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

Wider Borders in XFCE / Xubuntu
A longstanding Xubuntu / XFCE UI problem has been single-pixel window borders that make click-and-drag resizing essentially impossible. The reason it’s a longstanding problem has been the developers’ unflinching response to any and all issues raised on the bug tracker:
- Use Vulcan Nerve Pinch keyboard workarounds
- Just build your own theme
- Go away
That discussion may be illuminating.

I had never looked for the XFCE theme-building documentation (and, thus, never found any), because building a whole new theme would be a lot of work just to resize the damn borders. It should be feasible to tweak only the borders of an existing theme, but … I stalled.

Repeatedly. On every single version of Xubuntu that’s come along.

Fortunately, someone recently did the legwork and summarized the method, which I slightly adapted:
```
cd /usr/share/themes/
sudo cp -a Greybird-compact/ Greybird-wide
cd Greybird-wide/xfwm4
for f in bottom left right ; do sudo cp ../../Daloa/xfwm4/${f}* . ; done
sudo sed -i -e 's/C0C0C0/CECECE/' *xpm
sudo sed -i -e 's/A0A0FF/7C7C7C/' *xpm
sudo sed -i -e 's/E0E0FF/E0E0E0/' *xpm
```
The exact color mapping depends on which two themes you’re using. You can also specify GTK element colors, which seems like a better way to do it. Maybe next time.

Apparently, the corresponding PNG files contain transparency information for the XPM files, but I haven’t bothered to investigate how that works or what might happen if I tweaked them.

Then you select the new Graybird-wide theme and It Just Works.

Sheesh & similar remarks…
2015-01-28
Pilot InstaBoost: Battery Capacity

The cardboard package liner claims the lithium-ion battery inside our Larval Engineer’s shiny new InstaBoost jump starter is good for 10.8 A·h and and the minuscule inscription on the case truncates it to 10 A·h. Given what I’ve seen for other batteries, either value would be true when measured under the most favorable conditions, but these curves still came as a bit of a surprise (clicky for more dots):

Pilot Instaboost

The three short, abruptly dropping curves come from the main terminals, with the battery clamps attached to similar clamps (with a glitch when they shifted position) plugged into my CBA II/IV battery tester, showing that the InstaBoost shuts off after a few minutes, regardless of load. That makes good sense: don’t connect a lithium battery to a lead-acid battery for more than a few minutes!

The two longer curves come from the 12 V jack on the side and show that it will run until the battery goes flat. Evidently, the internal battery protection circuit cuts out at less than the 10 V minimum I used for these tests.

I didn’t bother testing the USB charging outlet, as I assume it would produce 5 V at 1 A for slightly less than twice as long.

Under the most favorable conditions I could come up with, the actual battery capacity of 3.5 A·h is a third of what it should be. I’d expect that from the usual eBay supplier, not Lowe’s.

Given the cheapnified clamps, perhaps Pilot deliberately gutted the battery capacity to save a few bucks. After all, the customers will never notice. Will they?

Except…

Another customer took his apart and found three 3.6 A·h “high output” (whatever that means) lithium cells in series. In that configuration, the individual cell capacity does not add and the pack should produce about 3.6 A·h. Those curves show it produces slightly less than that when discharged to 10 V, which means the thing works exactly like you’d expect. Indeed, it’s better than a typical second-tier product and much better than typical eBay crap.

The most charitable explanation would be that somebody screwed up, multiplied the number of cells by their individual capacity, put that number in the specs, and everyone downstream ran with it. If the cells were in parallel, then the total capacity in ampere·hours would equal the sum of the cell capacity.

If you change the specs to match the as-built hardware, then, apart from those cheapnified clamps, it’s working just fine…

2015-01-09
The Windows Update That Replaces the Update That Prevented Further Updates

Category killer in the “You can’t make this stuff up” category:

Update to prevent update prevention error

I vaguely recall similar errors in Ubuntu’s updater and I suppose everybody gets it wrong occasionally.

2015-01-03
Always Remove Your Data Before Disposing of Your Hardware

Surely you’ve seen the reports on the plumber who sold his Ford F-250 pickup, only to have it reappear on the Syrian front lines, recycled into an anti-aircraft gun platform:

Mark-1 Truck Cannon in Syria

That’s the most spectacular example I’ve seen of what happens when you leave personal data on hardware that’s no longer under your control, but imagine what would happen if your junked hard drive wound up holding, oh, say, a few gigabytes of kiddy porn, along with your old letters and spreadsheets.

A visit from the DHS agents would look downright appealing.

