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.

Tag: Rants

And kvetching, too

  • Making the Asterisk Visible

    Spotted a new sign at the Van Wyck Road entrance to the Dutchess Rail Trail:

    DCRT at Van Wyck Rd - ATV Patrol sign
    DCRT at Van Wyck Rd – ATV Patrol sign

    The tiny print on the top sign still reads No Motorized Vehicles, but the bottom sign makes it explicit that that particular prohibition applies only to ordinary citizens.

    Which matches up with the Sheriff’s ATVs I spotted a weeks earlier:

    DCRT - Sheriff ATV Patrol - Page Park
    DCRT – Sheriff ATV Patrol – Page Park

    As of late May, the No All Terrain Vehicles signs were still up. Maybe they still are.

    According to the New York Times style guide and other reasonably erudite sources, the plural of ATV should be ATVS (or, if you have the luxury of mixed case, ATVs), not ATV’S.

  • Right Turn On Red: After Stop, After Yield

    With the green left-turn arrow indicating red for opposing traffic, everybody’s in the proper position. I’m crossing the stop line and leaning into the turn at about 15 mph:

    Right On Red - Tucker at Friendly - 0 sec
    Right On Red – Tucker at Friendly – 0 sec

    New York State allows a right turn on red, but you’re supposed to stop and yield to other traffic. In that picture, the oncoming car is definitely stopped.

    Three seconds later:

    Right On Red - Tucker at Friendly - 3 sec
    Right On Red – Tucker at Friendly – 3 sec

    She hugged the curb to turn into the gas station entrance just to her right, which was the only thing that saved me. Braking hard in a turn slides you under the oncoming vehicle, ramming a school bus head-on is bad form, and sideswiping a car at speed never ends well.

    I suppose I just don’t look nearly as fast as I am. Which, given the fairing and spinning feet, is hard to imagine.

  • Monthly Image: Left Cross

    It’s the start of a new riding season and we’re returning from a concert at Vassar. I’m cranking 20+ mph, pushed by a gusty tailwind.

    T minus 7 seconds:

    Cedar Valley Rd - Left Cross - T-7
    Cedar Valley Rd – Left Cross – T-7

    The white car approaches the intersection a bit faster than usual, which leads me to expect a New York State Rolling Stop-and-Go right turn directly in front of me.

    T minus 5 seconds:

    Cedar Valley Rd - Left Cross - T-5
    Cedar Valley Rd – Left Cross – T-5

    The white car slows enough that I now expect a stop with the front end well onto the shoulder. A quick check in the mirror shows no traffic behind me: I can take the lane if needed. This intersection always has a large gravel patch spanning the shoulder, so I must move closer to the fog line anyway.

    T minus 2 seconds:

    Cedar Valley Rd - Left Cross - T-2
    Cedar Valley Rd – Left Cross – T-2

    The white car comes to a full stop, not too far onto the shoulder, and my fingers come off the brakes. I gotta work on that fingers-up position, though.

    … Whoops, a classic left cross from the black SUV!

    T minus 1 second:

    Cedar Valley Rd - Left Cross - T-1
    Cedar Valley Rd – Left Cross – T-1

    I’m now braking hard, barely to the left of the gravel patch.

    T zero:

    Cedar Valley Rd - Left Cross - T-0
    Cedar Valley Rd – Left Cross – T-0

    Well, that was close.

    Somewhat to my surprise, the white car hasn’t crept any further onto the shoulder.

    The SUV driver gives me a cheery wave, as if to thank me for not scratching the doors. I never make hand gestures, but I did tell him he does nice work.

    It’s hard to not see a faired long-wheelbase recumbent, head-on in bright sunlight, not to mention that I’m wearing my new Sugoi Zap Bike Jacket in Super Nova retroreflective lime green with retroreflective lime green utility gloves.

    I. Am. Visible. In. Any. Light. Dammit.

    It is, apparently, easy to mis-judge a bike’s speed, although driver-ed courses used to recommend that you err on the side of not trying to beat an oncoming vehicle. Perhaps that recommendation has become inoperative?

    The corresponding maneuver by a car passing you is known as a right hook.

    Memo to Self: Always look at the license plate to give the camera a straight-on picture.

