Sibylla Bostoniensis

I want a widget that doesn't exist so I might be stuck designing it for 3D printing. I have never done this before. For design software, I gather both Onshape and TinkerCAD are available for free. Anybody with experience have opinions which I should start with? I have never used any CAD program before, but am not new to drafting. OTOH my drafting experience was all about 40 years ago. Open to other suggestions available for the Mac for free.

Also, I don't have my own 3D printer, so I'll be availing myself of various public-access options. But this means the iterative design feedback loop will be irritatingly protracted. Also I might have to pay money for each go round, so I'd like to minimize that. Also I am still disabled and not able to spend a lot of time in a makerspace. But I am a complete n00b to 3D printing and have zero idea what I'm doing. Does anybody have any recommendations for good educational references online about how to design for 3D printing so your widget is more likely to come out right the first or at least third time? By which I mean both print right and also function like you wanted – I know basically nothing about working with the material(s) and how they behave and what the various options are, while the widget I want to make will be functional not ornamental and have like tolerances and affordances and stuff. So finding a way to get those clues without hands-on experience, or at least minimizing the hands-on experience would be superb.

Whelp, it looks like I'm in the market for a cell phone again.

On Saturday night, I noticed something dangling from the corner of my cell phone, which immediately struck me as odd, as there's no aperture in the protective gel case there for something to get stuck. Well, there's not supposed to be. On further inspection, I discovered the corner of the gel case no longer fit over the corner of the phone, and some random shmutzig had gotten wedged... between the back plate of the phone and the rest of the phone, to which it was no longer attached along the bottom. Pressing it back down didn't work: something in the middle of the phone was causing resistance to closing the phone.

Lo, verily, my phone's battery was pregnant.

Some of you who follow me on the fediverse might be thinking, "Wait, didn't you just replace a phone, the battery of which swelled up?" Lol, yes: late April. That was my work phone. This is my personal phone. Lolsob.

So, being a proper nerd, I went right to iFixit to order myself a battery. Whereupon I was stopped by something that did not bode well. I entered my phone's model information and iFixit, instead of telling me what battery to buy, alerted me that it is not possible to determine what kind of battery my phone took from the outside.

It turns out that the OnePlus 9 G5 can take one of two batteries, and which one a given OnePlus 9 G5 takes can only be determined by putting eyes on the battery which is in it.

Well, okay then: I clicked through the helpful link to read instructions on how to pull the battery on a OnePlus 9 G5. I read along with slow dawning horror at exactly how involved it was and how many tools I would have to buy, and made it to step twelve – "Use a Phillips screwdriver to remove the ten 3.8 mm-long screws securing the motherboard cover. One of the motherboard cover screws is covered by a white water ingress sticker. To unfasten the screw you can puncture the sticker with your screwdriver." – of thirty and decided: fuck this, I will hire a professional.

(I think maybe it was a fortunate thing that I went through the prior fiasco with trying to change the battery on the Nuu B20 5G, first, because it softened me to the idea of maybe I don't have to service all my electronics personally myself.)

Alas, it was late on a Saturday night and all the cell phone repair places around me were closed until Monday.

Fortunately, I had a short day Monday and would be getting out of work around 5:30pm. I called ahead to a place that is open to 7pm to ask if I needed an appointment and whether they did OnePlus phones. There was a bit of a language barrier with the guy who answered the phone, but he said no appointment was necessary and whether they could fix my phone would entail putting eyes on it, and please try to come before 6pm to give them time to fix it before they close.

So after work, Mr B took me there, and we presented the phone. Dude got the back of the phone the rest of the way off the phone with rather more dispatch that I would be have been able to, and pretty quickly discovered that he was in over his head. Credit where it's due – "A man's got to know his limitations" – he promptly backed off, and told me to bring it back tomorrow when the more-expert boss was in.

