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
You know those slide-out ads, the ones that emerge from the lower-right corner of your screen, demanding your attention? The ones that aren’t pop-ups, so pop-up blockers don’t work on them?
Just had this one appear.
Words fail me.
BTW, if you figure out how to block those mumble things, let me know!
I bought a pair of stainless-steel water bottles on sale from the usual Amazon sub-supplier at a small fraction of “regular price”: roughly 11 bucks delivered. My ladies use water bottles pretty heavily and these looked like good, durable bottles.
Of course, you wash new water bottles before putting them into service. It’s a darn good thing I got the first look inside; these were filthy!
The caps have nice flexible silicone-rubber “straws” extending down into the bottles. The straw on the left was literally black with a coating of fine, powdery dust. The one on the right was merely gray.
The interior of the bottle with the dirtiest straw was, as you might expect, coated with black dust. The other bottle was comparatively clean, although I suspect the straw collected much of the free-floating dust.
I’m guessing the dust was part of the final polishing for the stainless bottles, although I can’t imagine how it got past final QC. Oh, yeah, they’re made in China, as is everything else these days.
All the parts cleaned up nicely after an attack with the bottle and tubing brushes, then two passes through the dishwasher.
Maybe that’s why they were on sale?
Every now and again, I’m asked to judge a technical contest of one sort or another. Let us assume, for the purposes of this discussion, that you are participating in such a contest and I’ve just begun to look at your entry…
The contest rules will tell you what document files they expect; typically, it’ll involve some version of Microsoft Word. Why they do that, I cannot say, but Word documents aren’t really suited to read-only document distribution. Not to mention, some of us don’t have MS Word installed…
In addition to those files, also include a PDF of your final document file so that when I open it, it’ll look exactly the way you intended. MS Word documents tend to look weird on any PC other than yours, particularly if you have any odd fonts or formatting options turned on. If you can’t figure out how to produce a PDF, install OpenOffice and use the direct PDF export; that’ll also show you how weird MS Word can appear in a different word processor.
Don’t waste time on a fancy layout, but do pay attention to the basics:
Hint: ask a friend to review your submission, ideally a few days before you plan to submit it. Take any comments you get very seriously.
The first two paragraphs of your documentation must tell me:
That should take, at most, half of the first page.
You have two paragraphs to catch my attention; sweat bullets over those words!
Hint: If you can’t summarize what your project does in one sentence, maybe you don’t have a good project.
Going on at length about how easy the project was produces the impression that maybe there’s not enough effort in there to justify a few kilobucks of prize money. Conversely, kvetching about how hard you worked indicates that you bit off more than you can chew.
Let the project tell the story. A good project requires more than a few evenings of effort and, believe it or not, the amount of effort will show up in your description, even if you don’t mention it at all.
Hint: If you’re trying to be funny, it probably won’t work.
Examine all the pictures with a hyper-critical eye.
When you get the focus right, ruthlessly crop your pictures. Hint: I don’t need to see the crap on your workbench or the dirty laundry in the corner of your room. Devote all the pixels to your project!
When you don’t care enough to invest a few minutes getting a good picture, the rest of your project is probably sub-optimal, too. Don’t bother to submit it, OK?
Crisp pictures can’t sell a weak project. Blurry images rarely accompany a good project.
Hint: That big LCD on the back of your camera is there for a reason. Use it!
If you claim to have built a multi-node, RF-networked, high-bandwidth, vibration sensor measurement system, then you must include data supporting your claims. Otherwise, I’ll assume you don’t know what you’re talking about or haven’t actually gotten it working, should my back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate there’s not enough RF bandwidth / range / compute power to pull it off.
You must convince me that your project does what you claim!
Hint: Should you claim to have built a snake-armed robot that balances atop a ball while serving drinks from a refrigerator, a video demonstrating it in action is worth a thousand words.
You may encounter a serious problem that simply can’t be fixed before the contest deadline. When that happens, explain what you intended to have happen, what the problem is, and what you propose as a solution. As long as the problem is secondary to the project’s intent, that’ll be fine.
For example, if your project involves half a dozen different sensors and you just can’t get the humidity sensor working, explain your debugging efforts and the results.
