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

Windows 7 First Boot

OK, this resembles dynamiting fish, but I can’t help myself. A cute little Lenovo Q150 with a D525 dual-core Atom and nVidia ION graphics just arrived, which, perforce, has Windows 7 preinstalled. The first step is to get Windows activated, updated, and settled down… the second step being, of course, to shrink that partition to a nub and install Linux for actual use.

After a bit of huffing & puffing, reading (*) & clicking of many EULAs, and the first round of updates:

Windows 7 – You must restart your computer

Every time I see that, I think of the old dialog box joke:

Mouse motion detected. Windows NT must reboot to apply this change. [OK]

Then it had to update .NET, which produced this unbelievable body count of changes:

Windows 7 – Applying update operation

And then another few rounds of updates, the last of which evidently crashed & burned. The Get help with this error link was, mmm, unhelpful; it simply reported they hadn’t the foggiest idea what went wrong. Rebooting and retrying the automated updates presumably worked:

Windows 7 – Some updates were not installed

Doing all of that while puttering around with other stuff occupied the better part of a day, after which one owns a PC with an operating system installed. Yeah, you do get a UI that exposes IE 9, but if you want to do something with the PC, well, that requires installing applications.

I loves me my default Windows desktop background, from a long-ago crash inside a VM:

BSOD – fatal app exception

(*) Yes, I do read them, mostly for comic relief. The general practice of forcing you to scroll through a sheaf of typewriter-formatted pages in a 2×3 inch peephole centered in a huge monitor suggests that they really don’t want you to know what’s going on. Anyone who suggests buying commercial software because it has a reputable company standing behind it has obviously never gone to the trouble of reading the relevant EULA.

2011-07-20
Independence Day 2011

From our Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

We read the original document in DC a few months ago, while doing the touristy thing. These days, that means submitting to a search on the way into each museum; Mary lost her forgotten-in-the-bottom-of-her-purse Swiss Army Knife to the Smithsonian guards.

We left town feeling that something has gone badly wrong in the last decade or so.

2011-07-04
Wal-Mart Unit Pricing Amusement

OK, let’s see how well you do on this round…

In the Mysteriously Missing Label category, we find three similar products with only one shelf label. Which one is the better deal?

Caffeine unit pricing

You might think it’d be the Wal-Mart Equate house brand. In order to find out, you’d have to haul all three offerings down the aisle and around the corner to the price scanner, which would reveal it’s the one on the far left, by a considerable margin. Oddly, that one says “Double Strength” even though it has the same 200 mg dose as the others.

In the Bizarre Units category, we have two very similar products with completely different unit-price units of measure. Seeing as how a “fluid ounce” is a unit of volume and a “pound” is a unit of weight (or, for the pedantic, force), even the dimensions aren’t compatible. Clicky for bigger pictures.

Vanilla unit pricing – 2 oz

And, just to show that wasn’t a one-off mistake that could happen to anyone, the smaller size containers continue the theme.

Vanilla unit pricing – 1 oz

Given that nothing in a Wal-Mart store happens by accident, someone was directed to remove two of those three labels and another someone deliberately chose incompatible units.

Of course, anyone I’ve ever asked has no idea why that would happen…

Previous rants live there and there.

2011-03-07
Measuring Tape Crank Handle Repair

My Shop Assistant (who now merits a Proper Name) returned a fairly new measuring tape to the Basement Laboratory, reporting that the retracting crank handle fell off in “normal use”.

Stripped handle threads

Admittedly, this was a surplus find, but you’d think the build quality would be a bit higher. I’m sure I paid a minute fraction of list price: you could have bought it for much more in a reputable store.

Maybe this is why the whole lot got scrapped out:

Handle detail

I applied a bit of JB Industro Weld to the plastic (?) threads on the spool, twisted the handle in place, squared it up, then eased more epoxy around the top of the threads and let it cure flat on the bench.