I'm slightly irritated that we made the unnecessary trip instead of him saying, "Oh, a OnePlus, come tomorrow when our OnePlus expert is in", but it did give me the extra time to do more thorough backing-up. I have never managed to get Android File Transfer to work, nor any a number of alternatives; snapdrop.io would only do single files at a time, not whole directories, and, weirdly, Proton Drive, both app and website, doesn't allow uploading whole directories from Android either.

Finally, I saw a mention that the Android app Solid Explorer "does FTP". I wanted to make a local backup to my Mac, but, fuck it, I have servers, I can run FTP somewhere just to get my files backed up off my phone. Imagine my surprise on opening up the "FTP" option on Solid Explorer and discovering it wasn't an FTP client it was an FTP server. Yes, the easiest way I found to exchange files between my Android phone and my MacBook Pro was to put an FTP server on my phone.

Worked fine. My FTP client on my Mac sucks, but I'll solve that another day. (Does Fetch still exist?)

Mr B and I discussed it and decided he'd bring the phone in the next day, Tuesday, to spare me the hike. He returned with the phone, still with the back off, and the news that they had discovered, as I had, you have to get at the battery to even figure out which battery to order. And that he was told that the battery would be in by 3pm the next day (Wednesday). The only surprising thing here is that they could get the battery that fast.

So, today (Wednesday), after 3pm, Mr B took my phone back for a third visit, and they attempted to install my new battery.

It was the wrong battery.

( Hwaet! The saga continues... )

If you think you might someday want to have and use Signal, the secure messaging app for Android and iOS, I suggest you go install it immediately.

The whole reason Signal was invented was to provide secure communications for dissidents and activists living under repressive regimes. It is illegal to have in China, Egypt, Cuba, Uzbekistan, and Iran.

I expect the Trump administration to go after it. It would be very hard to make it illegal here given the first amendment (though not, perhaps the TikTok ban proves, impossible) but it might turn out to be very easy, given how conciliatory the tech giants are being towards the Trump administration, for Trump to get it pulled from the app stores.

So get it while you can.

Also, you might want to adopt it. Given the handbasket is fully boarded and taxiing down the runway.

By "adopt it", I don't mean "use it when you want your messages to be secure", I mean "use it all the time, by default, for texting with anyone who also has it, and start moving away from normal SMS, because fuck Big Brother." (Signal will no longer let you text people who don't have it.)

It's free and easy to use. The Signal Foundation would appreciate your donations.

As a side note, there are alternatives to Signal, and some of them are probably great, and maybe some are better. You can do those too. But all the birds are wheeling in the sky and settling on Signal.

2024 Oct 18: Def Con (computer hacking conference, video on YT): "DEF CON 32 - Inside the FBI’s Secret Encrypted Phone Company ‘Anom’ - Joseph Cox (talk by Joseph Cox). Description :

In 2018, a secure communications app called Anom started to gain popularity among organized criminals. Soon, top tier drug traffickers were using it all over the world. Because they thought their messages were secure, smugglers and hitmen coordinated high stakes crimes across the platform. But Anom had a secret: it was secretly run by the FBI.

For years Joseph Cox has investigated the inside story of Anom, speaking to people who coded the app, those who sold it, criminals who chatted across it, and the FBI agents who surreptitiously managed it. This new talk, building on details from his recent book DARK WIRE, will include never-before-published technical details on how the Anom network functioned, how the backdoor itself worked, and how Anom grew to such a size that the FBI started to lose control of its own creation.

It will also reflect on how police have entered a new phase of compromising entire encrypted phone networks, with little to no debate from the public, and provide critical insight on what really happens when authorities introduce a backdoor into a telecommunications product.

40 minutes. I found it riveting. Cox is a very good storyteller and it's a hell of a story. I have all sorts of complicated feels about it. On the one hand, epic pwnage. OTOH, civil liberties. On one hand, good job. OTOH, FBI operating way outside its mandate. On one hand, hilarious. OTOH, paranoia.

Things are being a bit too eventful in the Bostoniensis household.

But first: I'm ambulatory again. Starting about starting about two weeks ago my pain finally started ebbing – a mere five weeks after my epidural – and by about a week ago I was better enough to start doing some things for myself again and also wash my hair.

