Tag: Rants

And kvetching, too

Road Construction: Right Turn Only

The previous layout of Rt 376 had two lanes approaching the Raymond Avenue intersection from the south (from the right in this rotated & ruthlessly contrast-blown Google Maps screenshot):

Rt 376 at Raymond – prior two-lane striping

The right lane is marked Only ↱ for the Raymond intersection, starting just past the Vassar Security Office entrance in the top middle of the screenshot.

Given this preliminary striping with faded Only ↱ markings, one might assume a similar lane layout is in effect for the new traffic circle at the intersection:

Vassar Security Office Lane – A

The lighting poles may seem snugly placed, but not too much out of the ordinary:

Some drivers seem concerned at this point:

Vassar Security Office Lane – C

With any luck, they can swerve back into what is the only lane going all the way to the circle, because the right lane is dedicated to Vassar Security Office traffic:

Vassar Security Office Lane – D

If you happen to be walking southbound, toward the traffic, in the middle of the shoulder beyond the turn lane, you will look that driver directly in the eye, as happened to me while walking back from Mary’s garden.

As I mentioned last week, my money says that first lamp post, the one with the barrel guarding it, won’t survive the year.

Given the utter lack of pedestrian facilities (f.k.a. “sidewalks”) south of the circle, I can only hope the road furniture will absorb all the damage / fatalities.

2025-03-25
Road Construction: New Lamp Bases
Seen in the equipment marshalling yard for the new traffic circle at the intersection of Raymond Avenue and Rt 376 / Hooker Avenue:

Street Lamp Base – excavated

The backstory:
- Road Construction: Collateral Damage
- Road Construction: Continual Damage
Apparently they excavated around the smashed bases and sawed off the conduits:

Street Lamp Base – sawed conduit

Then they yoinked the concrete cylinders, installed new bases, re-connected the conduits, cast more concrete, and installed the posts:

Street Lamp Base – Rombout House Ln – detail

I think the two “Signal” box covers flush with the surface on either side of Rombout House Lane lie just beyond the edges of what will eventually be the repaved road at the intersection.

Street Lamp Base – Rombout House Ln – overview

Given how much damage the base at that intersection encountered, my visualization of the Cosmic All says that pole will not survive the year unless they install a few well-spaced bollards.

There’s another pole on the other side of the road I expect will have a full-on collision, too.
2025-03-20
Price Scanner FAIL: Plausible Deniability

I always suspect there’s a reason behind a missing price label on a shelf, so I waved a half-gallon of milk under a nearby price scanner:

Shop-Rite Scanner FAIL

If you’re thinking that white rectangle doesn’t look like a price, you’re right:

Shop-Rite Scanner FAIL – Warning pop-up

A 10 digit Phone number?

I’m don’t know what a “PPC number” is, although the UPC on the milk carton seems perfectly normal:

Shop-Rite Scanner FAIL – offending bar code

Admittedly, the number starts with a zero and has 12 digits, so it’s definitely not what the price scanner wants. On the other paw, why is a price scanner not looking for a UPC?

The placard below the display is amusing:

Shop-Rite Scanner FAIL – DCNY Requiring Scanner Accuracy

Gray’s variant of Hanlon’s Razor: “Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”

No, I neither asked why the scanners didn’t work nor made a phone call, as I’m old enough to know better.

2025-03-14

Medical Image CD: FAIL

I asked for the images from recent X-ray and MRI sessions, whereupon a CD arrived in the mail. Popping it into my desktop Linux box produced this directory listing:

ll /run/media/ed/Feb\ 21\ 2025/
total 146M
dr-xr-xr-x  2 ed   ed    136 Feb 21 13:14 ./
drwxr-x---+ 3 root root   60 Mar  2 13:40 ../
-r--r--r--  1 ed   ed   146M Feb 21 13:14 -NISLEY-DMBG8yMQcf8qXcVj.iso

It seems whoever / whatever produced the CD copied the ISO image to the CD, rather than burning the ISO directly to the CD. As a result, the CD has one file.

Raise your hand if you’ve never done that.

Well, I was going to save the CD as an ISO file anyway, so I just copied it to the file server.

Attempting to mount it produces an odd result:

sudo mount -o loop "-NISLEY-DMBG8yMQcf8qXcVj.iso" /mnt/loop/
[sudo] password for ed: <make up your own>
mount: failed to set target namespace to ISLEY-DMBG8yMQcf8qXcVj.iso: No such file or directory

Oh, right, starting a filename with a leading dash is never a Good Idea™.

Rename it:

mv -NISLEY-DMBG8yMQcf8qXcVj.iso NISLEY-DMBG8yMQcf8qXcVj.iso
mv: invalid option -- 'N'
Try 'mv --help' for more information.

Which is why leading dashes are a Terrible Idea™.

Force the rename to happen:

mv ./-NISLEY-DMBG8yMQcf8qXcVj.iso NISLEY-DMBG8yMQcf8qXcVj.iso

The same syntax works in the mount command, but it’s easier to solve the problem once and be done with it.

Now mount the file:

sudo mount NISLEY-DMBG8yMQcf8qXcVj.iso /mnt/loop
mount: /mnt/loop: WARNING: source write-protected, mounted read-only.

That’s entirely expected, because the whole filesystem is intended for a non-writeable CD.

