I thoroughly confused some fans of ShitPostBot 5000 by joining their Patreon with my call sign as a custom title.
Now, a word on ShitPostBot 5000: it’s a bot that automatically generates memes every 30 minutes and posts them to Facebook and Twitter.
It’s gotten kind of frighteningly accurate as of late.
I think it could pass a Turing test:
Give a human instructions to create dank memes, then compare the result to ShitPostBot’s output.
I’m honestly suspecting the Turing Test will pass.
Oh what an amazing world we live in! 😀
ShitPostBot For President!!
Here’s a glorious example of ShitPostBot output from today: Spot on.
This little turd blossom!!! Its blower relay inexplicably turned its cooling fan off while I was using it to shitcan 23,500 watts of RF power!!!
Looks like I’ve got some interlock logic to fix up! This should have opened an interlock upon the load’s air vane switch dropping and caused the transmitter to drop back to plate off. You know, instead of me hearing its blower stop from in the restroom and having to go running to prevent the meltdown. XD
Dummy load INDEED
The silver plating in here is a bit tarnished from the unit’s prior big smokeout… Detailed elsewhere on this blog.
Little do you know, until it’s too late, but many electronic systems feature a sort of latent failure mode that can be triggered by a seemingly asymptomatic event happening seconds, minutes, even days prior.
The Fuck You Cracker
Meet the Fuck You Cracker.
When the Fuck You Cracker detonates, it goes off taking the software, sometimes hardware, but always at least a bit of your hard work with it.
The event that lights its fuse is often very strange and minor. In the case of Ericsson IRD satellite receivers, one detonator is a loss or glitch in the black burst sync input when the receiver’s internal frame sync is enabled.
In the case of these camera robotics, it’s a slow loss of nitrogen gas pressure in the pedestal which led to loss of even lens zoom/focus control minutes before a live show. Seen here: Deco Drive before the magic is applied.
Rawr XD
Other examples I can think of:
Internal software fault on a Mazda 6 ECU causing runaway battery charge to 19VDC
Sony XDCAM deck losing sync and trashing closed caption data on line 9 in a recording quietly– it went from Closed Captioning to Clclososeded Cacaptptioioniningng.
Any number of I/O accesses to an NFS filesystem that’s gone offline
The Monroe Systems DASDEC, where a received EAS alert hangs forever in the machine’s “inbox” if it’s received with an out of range valid time, and there’s no way to delete it or let it expire until the valid window comes up again. This is fine unless you put audio of a national EAS test alert into it, as the infamous Bobby Bones show incident did– the DASDEC will always auto relay this, you cannot override or filter it out, thus not only causing the Fuck You Cracker fuse to burn until it’s valid again but possibly also relighting the fuse on any station that monitors yours………
I’m sure you’ve also run into the Fuck You Cracker. Watch out, it’s a sneaky one.
Me: ponders whether I should have a really nice professional looking website talking about some of my engineering contract work Press plate on to make the airwaves shiny
Also me: slaps photo of one of my clients towers through the 1980s neon art meets tri-color foaming wax filter and posts it
My new coat got here from Hilary’s Vanity and I love it. It’s the Devious coat in black PVC. You can’t see any of the cool details of it here but the shape is perfect:
Brb gotta go make a darkwave album now.
Oh, and if you’re wondering if a Crown translator can work on its own first adjacent:
some identifying details were deleted from this photo before further demolition
Yes. Despite the receiver and exciter being adjacent like this, it… works.
In fact it works so well there’s negative reflect.
Not that any of these have ever been designed WELL, but this is worse…
It’s literally the worst designed ear piercing gun I’ve ever heard of. Of particular note though, the description suggests it can also be used on the nose or navel. How? No, don’t. Just don’t. On anything.
Also note the random weirdass stud jewelry that comes stuck in a sheet of pink antistatic foam.