I'm not actually certain how much of this benefit is from the epidural; I'm also using compression garments again, and they worked previously to my getting any epidural.

[ETA: My epidural was on the 5th of August; the follow-up appointment was supposed to be about 3 or 4 weeks later, but the earliest they could book it was September 18th. At the end of August, having not seen much of any improvement I emailed to ask whether I should be scheduled for a second epidural or wait to discuss the issue at my follow-up appointment; the staff replied since my follow-up was only in 2 weeks, I should wait for it and discuss it with the doctor.

A week later, I got a call that they had to cancel my follow-up appointment due to some issue the doctor was having and to call in to reschedule. The earliest they could get me in was October 25th.

Given how much trouble I had scheduling the epidural of Aug 5, while I was there I asked the doctor if I could just be put on the schedule for my next epidural sometime around November when it should be wearing off. He informed me that that was not possible because insurance no longer allows it: to establish medical necessity to justify the expense, we have to wait for the epidural to wear off. I pointed out that they could put me on the schedule and if I didn't need it I could cancel the appointment, but he was unwilling to play ball. So it looks like, thanks to insurance company policy, my life is going to consist of 2/3 being kinda able to walk and 1/3 not really being able to walk and either waiting to get the shot that will allow me to walk or waiting for the shot that will allow me to walk to finally kick in.]

[ETA2: oh, in other health related news, I had been prescribed HRT for menopause early in July. But I didn't want to do anything that might further disrupt my sleep, which was already made difficult by the amount of pain I was in. So I decided to wait on starting it until my pain levels were better under control. I finally started it on September 16. My PCP reasonably wanted me to get a (extremely overdue) mammogram to baseline me in case the hormones start giving me cancer. The earliest the facility at the hospital could book me was next March. They used to have a clinic that did them in the same town that I now live in, but it closed at the end of 2023. Given they were booking into March, I made an appointment for May, figuring I would probably need a follow-up appointment around then and whatever COVID vaccination I get in March or April would have had a chance to kick in by then. I called the practice I used to get my mammograms through and they were able to offer me an appointment in November, and I was glad of it.

I was embarrassingly pleased that the online mammogram appointment request platform actually asked whether one has a mobility impairment. And when I was on the phone to schedule, the scheduler noticed that and discussed it with me, and booked me for a double length appointment to accommodate the difficulty this would add.

So far, it's been one week and I don't know that I've noticed any effects. On the other hand I slept a lot better last night and I was not woken by any hot flashes. Here's hoping. I was told to give it a month or two before expecting anything.]

I've been able to do some further unpacking, which is good, because, for one thing, I have been getting very stressed out about the fact that I don't have my stuff with me and haven't actually entirely moved in, and also, secondly, because the storage unit I am renting increased its price something like 80%. I called them up and got them to reduce the increase to something like 60% of what it was previously paying. I am obviously not thrilled by this. I'd hoped to have moved all of my books home by now.

We were talking about having Mr Bostoniensis drive to my storage unit and put a bunch of boxes of books in his car and drive them here for me to shelve.

But that's not going to be happening in the short term, because yesterday his car abruptly made a horrible noise and died in traffic. There are a lot of things that could have made this worse: he wasn't far from home, he has AAA, he has a new favorite repair place walking distance from our new home, and I wasn't with him. Still this sucks. He has some important medical appointments coming up. We expect to be learning a lot about Uber in the near future. He has attempted to sign up for Zipcar, but for some reason they have decided that his Massachusetts driver's license was issued by Arizona, and that is why they can't validate it.

Speaking of insane validation problems with online services: Experian.

Re the previous, we both endeavored to put freezes on our credit reports. Mostly it went swimmingly, except for me and Experian. Experian wouldn't let me create an account until it could validate that I was me. Unfortunately, it couldn't do that for some reason. I think part of the problem was that the UI kept asking what my address was to verify my identity, and I couldn't figure out what address they had on record for me, and this was complicated by the fact I just moved, but that another part of the problem is clearly that Experian just sucks.

