elimination for toilets, ensuring the highest standards of hygiene for your guests.
Wikipedia reminds us Sir John Harington gets credit for inventing the flush toilet, thus explaining the device’s name. Surprisingly, a casual search with the obvious keywords suggests a different origin story much closer to the (nominal) company sending the spam.
Another sentence definitely gained something in translation:
A short but happy time spent on the toilet with a trustworthy friend who protects my secret and precious place from bacterial infection!
The emails have an unsubscribe link, but experience shows clicking only encourages the senders.
I wonder how much they spent to buy whatever list says my domain is a hotel …
This is getting to be a regular occurrence:
Typically, every day two or three hundred visitors read three or four hundred posts, about 1.4 posts/viewer. Nearly 4000 views from the same number of visitors is unusual. The whole blog has just over 5200 posts; perhaps they don’t want really old content.
A look at the timing suggests what happened:
My guess: WordPress throttles aggressive scraping, so the program backed off for a couple of hours before finishing the job.
Long ago, a magazine editor told me I have the strongest writing voice he had ever encountered, so when an AI uses my blog as its training set the results should be obvious.
Let me know where else you meet me …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 