Covid19 and other horrors

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photomaster
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Covid19 and other horrors

Post by photomaster »

I see I haven't posted anything to my forum since the pandemic. What's there to say? Well, I'm in New York - just 50 miles from a major hot spot, NYC. This has not only changed my photography but my life as well. Where to start?

I grabbed a case of napkins and case of toilet tissue off Ebay for double what it was worth, followed by a single 5lb bag of flour for $20US. That's a 1000% mark-up. Locals wiped the grocery shelves clean of meat as I waited a month for a case of frozen chicken to be delivered. We still had plenty of food being delivered to the stores but hoarding was disrupting everyone's life and driving prices up.

Cuomo shut down the state. I found myself suddenly working off my kitchen table. I needed to purchase some telephone equipment because my "landlines" haven't been used in decades. I needed to run new phone cables and buy two conference phones to communicate with my day job. For weeks I balanced some equipment on the case of napkins - but, I had to replace the cardboard box with a folding table which I found in the closet.

I emptied the closet since my FIOS ONT was in the back and it had failed. Verizon sent a tech who passed me tools and instructions for repairing the equipment thru a crack in the door :lol: I repaired the unit but there are wires still strung across the livingroom floor. All the crap from the closet was now in a pile of shit waist deep. ugg. So, the cleaning began.

I installed a wireless dimmer switch by the front door to control the dining room light and added another wireless dimmer for my livingroom light, the livingroom doubles as my studio... rents being what they are on Long Island I cannot afford to rent studio space.
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Here's one change I'm making. Back in my college days I made a dimmer box for the overhead lamp using whatever parts I could afford. On the right shows what it looks like now. I can dim the light as before, but also can be controlled with a small wireless remote control. I also replaced the ugly reel type retractable extension cord with a proper outlet strip and wireless on/off switch. Instead of crawling around on my hands and knees clicking on and off switches I can control everything a lot more easier - great for those times after an exhausting photo shoot I don't need to expend more energy to power everything off.

I also moved the battery chargers to their own outlet so I keep camera batteries charged and ready, rather than draping them over my coffee pot in the kitchen! I've been such an amateur. Oh... and the broiler door at the bottom of the oven made the most annoying sound in the world. Yes, in the movie "Dumb and Dumber," JimC explains what the most annoying sound in the world was... and it was the same sound my broiler door made whenever I made chicken! Uncanny, considering I never had Jim over for chicken.

How does one oil an oven door? You can't. Oil would just burn off in a puff of blue smoke and probably set off the smoke alarm. ah! But, I used high temperature anti-seize which is good to 1600 degrees F. Even under the raw flame of my gas stove it doesn't get nearly that hot. I smeared a few dabs of goo on the oven door hinge and... silence. I may use the broiler more often!

I swapped out my garbage can for the same model. Simplehuman made some design improvements! Like, drilling a hole into the side of the inside bin to let air escape (and let the trash bag full open inside of it), plus drain holes for an occasional hose-down. My failing coffee maker was replaced with an SCA certified coffeemaker. What a difference. I'm currently at 203 brew temp with a 30sec soak but sticking to supermarket whole bean coffee rather than roasting my own. That's... more effort than I'd like.

What else? Oh, I've upgraded the 2T drives on my NAS to 4T. I only had 1T of crap so I figured a 2T would last me a lifetime. It did not. I underestimated (sigh) so B&H had a flash sale, one day only to push the 4T RED drives. I'm so happy I went with RAID1. All I needed to do was install (1) drive at a time and let the system repair itself overnight twice. Done and done. It also expanded my volume to the full 4T space, leaving me with more than 50% available in the end. NOW that should last a while, even while I rip all my X-Files DVD's onto the NAS. I ran thru all 9 years of the best television ever and am considering watching them once more.





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Smoke Alarms are the devil's playthings

Post by photomaster »

Smoke alarms. You know you hate them. Let me share you my experience with a popular brand... I forget the name. It's sounds like kitty? It's not important. This model is wired into the AC wiring directly with a battery backup. This has got to be the most annoying torture device ever designed since the car alarm. Back the old days we would install this massive battery dubbed a "smoke alarm battery" which cost a fortune, weighed about a pound, and barely lasted the year. It wasn't for years before designs switched to a more common 9v battery.

Nowadays smoke alarms have carbon monoxide detectors as well - carbon monoxide being the silent killer. The chances of it actually reporting correctly is overshadowed by endless weekly false alarms. Google when the low battery alarm goes off in a smoke detector. It's is nearly always between the hours of 2am and 3am. Never never never have I experienced a low battery alarm during daylight hours.

The low battery alarm of my kitty is a combination of shrieking combined with a woman's voice scolding me, "Low Battery," every fucking minute. LOW BATTERY. LOW BATTERY. LOW BATTERY. LOW BATTERY. ok, fine. It's 2am and I have to buy batteries. I open the battery compartment and pull the batteries. An interlock engages to keep the door open until fresh batteries are installed. And, this does not resolve my LOW BATTERY LOW BATTERY LOW BATTERY alarm which continues every fucking 60 seconds for (at least) 7 days. You could push the "hush button" but that doubles as the "test button" so now the alarm is screaming at me, "FIRE! FIRE!" going thru all its responses for what seems like forever until I am in pain from the siren blasting and the woman scolding me (the voice should have been British but that might have been too exciting for this impromptu 2am BDSM session).

It's also mounted so high that I cannot reach the "hush button." While this model has features to lock the unit to the wall and lock the battery compartment closed until it is removed from the wall, those features were not activated for fear of someone like me hitting it with a sledge hammer. Every time I roast chicken the alarm sounds FIRE FIRE FIRE FIRE with the annunciator screaming at 85db - right at the pain threshold.

The first time the smoke alarm went off I was stunned. My brain completely shut off and I stopped what I was doing. I remember being in pain and the pain was everywhere. I couldn't locate the source of the pain. Slowly I began to focus on what was causing the pain, like being hit over the head with a hammer. Sound. LOUD fucking sound coming from the direction of the kitchen. I had to get closer to the noise which increased my pain. I couldn't reach the "hush button."

Now I'm standing in the hallway in agony as my ears are ringing. I find a ladder finally find the "hush button" but that runs a self test. Now as I am desperate to make the screaming stop the alarm begins its self-test. FIRE FIRE FIRE for another 30 seconds. I pull the batteries to no avail. It's wired into the AC directly and now it's screaming that the battery has been removed. I twist the thing off the wall and it's held with a locking AC quick connector. I wrestle with the connector while balanced on the ladder, desperately wrestling with this obnoxious fucking thing trying to get it to shut the fuck up!

With the batteries removed and the AC connector pulled, the kitty lets out one last screeeeeeeeccch! and then, silence.

This happened weekly when I made chicken.

First, I created a "fire stick" (photo attached). I should have thought of this years ago. It's super cheap to make. You find a short stick and screw a rigid door stop onto the end. Now you've got a rubber tipped pole which gently pushes the "hush button." I searched for a long while to design it - I looked at rubber tipped arrows but they were too wide. Pool cue? They were either too long or too short. How about those rubber tipped wooden sticks which the teacher would use to point at things on the map during class? ah, those are gone, replaced with telescoping pointers which won't do it.
firestick.jpg
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But, isn't there a way to hush it before I started my chicken until waiting until it began its reprehensible behavior? The previous model was much simpler. It had a battery and there was lots of room inside for a small toggle switch. Rather than pulling the batteries I could just flip the switch. This model was much more difficult to modify (photo attached)
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The switch would need to cut the AC power which was hard-wired directly to the PC board as well as cut the battery power. I just couldn't figure out where to mount a small switch to do all of that - DPST rather than a smaller SPST. It took me a long time to find something small enough to fit inside, which still required me to cut out the top support to make room. Even with that gone, the only toggle switch I could get to fit was a micro miniature PC mounted toggle switch with right-angle leads. I had to solder onto the leads, heat shrink over that, and epoxy the thing into place since there was no threaded nut to hold it in place.

I still had to install a DPST or DPDT since this unit has both a speaker for the nagging female voice plus the annunciator which was as loud as balls. I cut one lead of the speaker which was clearly marked +/- and ran it one half of the switch. bu-bye to the lady who lives in the smoke alarm! bu-bye! Next to the screeeeeeech maker. That had three wires. I googled some common circuits for solid state noise makers and see two transistors feeding the circuit which was grounded. Cutting the ground wire should silence it.. I'm guessing black? I snipped. I did well. With the switch open and the alarm going off the kitty sounds as quiet as a ticking clock with blinking lights.

I call it "the chicken switch." Now I can peacefully go back to making chicken on Tuesday's. Fuck you, kitty.

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e-bikes, exercise, and quarantine

Post by photomaster »

Being stuck in quarantine for months I've done the impossible - I am cleaning my apartment! I give a shout out to a model whom I hired several times to take many pounds of junk to the dumpster. All my precious treasures have somehow to turned to a pile of cheap junk with the passage of time. For my fellow computer geeks - true, I have a good collection of 3.5" floppy disks but in the back of my big closet was a couple of 5.25" Maxell's. That should give you a time frame as to the last time I cleaned.

I cleaned the livingroom. I'm working on the bedroom. I've got my eye on the huge pile of shit in the hallway which has partially blocked travel thru said hallway for the past ten years.

which... brings me to a 17yo vintage Diamondback steal frame mountain bicycle. It sits in my livingroom with 2 flat tires for well over ten years... maybe closer to fifteen? I keep tripping over it. I decided to fix both flat tires, clean it up, have it tuned up if needed. I installed "thorn proof" inner tubes which hold air better due their thickness. I purchased a bicycle repair stand and attached the Diamondback.

