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
This is not what you want to see on the monitor displaying the dental X-ray images guiding your dentist during a root canal:
Yup, exactly what you’d expect:
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…]
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:
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.
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:
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:
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):
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:
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.
Based on my good experience with the Wasabi NP-BX1 batteries, I also bought three Wasabi NB-5L batteries for my Canon SX-230HS pocket camera:
Well, that’s not what I expected: the “new” Wasabi batteries perform worse than the three year old Canon OEM battery and no better than the crap batteries from eBay.
Just to be sure, I ran two tests on each of the three new batteries. Unlike the NP-BX1 batteries, these deliver a lower voltage than the Canon OEM battery and have a much lower capacity. The camera cuts off at 3.5 V, so the new batteries deliver 2/3 the run time of the old OEM battery
Sheesh…
Tech support at Blue Nook (I am not making that up) says they’ll send me a couple of batteries from their next shipment to see if something’s wrong with this batch; all the batteries have date code BNF27.
Seeing as how we live in The Internet Age, I must fetch my statements from Big Bank’s website, rather than extract quaint sheets of paper from an envelope. Seeing as how the start of the Internet Age is over, I run a fairly well armored version of Firefox that ruthlessly suppresses ads (have you ever bought anything as a result of an Internet ad?), crushes cookies, rejects malware, and generally defends my interests.
Big Bank’s website doesn’t work without adjusting the armor and, equally unsurprisingly, those adjustments seem to depend on both their website’s current revisions and my browser / plugin / extension versions. It seems mildly odd that Big Bank would depend on the same techniques that identify advertisers and scammers and malware purveyors, but so it goes.
My most recent attempts to retrieve an account statement produced an indefinite “busy” loop instead of a PDF file, which usually means something got blocked. Big Bank outsources its statements and I’ve already whitelisted internet-estatements.com and allowed its popups, so it must be something else.
A bit of rummaging in the sump revealed cookies from several domains that didn’t get set whenever I tried to access my statement:
Pop Quiz: which domains in that list would you trust without question?
Bonus: Explain why “mookie1.com” isn’t funny in this context.
Double Bonus: Why is a banking website dealing with doubleclick?
It seems the missing cookies came from bigbankcardus.com, as the statement PDF appeared after I whitelisted that domain and reloaded everything.
I could understand (if not enthusiastically approve of) getting advertising cookies from Big Bank’s main page, but there should be exactly none of that crap when I access my statements.
There is no point in complaining: it’s like that, and that’s the way it is.
At least they don’t require Internet Explorer…
It used to be we “signed in” at the dentist by exchanging pleasantries with the folks behind the desk, but that was so 20th Century. Now we’re confronted with an iPad sporting a form:
Pop Quiz: Assuming you filled in your birthdate and remembered how their files have recorded your name, where do you tap to proceed onward?
Reasoning by analogy from my Kindle Fire’s keyboard, I assumed the conspicuous bright blue Go button would do the trick.
Nope. That’s not it.
After a bit of fumbling around, it turns out to be the dark blue Next button (on the non-contrasting light gray title bar) at the right edge of the title bar.
I betcha I could have fun with some of those little icons…
In fact, the next time we showed up, the iDingus sported a popup asking if I wanted to update the firmware (or some such). Of course, I gave the receptionist an evil grin and tapped “Hit me!”
Word: this app nonsense isn’t ready for prime time.
After years of neglect, an NYS DOT crew started a really nice repair job on the inside edge of the curve just north of our house. They milled out the deteriorated road surface, cleaned out the debris, and laid in a patch flush with the road surface. That’s quite unlike their usual shovel-some-cold-patch / hand-tamp / drive-over-it process, made familiar everywhere else around here.
Unfortunately, for unknown reasons, they didn’t fill in the last two feet of the milled-out trench, leaving a tooth-shattering pair of perpendicular edges exactly where you’d least expect them:
Ran out of asphalt? Lunch break? Called off to another emergency? We’ll never know.
I sent a note, with that picture, to the NYS DOT Bicycle & Pedestrian Coordinator, asking what happened; perhaps they planned another layer atop the whole curve to seal the rest of the cracked pavement?
The next day a crew filled in the hole, which I find far more than coincidental.
Although it’s better than it was, there’s now a joint that will deteriorate more rapidly than the uniform asphalt layer they should have created.
We’ll take what we get…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 