Mind boggling

A couple days ago, a homemade extension cord ceased functioning. So, obvious first step before taking it apart, was a quick continuity test (resistance) with the voltmeter.

But it didn’t work — the needle’s movement was almost imperceptible.

I don’t know when or where I got this voltmeter, but it was decades ago at least. And for the first time in all those years, a thought occurred to me: in order to measure resistance, it must have a power source. I swear, I had never thought of that before.

It took all of thirty seconds to discover and remove the battery cover, and sure enough, on the bottom of the AA battery was its expiration date. Usually they’re guaranteed to retain 80% of their charge 10 years from manufacture. This one only died after 27 years and four months….can’t complain!

Changing of the guard

I can’t begin to tell you how long we’ve used the dish detergent container in the foreground, but it must be at least ten years. The new, blue stuff seems to be pretty good quality (some here is really watered down), but I bought it based on one criterion: the apparent solidness of the container. What else matters?

Part of a cent that will never be spent

Doing some spring cleaning on my computer, I discovered a forgotten crypto wallet, so emptied it: $2.73 worth of Tron, $7.32 worth of Polygon (yes, 2.73 and 7.32 are the real numbers), and a whopping $64.55 worth of Ethereum.

The wallet was emptied. But wait – one asset?

Yes, $0.000001 USD Tether: 1/10,000th of a cent remained. Delightful!

But when I reopened the wallet, it was gone! Just like that!

Oh well; easy come, easy go. The wild world of cryptocurrency.

Product placement (I guess?)

We were watching The Station Agent (2003) when my sharp-eyed wife spotted something interesting. When Finbar McBride (Peter Dinklage) addresses an elementary school classroom on the subject of trains, a shot of the students includes books in the background.

One of which is mine, Draw Dinosaurs.

First published in 1997, it had sold 1,069,192 copies as of June 2009, 90% of them through rights (about that time our book sales had passed 10 million, and my interest in precise records faded). Our last printing of this title, 20 years and two days after the first, was a print-on-demand run of 350 copies, an amount far too small to be practical with the printing technology that existed in 1997.

One line of code, AKA a tale of two Nanos

Ledger Nano is a cryptocurrency hard wallet. I’ve had one for several years, which worked fine…until it didn’t.

Suddenly it wouldn’t let me in because the device failed the “Is this a real Ledger Nano?” test.

After a lot of this-and-that with customer support, they offered to ship me a new one. Untenable, I replied, because of Uruguayan Customs fees and hassles.

We’ll handle all that, they replied. And they did: shipped a new $59 device from Paris via courier with no hassle on my end.

Except for one thing: the new one gave the exact same error message.

And suddenly I got someone in tech support who knew that there was a solution in Ledger’s own online documentation. He send me the link. One line of code.

wget -q -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LedgerHQ/udev-rules/master/add_udev_rules.sh | sudo bash

No, I don’t know what udev rules are, and must admit I’m not entirely curious. But now I have two perfectly functional Ledger Nano S’s instead of one, the second for free Makes me think of the recent $1.49 dishwasher adventure.