Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Spring cleaning provided the opportunity for Yet Another Episode in my long-standing battle with the Whirlpool refrigerator entropy generator:
Whirlpool Refrigerator – drawer support gluing
That little thing supports half the weight of the two drawers across the bottom of the refrigerator; how such a thin plastic member was supposed to be adequate to the task continues to escape me.
If we had to pay real money for all the repairs I’ve made to that piece of crap, we’d have replaced it long ago. The only thing that hasn’t failed so far is the compressor, so driving it until it drops continues to make sense; replacing a working anything seems like a bad idea.
As the basement’s fluorescent fixtures and lamps gradually die, I’ve been rewiring the fixtures for LED tubes, all bought from KEDSUM through Amazon. The first few batches looked like this:
Kedsum – good LED lamp
The most recent two batches seem cheapnified:
Kedsum – poor LED lamp
The tubes show similar changes, going from a stylin’ version to a simple cylindrical cap:
Kedsum vs Kedsun – tube end caps
The most recent carton label might lead you to think they’re counterfeits, but it could just be a simple typo:
Kedsum vs Kedsun – LED lamp carton
There’s absolutely no way to tell what you’re going to get from any vendor on Amazon (or anywhere else, for that matter), so there’s no point in returning them, but I’d hoped buying “the same thing” from “the same seller” would produce a consistent result.
Although different rules apply to the Park staff, so they can drive back & forth across a crowded Walkway with impunity, it’d be courteous if they didn’t block the bike rack with their vehicles. After we parked our bikes in the rack, the woman riding the third bike couldn’t get out and two other riders simply leaned their bikes against the Welcome Center.
Privilege is one thing, flaunting it seems entirely unnecessary.
I’ve yet to understand why the staff must drive over the Walkway at any time, not just park on the pedestrian plaza, as there’s a perfectly serviceable bridge designed specifically for motor vehicles barely half a mile to the south. Heck, on a clear day, you can even see it from the Walkway. [grin]
Our bikes get us from one end to the other in under ten minutes, about as fast as the Park staff can drive, so using a car doesn’t provide any speed advantage. I can carry a week’s worth of groceries in my bike trailer and rarely see the staff carrying anything bigger in the car, so a “we must haul stuff” excuse seems self-serving.
Every “unintended acceleration” mass-casualty incident involves a vehicle, a bunch of pedestrians, and a driver who never thought it could happen. Proactively eliminating vehicle traffic from the Walkway seems much easier than explaining why you didn’t.
Parking vehicles in appropriate places doesn’t require any explanation.
Thanks …
Email to Walkway Over the Hudson
I should have sent it to the sprawling NYS Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation, but I hoped the Walkway staff could forward it to the right person. Haven’t heard anything back; I should have saved the electrons.
I bought my Bose Hearphones in late August 2017, so they’re just shy of two years old, and have used them more-or-less daily since then. Although the innards still improve my hearing, the exterior is falling apart:
Bose Hearphones – cosmetic repairs
The conspicuous blue tips come from silicone tape holding the “soft touch” silicone shell together:
Bose Hearphones – detached band cover
The white line seems to be silicone glue holding the hard cover plate to the equally hard base. So far, it’s working, but the two-piece soft cover is peeling away from the very thin adhesive (?) holding it to the hard parts.
The silicone glue under the flexy cover on the control pod along the right earbud cable hasn’t fared as well:
Bose Hearphones – failed control cover
I blobbed ordinary RTV silicone under the cover, ignoring the caveats about acetic acid corrosion, because I don’t have any platinum-cure silicone on the shelf.
When the blue tape wears out / falls off, I’ll replace it with black silicone tape going further up the ring to hold the rest of the soft cover in place:
Bose Hearphones – cosmetic repairs – detail
The ear buds have soft silicone strain relief tubes around the cables. The friction holding them in place failed long ago and, because no adhesive will work with silicone, I wrapped enough double-sided tape around the cables to produce a sticky lump jamming them in place:
Bose Hearphones – ear piece strain relief
A bit of the muck sticks out on both ends and I expect to replace the tape every now and again:
[Update: Bose apparently had a QC failure on the silicone covering and, much to my surprise, swapped me entirely new Hearphones. The new covering feels slightly different, the USB cable hatch is a distinct piece of plastic, and maybe it’ll survive until the battery gives out. Color me satisfied! ]
Following the same drill as before, the Epson R380 printer once again thinks I’ve changed its diaper before resetting its waste ink counter. Instead, I’ve poured what would be a moderate fortune of waste ink down the drain from the external tank, had I not grafted a continuous flow ink supply onto the thing.