Remounted handle

I’d say the original design wasn’t particularly good and the implementation left a lot to be desired. If the interior fittings have similar flaws, I’ll eventually regret applying JB Weld in such a cavalier manner…

2011-02-22
Epson R380 Ink Fillup
Another shot of ink for the printer:
- Black = 60 ml
- Magenta = 20 ml
- Yellow / Light Cyan / Cyan / Light Magenta = 30 ml each
The waste ink container is now a bit more than half full: 90 mm high in a 40 mm diameter cylinder. That works out to 113×10³ mm = 113 ml. Given that “high capacity” cartridges for this printer contain 11 ml, I’m looking at 10 cartridges worth of waste ink.

While I was printing handouts for Cabin Fever, the R380 had a brain spasm and announced it didn’t recognize any of its ink cartridges. A power cycle brought it back to its senses and all the continuous-ink cartridges reset themselves to Completely full once again. With another printer, that error message required a complete new set of cartridges, because the printer could (and did!) set bits inside the refill-prevention chips that rendered the cartridges unusable.

I don’t buy that much ink at one time, but …
2011-02-03
ATX Power Supply Dual +12 V Outputs: Fakery Thereof
I wondered if the Thing-O-Matic would benefit from having its two high-current heaters on a separate +12 V supply than the DC Extruder, after finding that the heaters dragged the +12 V output down by nearly half a volt.

A bit of rummaging turned up a suitable ATX supply with a data plate that might justifiably lead one to believe that the supply provides separate +12 V outputs:

Turbolink ATX-CW420W power supply data plate

There’s no indication which of the four connectors might use +12V1 and +12V2, but, being that sort of guy, I applied an ohmmeter to the various yellow wires and found they were all exactly 0.0 Ω apart.

Huh.

So I opened the Warranty Void If Seal Removed top cover and found this situation:

ATX with fake dual 12 V supplies

Nota bene:
- All the yellow wires terminate in the same solder blob below the PCB
- Two incoming wires got neatly spliced together in mid-air, despite having free holes in the PCB
This may not come as much of a shock: they lie…

Perhaps if you spend more money on your supply, it’ll actually live up to the data plate specs. Then, again, perhaps you’ll just be spending more money.

And, if you swap in a fancy supply for the MBI-stock one, it might not make much difference at all. I suspect the various power levels and current capacities have pretty much the same degree of integrity…
2011-01-25
Buckle Up For Safety

Windshield head strikes

Y’know how some folks say they don’t wear a seat belt because they want to be thrown free in a crash? Here’s how that works in actual practice.

The air bag fires as the front bumper begins to deform and your body rises off the seat. Because you’re not belted in, the bag boosts your upper torso against the roof liner, bounces your head off the sunshade and bezel, then feeds you directly into the windshield glass.

Laminated glass doesn’t disintegrate, so your skull probably won’t completely penetrate the windshield. You’ll lose some scalp, though, as you slide down the crumbling glass and wedge above the dashboard.

Even if you survive a broken neck, the ensuing brain trauma means you won’t be the same person ever again.

News flash: massive brain trauma does not make you a better person.

Before laminated windshield glass became mandatory, your head would completely penetrate the windshield. Here’s what happened in 1937, from the incomparably grisly — And Sudden Death by J. C. Furnas:

Safety Glass Windshields

I read one of the many Reader’s Digest editions of that article during my formative years. Probably the one in October 1967, if a bit of Google-fu serves me right. You can’t get reprints of it from RD any longer, it seems.

However, unbelievably, while I was composing this post, I checked eBay and found a typewritten copy of the article, signed by Furnas, with 38 minutes remaining in the auction. I was the only bidder: for nine bucks (delivered) it’s mine.

Most likely it’s a publicity / fundraising copy, because the handwritten notation on the first page reads:

With best
regards to
[name]
J. C. Furnas
Oct 20, 1947

Those SUVs reside in the junkyard along the Dutchess Rail Trail near Creek Road, where I might get a new seat to rebuild my comfy office chair this spring.

2010-12-17