Conversely, if it’s a networking project and you can’t get the Ethernet code working, then your entire project just went down the drain and you shouldn’t submit it. I can generally tell when a project simply isn’t going to work, so your efforts to hide the corpse won’t gain you any points.
Hint: Start your project early enough so that when something goes wrong, you have time to fix it.
The contest is generally about using some particular microcontroller or chunk of hardware. Your project should fully utilize that chip: make sure you read the manual and exploit a whole bunch of its unique features.
Hint: a project where all the action takes place in a Javascript routine or another, entirely different microcontroller probably isn’t making good use of the specified chip.
If you’ve got a good project and describe it well, you’re probably in the money. Plenty of other entrants will ignore these suggestions and wind up on the bottom of the pile.
Fair enough?
The amount of ink dumped into the external waste ink tank is staggering. A single head cleaning results in a stream of ink pouring into the tank. After a few weeks of watching that, I stood the tank on end: to my astonishment, the ink pretty much fills the black endcap.
In round numbers, the cylinder is 40 mm ID and the cap is 20 mm tall. Volume of a cylinder is πr2h, so you’re looking at 25×103 mm3 of waste ink.
Seeing as how 1 mm3 = 0.001 ml, the tank currently holds about 25 ml of ink!
The printer has six cartridges. Assuming head cleanings drain an equal amount from each cartridge, that’s 4 ml apiece. Given that the large OEM ink cartridges come with 11 ml of ink, you can do the math: a third of a cartridge of each color just for head cleanings so far.
I do not object to head cleanings; that’s how they keep all those teeny little nozzles free of gunk. However, coupling that ink usage with minuscule ink tanks is robbery, plain and simple.
The next time you hear a printer manufacture tout their greenness, you can spit right into their shadow for me.
We’re getting set up for a bicycle vacation and I did a quick tire inspection… good thing, too, considering the gashes I found in the rear tire on Mary’s Tour Easy.
I put Schwalbe Marathon 700x35C tires on the back of our ‘bents, for well and good reason: Marathons have plenty of rubber and include a Kevlar puncture-resistant layer. In this case, that was just barely enough!
Here’s a cross-section through the tire; the Kevlar layer is yellow, with the tire carcass fibers inward of that.
The greenish-yellow tint in the left-hand gash (in the top picture) is the Slime tire liner (they prefer “tube protector”) showing through. Here’s what the liner looked like after we pulled the tire off; the liner shows some damage, but it’s just surface scuffing.
Quite by coincidence, the gashes straddled the overlapped end of the liner. The end of the liner is on the tube side; I haven’t trimmed or tapered the end of this one.
Here’s what the inside of the tire looked like; the Kevlar fought the gashes to a standstill and left the carcass mostly intact. The painted and illustrated fingernails belong to my shop assistant.
Here’s a cross-section through the Kevlar layer. I don’t know what Mary ran over, but it was most likely a sizable chunk of the broken glass that litters the roads around here. I doubt anybody gets prosecuted for littering, but as far as I’m concerned, a fitting punishment would be collecting the glass from a few miles of roadway: crawling on hands and knees, picking up fragments with their lips.
I put a new tube in a new Marathon (for obvious reasons, I have a supply of both on the shelf at all times), we positioned the liner, pumped it up, and it’s all good.
OpenOffice normally stores graphic file links relative to the location of the ODT document file. It’s an option at Tools -> Options -> Load/Save -> General, where you check Save URLs relative to file system.
That generally works well, as long as you keep all the graphics either in the same directory or in a subdirectory, which is our general practice. Note that this doesn’t apply if you embed the image files into the document, which works fine for one-pagers and dies horribly for lengthy graphics-intense documents.
(Yes, I know OOo is not a page layout program. Sometimes other considerations get in the way. Work with me on this, OK?)
It’s easy to confuse the program: copy the ODT file somewhere else and, shazam, the links either break or get weird. In a recent case, the links somehow wound up holding the entire path from the root directory through /home, down through an NFS mount, and out to the actual file. Not only was it un-pretty, the links basically didn’t work from any other account on any other machine because you really can’t reach through another user’s account to your files.
This is tedious, at best, to fix up within OpenOffice, because you can’t do a find-and-replace on the file names.