  • Where Web Content Comes From

    Make sure you’re running an ad blocker and perhaps a script killer, feed “Larval Engineer received a Pilot InstaBoost” into your favorite search engine, along these lines:

    Google

    DuckDuckGo

    Bing

    The first (few) hits should be the various ways my original post from late last year appears on wordpress.com, but the rest (particularly from Google) will be spam blogs and scraper sites that ripped my text, ran it past a thesaurus (euphemistically known as article spinning), larded the result with keywords, and reposted the shattered remains. If you click on the links, you’ll have the experience of reading text where short sequences of words make sense, but the overall corpus leaves you shaking your head in disbelief.

    Even though Google allegedly doesn’t reward such sites, they make up the bulk of its list. DuckDuckGo does a slightly better job of suppressing them and Bing kills nearly all of the junk, which suggests that Google operates with a powerful incentive to not notice problems in sites serving (its?) advertisements.

    There’s obviously no point in getting annoyed with any of the participants…

    FWIW, that particular post seems to have drawn the attention of scammers due to the presence of a trademarked brand name with good search-ability. Other posts have been more fortunate in escaping their attention, despite my glowing prose…

  • It Wasn’t Quite Touching, So Ship It

    Picked up a Prime Switched Outlet to help tame the U2711 monitor’s DisplayPort incompatibility and, being that type of guy, had to open it up to see what’s inside.

    Good thing I did:

    Prime Switched Outlet - stray wire strand
    Prime Switched Outlet – stray wire strand

    Admittedly, white is neutral, so that stray wire would should just pop the GFI, but, still …

    You can wind up with events like this:

    Burnt outlet expander
    Burnt outlet expander

  • Backyard Deer Herd

    One deer might be cute:

    Deer Herd - outlier
    Deer Herd – outlier

    But the rest of the herd makes up for it:

    Deer Herd - main
    Deer Herd – main

    You’ll note the complete lack of understory vegetation; the only remaining plants can withstand continuous deer browsing. Deer have clipped all of the evergreens five feet off the ground, even through they don’t normally eat evergreens…

    In fact, there’s no new tree growth in the Hudson Valley, because tree seedlings don’t stand a chance.

  • Samba Setup Woes

    As with all Windows boxes, the old Lenovo Q150 (dual booted with Win 7 Home Premium) became slow and cranky, despite not being used for anything other than monthly science and annual taxes. Various fixes and tweaks being unavailing, I swapped in an Optiplex 780 (dual booted with Win 7 Pro), replaced the IBM L191p monitor with the recapped Dell 2005FPW, reinstalled all the programs, and discovered that Samba was intermittent.

    For future reference…

    Win 7 Pro includes the Remote Desktop Protocol server that’s missing from Win 7 Home Premium. Oddly, RDP works better than UltraVNC, using Remmina as a client.

    The file server in the basement runs Xubuntu 14.04 with Samba 4.1.6 and works perfectly with smbclient, showing no glitches at all. Even when the Win 7 box doesn’t show the server shares at all, it’s rock solid to my desktop Xubuntu box.

    The familiar sudo service samba restart doesn’t actually do that any more, so get used to the two-step dance:

    sudo service nmbd restart
sudo service smbd restart

    However, that sometimes seems to start a spurious third copy of smbd (there should be two, for unknown reasons), so it’s better to use a four-step dance:

    sudo service nmbd stop
sudo service nmbd start
sudo service smbd stop
sudo service smbd start

    The old SysV init system wasn’t good enough, so they invented the run-all-the-things upstart, then systemd Borged upstart, all while Samba, one of the most critical Windows interfaces, still hasn’t emerged from the original init scripts. They call this progress, but I’m not sure.

    Telling the Samba server to not be the domain controller, which should resolve intermittent pissing matches over who’s on first, had no effect.

    When the Win 7 box does show the shared files, everything works fine: files read & write with the proper permissions, the owners & groups are fine, all is right with the world. In between those moments, however, nothing works, because the share simply doesn’t appear.

    Then, seconds or minutes or tens of minutes later, it’s back!

    Setting map to guest = bad password, as found in the usual random blog comment, had no effect.

    The most recent Samba update replaced the /etc/samba/smb.conf file, so we’ll restart from scratch and see what happens next.

    My general approach to Samba has been to futz around until it mysteriously starts working. That seems not to be of any avail this time around; we may put the tax data on a USB stick and move on.