Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
A Red Fox came trotting around the garden on the day before Christmas, then nosed up to the back of the house:
Red Fox visitation – 2018-12-24
Presumably, it was in search of a snack. We wish it good hunting.
A few hours later, the fox walked quickly across the back yard with half a dozen turkey toms close behind, perhaps urging it away from their hens. Everybody remained calm and collected, knowing their roles in this particular play.
FWIW, Marist College fields Red Foxes athletic teams. The women’s teams are Lady Red Foxes, as “vixen” carries entirely inappropriate connotations.
We hung a pine-cone wreath beside the back door (a.k.a. the only door we use), replacing a Welcome sign painted on a slate tile. Of course, the tile had long provided a sheltered spot against the house siding:
Our Compact Edition of the OED doesn’t get much use these days, but Mary needed a magnifier for a class on quilt judging and the OED has one that seemed just about right:
OED Magnifier Box in drawer
The magnifier comes in a removable box fitted neatly into the drawer, revealing a surprise underneath:
OED Magnifier drawer – plastic ant
A detail view:
OED Magnifier drawer – plastic ant – detail
It’s a plastic ant from a bag in the Kiddie Surplus box my Shop Assistant grew up with and a pleasant reminder of long-ago days, carefully placed where only I’d ever see it.
The Wzye Pan camera overlooking the bird feeders attracted the attention of a Downy Woodpecker:
Screenshot_20181029-112307 – Downy Woodpecker at the Pan
The camera sits on a “guest” branch of the house network, fenced off from the rest of the devices, because Pi-Hole showed it relentlessly nattering with its Chinese servers:
Blocked Domains – Wyze iotcplatform
In round numbers, the Pan camera tried to reach those (blocked) iotcplatform domains every 30 seconds around the clock, using a (permitted) google.com lookup to check Internet connectivity. Pi-Hole supplied the latter from its cache and squelched the former, but enough is enough.
I haven’t tested for traffic to hardcoded dotted-quad IP addresses not requiring DNS lookups through the Pi-Hole. Scuttlebutt suggests the camera firmware includes binary blobs from the baseline Xaiomi/Dafang cameras, so there’s no telling what’s going on in there.
The Xiaomi-Dafang Hacks firmware doesn’t phone home to anybody, but requires router port forwarding and a compatible RTSP client on the remote end. Isolating it from the rest of the LAN must suffice until I can work out that mess; I assume the camera has already made my WiFi passwords public knowledge.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 