So.
In OOo, click through Tools -> Options -> Load/Save -> General. Uncheck the Size optimization for ODF format option to force the XML file to become human-readable. Otherwise, OO stores everything as one huge line. While you’re there, make sure Save URLs relative to file system is checked.
Save the file again to get readable XML.
Create /tmp/work, copy the ODT file therein, apply unzip to it. That extracts the contents, including the all-important content.xml containing your document’s text & links.
Edit content.xml with the text editor (not a word processor like OOo!) of your choice. Bulk-change the garbage paths to something meaningful. For example, we had all the images in Tweaked, a subdirectory below the document directory, so the desired file links looked like ../Tweaked/image-file-name.jpg.
Save the file and stuff it back into the ODT file using zip -vi document.odt content.xml
That produced some odd error messages that didn’t seem to have any effect:
zip warning: undefined bits used in flags = 0x0808: layout-cache zip warning: undefined bits used in flags = 0x0808: content.xml zip warning: undefined bits used in flags = 0x0808: styles.xml zip warning: undefined bits used in flags = 0x0808: Thumbnails/thumbnail.png zip warning: undefined bits used in flags = 0x0808: settings.xml zip warning: undefined bits used in flags = 0x0808: META-INF/manifest.xml updating: content.xml zip warning: Local Entry CRC does not match CD: content.xml (in=54496) (out=7765) (deflated 86%) total bytes=91294, compressed=17644 -> 81% savings
OOo stores the file timestamps within the ODT file in UTC, confusing the daylights out of zip, which assumes they’re in local time. Being at UTC-4 right now, I couldn’t simply freshen or update a recently created ODT file.
Copy the modified ODT file back where it came from, make sure the graphic files are where you promised they’d be, and open the document.
Everything should be just fine.
Got an email from Virgin Mobile:
From: Virgin Mobile <virginmobile-service@my.vmu-mail.com>
Date: Today 14:34:24Hi ED,
Top-Up now to save your service!
Since you haven’t added money to your account in the last 90 days, your phone has stopped working. If you don’t take emergency action and Top-Up now, you might lose your phone number and any balance remaining in your account.
Given that I have the account set to recharge itself every 90 days and it’s been doing that for a couple of years, I thought perhaps my credit card had flipped past the expiration date on file. Fighting my way through VM’s craptastic website, noooo, that’s not the case.
Nay, verily, the account had topped itself off at 11:34, exactly three hours before that email went out.
So I asked the obvious question, doggedly using the impenetrable Customer Service form:
The phone seems OK.
What’s going on?
Which produced this missive:
Response (Rommel) – 06/23/2010 08:32 AM
Hello Ed,Thanks for contacting Virgin Mobile Customer Care.
I really appreciate the time you took to provide us with the information requested. I reviewed your account and found that indeed you have the auto payment set up correctly in your account. What happened is that the system always sent this alerts to keep the customers aware of their account status but since you have the auto payment option, please ignore this alerts, you don’t have to worry about it. The system charged your card for $15 on 6/22/2010.
Now, your account will be active until 9/20/2010. You don’t have to worry about the alerts, if you have credit on your card the system will always do it automatically. I apologize on behalf Virgin Mobile for any misunderstanding.
Perhaps it’s just me, but formulaic cut-and-paste obsequious fawning grates on my sensibilities. What I really want is action that resolves the problem, not just having VM’s Customer Service team blow it off. So I fired off a reply:
> please ignore this alerts,
> you don’t have to worry about it.So, if I understand your advice correctly, when VM sends me a warning message like this:
——-
Since you haven’t added money to your account in the last 90 days, your phone has stopped working.
——-I should just ignore it. Is that what you mean?
That’s stupid advice. You do not want to train your customers to ignore email from VM, particularly information saying their phones are “not working”.
The correct response is that you will take steps to ensure that VM never sends a bogus warning. The people responsible for sending that message must fix their own problem, at the source of the problem, where it happens.
Your customers should not be required to ignore anything from VM.
Let me know when you’ve taken effective action to prevent this from happening again.
Thanks…
No answer to date. I suspect VM doesn’t monitor incoming email. I wonder why?
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 