My attempts to create an account on the Experian website kept resulting in the error message that "We're sorry we can't validate your identity, please call customer service at this special number to do so." So I called in, to be greeted by a phone menu, that you can't get past until you can validate your identity by the same method as on the website. That didn't work either, and they won't let you talk to a customer service agent until you have done so.

I called every phone number I could find on the Experian website to try and reach a human being. I used all the tricks I knew to try to get through the phone tree to an agent, and that didn't work.

I called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and they were almost perfectly unhelpful.

I was figuring my next to last last option was to actually file a complaint with the CFPB against Experian to see if that could provoke them sharing a phone number with me that I could call to reach a human.

But then for some reason last night on Mastodon Brian Krebs went on a tear about how much Experian"s security sucks.

Look, if you have a sign in the waiting room that says "ring bell for service" and I ring the bell for service and nobody ever shows up, I don't necessarily feel the need to only go through the front door, if you know what I mean. I may wander through the doors marked "Employees only beyond this point", calling out, "Yoo-hoo! Anybody here?"

So. One of Brian's linked articles mentioned how completely inadequate the identity vetting was on Experian's "Show me my credit report" account creation page. Now, I was having a different user experience than he described having in late 2023; notably, he was describing getting dumped there by annualcreditreport.com upon requesting a credit report, instead of the way I came in which was looking for a credit freeze. Since I suspected the reason I was having trouble authenticating was I didn't know what address they had me at, I figured that if I could see my Experian credit report, it could make it a lot easier for me to authenticate for an Experian account. So I figured I would try the security hack he uncovered by requesting one's credit report.

I didn't get as far as attempting the hack: I had no problem authenticating via that route. I'm not sure what occasioned the difference of this time. Maybe they fixed the website between when I tried this last week and now? Maybe when you come in looking for a credit freeze you get a different UI/UX than when you come in looking for your credit report, even though you're signing up for the same thing? Maybe something about my multiple trials timed out?

But, for whatever reason, this time I was not asked for my address at all on signing up, so I didn't even have to guess. Like Brian Krebs described last November, they were willing to let me in on the basis of my phone number and a social security number.

Which, um.

Well.

I'm in anyways. And I've got the credit freeze on. For all the good that will do me.

I am amused to discover that my credit score on Experian is way higher than on the other two bureaus. Also they have an employer of record, but it's a temp agency I haven't worked for for two decades. Literally an employer I had before Gmail existed.

Also while the other two bureaus only list my own personal credit cards, Experian knows that I am an authorized user of a card on one of Mr B's credit accounts. So for whomever needs to know this: apparently being the authorized user for somebody else's credit card will impact your credit rating only on Experian, not the other two bureaus.

(At least only figuratively this time, AFAIK.)

In no particular order:

1) I just found a pretty serious security problem / bug at Patreon.

2) My email is down because my hosting company apparently just sucks.

Expect me when you see me.

P.S. Anybody have an opinion about Liquid Web especially their Managed VPS service? I'm thinking about moving there. nvmd, Reddit says they're trash. Now entertaining KnownHost.

Also open to other Managed VPS hosting recommendations. I'm looking for Managed with a capital M: I want someone other than me to keep this thing up to date and running. I pay money. I need a reasonable SLA and a bus factor of at least three, so it's not a job for a friend running a box in his basement.

Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1824441.html

Another post that started as a rant on Mastodon. This has been adapted and expanded further.

---

It is incredibly frustrating that the only thing more stupid than Patreon is all the alleged Patreon substitutes that clearly don't even understand what Patreon does.

Pro tip: Patreon has no meaningful competitors, and also it sucks, so there's a huge opportunity for somebody to kick sand in its face and take its lunch money. But to do that you would have to understand what actually Patreon does that is worth it to creators to allow Patreon to take 5% of their proceeds (and then pass on to them a second 5% in payment processing fees).