A little background on how these things are supposed to work: The tip of the stud (not seen anywhere in the description photos) is pointed. Not really all that sharp, but pointed. The butterfly back of the stud earring is placed in the other end of the gun and it’s driven by brute force (this one appears to use a spring) through the earlobe.
The most common place you find these things is in kiosks and stores in the mall. Claire’s uses a variation made by Studex and theirs has a disposable sterilized plastic cartridge that goes at the end. The gun itself can never be fully cleaned or sterilized, but at least most of it is not in contact with the person it’s used on. Thanks to this, infection caused by bloodborne pathogens left on the gun itself is at least rare. The complications caused by the body trying to heal a rough bruised hole created by jamming a somewhat dull metal stud through, that’s another story. This one, uhhhhh….
good luck
On this design you just get a little stack of steel plates with a notch in them. The outer one is bent to hold the butterfly back of the earring. Sort of. I can’t really imagine how it keeps it lined up such that the stud will align with the hole in the end – chances are better it just kind of crashes into it and either further tears the hole by skewing at an angle, or launches the backing into space.
But it’s not covered with any sort of disposable part…. and it couldn’t even be effectively wiped down to clean it because it’s got all those gaps between the plates.
A felt tipped pen and a magnifying glass are also included for your convenience. I can’t even understand why, as there’s no logical reason this thing should actually make the hole where you want it to land.
It should be no secret that I think the ear piercing gun is one of the worst products of modern misengineering, but this just… this deserves some kind of award. This is BAD and whoever designed it should feel bad for it.
Yeah. Do yourself a favor and go find a member of the Association of Professional Piercers if you’re looking to get any sort of piercings and want the process to go as well as possible.
And do beware of the utter bullshit that shows up in the Walmart “marketplace”. Same goes for Sears. It’s all the ecommerce equivalent of the Opa-Locka Hialeah Flea Market or something.
Last weekend, when I was making the drive to Derp Island, deep in the Florida Keys, it was pretty hot but stormy out and I was driving down there with the A/C on in the car set to use outside air, since the air down there is not 97% diesel spooge like it is up on the mainland. As I was going down the road I noticed the A/C started getting slightly warmer, then the airflow abruptly dropped as if the blower was burning out or the system had sucked in rainwater and soaked the cabin air filter. (I’ve had both happen on that car. We wear out A/C system blowers here in South Florida like mad.)
Then smoke blew out of the vents……!!
I pulled off at a gas station, stopped, and was looking around trying to figure out what Let The Smoke Out, unsuccessfully. Then I started the car again and… maddeningly… everything worked fine, although I had the reduced airflow problem every now and then afterwards.
Last night, I was driving down what I like to call Miami-Dade County’s emergency exit (I’m not telling, otherwise EVERYONE will try taking it!). The road was empty and as it started raining, I hit the vent button again. The airflow faded away again after a burst of fog came out of the vents, then the airflow cut back. I suspected a coil freeze. Sure enough.. I turned off the compressor and cold wet air began to gradually blast out of the vents.
For sake of illustration, a typical, severely frozen over A/C coil. Watch out – this often leads to flooding.
Later, with the A/C back on again, the airflow started to fade away… then the engine misfired(??) and shut down impolitely. I shifted into neutral and coasted into a well lit parking lot to investigate. I found three blown fuses.
Now I was thoroughly baffled, why did things SHORT OUT? I pulled the glove compartment off to look at the area where the cabin air filter is, and found that a wiring harness runs along the plastic air duct. Just almost out of view in the center console area, that ran between the duct and a razor sharp edge on the dash frame.
The plastic duct had swollen up from the ice buildup and pinched the harness, cutting into some wires.
Sorry, no pictures as the clearances were insufficient to get my phone into the space. I was working with a flashlight and a dental mirror!
I fixed the issue for the time being with electrical tape and cable ties to hold the harness out of the area where it’d gotten pinched, and cut up a plastic bottle to serve as a protective sleeve.