I cleaned and polished the frame and wheel, repaired the rear light which was caked with corroded batteries, tossed out anything that wasn't working, and purchased a chain cleaning device which was advertising "works with e-bike chains as well." Sounds good. What's an e-bike?

Here in New York, the honorable douchebag de Blasio was beating up on delivery workers operating on electric bikes and scooters. He was dishing out fines as high as $500, negating as much as a week's wages for these workers. However, with Covid19 locking down the City, fines levied against food delivery was temporarily suspended.

I'm going from memory, so please don't quote me. From what I read, there was a push to legalize electric bikes in New York for the longest time. Cuomo vetoed legislation late last year quoting safety concerns. Those fine points were polished and he finally signed into law legalization of e-bikes in New York. Damn. I never knew they were illegal in the first place. In fact, I never knew that e-bikes even existed.

So much reading followed. Many purchased a DIY kit which swapped out the front wheel with a battery and 250 or 350 watt motor. It's great for a short commute to the train station and costs less than $400 bucks. The rub is that there's wires to run, controller to mount... and when I'm done I've destroyed a perfectly good mountain bike and possibly wasted a lot of money.

As I continued my repairs I discovered the shifters had frozen up. There's no way to get them operational again without complete disassembly and possible destruction. I wrote to two local shops for advice but neither replied. I visited a third bike shop in person and they blew me off entirely. They said they were booked solid on repairs, I would have bring the mountain bike in for examination just to get an evaluation and appointment for future repairs, then return in 1-2 months for that repair and wait for another unknown amount of time for parts. In particular, Shimano components are months back-logged.

I walked out disappointed. Onto google searched and mail-order e-bikes.

You see, when I added up all the components for a DIY e-bike, I figured it's more economical to simply purchase one off the rack. The crank pedal center drive motors offer up to 1000 watts of power (750 watts legal) and uses the chain drive in parallel with the rider. For the hardcore bikers, that's the only way to go. I am not that person.

An easier route and simpler design is a rear-driven 500 watt motor. I found a model with dual hydraulic disc brakes, brake light, turn signals, headlight - all integrated, electric horn, in a folding BMX FAT tire 20" wheel design. No bike rack required - just fold it up and toss it in the back of the Wrangler (cough) at least until I get too old lift it. It's a bit heavy for sure but not quite as heavy as people complain about. True, you'll never be able to lift it like a road bike with a single finger but you don't need an electric winch either.

Enter the liberals. omg. Heaven forbid we have people running around on battery driven motors. That could rain down destruction upon us and bring about the collapse of civilization. For the most part, a 500 watt rear driven e-bike has a top speed of 28mph. That's enough to make me nervous. We'll call that "Class 3." I can't pedal that fast. Class 3's are often driven by a throttle, twist type or thumb type, left or right hand. Mine is a left-hand thumb throttle which I find perfectly matches the bicycling experience.

aside, I used to scoff at hydraulic discs brakes on a bicycle with their cute little brake pads. Upon using them, however, I am convinced this to be a "must have" for a bike this heavy and this fast.

Cuomo restricted "Class 3" e-bikes to NYC to come to the aid of delivery workers who rely on them but, in his usual style, restricted the top speed of "Class 3" bikes to 25mph to conform to Manhattan's stop speed of anything moving on 2 or 4 wheels. This is a wrinkle as everywhere else in the world they have a top speed of 28mph. Why not just simply tell people not to drive faster than 25? Everyone is annoyed.

At least Class 1 and 2 are more in-line with the rest of the country. Limit the speed to 20mph and you've got "Class 2." Disable the throttle and you've got "Class 1." While Class 1 and 2 are now legal in New York, Cuomo also added an oddball bit of legislation which keeps them off any road with a maximum speed limit of 30mph. On the surface, it seems logical to keep the e-bikes off the expressway's and parkway's.

The rub is that Long Island has some oddball highways, like rt454 with a maximum speed limit of 55mph and a bicycle lane on the side. This means that it's possible to drive a car, truck, motorcycle, or bicycle down this highway but NOT an e-bike. There's more work to do.

I found the seat lowered to its lowest position allows me to use it like a scooter but I cannot pedal. With the seat raised to proper height I cannot easily rest at a stop. I'll need to do more experimenting to find the best way to ride it. The bike combines 7 speeds of gearing, 9 levels of pedal assist, and a throttle. It's very intuitive how to work with the electronics, except for the "walk" button which is supposed to use the motor to help you walk the bike along side of it. In practice, I find pressing the button launches the bike forward uncontrollably until I hit the brakes. I guess it's good for moving the bike up a ramp?

And, this bike is totally hackable. From within the "hidden" menu on the controller I can remove the speed limit restrictions and classifications, or even tone it down a bit more. Personally, I'm quite happy zipping along at 17mph and the thought of accelerating to 28mph scares the crap out of me, on a bike that is.

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