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

Epson R380 Waste Ink: Gadzooks!

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.

Waste ink collection

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.

2010-08-13
Bicycle Tire Liners FTW!

Gashed tread

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.

Schwalbe Marathon tire cross-section

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.

Scuffs on tire liner

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.

Scuffs inside tire carcass

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.

Cuts through tire anti-puncture layer

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.

2010-08-08
OpenOffice 3.2 Graphic File Link Hackage
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.
2010-07-25
Virgin Mobile Customer Service

Got an email from Virgin Mobile:

From: Virgin Mobile <virginmobile-service@my.vmu-mail.com>
Date: Today 14:34:24

Hi 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?

2010-07-23
Sears Kenmore HE3 Washer Teardown: Tub Damage Assessment
After removing the concrete weights from the tub, I saw where the piddle of water was coming from: the stainless steel drum (formally: Basket) had been chewing on the plastic Tub for quite some time. That’s most likely the strange new sound Mary heard, but it’s impossible to see the affected area without gutting the entire washer.

The top left section, below the detergent dispenser.

Outer Tub Damage – Top Left

The top right section.

Outer Tub Damage – Top Right

I assumed the damage was limited to the top section, because the drum would pivot downward under load. That turned out to be incorrect, as I realized when I looked behind the lower concrete weight: the Tub was scored through all the way around.

Here’s a view of the interior, taken after I removed the Tub from the washer and pried off all the clamps that secure the Front Tub to the Rear Tub.

Outer Tub Damage – Inside View

And a closeup…

Outer Tub Damage – Inside Detail

The drum has a ridge around the front circumference where the round perforated shell joins the convoluted front piece that necks down into the opening behind the door. That ridge contacts the plastic Tub and, even though it’s smooth, generates enough friction to burn through the Tub.

Now, this is the point where the repairman turns to you and says that, although he (it’s always a he) can replace the drum and Tub, the total cost will be more than a whole new washer.

Sticker price for the parts, direct from Sears, looks like this:
- Stainless Steel Basket: $364
- Front Tub: $150
Onto that, reports from various forums indicate that you will have incurred some labor charges:
- Labor: $120+ to this point
- Parts Service Fee: $50 (I don’t know what that is, either)
A new HE3 washer is $850, more or less.

Ah, you ask, isn’t there a Lifetime Limited Warranty on the Stainless Steel Drum? Why, yes, there is, and that’s a story all in itself …
2010-07-20
Sears Kenmore HE3 Washer Drum: The Rot

Corroded Aluminum Spider – Overview

Our Kenmore HE3 washer emitted a dramatic KLONK that had all hands racing for the Cancel button. After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, some Web searching, and a few hours of teardown, I determined that the washer had failed in the usual HE3 way: the cast aluminum spider connecting the back of the lah-dee-dah stainless steel drum to the shaft had corroded and fractured.

Now, class, let’s review our chemistry. What do we call a pair of dissimilar metals in an ionic solution?

Very good. Can you spell “battery”?

Bonus points: what happens to the battery electrodes as the current flows?

Excellent! I’m sure you can spell “corrosion”, too.

The stuff that looks (and feels!) like cheese is aluminum corrosion filling every nook & cranny in the back of the spider. The fact that the drum spins at 900 rpm tells you it’s rather tenacious gunk, but evidently we’ve been washing our clothes in corrosion products for several years.

If you have a Sears or Whirlpool HE washer, so are you.

Mary noticed the washer made a strange noise during the spin parts of the cycle, starting a few weeks ago, but it wasn’t anything you’d tear down the washer to diagnose. I’ll have more to say about that in a bit.

The KLONK happened when a third fracture finally disconnected the drum from the shaft and it started whacking against the outer tub. All that’s holding the shaft in place is the remaining thickness of the spider casting and the interlocking fracture pattern; I can move the shaft, but not easily.

Here are closeups of the three sections near the hub between the arms. Anything that looks like a crack really is one…

Corroded Spider – Fracture 1

The next section has a nice crack running along the circumference, too…

Corroded Spider – Fracture 2

And the third section…

Corroded Spider – Fracture 3

I hauled it to the driveway and hosed off the corrosion. There isn’t supposed to be that little hole where the sun shines through…

Corroded Spider – After Rinsing

The washer is six years old and cost $1100 new.

Needless to say, We Are Not Amused.

More on this as I sort things out. Search for HE3 and you’ll find more than you want to know (at least after I’ve gotten it posted).

2010-07-15
How to Solve a Parking Problem

The Walkway Over the Hudson has been a resounding success, at least measured by the number of people using it. The Parker Avenue parking lot has about 80 spaces and, during most days, is jammed full.

The NYS park system now owns the Walkway and, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the parking facilities should have a fee just like the rest of their lots: $5 / 4 hours.

Here’s what the Walkway lot looked like on the day the fee went into effect…

Walkway Parking Lot With Parking Fee In Full Effect

To quote from the Poughkeepsie Journal:

State officials hope there will be no decline in visitors with the new parking fee, said State Parks spokesman Kristen Davidson.

Basically, there’s enough free on-street parking in the area that most folks park nearby and hike in, which makes sense for a park consisting of about two miles of walking path. The parking fee amounts to a tax on handicapped and elderly visitors who find it difficult to navigate streets and ramps.

On the bright side, it’ll be a lot easier to bike across the bridge…

2010-06-25