Because I want there to be Patreon competitors, I will explain what Patreon actually does, so if somebody would like to actually compete with Patreon they will know what they have to actually accomplish.

( Brace yourself. Some of this is a little complicated to explain. (Read more [5,960 words]) )

This post brought to you by the 159 readers who funded my writing it – thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.

Please leave comments on the Comment Catcher comment, instead of the main body of the post – unless you are commenting to get a copy of the post sent to you in email through the notification system, then go ahead and comment on it directly. Thanks!

Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1821984.html

This was originally posted to Mastodon here. Slight changes have been made and further commentary added.




This is a true story.

In 2014, I happened to be on site at a software development company, where I wound up being a proverbial fly on the wall during a notable conversation.

I was being shown around by the head of technical documentation, and had just been introduced to the head of engineering. Maybe he was a VP, I don't recall. Anyways, he decided that was the occasion, with me, random contractor standing in front of him, to engage the head of technical documentation in a conversation about how there might be layoffs coming, and he was of the opinion that they should probably lay off his division's tech writers, and make the software developers write their own documentation, to save money.

The head of technical documentation was, of course, flabbergasted and appalled, but substantially outranked, and she had to be diplomatic in her response, tying her hands – and her tongue. Also she was caught somewhat by surprise by this fascinating proposal.

Unbeknownst to me, while this conversation was happening and I was supposed to be being onboarded, my contract was in the process of falling through, because the disorganization of this organization was so high, the parties who had extended me the offer were unaware the organization had put a stop order on retaining new contractors.

And to this day I lament that I did not know that fact, because I was being on my best behavior, and in retrospect I really wish I hadn't been. ( Because what I was biting my tongue rather than say was...[5,020 words] )

This post brought to you by the 160 readers who funded my writing it – thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.

Please leave comments on the Comment Catcher comment, instead of the main body of the post – unless you are commenting to get a copy of the post sent to you in email through the notification system, then go ahead and comment on it directly. Thanks!

Yes, while you're unable to sit up, barely able to reach a keyboard, using not one but two inadequate speech-to-text technologies, neither of which interoperates at all with your writing environment, is abolutely the right time to triple down on a post not just with heavy HTML formating, but about HTML formatting, illustrated with escaped examples. *facepalm*

Heads up, PayPal users! tl;dr: They've started tricking users into using their premium option to transfer funds out.

I just went to transfer money in my PayPal account to my bank account, like one does, and I was very mispleased to discover they've introduced a dark pattern to the UI to trick the user into using the non-free, and actually quite expensive, immediate transfer option, instead of the free 1-3 days option.

Heretofore (or at least as of the end of May when I last previously tried this) when you initiated a transfer of a balance to one's bank account, one is shown a dialog where one can choose either "Immediate" for $25* or "1-3 days" for free.

Today, when I initiated a transfer, I got a dialog that asked "Transfer immediately?" with the only other option being something like "not now" or something similar that made it look like backing out of doing the transfer altogether. At the bottom of the dialog was fine print saying "fees may apply" without actually saying what those fees were. Since I know that immediate transfer is $25, I selected the "no" option, and, lo and behold, I was presented with the old UI that lets one choose the free transfer option.

I am not amused.

I have already complained, and threatened to report them to a variety of government agencies, like, say, the FTC which just filed a class action suit against Amazon for doing something similar with Prime. If you are a PayPal user, maybe you want to complain too.

Also, if you have occasion to do a transfer, screenshot this if you encounter it, would you? I regret I didn't, and now I don't have any money in my account to do it with.

* Apparently this number is supposed to be some sort of percentage, but I've never seen anything other than $25, despite various fluctuating amounts I'm transferring, so honestly, I have no idea what the actual fee is. In general, with PayPal's recent fee increase, they've also made it dramatically harder to even figure out what fees apply to which transactions. Maybe it's time to abandon PayPal.

EDIT: mad props to adelenedawner who captured a screenshot of the new dialog box and sent it to me. Here it is in all it's glory: