USPS Click-n-Ship account error: “Sorry, your transaction has been declined. Your transaction cannot be processed at this time with this payment type”

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I’ve been having an issue with the USPS Click & Ship account where it would not allow me to pay for shipping labels online. Everything would work fine up until I tried to pay, and then it would give me the “Sorry, your transaction has been declined. Your transaction cannot be processed at this time with this payment type” error message. It only took USPS a week to resolve it.
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My Glowforge Glass Lid Detached!

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Remember how the handle on the front of my Glowforge’s glass lid fell off back in 2019? Well today when I went to lift the lid, the entire glass lid was detached from the back (hinges!).   I am NOT impressed with the adhesive that Glowforge used on this unit.

Glass lid detached from the hindges

Last time I was able to simply epoxy the handle back into place. I’m hopeful I can do the same thing for the back of the lid, but unfortunately this time it will be very important that I be able to get the lid as close to possible to the original position, as the calibration of the under-lid camera may be negatively impacted by any offsets.     On the plus side, since my last issue, Glowforge has introduced a “beta” Calibrate Camera feature which should hopefully give me the ability to re-calibrate the under-lid (wide angle) camera “in the field”.

Somebody on the Glowforge community forums suggested that they had used E6000 (a flexible adhesive) to repair their lid, so I decided to give that a shot. I made this choice based mostly on the fact that E6000 is a single part adhesive that comes in a squeeze tube with a nice nozzle for dispensing. Getting a good bead between the lid and the hinge mechanism was going to be a little tricky because the lid is still attached to the main unit by a flexible circuit board/wire and it wasn’t immediately clear how to detach the connector. (I was worried that getting 2-part epoxy between the two of them without spilling any would be difficult. In retrospect, I should have ordered one of those “mix in the nozzle” dispensers for the epoxy….).

So, I laid down a few beads of E6000 and then clamped the lid down onto the hinges for 48 hours.

Rocks holding the lid down

Clamping force provided by gravity.

When I opened the lid, the E6000 mostly held, but there was a noticeable “glue stretching” sound, and the right hand side of the lid (nearest the flexible wire, and hardest to get the nozzle under) detached.   The E6000 was holding the lid on the hinge in an upright orientation, but I didn’t want to risk closing and opening the lid more.

So I ended up using JB Weld Clear 2 part 5 minute epoxy all along the edge of the lid and the hinge mechanism (using a toothpick to push it down in the gap on the right hand side) and then clamping the lid to the hinge in an upright position   (using a real clamp this time) for another 24 hours.

The Epoxy is currently holding the lid onto the hinge very solidly. I’d feel better if I’d used epoxy between the entire lid and hinge mechanism, instead of just the edge and what I could force down the crack on the right hand side, so I’ll be gentle with the lid (but then again, I’ve been gentle with it ever since the handle fell off….)

I’m hopeful the bond will remain at least as permanent as my repair on the handle has so far.

Update: My laser tube gave up the ghost, and GlowForge exchanged my (well out of warranty) unit for a Refurbished one for $500.   (Yes, they were informed about my lid repair activities with Epoxy and approved the exchange anyways…..)

It’s November 27th, 2020, how is Orange County Florida doing with COVID-19?

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The rate of   new cases had a slight rise in September, and continues to be on a slight upward trend in October. This upward trend accelerated in November. Orange County is averaging 469 confirmed new cases per day over the last two weeks (compared to 224 in the same period in October). While not quite as bad as the summer peak of 600-800 per day in July, these numbers are   going in the wrong direction.

We had 96 people die from Covid-19 in Orange County in the last month (slightly better than the 105 in the prior month) and the total death count is at 642.
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Technical, Hardware, Electronics & Surplus suppliers with fast shipping times to Florida

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Here is a list of suppliers located close to or in Florida, for fast shipping times:

  • Industrial Safety Products – Miami FL – Personal Protective Equipment.
  • MPJA.com – West Palm Beach FL – Surplus & Closeout electronics, motors, chemicals & tools.
  • Raka.com – Epoxy Resins, Fiberglass and other composite supplies.
  • McMaster Carr – fast shipping to just about anywhere, but PHEW those prices….
  • MonsterBolts – (I haven’t tried them yet, but the next time I need some fasteners I’m going to check to see if they are cheaper than McMaster…..)

Other useful suppliers located farther away:

EGO 7.5AH Battery degradation over time (3 year mark)

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I log how much power it takes to charge my Ego batteries after I use them. I’m using this as a stand-in for how much capacity they retain over time. You should know that I have a large lawn (in Florida) and cycle these batteries at least once a week (more in the summer) so these batteries are getting more of a workout than if you had a small city lot that you could mow a few times before charging the battery.

I have two 7.5 AH batteries (one bought before the other). They took 410 watt hours to recharge when new.   My older battery has three years of use, and has 63% of it’s original capacity (260 w/h).     The drop from year 2 to year 3 was from 75->63% [The batteries have a 3 year warranty, so the first battery is now out of warranty.]

My second battery appears to be following the same general trajectory, although it’s capacity is just slightly less than the first battery (at the same years in service mark).

For the bar chart above I averaged the capacity of all measurements in a particular year, but if you graph all measurements you can see that they are generally decreasing over time (although the batteries do sometimes go “up” in capacity, possibly due to ambient temperatures).   The following graph is for my 2nd 7.5AH battery (manufacture date of 2018).

Judging the balance of cells within a battery based upon ending charge profile

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My S-10 EV conversion has a battery pack made up of Nissan Leaf modules. I am using a mini-bms system which has a per-cell alarm, but does not report per-cell voltages and also does not do a great job keeping the cells balanced.   To check individual cell voltages, or manually balance cells, I need to pull a few pins and lift up the tilt bed on the back of the truck.   But it is possible to determine when cells in the battery are no longer well balanced based upon the power draw when the ending voltage is reached. You can see this most easily by looking at the charge profile graphs (provided by my JuiceBox EVSE).

When the cells are not balanced, some cells are at a lower SOC than others when the ending voltage is reached, which results in the entire pack drawing more power (in this case, charging ended when the max voltage cutoff was reached, but the pack was still drawing 3,000 watts.

After balancing the cells, the normal charging profile looks like this:

As you can see, the amp/power draw slowly tapers off as the max voltage is approached, and the pack is drawing less than 1,000 watts when the cells are balanced.

I use these end-of-charge graphs to determine when it is time to pop the back of the truck and manually check/balance individual cells. [I still have the mini-bms units to automatically stop the charger if any cells voltage goes too high, or alarm if any cells voltage goes too low.]

First Alert Smoke Alarm with Voice SA511 short service life (Malfunction signal)

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In 2017, I purchased six First Alert Smoke Alarms with Voice (Model SA511) for our house. These are battery powered units that run for about a year before the 2 AA’s need to be replaced.

Sometime in the past   (late 2018? 2019?) one of them kept false alarming, and no amount of compressed air, battery changes, resetting, etc would keep it from alarming, so after several calls to First Alert, they replaced it under warranty.

More recently, (in June 2020 and November 2020) the units in my garage and utility room off of the garage both failed with a “Detector Error in <location>. Check Manual” error message (followed by three short “berrps” in rapid succession).

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Lenovo Smart TAB M10 does not work with WPA2 and Android 9

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To summarize why I do not recommend buying a Lenovo Android tablet:

  1. Their Android 9 software update borked WPA2 support.
  2. Instead of figuring out the (software) problem and fixing it, they instead instruct their customers to downgrade the security of their wifi.
  3. If that doesn’t work, they RMA the tablet and flash an older (insecure) version of android on it, and disallow software updates.

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October 28th 2020: Orange County Florida COVID-19 Report

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It’s October 28th, 2020, how is Orange County Florida doing with COVID-19?

The rate of decline in new cases had grown sluggish at the end of August, plateaued and then had a slight rise in September, and continues to be on a slight upward trend in October. Orange County is averaging 224 confirmed new cases per day over the last two weeks (compared to 147 in the same period in September). Compared to an average of 14 new cases per day in the first two weeks of April, the number of people infected each day is 16 times higher than in April.

We had 105 people die from Covid-19 in Orange County in the last month (slightly worse than the 79 in the prior month) and the total death count is at 549. Continue reading →