Shill bidding on Ebay? You be the judge…

Posted on July 31, 2012 by Jay

Shill bidding is when somebody places a bid on an auction solely to drive up the price of the item, without intending to purchase the item. Typically shill bids are placed by the seller or a confederate of the seller to increase the profit from the auction.

In an effort to combat shill bidding, online auction sites such as Ebay typically disallow anonymous bidding, but it can still happen. To combat shill bidding on a personal level, it helps to make your bid at the last minute (so shill bidders can’t react to your bid) and to never increase your initial bid. (You should always bid the maximum you are willing to pay.)

Posted below is the complete bidding history for a laptop computer which I believe exhibits shill bidding. The shill bidding appeared to use two different accounts (one with zero feedback, and another account that was more established) in an attempt to disguise what was going on. Continue reading →

IKEA Atlanta no longer recycling batteries

Posted on July 21, 2012 by Jay

IKEA has long been my go to place for recycling used alkaline batteries and eating cheap hot dogs. (Lowes & Home Depot will accept LiIon batteries, but not alkaline).

On my last trip to IKEA Atlanta, I was disappointed to find the following sign covering the hole that used to be the battery recycling station.

Of course, whoever is in charge of their website hasn’t yet gotten the memo yet:

I really doubt that the U.S. Department of Transportation has issued a regulation that says IKEA can’t recycle batteries. Perhaps just that they can’t recycle them to a 3rd world country….and IKEA is very good at reducing costs.

How not to wire up porch lights

Posted on July 8, 2012 by Jay

Our house was built in the 1960’s, so I didn’t wonder too much about this “mystery” panel inside the front door…

That is, until I went to replace an outlet on the other side of the wall, and found this LAMP CORD soldered on to the back of the wires feeding the outlet and heading up into the wall.

Now, I have nothing against lamp cord specifically. It is fine for, you know, carrying electricity from an outlet over to a lamp. However, it is not designed to be used inside walls, so I decided to take the “mystery panel” off and see where this lamp cord went…

Turns out it ended at what used to be a switch box. Yes, that is a bare end of a hot wire just sitting there in that metal box…. somebody had removed the switch (probably so that the house would have a chance of passing inspection…) But what had the missing switch switched? Seeing as how it was right inside the front door, I went outside to take a look, and found a set of four nail holes in the brick on both sides of the front door….and matching lamp cord going over the front door frame. Apparently somebody had wired up two porch lights using lamp cord instead of Romex. I had seen the lamp wire tacked over the door frame with staples while hanging Christmas lights, but because it hadn’t gone anywhere I figured it was just the remnants of a left over extension cord from a previous Christmas.

In case you are reading this post and think this looks like a good idea…don’t….go hire an electrician. I yanked the remaining lamp cord out of the wall and replaced the outlet.

Getting rid of extra UI elements in Google Reader!

Posted on June 14, 2012 by Jay

My wife complained about all of the extra stuff at the top of Google reader. You know, the links to all of the other Google products in the black bar, the humongously big “Search Reader” bar and Google logo. I had never really minded them before, but it does take up around 150 pixels before you get down to your actual content!

So I searched around and found out that other people also dislike all the extra clutter and have designed scripts that will allow you to give the Google User Interface a haircut. If you are using Mozilla firefox, you can install the Stylish plugin and then the Google Reader Absolutely Compact style to get the following effect:

Of course, the Stylish modification is a “one size fits all” super compact view. I actually like having access to the “Entry Actions” (keep unread, Email link, Plus One, etc…), so I ended up using the Google Reader Absolutely Customizable script for the Greasemonkey add-on, as it allows you to fully customize which elements are shown/hidden from within the Google Reader GUI (click on the “Subscriptions” drop down menu, select “Customize…” at the bottom.). Here is my final view of Google Reader:

Cell phone door refusing to close? Check for a bulging battery!

Posted on June 11, 2012 by Jay

Have you noticed that the back of your smartphone won’t stay on? The battery door no longer latches? The problem may be as simple as an old battery that has began to bulge. If it’s been a year or two since you bought your phone, it’s likely that you need a new battery.

Modern Smartphones can burn through all the energy stored in their LiIon batteries in only a few hours of GPS map viewing, YouTube Downloading, Web Browsing activity. And LiIon batteries will start to degrade over time and multiple charge/discharge cycles. The typical LiIon battery is at only 50% of it’s rated capacity 18 months after it is manufactured. This means that your SmartPhone will run it down twice as fast. The faster you discharge these batteries the more likely they are to physically deform.

The photos below show two identical HTC Aria batteries. The battery on the left is two years older than the battery on the right, and has been used daily in the phone. As you can see, at the end of it’s life, the battery in the left has deformed so badly that it would no longer fit in the phone.

Acrylic Welding Solvent – Bubble Display Nozzle Test 1

Posted on May 21, 2012 by Jay

This is an industrial acrylic welding solvent. Highly volatile industrial solvents have the ability to unscrew their own lids and escape into the atmosphere during shipping, so they are shipped inside a sealed metal can. It is assumed that you will have something to “cut this out” when you open the solvent and want to use it.

I’m not going to post a picture of the warnings on the side of the can, because, well, this blog is publicly available on the Internet, possibly read by children, and man, are they scary! Cancer, infertility, death, and skin irritation. Lets just say that when you open this can, your liver pokes you in the side to remind you to put on your nitrile gloves.

So, what am I trying to weld together? Continue reading →

Using Cloudflare to speed up webpage loading speeds

Posted on May 13, 2012 by Jay

My web host (Dreamhost) has an agreement with Cloudflare, a content delivery network, that allows you to enable the Cloudflare basic service for any of their domains. In mid-April I enabled the Cloudflare service for one of the domains I host with Dreamhost. The chart below from Google Labs’ “page load speed” report clearly indicates that the Cloudflare network helped the speed of loading the web pages. Of course, if you look at the far left of the graph, you can see that Dreamhost on their own was able to provide the same page load speeds without Cloudflare back in January, and the page load-time has been growing slowly since then. It is possible that Dreamhost is using the availability of Cloudflare to offset a higher load on their servers. But all in all, the website is close to the top 20% (which Google labels “fast”), which isn’t bad for a personal web hosting account.

(click the image for a full sized version)

Missed Schedule for wordpress posts due to .htaccess password protection blocking wp-cron.php

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Jay

I recently set up a private blog that is fully password protected using an .htaccess file. (Users have to enter a username and password to view anything on the blog.) Everything was working well until we tried to set up posts scheduled to publish in the future. They would not post. The dashboard would show “Missed Schedule” and we would have to publish them manually.

After lots of head scratching, I finally figured out what was causing this. Apparently wordpress will call the wp-cron.php file every time a user views a page. HOWEVER, because the web server is doing this, and not the user’s browser, if the wp-cron.php file is protected by a .htaccess user authentication system it will not load (because wordpress doesn’t have the correct username/password!). So none of your scheduled actions will take place.

The solution is to allow (only) that file to be loaded without the normal username/password check in your .htaccess file like this:
#Require username and password for all files! AuthName "Enter your username and password:" AuthType Basic AuthUserFile /home/yourdirectory/.htpasswd Require valid-user

#Exclude the wp-cron.php file! <files wp-cron.php> Order Allow,Deny Allow from all Satisfy any </files>

Of course, if your blog is password protected, the wp-cron.php file won’t get hit until somebody logs in to view the blog…but at that point any tasks that are pending will activate.

Using refrigerator door bins and vegetable crisper drawers for garage organization

Posted on January 22, 2012 by Jay

Cardboard boxes are fine, but refrigerator door bins and vegetable crisper drawers are nicer for storing things. The good ones I used here are made from clear plastic so you can see inside them easily and they don’t block light.

Of course, they are terribly expensive to purchase for this use, but with the (lack of) quality of Kenmore /Amana refrigerators manufactured after 2004 you can find free donor components relatively frequently. I also believe that with the addition of standard closet shelving support brackets the glass shelves from these fridges can be re-purposed into standard wall shelves.

Emily Smithson broken link recommendation spam

Posted on October 15, 2011 by Jay

I received two emails from “Emily Smithson” alerting me to broken links on a webpage I maintain. She recommended a website which has “mirrored” the original content as a place to link to.

How helpful, I thought, reading the first email. But then I saw that the 2nd email had the exact same format, almost as if it was sent out automatically by a spam bot. Continue reading →

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