You could always scrub the platters clean:

Scrubbed hard drive platters

The gun has shrapnel shields and might actually be an anti-aircraft gun, but it’s obviously pounding ground-level targets…

2014-12-27
Windows Driver Update: Root Canal Edition

This is not what you want to see on the monitor displaying the dental X-ray images guiding your dentist during a root canal:

Epson Driver Update – X-Ray Screen

Yup, exactly what you’d expect:

Epson Driver Update – X-Ray Screen – Detail

They dismissed the message and continued the mission.

You’d think that for as much as they’re surely paying for that software package, it would hold off all the updates until after office hours…

[Those quick on the RSS feed saw this in mid-November, after a finger fumble while typing the date dropped it into the past…]

2014-11-29
Halloween Horror: Line Voltage on the Loose!

I hauled the Kenmore 158 sewing machine and controller to a Squidwrench meeting for some current measurements (and, admittedly, showing it off) while schmoozing. After hauling it home and setting it up on my bench again, it didn’t work: the motor didn’t run at all.

While doing the usual poking around under the cover, I spotted this horrifying sight:

Loose AC line hot wire

The brown insulation tells you that’s a hot wire from the AC line and, in fact, it’s coming directly from the line fuse; it’s live whenever the plug is in.

It’s a stranded wire to allow flexing without breaking, but that same flexibility allows it to squeeze its way out of a tightly fastened screw terminal. In principle, one should crimp a pin on the wire, but the only pins in my heap don’t quite fit along the screw terminal block.

This sort of thing is why I’m being rather relentless about building a grounded, steel-lined box with all the pieces firmly mounted on plastic sheets and all the loose ends tucked in. If that wire had gone much further to the side or top, it would have blown the fuse when it tapped the steel frame. The non-isolated components on that board are facing you, with those connections as far from the terminal block as they can be.

Engineers tend to be difficult to live with, because we have certain fixed ways of doing things that are not amenable to debate. There’s probably a genetic trait involved, but we also realize that being sloppy can kill you rather quickly; the universe is not all about pink unicorns and rainbows.

In fact, the universe wants you dead.

Now, go play with those goblins and zombies tonight…

Memo to Self: Tighten those terminals every now and again. A wire will come loose shortly after you forget to do that, of course.

2014-10-31
Threading the Bicycling Needle on Raymond Avenue

The NYS DOT’s original planning documents said that roundabouts / rotaries weren’t optimal for pedestrians or bicyclists or large trucks, but, because DOT likes rotaries, that’s what they built on Raymond Avenue. However, they didn’t relocate the drainage lines under the road and left some catch boxes in awkward spots.

This Google Street View image from a few years ago shows the College Avenue intersection from northbound Raymond Avenue, with the catch box in the lane:

Google Street View – Raymond northbound at College

Raymond is basically the only bicycle route into Arlington from the south and has “shared roadway” signs, but the design flat-out doesn’t work for bikes and the implementation leaves a lot to be desired.

Here’s what it looks like from the bike:

MAH00138-2014-09-28-095

Note the deteriorated asphalt and longitudinal cracks near the white fog line next to the curb. That forces bike traffic another few feet into the deliberately narrowed traffic lane at the entrance to the intersection.

Mary’s about as far to the right as practicable (that’s a legal term):

MAH00138-2014-09-28-155

I’m angling over from the middle of the lane, because, unless I take the lane, motorists will attempt to pass us in the rotary entrances. The asphalt on the far side of the box has subsided several inches into a tooth-rattling drop, you can see the crevice adjacent to the right side of the box, and I know better than to cross steel grates while turning.

Notice that the Google view shows four bollards marking what DOT charmingly calls the “pedestrian refuge” in the median, but only two appear in my pictures. NYS DOT recently removed half the bollards from each refuge and relocated the remainder, apparently to reduce the number of street furniture targets. Early on, they were losing one bollard per intersection per year, but that’s slowed down now that they’ve stopped replacing smashed hardware.

It was never clear to me why putting nonreflective black bollards a foot or two from the traffic lane made any sense, but that’s how it was done. Most of the relocated bollards stand close to the center of the median, so maybe it didn’t make any sense.

Anyhow, bikes can’t stay too far to the right after the box, because the asphalt has crumbled away in furrows around Yet Another Crappy Patch:

MAH00138-2014-09-28-184

That’s pretty much the state of the traffic engineering art around here. A while back, the NYS DOT engineer in charge of the project assured me it’s all built in compliance with the relevant standards.

It’s worth noting that Mary’s on the Dutchess County Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee, so we volunteered to count cyclists and pedestrians on Raymond a few months ago. When I say that we’re essentially the only cyclists riding Raymond Avenue, we have the numbers to back it up. Everybody else rides on the sidewalks, despite that being of questionable legality and dubious for pedestrian safety, because, well, you’d be crazy to ride in the shared roadway.

2014-10-26