Cool Geek Tricks

[From mid-2008] My dishwasher’s been making a bad grinding noise that, I think, is the remnant of a broken coffee cup sloshing around in the sprayer assembly. I noticed the screws holding this on are the TORX shape. This got me wondering about the type of screws available and what their trade-offs were. Enjoy! The flathead (or “slotted”) screw is an old design, but suffers two shortfalls: it’s hard to center and it’s too easy to apply too much torque, causing the screwdriver blade to pop out and destroy the head. Thus, it’s used primarily in wood products assembled by hand. ...

To celebrate the oven’s 10th birthday, the “hot surface” light would come on more often (such as running the oven, but not burner) and stay on up to three hours (!) after the surface has reached room temperature. Each heating element has a thermostat, and this is a symptom of one or more of those going out. Unfortunately, the thermostat is built into the heating element, so the whole thing must be replaced. Fortunately, the four sizes of elements are fairly common and available at fine places like Repair Clinic. ...

(Notes to self, Continued from part 1.) Whitefish Island Indian Reserve, Sault Saint Marie, Ontario Sault Ste Marie – I’d originally planned to spend a full day in Sault Ste Marie, but that fell apart when I opted to go to Mackinac Island the second time. Since I had to claim my Ontario geocaching souvenir, I crossed the border to hike on Whitefish Island Indian Reserve and see Soo Locks. Swing Gate ...

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. It wasn’t that bad. (These are notes are mostly for myself for next time.) Beware of shark **T – 10+ days: Pick up The Kit. **The kit is a 4L container with GoLytley powder, a flavor packet, and a prescription ondansetron, an anti-nausea drug that I would cherish later. Out of pocket costs for this: $2.31. A nurse called to check that I’d done this, reviewed the information packet, and had arranged for someone to take me home on the day of the event. She proceeded to ask me a bunch of odd questions about pacemakers and other stuff that didn’t apply, then asked if I had any questions. I could hear a sigh when I responded in the affirmative… ...

Well that was an enjoyable week! 88 geocaches in 6 states (DC, DE, MD, NJ, PA, WV) with 375 miles of biking (and some Ubering) over 9 days. Highlights were the guided tours of Gettysburg, PA (by a professional guide) and Washington, DC monuments (local, at night). Pre-trip: This was about as bad shape as I could be in for the ride. In June, shortly after signing up for the ride, I sprained my ankle on a hike. Then in August, I caught some sweet bronchitis for 4 weeks: I was in not-so-great shape for the ride. ...

If you give a mouse a cookie, they’ll get crumbs and chocolate all over their clothes. When they get crumbs and chocolate all over their clothes, the laundry piles up. When the laundry piles up, you will need to use the Electrolux front-loading washing machine. When you do several years-worth of laundry in the Electrolux front-loading washing machine, you’ll eventually discover it was leaking all over the floor. And you’ll call a repair person. And then another. And another. And another. And another. And another. Four will tell you Electrolux front-loading washing machines are “bad news” and decline to fix them. The fifth will tell you he’s on injury leave (we wish him a speedy recovery), and the sixth will say he will fix it, but the earliest appointment is in two weeks. ...

During the summer of 2011, I had some mythical Spare Time to blow the centimeter-thick layer of dust off my programming skills and port FizzyCalc, a Windows-based geocoordinate conversion utility that I’ve used for solving several puzzles in my obsessive hobby, geocaching, to the Mac. Mac FizzyCalc celebrated its 2500th download in November, a year after it was released. Cupcakes were served. FizzyCalc is used primarily to precisely project waypoints and convert among the most common geo-coordinate formats. Applied judiciously, it can help you in finding the center of a circle given points on its circumference or the intersection of three circles. (Latitude/longitude is a Cartesian grid superimposed on a spheroid earth. At my latitude, one minute west is far less than the one minute north/south. Thus, my tenth-grade algebra fails.) One of the reasons I wanted to port it is using a Windows virtual machine always takes … a … w-h-i-lllllllllll-e to start because, oh, merde, Adobe Flash has another security update – Reboot to make the changes take effect! ...

Over the Memorial Day Weekend, I had an opportunity to head down to Pendleton for the tenth annual Century Ride of the Centuries (aka “CROC”). This was my seventh visit in eight years — having skipped last year’s — and especially anticipated because the Bar M Ranch was reopened as a camping option. What a kick Pendleton is! After checking in at Hamley’s, I headed over to the Wildhorse Casino, CROC’s flagship sponsor, where we could set up tents in the field behind the RV park. Setting up my tent the first time each season is always an adventure, but after some creative pole tricks, It Was Done. While basking in my tent setting-up success, I went through the bag o’ information they offered us and decided that I’d forgo Day 1’s Despain Gulch route for the opportunity to head south and see the John Day Fossil Beds “Sheep Rock” unit. JDFB:SRU is really off the beaten track, but this is as close as I was going to get in the foreseeable future. ...

As GPS-enabled phones become more popular, there have been a lot of geocaches placed by people using phones. Many of these will have serious “adjustments” to their posted coordinates because the person placing it just took a single reading, using whatever their phone was reporting and called it good. Usually these adjustments are anywhere from 50-500 feet, but that’s a lot when you consider the cache may be the size of a pinky and located in an area with a lot of hiding places. Like a forest, perhaps! ...

Mister Peabody, set the Wayback Machine to three years ago, pick a spot during a really long product release cycle. Partly out of boredom, but mostly to mess with development manager at the time, I had asked one of the developers to swap out the splash screen. The product logo was thus modified: **Official** **Battle-ready!** Appropriate text was substituted, changing our tagline from “Enjoy the view” to “Today is a good day to PLOT!” Laughs were had, and it was removed before alpha testing several months later. ...