To judge from how often I must reset the counters, I’m expected to buy a new printer every three years. For sure, it’s uneconomical to have anybody else (the nearest Epson Authorized Customer Care Centers is 68 miles away on Long Island) do the deed. As Epson delicately puts it “replacement of ink pads may not be a good investment for lower-cost printers”.
Epson now provides a utility allowing you to reset the counters exactly one time. Having a scrap Windows PC ready to go, I didn’t bother capturing the partition before firing off the previous Sketchy Utility™, nor did I restore it, so the whole process took about half an hour.
The hard drive platters will eventually become nightlights.
The spam filters on my email account snagged a message with an impressive subject:
Be sure to read this message! Your personal data is threatened!
The sender used my very own email address, sending the message from a server with a Mumbai IP address:
Hello! As you may have noticed, I sent you an email from your account. This means that I have full access to your device. I’ve been watching you for a few months now. The fact is that you were infected with malware through an adult site that you visited. If you are not familiar with this, I will explain. Trojan Virus gives me full access and control over a computer or other device. This means that I can see everything on your screen, turn on the camera and microphone, but you do not know about it. I also have access to all your contacts and all your correspondence. Why your antivirus did not detect malware? Answer: My malware uses the driver, I update its signatures every 4 hours so that your antivirus is silent. I made a video showing how you satisfy yourself in the left half of the screen, and in the right half you see the video that you watched. With one click of the mouse, I can send this video to all your emails and contacts on social networks. I can also post access to all your e-mail correspondence and messengers that you use. If you want to prevent this, transfer the amount of $796 to my bitcoin address (if you do not know how to do this, write to Google: “Buy Bitcoin”). My bitcoin address (BTC Wallet) is: 14tfS3 << redacted >> WH6Y After receiving the payment, I will delete the video and you will never hear me again. I give you 50 hours (more than 2 days) to pay. I have a notice reading this letter, and the timer will work when you see this letter. Filing a complaint somewhere does not make sense because this email cannot be tracked like my bitcoin address. I do not make any mistakes. If I find that you have shared this message with someone else, the video will be immediately distributed. Best regards!
The threat uses Nigerian-scam grade English, evidently targeted at folks with both a guilty conscience and a tenuous grasp on how email works. I thought those same folks would have enormous difficulty converting dollars into Bitcoin.
However, feeding the wallet ID into a Block Explorer shows three transactions over the last two days, with the account now standing at 0.43069539 BTC = US$2269.44. I have no way of knowing how many emails went out, but obviously three people had sufficiently guilty consciences to (figure out how to) make a Bitcoin transaction.
Update: The ransom payments tapered off after five days.
Bitcoin Scam – Total
I don’t know how many different scams came from the same source, but $6700 (at today’s market rate) says this campaign paid better than most legal occupations outside the fintech sector.
This time, I neglected to give my “We’re taking the lane!” signal, whereupon the driver behind us assumed we would all fit into the roundabout / traffic circle at Vassar’s Main Gate:
Raymond Ave – passing into Main Gate roundabout – rear camera – 2019-03-28
Raymond Avenue’s original “standards compliant” design has undergone some revision during the last few years:
Raymond Ave – passing into Main Gate roundabout – helmet 1 – 2019-03-28
The brace of black bollards centered on the median at the “pedestrian refuge” now replace the original quartet of illuminated, albeit non-reflective black, bollards, after errant drivers successively destroyed them.
There’s apparently no standard governing the placement or depth of drain grates along the right edge of the lane, nor the amount of gravel and trash allowed to accumulate to the right of the fog line:
Raymond Ave – passing into Main Gate roundabout – helmet 2 – 2019-03-28
Mary is just barely clearing the grate, I’m moving leftward to ensure I’m the first one to get hit. Fortunately, common sense broke out:
Raymond Ave – passing into Main Gate roundabout – helmet 3 – 2019-03-28
We got through the traffic circle without further contention and continued on our way.
Getting squeezed into a traffic circle happens often enough to show whatever NYS DOT uses as a “design standard” doesn’t include pedestrian or bicyclist safety as measurable quantities.
As we all know, anything you don’t measure doesn’t happen.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 