What’s inside?

ll /mnt/loop/
ls: cannot open directory '/mnt/loop/': Permission denied

Why would that be?

ll /mnt
total 58K
drwxr-xr-x 15 root root 4.0K May 21  2023 ./
drwxr-xr-x 17 root root 4.0K Mar  2 13:43 ../
… omitted …
drwxrwx---  4  496  495 2.0K Feb 21 13:13 loop/
… omitted …

Maybe 496 and 495 are the UID and GID of whatever created the CD?

Force it to my UID:

sudo umount /mnt/loop
[ed@shiitake tmp]$ sudo mount -o uid=ed NISLEY-DMBG8yMQcf8qXcVj.iso /mnt/loop
mount: /mnt/loop: WARNING: source write-protected, mounted read-only.
[ed@shiitake tmp]$ ll /mnt/loop
total 16K
drwxrwx---  4 ed    495 2.0K Feb 21 13:13 ./
drwxr-xr-x 15 root root 4.0K May 21  2023 ../
drwxrwx---  4 ed    495 2.0K Feb 21 13:12 data/
drwxr-xr-x  5 ed    495 2.0K Feb 21 13:13 DICOM/
-rw-rw----  1 ed    495 1.7K Feb 21 13:12 README.txt
-rw-rw----  1 ed    495 3.2K Feb 21 13:12 view-studies.html

Now that’s more like it.

Finally, I can fire up Weasis to look at pretty DICOM images:

Spine - lateral T2 TSE SAG - 2025-02 - tweaked — Spine – lateral T2 TSE SAG – 2025-02 – tweaked

Apparently things looks suspicious around L4.

2025-03-05

Why I No Longer Trust Google Weather

You can’t make this stuff up:

Google Weather App – precipitation puzzle

We didn’t get half a foot of any precipitation that day.

That is apparently the “Pixel At a Glance” app using info scraped from weather-dot-com. The other Google Weather app, the one that may or may not still have the Weather Frog, scrapes info from noaa-dot-gov and seems somewhat less uncoordinated.

The two apps generally disagree on what kind and how much precipitation will occur, sometimes absurdly, and rarely agree with the official National Weather Service forecast.

Sometimes the forecasts have not converged by the time the weather arrives outside the window.

2025-02-20
Samsung Refrigerator Condenser Coil Cleaning
The kitchen came with matched Samsung appliances dating back to 2018 and, on a frigid winter day, we piled the contents of the freezer on the porch and gave it a deep cleaning. While the empty freezer was cooling down from its adventure, I wondered:
- Where were the condenser coils were located?
- Did they need cleaning?
- How does one do that?
The manual is strangely silent about even the existence of the coils, so evidently cleaning them wasn’t of any importance to Samsung.

Rolling the refrigerator away from the wall just enough to get the phone camera down there suggests they exist and are in need of some attention:

Samsung refrigerator coils – first sight

Rolling the refrigerator out until the door handles met the countertop across the way let me climb over the counter and worm myself into the refrigerator-sized hole behind it, bringing along a screwdriver, the vacuum cleaner snout, and a few brushes.

Removing five screws released the back cover:

Samsung refrigerator coils – cover off

Looking into the intake end of those coils (on the right):

Samsung refrigerator coils – first intake view

So, yeah, I’m about to give them their first cleaning ever.

Five minutes of brushing fuzz, mostly into the vacuum, cleared a good bit of the exterior, but the interior needs more attention:

Samsung refrigerator coils – partial clean

Ten minutes later:

Samsung refrigerator coils – victory

Another five minutes:

Samsung refrigerator coils – intake cleaned

Making the coils cleanable and putting them where they could be cleaned were obviously not bullet-item goals for Samsung’s designers.

Although the coils are not perfectly clean, I don’t know how to get them any cleaner, despite knowing even a thin layer of fuzz kills the refrigerator’s much-touted energy efficiency. Perhaps blowing them off with compressed air, then cleaning a thin layer of dust off the entire kitchen, would help.

I think the refrigerator will be happier, at least for a while.
2025-01-16
Old Silvermine Place: LED Streetlights

One of our regular walks takes us up the hill on Old Sivermine Place and, being that type of guy, I tend to look at the infrastructure. The LED streetlights along the road sit atop wood poles and are obviously retrofits. Placards on some poles announce “277 V”, which means they’re fed from one leg of a three-phase 480 V wye service, making their casual mid-air wire-nut spliced connections seem … inappropriate.

Anyhow, they’re supposed to look like this:

LED streetlight – D

In reality, having multiple emitters comes in handy:

LED streetlight – C

Typical 12 V systems have parallel strings of three LEDs in series, so you (well, I) often see automobiles with three adjacent dead LEDs. That turned out to be true with the 15 V (-ish) LEDs in the HQ Sixteen machine I’ve been refurbishing.

These streetlights apparently have individual LED drivers, allowing single LEDs to go dark without affecting the rest. This one has five deaders, so the rot is spreading:

LED streetlight – B

There seems no pattern to the failures:

LED streetlight – A

Those fixtures are in order from the top of the hill downward.

Each light has its own photosensor to decide when to turn on. We don’t go walking after dusk, but at least one light will always be glowing brightly in middday; the sensors aren’t doing well, either.

2024-12-27